Kitabı oku: «If The Shoe Fits», sayfa 4

Chapter four

Shalomsistah: You okay, Rochelle? I haven’t seen you on the list for a few days. Dana told me to check if you disappeared for too long.

I stared at my computer monitor with tired eyes. It was Austin, one of the newer members on the devotional list and Dana’s new best friend, on the other side of the computer. Usually, the list was a lifeline, both to the Lord and to my friends. Lately though, I’d come unplugged, both from the Internet and from my relationship with God.

After this memorable day—Moriah’s birth, Terri’s presence and Tad’s chin—I definitely needed to talk, but I wasn’t sure if Austin was the person to sing my blues to. I’d prayed about my attitude toward her and tried to figure it out, but still something about her just didn’t sit right. Perhaps the fact that, without trying, she’d taken my place in Dana’s life was the cause for my misgivings.

Sassysistah1: Shemika had the baby.

Shalomsistah: CONGRATULATIONS!

I stiffened. This was one of the things about her that got on my nerves. Austin had always been too perky, even when she’d just been the evening anchorwoman, a stranger on the news. At least Tad knew how to turn off his TV persona…most of the time anyway.

Sassysistah1: Thanks. I guess. There’s a lot going on.

Shalomsistah: Want to talk about it? I know you don’t eat sugar, but I’ve got lots of chicken soup. My mother-in-law thinks it can bring world peace.

I had to smile at that. Mrs. Shapiro, so meticulous when she came in to select her shoes each season, certainly believed in the power of chicken soup. In truth, her matzo-ball variety had put the whammy on more than one of my colds and her words always warmed my heart. These days, I showcased the designs of other people’s shoes more than I made my own—except for Mrs. Shapiro.

“Shoes of peace,” she’d say. “Just like the name on the door, just like you. You make them with your own hands, with your heart.” Those words and the baskets filled with chicken soup, tea and vitamins always made me feel better. Stronger. Sometimes I forgot that Austin had married Mrs. Shapiro’s son. The girl couldn’t be all bad.

Sassysistah1: It’s hot outside, but soup sounds good. I’d come over there, but I’m too tired to drive.

Shalomsistah: Not a problem. I’m there.

Sassysistah1: Knock hard. I’ll probably be asleep.

Shalomsistah: Got it.

Sassysistah1: Wait! Do you remember where I live?

Shalomsistah is not signed on.

Hmm…Austin must have remembered the directions or she would have asked. I couldn’t muster the strength to get up and look for her number. I needed to go and dig my Bible out of the trash in the other room. Someone had actually dared to throw it away. Jordan maybe? I needed to fall on my face in prayer, but I didn’t. I pulled away from the computer to the creak of my bones.

The plan had been to come home from the hospital, change my clothes and rush right back, even though everyone advised against it. Especially Terri. I’m convinced she was stalking outside the hospital or something, but what did I know? Not much or I wouldn’t be trying to figure out how to be a single grandmother. As if being a single mother wasn’t job enough.

Shooting off a round of tangled prayers, I stretched my hands upward. Weariness poured down my legs, past my ankles and straight into my toes. With a thump, I dropped to the couch, the one that was just for decoration. It was time for that thing to earn its keep. As I sank back into it, my feet arched as if by their own will. I wiggled my toes, but it didn’t help. What I needed now was the foot washing I’d run from this morning.

Life is funny like that. What I try to outrun one minute, I needed the next. In truth, I could use a lot more from Tad than a soak in his kitty-litter container—a generous look or one of his steady prayers would do me just fine about now. Even when things had got bad after Shemika’s birth, the man hadn’t even flinched. He just stood there tall and strong, speaking loud and clear—

“We ask Lord, that this blood would stop, in the name of Jesus…”

When the room blurred into a rush of nurses and the smell of fear, there Tad was, rooted to the floor like a tree, his pecan skin glowing with sweat. The blood didn’t stop then, but the atmosphere did, and so did my attitude. This wasn’t my life all over again. No matter what happened, God was in control. Too bad Tad hadn’t been there the day I delivered Jericho. The outcome might have been the same, but maybe my heart wouldn’t have…

The doorbell sliced through my musings. I took a deep breath and hobbled for the door.

Behind it was Austin’s smiling face and two armfuls of low-carb goodies—almonds, teriyaki steak jerky, a veggie tray, some of Mrs. Shapiro’s chicken soup minus the matzo balls and a jug of diet V8 Splash. The tropical kind.

I hugged her inside. “Dana’s been telling you all my secrets, I see.”

She shook her head. “Nope. I’m just observant. It’s the reporter in me.”

We both laughed and put the spread on the table. She pulled two cold Diet Cokes from her purse and plopped onto the couch beside me. “We’ll get to that stuff later. Tell me about the birth.”

“It was something,” I said, sounding more like Jordan than I was comfortable with. My fingers gripped the cold drink while my lips refused to recount Moriah’s story. At least not yet. I looked back at the table, wondering which item would loosen my lips. Being on the receiving end of a girlfriend gift pack seemed strange. I’d been doing similar things for Dana and Tracey for years. I was used to it, being the one who gave, who smoothed things over. Having someone do it for me? Well, I didn’t know how to take it exactly. I sipped my pop anyway. Mine was vanilla, hers was lime.

It tasted wonderful. Much better than that bitter coffee, better than the story I had to tell. “This is good. And you got lime. Is it your favorite?”

Austin shook her head. “I don’t usually drink diet. This wasn’t about me though, so I just went along.” Her smile lit up the room like a candle.

“Sounds like a practice I should try.” I put my can on a coaster, suddenly deciding against my usual speech about being careful not to spill anything. If we made a mess, I could have it cleaned later. For once, I just didn’t care.

Austin took a coaster without being reminded and rested her can on it. She smiled at me, but made none of the usual chitchat or self-deprecating jokes that Dana provided. Not even any of Tracey’s goofy music and movie trivia that had nothing to do with anything. She just sat there sipping, ready to listen. This was a lot to get used to.

“Well, I’ll try and make this short,” I said.

“That’s your call. I’ve got four hours. The husband is fed, kissed and napping in front of ESPN. Pre-season games. He even has snackage. I left a note, but he’ll realize I’ve been gone after I walk back in the door.”

I made what must have been a horrible face. “Four hours? Please. I don’t talk to anybody that long. Not even God.”

Austin took another sip of her pop and curled her feet beneath her. “You’d be surprised.”

Five hours later, I was surprised…and full. I talked about everything from Jordan to the foot washing to the birth. I’d cried and eaten and cried some more. With Austin past due to be home, we were getting to the good part.

I stared at the clock in horror. “Oh my goodness. You need to go. I’m so sorry—”

She waved me off. “Double overtime. I called him in the bathroom. He thought I was in the other room on the computer. I will go soon, but we’re okay. What I need to know is, are you okay? You keep talking about everybody else and your concerns for them, but what about you? It’s okay to feel something just for yourself, you know.”

Was it okay? The thought stunned me. “Haven’t I been talking about me all this time?”

“No. You’ve been talking about your son, your granddaughter, your son’s father, Tad, the church…Before I go, I need to hear what’s really going on. With you.” She paused. “If you want to go there, that is.”

My defenses sprang up. My walls. How dare this little skinny blond girl come here and try to tell me to get real about something! What did she know about it?

A lot, from the look in her eyes. From the patient quietness she’d blessed me with the past few hours. No wonder Dana rambled on about her so much. She had a deep, just-what-you-need faith.

Sistah faith.

My true feelings quaked inside me, shook my shoulders. Before I knew it I was crying again and half shouting. “How could my baby have a baby now? What did I do wrong? I prayed, took him to church, went without a man. How could God let this happen?”

I was up off the couch now, pacing the room. Austin didn’t say a word. She just got up and walked beside me. Poor thing. She’d opened the floodgates now.

“And Tad. Talking about some beautiful feet. All these years I’ve been standing here dying, trying to serve God only to have people look down on me because I didn’t have a husband, and now this fool wants to try and be good to me?”

She took my hand, laced my fingers. I didn’t pull away.

“There was so much more I wanted, but I was trying to do the right things. But it didn’t work, none of it. Jordan is back and instead of fixing everything, he’s messed it all up. Him and his silly girlfriend. I don’t even know that I want him anymore, but he should have tried harder, done more than just propose to some heifer he barely knows—”

“Yeah.” Austin finally spoke.

We stopped walking and I tried to breathe. I guess it was time for her to rein me in. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say all of that,” I said.

She shrugged. “It’s okay. You needed to. Everybody needs to bleed. That’s what friends are for. The thing is making sure the wound is clean after. It’s the infection that can kill you.”

This time I took her hand. We walked to the couch, the one unused until today and knelt there together. I bowed my head.

“Let’s pray,” Austin whispered.

“Mom, I didn’t think it would be this hard.”

I stared at my son through bleary eyes, spotting his face across his daughter’s crib. Moriah, my sweet pea of a granddaughter, had been crying nonstop for thirty minutes. It was four in the morning. “Actually, this is the easy part. They sleep a lot at the beginning.” My arms extended to take her from him.

Jericho swiped at his chin. “This is a lot of sleep?”

Moriah snuggled into my robe, no doubt looking for milk I didn’t have. “This baby does well. You kept me up most of the night until you were five years old. If it wasn’t for Dana, I don’t know how—”

“I’m sorry.” He dropped into the rocking chair I’d brought down from the attic, the one I’d rocked him in. It was still functional, but as creaky as his voice.

“Don’t be. This is what it’s all about. There were great moments, too. Being a parent is the most difficult and the most rewarding job I’ve ever had. The shop, my faith, most of who I am—it’s all somehow tied to making a better life for you.”

He scrubbed his eyes. “But it could have been easier if Dad had been there, huh?”

I paced to the door and back again. “I try not to think in could-haves, honey, but yes, I suppose it might have been easier with your father around, but then again, maybe not.”

With a final wail, Moriah went limp against me.

“Finally,” I whispered, starting toward the crib.

My son held out his hand, shook his head. “I’ll walk her a little more. Until she’s asleep for real.”

Asleep for real? I stared down at her closed angel eyes, tiny chest rising and falling. What was this, fake sleep? I didn’t dare ask. I wanted to tell him that even if she woke up she’d go back down again, just like he always had, but that would be parenting advice, which I’d promised myself not to give. Though I still think parents who live with their parents need all the advice they can get.

In spite of Jericho’s warning, I placed Moriah in her crib. If she was going to spend half of her time here, she was going to have to learn how to sleep sometime. Besides, I had a feeling I might not want to be holding a newborn for whatever my son was trying to say.

Jericho paced my route, to the door and back. “I think things could have been much better if Dad had stayed—I don’t think this babysitting switch-off stuff is enough—”

“Look, I can’t let Shemika move in here, you know that.” Especially not with her breastfeeding. It gave me the willies just thinking about her popping out the goods every few hours. Warming up the milk and keeping that electronic pump maintained was a nightmare, though. Whatever happened to good old boiling water and formula? If something happened to Shemika, that baby would probably starve. She didn’t even take a pacifier.

“Okay Mom, I get that. I wouldn’t feel right about that anyway. If I just wanted to live with her, I’d be at Dad’s right now.”

I froze. “Why does it always have to come back to this tug-of-war between your father and me?” Moriah started to fuss in the crib. Maybe there was something to this fake-sleep theory after all.

Jericho reached in and rubbed the baby’s back. “No, Mom, it isn’t about you and Dad. It’s about Shemika and me. I want her to be my wife.”

This again?

“What?” I took a cleansing breath, the kind recommended on my new exercise video. No help. Jericho’s plan to marry Shemika wasn’t a new concept or a smart one. “I thought we’d permanently tabled that one for now.”

He gathered the now-screaming child into his arms. “You tabled it, Mom. Not me. I’m going to do it anyway, but it’d be nice if you’d just support us—”

“I can’t. You don’t have a job or an education. What about college? We’ve been over this a hundred times. If you really love your child, you’ll think of your future. And hers.”

He rolled his eyes. “I do have a job lined up. As soon as Moriah is a little older, I’ll start college. Plenty of ball players have wives and kids.”

Here we go with that again.

“Plenty of ball players beat those wives and ignore those kids, too. You’re nothing more than a child yourself. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but Mother Holloway and I will find a way to look after Moriah so that you and Shemika can finish school. What happened to you, Jericho? What happened to wanting to be the best?”

He tapped the baby’s back. A sour burp exploded from her little body. “I still want to be the best, Mom—the best dad.”

I sighed. “Did your aunt Dana put you up to this?”

Jericho shook his head.

“Your Dad’s father? I know you’ve spent a lot of time down at his restaurant lately.”

“Nope. You changed his mind. He’s against it now, actually. Says I should go into the army, then get married.”

Great. The idea had possibilities actually, but with all the turmoil in the world, I wasn’t sure about that one, either. Best to ignore it completely. “Your father then?”

He looked away.

“I knew it!” I started across the room toward the phone.

He cut me off as I picked up the cordless from the base. “Don’t. I brought it up to Dad. He just said that maybe if he’d married you, things wouldn’t be so hard for me right now. He said that he’d wanted to marry you, but people talked him out of it, told him that it’d hurt his basketball career and that he was too young to handle it.”

“Looks like they were right.” I tried not to wonder who these “people” were and why they would have said such a thing. It didn’t matter now. I pushed Jericho aside and clicked the phone on.

Jericho unplugged the phone from the base, preventing me from calling out. “Maybe they were right. Maybe not. Maybe Dad just believed what people said more than what his heart said. I know this won’t be easy, but I think it will be better, better than this.” He stared down at the baby, sagging against him in a fitful sleep.

“Better than this? Better than this, would have been for you to have listened to me in the first place! Shemika could keep the baby all week and take her to the nursery at her school. You are the one making things ‘like this.’ It’s a little too late to try and be the Cleavers, don’t you think?”

“I didn’t want to only see my daughter on the weekends or every once in a while like all the guys I know. I don’t want to be some fool at the mall getting yelled at by his child’s mother because he didn’t bring diapers over. I know you don’t believe this, Mom, but this has really changed me. I don’t want to just be another baby’s daddy. I want to be a husband. I want to be a man.”

The conviction in his voice blew through me like one of the fall winds soon to arrive.

A man. Wasn’t that what I raised him to be? Why had he waited until now to come to this conclusion? Why couldn’t he have been a man last year and not gotten the girl pregnant in the first place? “So now you want to be a man, huh? That’s convenient. You act totally irresponsible, risk everything I’ve given you, everything God has given you and all of the sudden I’m supposed to believe you’re grown-up?”

He took the phone from where I’d curled it to my chest and hung it back in place on the wall. “You don’t have to believe it, Mom, but it’s true. Everything that’s going on—with Dad coming back, Aunt Dana getting married to Adrian, Grandpa cooking again, even Aunt Dahlia and Trevor being around—it’s all I ever wanted. Family. And now I have one of my own. I want to make it work, make it last.”

I turned away so that my son wouldn’t see me cry. Dahlia was Dana and Jordan’s younger sister. She’d dedicated herself to the Lord during Dana’s wedding ceremony and was going through marriage counseling with the father of her child, who was also Dana’s ex-boyfriend. As much as Jericho drove me crazy, he and Shemika were probably easily as mature as that couple. And I supported their marriage wholeheartedly. Still, it wasn’t who Jericho had mentioned that bothered me, but what.

Family. The thing he’d always wanted.

Hadn’t I been his family? It was hard enough to be put aside in the church, in business, in the world, but I’d always thought that what we’d had as mother and son had been enough. Evidently, I’d been wrong. What hurt more than his words was the fact that somewhere inside me, a part of me nodded in agreement. I wanted a family, too.

“I know that your baby needs you, but you are my baby. My family. I just can’t let you ruin your life.”

He put the baby down again, lowering her an inch at a time. He started for the door, then looked back. “Ruin my life? Like you ruined yours?”

We stepped into the hall together, trying to keep our voices down. I didn’t do so well with that. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. You may be turning eighteen in a few months and have some mystery job lined up, but you’re not grown yet. I love the both of you, but we can’t even discuss this again until you’ve graduated. I just can’t take the chance that you won’t. Moriah needs a father with an education as much as she needs this perfect dad you want to become.”

My son’s shoulders sagged. “Don’t make this difficult, Mom.”

I straightened, tightened the belt on my robe. I knew a threat when I heard one. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. There are ways to get what I want. I’d rather not go around you, but if I have to, I will.” Jericho disappeared down the hall, but his words hung in the air.

As August eased into autumn, the vise of tension between my son and I tightened more and more. I arrived early at my shop and had a special prayer time followed by working some new leather samples and playing around with some shoe designs. By seven-thirty, I’d made my decision to call Jordan to get to the root of our little parenting problem.

I still feel strange using “parenting” and “Jordan” in the same sentence after his seventeen-year absence, but men seem to be able to pull off tricks like that—reappear and become the hero. If I’d left my kid, then come back almost twenty years later and tried to be a mom, I’d have been laughed out of town. Oh, well. Such is life.

Though we’d gotten along well in the weeks following Moriah’s birth, a divide had developed between Jordan and me, no doubt facilitated by Terri, his future bride. She answered the phone when I called.

“Good morning!”

I pulled the cell away from my ear. How Jordan could ever have been interested in me and her in the same lifetime defied my best logic. “Hello, Terri. It’s Rochelle. It’s Jordan available?”

Her cheeriness took a quick vacation, replaced by her “Oh, it’s you” voice. “He’s a little tied up. Maybe I can take a—”

“Who is that on the phone?” Jordan’s voice echoed in the background. Probably still asleep. “Hello?”

“It’s Rochelle. Sorry to wake you. I’m calling to set up a time when we can talk about Jericho and this getting-married business. I think it best to come at this from a united front.”

He sniffed away all that remained of his night’s rest and cleared his throat. “I’m not sure if I can do that, Chelle. To be honest, I’m pulling for them. And I’ll do anything I can to help them.”

“We both will!” Terri’s enthusiastic cheer from the background set my teeth on edge.

Jordan muffled the receiver, but I could hear him say, “Sweetheart? Why don’t you go and start us some breakfast, huh?”

I held my stomach, hoping its contents wouldn’t end up on the Persian rug I’d recently purchased for the shop, or worse, a pair of the shoes on the display table. Was everyone losing their minds?

“Help them? Are you insane?” Oops. I hadn’t meant to sound so shrill.

“When I left you, I was insane, but not now.” He lowered his voice.

I raised mine. “Don’t go there, J! This is about the kids.” So it was about us, too, but I couldn’t deal with that now.

“Hold on.”

The sound of Jordan’s size-sixteen feet padding down the hall came scuffling through the line. A door slammed. “Look, I’m trying to build a relationship with our son—with you or without you. If the boy wants to be a man and try to do the right thing, I’m going to support him.”

A dull ringing sound filled my ears. I stared around the shop, my eyes resting on a bright fucshia pair of designer pumps that arrived last week to fill a special order. This was real. I was awake. “All right, thanks for letting me know where things stand. I’ll be in touch—”

“Wait, Chelle, I—”

I jabbed the button on my phone and pasted a smile on my face as the bell jingled over the door.

My first customer of the day.