God Only Knows (9 page)

For months Gil seemed content to tiptoe toward sex with Cassie in those precious hours before his parents returned home from
their shifts at a local plant. Each week she would let him progress from hand holding to kissing, then to French-kissing,
then to petting, then heavy petting. Cassie wasn’t sure what type of schedule she was on, but she figured eventually she’d
know when it was time to let Gil “round home,” as he suggested she do every such afternoon.

When the time came, though, it had not been on Cassie’s schedule. She would come to learn that Gil, pressured by his parents
to get a “respectable” girlfriend, had decided to collect the return on his investment before cutting her loose. With little
warning and a style both swift and brutish, he had set Cassie on the promiscuous course that didn’t end until her first bout
of morning sickness.

It had taken Cassie years to forgive Gil Darby for his sin against her, but a few seconds with Pete Whitlock had nearly set
her back almost twenty years. Gasping for breath, she threw her car door open, swung about violently, and vomited onto the
pavement. Shoulders heaving, fighting for every breath, Cassie raised her hands heavenward, ignoring the stares of a woman
parked adjacent to her.

“I give, Father,” she whimpered, eyes cast to the cloudy skies overhead. “I can’t solve this alone.”

L
ook here, Julia,” her father said as soon as he answered his phone, “it’s ten o’clock on a Saturday night. Used to be I was
just heading out into the streets at this hour, but them days are over. You know I don’t take to folk ringing me up this late.”

“Excuse me,” Julia replied, her tone sharper than it should be. She collapsed back into her office chair, wiping another puddle
of sweat from her brow. “Daddy, forgive me if that sounded disrespectful. It’s just that your little girl is worn-out. We’ve
been working this phone bank all day.”

“Uh-huh.” Julia’s father made a gagging sound, and she could easily picture him grabbing his nearest spittoon —whether one
of his old shot glasses, a cracked cereal bowl, or a long-neglected vase —and clearing his throat the old-fashioned way. “I
suppose you’re calling about Amber.”

“Yes, just making sure she’s asleep and not sitting up watching some trifling movie with Dejuan and Tracy.” Julia knew that
her nephew and niece, who happened to be Amber’s oldest brother and sister, were addicted to Ice Cube films —like
Friday
and
Barbershop
— really to anything that featured questionable language, crass behavior, and sexual innuendo.

“Julia,” her father replied, his throat sounding drier with each passing minute, “I know I ain’t really help raise you, but
can you cut me a break every now and then? I’m all over this. I do not let Amber stay up late with the other kids, and I certainly
don’t let her watch stuff I know you don’t approve of.”

“Thank you, I was just checking.”

“What time should I expect you?”

Julia scratched at the nape of her neck, feeling the occasional longing for the lengthy curls she had abandoned for this natural
hairstyle. “It will probably be another half hour, I’m sorry. The phone bank’s lead alumni volunteer and I are the only ones
left at this point, but we can’t leave without getting a clear count of all the pledges received tonight.”

“Okay, take your time.” Her father cleared his throat, which told Julia he was struggling to erase any protective emotions
from his tone. “You got someone to walk you to your car this late?”

“It’s okay, Daddy. I’ll just walk out with Dr. Simon.”

“Simon? This the son of those Simons who graduated from Dunbar, the highfalutin folk?”

Julia could feel her own frown as she looked at the phone’s receiver. “His name is Maxwell, Daddy. What do you know about
him anyway?” It wasn’t like her father should have the first clue that she and Maxwell had been classmates; Daddy had done
well in those days to attend her eighth-grade and high-school graduation ceremonies. To this day, he had never met Cassie,
Toya, or Terry.

“I know of the Simon boy’s parents, don’t know him personally,” he replied, chuckling. “Seem like Amber knows plenty about
him, though. According to her, he’s the only man on your volunteer board she thinks you should be dating.”

“Oh no she didn’t.” Julia shook her head. “Your granddaughter has a vivid imagination. Ignore her. I’ll see you guys in a
bit.”

• • •

As she headed back toward the conference room, where Maxwell and a dozen other Christian Light alumni had spent the evening
dialing for dollars, Julia fought back an embarrassed grin. Amber was definitely eight going on eighteen, convinced she knew
how to manage her aunt’s social life. Julia made a mental note to call Cassie for advice on how to deal with the shifting
nature of the mother-daughter relationship in these preteen years. She wanted to encourage Amber’s maturity, but at the same
time, she felt a need to keep the little booger’s nose out of her business.

Opening the conference room door, Julia was surprised to hear not just the hum of the laptop computers the volunteers had
used to record their pledge activity, but the ragged rhythm of Maxwell’s snores. Reclined in his seat, near the center of
the table, he sat with his head cocked back and mouth wide open, a sheaf of printouts in his lap. His chest rising and falling,
his eyes closed, and a thin trail of drool easing from one corner of his mouth, Dr. Maxwell Simon looked like a candidate
for
America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Strangely, Julia found herself staring in admiration.

Her own next move surprised her even more. Before she knew it, she had stepped to the table, crumpled up a stray sheet of
printer paper, and sent the makeshift ball sailing toward Maxwell’s forehead.

“Uh, yeah?” Maxwell popped forward in his seat as the paper glanced off his cheek. His neck jerking as his eyes met Julia’s,
he collapsed forward, elbows landing on the table. “I was, uh, just resting my eyes.”

“You’re only human, Doctor,” Julia replied, grinning and sliding into the chair on the opposite side of the table from him.
“I came to help. Why do you need all the printouts? I thought everyone uploaded their pledge sheets to that SharePoint site
my IT manager set up.”

“Oh, really?” Maxwell frowned. “I knew they were capturing their calls and pledges on spreadsheets, but everyone printed theirs
out before leaving. I figured I had to manually summarize them into one sheet.”

Julia raised an eyebrow. “Maybe if you’d been here on time, you would have heard me ask them to print hard copies just in
case we had any problems reading the copies they uploaded to the site.” She gave a benign smile. “Just how much time have
you spent manually typing in everyone’s data?”

“Let’s just say, if I told you,” Maxwell replied, “you’d have even less respect for me than you already do.” Yawning, he rubbed
at his right eye. “Especially given that I’m still only about halfway through these forms.”

“Maxwell,” Julia said, her tone casually professional now, “I have plenty of respect for you, just none for your understanding
of technology. Not to mention, I know you couldn’t help being late, given the extra patients you had to see this evening.”
She stood and walked over to his chair. “Is your PC still connected to Internet Explorer?”

Maxwell grimaced, wiping at his eyes. “I haven’t really checked.”

“Well,” Julia replied, leaning down next to him and sliding the laptop over in front of her, “let’s just see.” As her fingers
moved across the PC’s keyboard, she wondered if she should scoot farther down the table from the doctor. Barely an inch separated
them now; she could smell his bold cologne, as well as the minty smell of the gum he had quickly popped into his mouth.

“Okay, this is the SharePoint site,” Julia said when the desired screen popped up. In minutes she had walked Maxwell through
the steps required to locate each volunteer’s uploaded pledge spreadsheet and build the formulas necessary to pull the data
into one consolidated view.

“You mean that’s it?” Maxwell shook his head as he reviewed the summary statistics in the pivot table that Julia had already
built into the Excel file. “Good thing you didn’t leave me to my own devices, Julia. I’d have been here until sunrise.”

“Hey, we’re all pulling together for this important cause,” she replied, laying a hand on his shoulder and instantly questioning
her move. “You spent three hours overseeing everyone’s activity, which was time I didn’t have.” She shrugged, relieved that
she had moved her hand before Maxwell showed any sign of unease. “My day job didn’t let up the past few hours —creditors to
beg mercy from, wayward students to motivate, and one of my weekly mentoring sessions with a group of teenage mothers.”

Maxwell stood, but whipped around and leaned onto his chair, his tired eyes brightening as he stared at Julia. “Always knew
you would save the world,” he said. “Or Dayton, at least. That’s no small feat.”

“I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment,” Julia replied, rubbing her eyes despite herself, “but I’ll take it. What’s your
excuse?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play dumb, Doctor,” Julia said, leaning back a bit in her chair. “If you thought I would save the world, I expected
you to rule it. I mean, if I’d predicted where you’d be by this age, I would have said either corporate CEO, insanely wealthy
surgeon, or maybe big-time politician.”

Maxwell stood, crossed his arms, and actually sighed before saying, “Any of those would have sounded right to me back in the
day. I guess, sometimes life has a way of changing our ambitions.”

Julia cocked her head, surprised that her innocent question seemed to have set off a sudden bout of self-examination. “You
know, some in the Jack and Jill and Greek organization communities say this is all part of your family’s master plan. Now
that the family business is a statewide success, your parents need to send one of you into Congress, to help grease the skids
and take the company national. I have to say, it doesn’t sound crazy —you could lose your shirt with this clinic, but build
a heck of a bio for a future campaign.”

Maxwell’s hearty laugh, a deep-throated boom, filled the large, airy conference room. “Oh, Dr. Julia Turner,” he said finally,
“you have no idea. Rest assured my clinic has nothing to do with my family’s desire to have more wealth than God. You’re looking
at a proud black sheep here.”

“That’s hard to believe.” Something told Julia it was time to back off. Over the past several weeks, she and Maxwell had developed
a surprisingly easy, friendly rapport, but she was under no illusion. Yes, even though she had successfully called on God’s
peace and could now look at him without reliving the pain of his rejection from years before, she still found him handsome.
And, yes, the more she inadvertently scratched the surface of the apparent do-gooder motivation behind his opening the clinic,
the more impressed she became.

All that meant, though, was that in a different life she and Maxwell Simon could have been friends. Nothing more. She had
no place digging into the details of his past or into why he had left a glamorous job in Dallas to return to dreary Dayton.

Once they had straightened up the conference room, Maxwell trailed Julia to her office. Standing just outside, near the receptionist’s
desk, he tossed a question as she gathered her coat, purse, and briefcase. “I’ve been meaning to ask, besides Cassie and me,
did you invite any black alumni from our class to serve on the board?”

Shutting her office door after her, Julia chewed her bottom lip, thinking out loud. “Let me see. I think you two were the
only African-Americans.” As long as she was in Christian Light’s hallowed halls, her professionalism forced her to use politically
correct language. “The only other classmates of ours I even invited were Sarah Rice and Jerry Connell, if you remember them.
Sarah’s a mayor of a small town near Xenia, and Jerry is a successful car salesman down in Cincinnati. They’ve both pledged
money but didn’t have time to volunteer.”

“Hmm.” Maxwell followed Julia out into the main hall, let her arm the building’s alarm system, then opened the front door
for her. “You could have aimed a little higher, frankly. I think my boys —you remember Jake Campbell and Lyle Sharp —would
be willing to help out in a bigger way. You realize they’re now —”

“A megachurch pastor and a city councilman, respectively,” Julia replied, her back to Maxwell as she locked the three double-bolts
on the school’s main doors. “To be honest, Maxwell, I didn’t think they’d be interested.”
Hold me steady, Lord.
Julia really didn’t want to get sucked down this path with the doctor, just when things were getting to be so civil. Jake
Campbell, a short, thin, clean-shaven brother with an outdated Afro, lived out in Springboro, the far south suburb, where
his fast-growing, racially diverse church was located. Julia knew for a fact that he had enrolled all four of his children
in the well-funded public school system out there. She had heard through the grapevine that Jake had declared the “new” Christian
Light to be beneath the standards he set for his children’s education. On top of that, Jake had been the most visible local
minister to publicly support Pastor Pence’s criticisms of the Christian Light Schools’ decline.

As for Lyle Sharp, well, if Maxwell had accidentally damaged the self-esteem of the black girls of Christian Light, Lyle had
been a willing destroyer. A tall, sleek, and smooth-talking wisecracker who went on to win a college basketball scholarship,
he hadn’t taken well to Toya and Terry’s teasing about his taste in predictably white, busty, airheaded girlfriends. He always
gave worse than he got when it came to trading insults, and as a result, Julia had personally intervened time and again to
keep her girls from clawing Lyle’s eyes out. When considering alumni volunteers, she had considered Lyle, based on his local
contacts and his deep pockets, but in the end, she had left him off the list. Julia had a sense that even decades later, dealing
with Lyle Sharp carried the same hazards.