I Wish I Had a Red Dress (23 page)

BILL HAD MADE PASTA
with spinach and tomatoes, a lemon roasted chicken and homemade rolls. He had chilled the wine and cued up Sweet Honey in the Rock to signify a safe space for high-strung women. When we walked in, he gave Nate that back-thumping chest-bump hug that passes for an affectionate brotherly greeting. For me, he had a warm squeeze.

“How’s Tee?”

“She’s amazing,” I said. “Her leg is mending perfectly and she’s already trying to talk them into taking the cast off her wrist.”

“Thank God!” He hugged me again. “Well, then, let’s make this evening a Tomika-free zone.”

I froze. Men always have the option to think about this madness or not think about it. We don’t. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just that I’ll bet if we try really hard, we can come up with something else to talk about for the next three hours. I think we all deserve a break.”

Before I had a chance to ask him what the hell he meant by that, Sister came from the kitchen with kisses all around, a welcoming smile and four wineglasses. Bill took our coats and poured. I sipped my wine and tried to relax. Bill’s comment had seemed inappropriate and insensitive to me, but I knew he’d been as concerned about Tee as the rest of us. Maybe it was just his way.

“Something smells great,” Nate said, sitting beside me on the sofa.

“You got it wrong, brother,” Bill said cheerfully. “
Everything
smells great.”

“A cook without an ego is like a meal without hot sauce,” Sister teased him, but then she looked at me hard. “You haven’t been sleeping much, have you?”

I shook my head. “Not lately. Is it that obvious?”

“You’re not going to do Tee any good if you fall asleep at the wheel on Baldwin Road,” she said gently, not knowing she was breaking her husband’s declaration of her living room as a Tomika-free zone.

“I offered to drive her,” Nate said, sounding like he wanted Sister to know he had done his best,
but you know how she is
. I don’t know why, but coming on the heels of Bill’s weird pronouncement, it really pissed me off. I was beginning to realize that accepting this invitation was probably a bad idea.

“And I declined,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“The offer still stands,” he said.

“I heard you the first time,” I said, more sharply than I
meant to, feeling like Medusa with those snakes growing out of my head.

Bill raised his eyebrows. “A little testy, are we?”

Sister leaned over to kiss my cheek. “A sure sign of sleep deprivation.”

“Relax, sweetie,” said Bill. “You’re among friends.” He winked at Nate. “At least, as far as we know.”

“So far so good,” said Nate.

I smiled at him. A small smile, but it was the best I could do at the moment.

“How’s your workshop going?” I said to Bill. We definitely needed a change of topic and Bill could always be counted upon to talk about himself for a few uninterrupted minutes. Maybe I could use the time to calm down.

He groaned. “They’re hopeless! I asked them what they thought about the guy from Public Enemy saying rap is like a newspaper for the hip-hop nation. They seemed to endorse the idea as a concept, but when I asked them to try to write down some rap lyrics about a current event, none of them knew any.
Not one
. They weren’t even sure what I mean by
current event.
When I said it’s something you’d read in the newspaper, Ezell Henry said, ‘Well, that’s the problem right there. We don’t read no newspapers!’ ” Bill shook his head and refilled his glass.

“You should have asked them to write about Junior running Tee off the road,” I said.

Bill looked at Sister, who was looking at me. My comment just lay there, but I didn’t care.

“It’s a current event,” I said. “Maybe you could help them think it through.”

Bill frowned at me, his face darkening like a cloud. The two of us had declared an uneasy truce after our exchange about the
trip to the firing range, but we hadn’t settled anything and tonight both of us seemed to be full of strange energy. We used to call it bad vibes, but whatever you call it, I knew we were about to kill any possibility of a pleasant evening.

“It’s a poetry workshop, Joyce, remember?” Bill’s voice sounded sharp. “What could that possibly have to do with Junior?”

I set down my glass. “Well, what good is a poem right now if it doesn’t have anything to do with Junior?” I said. “What’s the point?”

“Calm down, sweetie,” Sister said very gently. Her voice sounded like a summer breeze, but I brushed it right off.

“I am calm. I’m just saying I thought that was what black writers were supposed to do.
Tell the truth to the people
.”

“You don’t have to lecture me,” Bill snapped. “I’m not the enemy.”

My face twisted into a tight little smile. “That’s right,” I said, looking at Nate. “You’re one of the good guys.”

Bill sat back in the chair and spread his arms in a gesture of supplication, but his face was harder than I wanted it to be. “I can’t change the world with ten kids in a poetry workshop, Joyce. That’s not my job.”

“Then whose job is it?”

“You seem to have all the answers,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Nate reached out and took my hand, but I pulled it back. I didn’t want comfort. I wanted clarity.

“All I know is this,” I said. “Every day I drive over to the hospital and every day Tee asks me, ‘Did they catch him?’ And every day I have to say no. And then I get to The Circus and they ask me, ‘Did they catch him?’ And I have to say no and offer some
encouragement by telling them something lame like all they have to fear is fear itself, when fear didn’t run Tee off that road.
Junior did!
”

I stood up and walked over to the fireplace, trying to calm down, but determined to find a way to tell Bill how I felt. If he’s really my friend, I have to be able to talk to him about something this important and he has to be able to listen.
Silence equals death
. Sister came to stand beside me, and when she put her arm around my waist, I know she could feel me trembling. Nate never took his eyes off me, but he didn’t say anything.

“We’re not cops,” Bill said, not backing down any more than I was. “What do you want us to be? Vigilantes?”

He hardly got it out of his mouth before I answered him. “I want you to be men!”

I hated the sound of my own angry voice. Sister tightened her arm around my waist, but her eyes were on Bill.

“I thought you were the one who believed in the healing power of love,” he said sarcastically. “Funny how as soon as you get scared enough, you go looking for somebody with a big gun to protect you by any means necessary.”

“How can you . . .” I stopped before I could finish one more angry accusation.
Slow down. Take a breath
.

I looked at Sister, and there was such worry and concern on her face, I felt even worse. “I’m so sorry,” I said softly, turning away from her, and then I started to cry. Nate stood up immediately and took me in his arms. He was talking to Sister and Bill, but he was holding me like we were all alone.

“Joyce and I have agreed that discussions of Brother Lattimore can be hell on your love life,” he said. “I would like to expand that statement to say he is also the death of pleasant predinner conversation.”

“Amen,” said Sister, handing me a napkin to mop my eyes and reaching for Bill’s hand. “Are you okay, sweetie?”

Bill shook his head and I heard him take a deep breath too. “I will be as soon as I get through being an asshole.”

“Let’s say a prayer,” Sister said.

Sister will do that sometimes, just grab you and start praying like it doesn’t require any more preparation than to bow your head and close your eyes and jabber away at will. I took Bill’s other hand without looking at him and felt him give mine a small squeeze, although he didn’t look at me either. I squeezed back hard. Bill’s like my big brother. I can’t stay mad at him. Plus, he was right. He’s not the enemy. There is no enemy. There’s just a lot of complicated human beings, some more damaged than others.

“Mother/father God,” Sister said softly. “We ask for patience and for faith. We ask for courage and compassion. We rededicate ourselves to truth and the love that is strong enough to tell it. We say thank you for this and for all things and we say the name of our friend Tomika Jackson out loud—”

She paused and we all said Tee’s name like an obedient Sunday school class. “Tomika Jackson.”

“. . . to bring peace to her spirit, strength to her body and speed to her healing.
Thank you.
”

And we three murmured with her, clutching each other’s hands; once again an unbroken circle.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you . . .”

WHAT A NIGHT! AFTER
Sister’s prayer, Bill and I both apologized, not for our feelings, but for expressing them in such a combative way. I confessed to some of that free-floating
woman at the end of her last nerve
anger that is always easier to read about than to actually experience, and Bill confessed he’d been drinking wine all day because he couldn’t bear to see how hurt I looked whenever I talked about Tee, knowing there was nothing he could do to make it better. Nate stayed close to me all night, and when he dropped me off at home, he kissed me like the good friend he was definitely proving himself to be and told me to call him if I needed to talk.

The snow was just starting to fall as I stood there watching his taillights disappear. The flakes were big and moist, falling so
softly you don’t even know it until you step outside in the morning and everything is covered in a thick white blanket. It was a beautiful night and I realized Nate was right. Junior was wreaking havoc on my peace of mind, my work, my friendships and my brand-new-almost-a-love-life. There was no way I wanted to be standing here alone tonight counting snowflakes.

I walked down the slope of the yard. The dock already had its own blanket of snow and I took three giant steps to the end of it, looking back with satisfaction at what could have been the product of size six-and-a-half seven-league boots. I tipped back my head and caught some of the big, wet flakes on my tongue. The older I get, the more I am in awe of things I used to take for granted, like the fact that each snowflake has a unique design that appears only once throughout all eternity. How amazing is that?

I was just standing there, watching the lake fill up with snow, when Nate’s car turned back into the yard and eased to a stop. Had he forgotten something? The house was still dark and I wondered if he would think I had already turned in. I don’t know why I didn’t call out to him since I knew he couldn’t see me down here, but I didn’t.

He stepped out of the car, walked quickly up to the back porch, stuck something in the door and headed back so fast I was afraid he’d get in before he heard me calling.

“Nate!”

He stopped and turned in the direction of my voice.

“Down here on the dock,” I called. “Do you want me to come up?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll come down.”

He turned off his car and started toward me. I was always
struck by the economy of his stride. For such a big man, there was no lumbering, no wasted motion. I stood where I was and he walked out on the dock and stood beside me.

“You okay?” I said.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.” He gestured back toward the house. “I left you a note.”

“What does it say?”

He looked surprised at the question. “Oh, well . . .”

I waited.

“It’s just something that I remembered from when I was a kid. You made me remember it. Tonight, I mean. Over at Sister’s when you were trying to put into words how you felt about things.” He stopped, hoping I understood. I didn’t have a clue.

“Do you want me to read it now?” I said.

“No.”

“Then tell me.” It was so quiet, we were both whispering. There couldn’t be a better place to share a secret.

He took a deep breath.

“Tell me.”

“One time my father came back from Havana,” he said, so quietly I could hardly hear him even in the silence. “It might have been the last time he went, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that he brought my mother a dress, a
red dress
.”

He hesitated again, and I slipped my arm through his and leaned a little closer. That seemed to reassure him and he smiled down at me in the darkness. “I was a kid, maybe five or six, but I remember him teasing her until she finally went upstairs and put it on. I could tell she didn’t want to, but he kept on and kept
on and finally, she did it. When she came back down, I didn’t hardly recognize her.”

He smiled a little at the memory. “My mother never wore red,
ever,
and this dress was about as red as you could get. It was silk or something and it sort of floated when she walked.”

It was so quiet, I could hear the wind pushing the snow across the surface of the frozen lake.

“She was so beautiful that I looked at my father to see if he thought so too, and he had this funny look on his face that I’d never seen before. He went over to her and kissed her and then he picked her up and swung her around and around.”

In my mind, I could see the skirt fluttering against her legs as they twirled. I hoped she was laughing at her husband’s excitment. I hoped she shared it.

“Did she love the dress?”

He shook his head slowly. “She hated it.”

My heart sank. I was hoping for a happy ending. “Why?”

“She said . . . she said it made her look like a whore. It didn’t,” he added quickly, “but that’s what she said and then she turned around and ran upstairs and my father just stood there like she’d slapped him across the mouth and then he looked at me and shrugged and he said, ‘I been married to that woman for ten years and I guess I don’t know her at all.’ ”

He pulled me closer and I looked into his face.

“I don’t want to be like my father,” he said. “I want to know you, really know you. I want to know what you think and what you feel and what makes you laugh and what drives you crazy, and I’m trying, but the closer I get, the more mysterious you seem. I’ve never known a woman like you.”

Under the circumstances, I thought a kiss was almost
required. His lips were cool and the snow on his face tickled my nose.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said softly, kissing my eyelids. “Why don’t you save that red dress I gave you until you feel like it’s safe to wear it and let me know.”

“And then what?”

“And then I’ll put on my best Sunday-go-to-meeting suit and come calling.”

“It’s a deal,” I said, wondering when that would be. “It’s a deal.”