Made of Honor (13 page)

In Sister Wells’s case, she changed the whole song. The choir leader was out of town, but if he had to deal with this situation when he returned, he wouldn’t be pleased, nor would he deal with it tactfully. God was still working on Simon in that area, and I didn’t hold it against him. I had my own struggles to focus on.

“So are you done with that basketball guy’s girlfriend? Angela?”

I knew she’d work her way around to it. “Tangela. And no, I’m not done. She asked me to be in the wedding—”

“That might be a good thing.”

Huh? Just when I was about to go into my tirade about how ridiculous the whole thing was, my best bud—well, former at the moment, but we’d get back—says that this nightmare is a good thing? I bit the inside of my cheek. The only explanation for her behavior was something I didn’t want to think about—a man. She’d been absent from Golden Corral the past few Sundays, but I hadn’t seen her with Bad Pants, either.

My eyes widened as we walked silently from the church to our cars parked side by side in the gravel lot, which looked big without Sunday’s cars spilling out of it. We stopped at her Lexus, facing my eight-year-old Cougar. Shoes were an easier sell than soap. Our vehicles reflected that.

“Since when is being a stand-in a good thing, Rochelle? And for Tangela, no less? You know…how people treat us singles. Always a fix-up—”

A sheepish grin crept across my friend’s face. A grin I’d missed. “Speaking of single, I’m seeing somebody…”

My breath caught in my chest. My girl. My partner. The last single Christian woman in my world holding it down on the job and holding out in the bedroom. Even if we weren’t speaking outside of e-mail, knowing Rochelle was going through the same things had helped me stand strong. What was next, Daddy get
ting a job? “Somebody? Not that guy from Golden Corral? Please, tell me it’s not.”

She didn’t say a word.

I turned back toward the church. Had I somehow driven her to this by not participating in BASIC?

Let’s not start the blame game.

“Why not Deacon Rivers instead?” At sixty-two, he hitched his pants up to his armpits, but he wasn’t bad-looking and could sing a mean hymn. He was too old for her, but if she was going to settle, why not sell out all the way?

Rochelle walked around her car, opened the door and sat inside. She motioned for me to get in too. Car talk.

“Why now?” I asked again, slamming the car door. “What’s changed? Just tell me that.”

I am the same yesterday, today and forever.

Rochelle tapped her foot on the gas pedal. “I’m not sure myself. This stuff with Jordan, I guess. It’s time for me to move on. I’ve known it a long time, but I didn’t want to let you down.”

Let
me
down? I’d always thought it would be the other way around. “Okay…why that guy then? Not to be funny, but I didn’t take him for your type.” Or anybody’s type for that matter. Even Tad would have been better than this.

She shrugged. “Because he wanted me, I guess.”

A pause whistled across the space between us. I blew it away, trying to catch my breath. Had it come to this? “You’re scaring me.”

She turned to face me, her shiny black curls reflecting in the rearview mirror. “He’s a chauffeur.”

I blinked. “A who?”

“You heard me.”

“I thought I did.” This was too much. All the times I’d let a fine blue-collar brothah get away because of Rochelle’s needling about having something in common? And now she was going to run off with someone’s driver?

“He owns the limo and rents it out, but he does the driving himself.” Her voice dipped in pitch. “He does well. It’s not serious yet, but if it doesn’t work out, I might try one of those dating things.”

I leaned all the way against the passenger door so I could get a look at my friend’s face. A good look. “A dating thing? What exactly does that mean?”

She smoothed her scarf against her neck. “It means that a few like-minded people get together and have dinner, exchange business cards…that kind of thing.”

My chin hit my chest. Had everyone lost their minds? “I can’t believe you, Rochelle. You’re not only dating, but planning for it not to work out?”

She sucked her teeth. “See why I didn’t tell you? Because I knew you’d act just like this—foolish.” She put the key in the ignition and started her car. “I know I blocked you from good men plenty of times and I thought I was right, that we didn’t need anybody…now I’m not so sure. For the first time I think someone good has come into my life. I’d like to find out.”

I cut my act. “Does Jericho like him?”

“His name is Shawn and Jericho likes him okay. It’s different. We’re taking it slow.”

Poor kid. Both his parents had lost it. At least she had that much sense to do it slowly. I opened the passenger door to get out. Quickly.

“Be happy for me and be good in the wedding. We’re not getting any younger,” she whispered behind me.

Too stunned to respond, I shoved my purse up on my shoulder and focused on getting to my car. What this conversation, this day, meant was more than I was ready to consider. The only thing I knew for sure was that I was hurting.

Bad.

U
nfortunately, Tangela was a woman of her word. When she said the dress was coming tomorrow, she meant it. After church, I stopped by the store where the Federal Express box awaited me. After an exhausting morning of trying to sing over Sister Wells and trying to soothe our Music Minister’s frustration at our off-tone melody, I had little energy left to deal with Tangela’s dress. And let’s not even talk about me and Rochelle. We’d been the dueling soloists this morning.

I’m ashamed of us both.

Rochelle thought I was jealous of her little man-fling. She couldn’t have been more wrong. In a weird sort of way, I was happy for her. The thing that bothered me was the numbness, the deadness in my own heart. A year ago, I might have listened to her little speech and thought, “She’s right. I’m not getting any younger. Maybe I’ll give it one last shot.”

Now, nothing of the sort came to mind. Whatever love had remained in me, was only for Jesus.

I held the red satin slip of a dress in my hands. What kind of woman chose red for a wedding? And strapless at that. I didn’t
have the nerve to try it on. Just holding it up to me was bad enough. The silhouette of that soft fabric against me, made me think of a part of myself I’d buried long ago in ratty T-shirts and baggy clothes.

My secret woman-self.

The part of me that had always caused me the most trouble in the past, the part of me that I’d surrendered to God and accepted His love in return for. Was He now trying to reopen that hidden chamber?

Today at church, a nice-looking man had sat on my pew and given me all the usual signals, but I didn’t bother to return any of them. A quick once-over gave me all the info I needed about him—too good to be true—probably living with his mama, driving some other woman’s car, “in between” jobs. Not to mention that he probably came to the Lord last week. I smiled at the guy, shot up a few prayers and pointed him to the singles’ group after service. It was the least—and the most—I could do.

And now I had the rest of the day to myself, since Rochelle was too caught up with her new man for our usual after-church lunch and hang-out. I could go to Jordan’s, but then I’d have to hear about his girlfriend and a whole lot of other stuff I’d rather not know. So I guess I’ll just be still…as long as I can stand it anyway. Probably go down to the shop and get a little work done.

A knock boomed at the door. “Dana! You in there?”

I dropped the flaming dress back in its box and kicked it in the closet. I’d deal with that later.

Lips pursed, I set out toward Rochelle’s voice, not bothering to put on my shoes. “Coming.”

As I pulled the door open, she almost tumbled in, with Jericho and the new boyfriend following close behind. While she gathered her breath from running up the stairs, I surveyed Mr. Car-and-Driver. He looked the same, wearing his pants tighter than I was comfortable with, but he had a kind smile.

“Girl, I tried to call you. Why didn’t you answer?”

I shrugged, shutting the door behind them.

“Don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Shawn. Nice seeing you again.” The new guy shoved his beefy hand in front of me. I shook it and peeked at Jericho, already across the room and seated at my computer.

“Same here.” I extended my hand.

Rochelle gave us both a little shove. “Later for all that. Listen. Since you were too rude to hang out with us, I took Shawn over to the health food store so he could see some of your stuff.” She paused for effect.

It worked. “And? What?”

“It wasn’t there, that’s what!”

“That’s impossible. I just gave them a new display last month.”

My nephew dropped onto my leather sectional. “The display is still there, but it’s full of Adrian’s candles. And that’s not all…”

What else could there be? “Spill it.” I wasn’t in the mood for a tease.

“I figured I’d have to go way to the mall then and show him your stuff at Smelly Chick. Your stuff was gone there, too.”

“Don’t tell me. Candles again.” My chin hit my chest.

“Yep. I checked all your accounts in town and I couldn’t find a thing. Not one bar of soap. Not one bottle of lotion, shampoo, nothing. Even the Vanilla Smella display at High Life was gone.”

I dropped to the couch, wondering how I could have missed the signs—the unreturned phone calls, the lack of interest in my new lines, no requests to restock the displays—it’d been so long since I’d been dumped by a guy, I’d forgotten the signals. A few new stores had sprouted up since I’d opened, but I’d managed to have a presence in all of them. Until now.

Now I remembered the signs of being jilted, and even though it wasn’t Trevor or some other man this time, it hurt the same. And it was all Adrian’s fault.

He was sleeping, but I didn’t care. When Adrian came to the door wearing his pajamas, I stormed right in, with Rochelle and her boyfriend behind me.

“What are you trying to do, wreck me? First you steal my idea and now you take my wholesale accounts? I thought you were my friend.” Or something.

He woke up real quick. Slammed the door. “Hold up. First off, how are you just going to bust in here talking to me like I’m a child? And stealing? I haven’t stolen anything from you. The stores came to me. I tried to ask you who you had accounts with months ago to keep this from happening, but as always, you wouldn’t respond.”

“And stealing ideas?” He turned to Rochelle. “Is she talking about Kick!?”

Rochelle nodded.

Adrian paused and offered Shawn a seat. “Hey, man, sorry they put you in the middle of this.”

“No problem. Anything to eat?”

Still playing it cool, Adrian nodded toward the kitchen. He wasn’t fooling me. Any second now, his entire face would squish into a ball of anger. And then…fireworks. This time I didn’t care.

“So you think that Kick! was your idea, Dane? The actual store itself?”

What did he think I was talking about? I crossed my arms. “If the candle fits.”

He raked a palm over his sweaty dome. “It was my idea. Mine. Don’t you remember?” His voice climbed in volume.

Shawn returned from the kitchen with a sandwich worthy of Dagwood, but quickly sensed the mounting tension. “Maybe we should go.”

Adrian didn’t even turn around. “Sit.”

I squared my shoulders. I remembered all right.

He shook his head. “That last night on the stoop…after they took—” his voice faltered “—my mother to the institution. It was
raining and your feet hurt because we’d walked up the hill to get ice cream for the apple pie.”

I hadn’t recalled the specifics until now. It made no difference though. I remembered the big stuff.

“I was rubbing your feet and you asked me if I thought anything could help her—Mama, I mean. All I could think of was the way she smiled when we lit candles. And how one time Daddy had lit them all over the house and she’d laughed and laughed. For a few minutes it was like before she got so bad.” He turned away. “I wanted to make a place that captured that laughter forever. A place where she would know I was always burning a candle for her, waiting for her to come home.”

I scratched my chin, trying to grab at a response. That wasn’t how it went, was it? It couldn’t be. I was so sure, but he seemed so sure, too. And my mind is bad sometimes. What if I was wrong? How would I talk myself out of this one? “That’s not how I remember it, Adrian. I told you about my dream place.”

He sighed and strode away from me, sinking into his sectional. “No, Dane. You told me you like to swim your toes in carpet and that too many smells at once gave you a headache. So I only burn one scent an hour and the shag is as long as they could make it. So there, that’s what I stole from you—barefeet and a headache. Anything else you want to scream at me about?”

Why did you marry Sandy in the first place? Let’s start with that? I cleared my throat. “Not that I can think of.”

“Good. Now sit down and listen to me for a second.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Whatever, Dane.” He stretched up to the ceiling, working the anger out of his muscles.

Goodness.

I needed to get out of here. My confidence and my ability to keep from either slapping or kissing Adrian was waning. “I guess
we should let you get back to your nap. We can talk about this later.”

Adrian shook his head. “I’m up now. Maybe you’ll think twice next time you go banging on people’s doors like the police, accusing them of things.”

He dropped to the couch, still simmering. “Did you get that business plan revised for the bridal line?”

I groaned. “I don’t have time, okay?”

“See? You have time to berate me for doing my job, but don’t have time to do yours. I see you over there all times of the day and night. Working yourself to death. Streamline it, Dane. You’ll kill yourself.”

He’d been talking to Rochelle, no doubt. “You do it like you do it and I do it like I do it, okay? All that organizational stuff just doesn’t work for me.”

“How do you know? You don’t even try.”

For a reason I’ll never understand, I walked to the couch and plopped. I guess everything just caught up to me. Tears streamed down my face. “I’m tired of trying. I’m just plain tired.”

Adrian leaned close. His arms circled me. His lips brushed my head. “I know. Me, too.”

“And I feel like a fool. I really believed—”

“I know. I’ve always known there was a problem about it. I thought it was just because of Sandy….” His words drowned between my braids.

I looked up at him slowly as if seeing him for the first time in many days, his eyes brown and clear. Everything Adrian had said about his mother ringing in my head. Sometimes, like today, he looked like her. Beautiful.

My eyes fluttered shut, oiled by fresh tears. I had to admit, there was a lot of his daddy in him, too. Especially around the mouth…. I reached for his hand. He pulled away.

“I went to see my mother at the mental health center before she died.”

Shawn coughed. I prayed. Adrian always used terms like “institution” or “hospital,” but never had I heard him use the words
mental
and
health
in a sentence together.

“You know who she asked for?”

Uh-oh. I’d gone to Sunnyside once a week until the day she died. I read her the Bible and let her beat me at cards. She never asked about Adrian except to tell me to feed him more carrots. “That child’s eyes are just bad,” she would say, then shudder at the horror of it.

“You, Dane. She shouted it. ‘Dana, tell him to leave. Dana…’”

I tried to swallow, but I couldn’t get the knot down this time. Why were crazy folks always calling for me? I couldn’t even help myself.

“It’s because I went there sometimes. Prayed with her.” He glared and turned his head. I clutched his shirt. “Listen to me. Please.”

“No. I won’t listen. You’re always crying about what somebody took from you. What you don’t have. You have everything. Always have had it. She always loved you.”

No use arguing that. I’d often thought growing up that Adrian and I had been switched at birth. His mother, with that mole on her face and that big red afro…She looked like sunshine to me.

When I came over, we didn’t talk. She’d grip her cigarette and grab a Jimi Hendrix eight-track and a sketch pad. Blues, greens and yellows on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and red, orange and purple on Tuesday and Thursday. She’d sneak me into the Bid Whist game on Sundays if my parents didn’t catch it. Adrian was always somewhere reading, playing with his chemistry set or…something. I’d never considered that I’d stolen her from him.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

He looked away. “Me, too.”

I’ve always been the same pretty much. The same friends, same places. Right down to still living in the apartment I grew
up in. Tracey, Rochelle, Adrian—we’d all lived here once, on the second floor. One by one, they moved away. Tracey’s parents’ divorce, Adrian’s mother’s nervous breakdown and his too-tired father’s too-soon heart attack had plucked them away.

Only Rochelle had stayed, abandoned by her mother when she learned of her pregnancy. The woman had come to our apartment and asked my mother to look after Rochelle, saying that she was moving to Arizona with her new husband. I’d often wondered what Rochelle really thought of that whole thing, but what did it matter? She would have done anything to be with Jordan then, and anything to be rid of him now.

Maybe she regretted it. Not Jericho, but loving Jordan so hard. She would have died for him then. In truth, she had died for him. We all did. I’d just pretended to live so as not to hurt my mother’s feelings. Wasn’t losing one child enough? And he wasn’t any ordinary child.

Neither was I, I realize now, but survival clouded my greatness in a haze of coping routines—prayer with Rochelle, cooking with Daddy, hanging with Adrian, talking to Tracey, staying out of Mama’s way, babysitting Jericho and when I could, riding like the wind on my motorcycle. Our place was one big pile of crazy, a place that only my true friends understood.

And of all my friends, Adrian was the truest. Even once he was staying with his grandfather across town, he could pick up my vibe on the phone and jet right over on his moped or even take the dreaded Leverhill transit bus if that’s what rescuing me required. He told me years later that he’d been saving himself, too. Our family, our fireworks of emotions, was a welcome change to the sterility of his uptown world.

Now standing here on the landing outside his apartment, I wondered who would save him this time? I’d had my chance and fumbled the ball. Tracey was the next natural choice, but from her e-mails, she could use a little salvation herself. Not that she and Ryan didn’t love each other.

But was love alone enough? Even in the best of matches, you’re still marrying a stranger. And sometimes they’re stranger than you thought. I hadn’t tied the knot myself, but I’d watched it choke plenty of folks, all the while wondering if it would have been like that between me and Adrian.

Today, I realized that no matter how close people are to one another, there’s always a place—a secret place—that only God can see. A place that folks don’t know exists until it’s too late. Some people know about it, but they stuff it with all the wrong things and when they open it, like Pandora’s box, it unleashes devastation on their relationships. I now know my box was stuffed with fear. And Adrian’s? Chock full of memories of his mother’s schizophrenic screams and his father’s powerlessness. All the words he’d never said, tears he’d never cried. They were there waiting….