The One That Got Away (3 page)

The affirming conversation turned testy for a few minutes, as the friends debated what role, if any, complexion played in Dawn's troubling behavior. Jade, whose own ethnicity was a melting pot of Jamaican, Colombian, and Korean strains, insisted on making her point. “Like it or not, girl, we all know this society still ranks people, especially women, by how close we come to the
white ideal. And little Sydney is closer to it than our precious Dawn.”

“I just don't agree with you,” Serena said, shaking her head but wondering whether it wouldn't be easier if her girlfriend was right. The more she thought about it, Jade's theory on Dawn's behavior beat the alternative. There was only one other good explanation for her daughter's acting out: the same demons that stalked Serena's own youth, the ones that left her temporarily unfit to raise baby Dawn. Not only had they made life hell then, they lay in wait for her today, daring her to skip a few days' pills. Were the same demons creeping up on her daughter now? Serena wasn't mentally prepared to go there.

A
s she held on to Jade's embrace, Serena whispered a prayer for mercy and strength. She'd get Dawn and Sydney through this rough period, but she had to have Jamie's help at parenting. At times he acted like Dawn was her responsibility alone, but Serena never hesitated to remind him that while Sydney was his only biological child, Dawn was his, too; the adoption had been a condition of her agreement to marry him in the first place.

“You don't have to solve all this tonight,” Jade said, rubbing Serena's back with warm, deep strokes. “Let's get you into bed.” A wry smile crept onto her face. “Once you drop off, maybe I'll get a call from that fine man I met at the reception.”

Just that quickly, Serena felt the appreciation welling up in her seep away. “Are you talking about that white boy who was with Tony Gooden?” He had been cute, but if he was friends with Tony he was probably trouble.

“Oh.” Jade frowned and looked away like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “Well, yeah. I swear, though, I didn't know he was with Tony until
after
he got my number.”

“I don't know the guy,” Serena said dismissively, “so do your thing. It's none of my business.”

Jade let her comment go, then asked, “You really didn't feel
anything,
positive or negative, after seeing Tony tonight?”

“Jade, did you hear me earlier or not? I've got bigger things on my mind than some man who crashed my wedding a decade ago.” Lies, all lies, but she was working overtime to convince herself they were true. After years spent suppressing her most embarrassing emotions, Serena was convinced that had been a complete stranger shaking Tony's hand in the receiving line. Yes, a weak-willed stranger, full of secret hopes that her ex would pursue her all over again, as if the ten years since her aborted wedding had never passed. What a fool the woman was; rejecting several dance invitations from handsome groomsmen, she'd rushed to the nearest ladies' room and dialed Tony's cell number, her mind intent on accepting his apology with a little more class. If she could lie to herself, how could she tell Jade the truth?

“Well, I still think he should have stayed away today out of respect for you,” Jade replied. “But I know sometimes the heart overwhelms the head, especially when you haven't seen someone in a long time.”

“He didn't even register on my scale, okay?”

“Okay, now,” Jade said, throwing a thin, peach-scented arm over Serena's shoulder as they walked toward the bathroom door. “Tell me some lies I can believe at least. Yes or no answers. Do you think he's still cute?”

“Yes, though I'd say handsome now.” Arriving at her bed, Serena took a seat and smiled up at Jade.

“I don't know if the mustache helps,” her friend replied. “Other than that, though, he was just like I would have pictured. Lean and fit, sharp fade, tailored suit, gold cuff links, you name it. Once he gets over his search for another version of you, Tony just might make someone a good husband.”

Serena let Jade's kind words go unchallenged. Her friend was probably right. Tony might still be fleeing the weights of marriage and family, but she knew him well enough to know he wasn't the typical bachelor racking up a bedroom body count. She wondered if he still doubted his ability to be a successful husband; he'd
always feared he would wind up like Wayne, his twice-divorced playboy father.

“Uh-oh,” Jade said as she settled onto her own bed. “You've got that dreamy look in your eyes. I hope you're not fantasizing about a certain somebody.” She smiled, but her eyes burned with a hint of caution. “You're better than Jamie, Serena. Don't go there.”

“Girl, I'm fine,” Serena said, waving her friend off and clicking on the television. To her right, a large window with an amazing view reminded her of the bustling city below, but she had no energy for adventure. Finding the Lifetime network, she settled back against the bed's fluffy pillows and shut her eyes.
A trip down memory lane never hurt anyone, Jade.

There were any number of reasons Mr. Tony Gooden got close enough to do his damage, damage he'd unsuccessfully tried to undo at her and Jamie's wedding. Despite the many memories they shared from a romance that lasted barely two hundred days, the sight today of his button nose and the sound of his high-pitched voice—half a notch between Chris Tucker and Chris Rock—brought one particular day rushing back.

It was a rainy spring afternoon, late in her freshman year, when he arrived at her aunt Velma's house in Oak Park. Serena was living with Velma, the only relative willing to take her off her parents' hands after years of crack, DUIs, and Dawn's unplanned arrival. As soon as she stepped onto Velma's porch, Tony spun around and pulled her close. After risking a lengthy French kiss, something he knew Velma forbade on her property, he began pulling her toward his used faded Mercedes sedan. “Let's move,” he said. “I promised Devon we'd meet him and the girls at five.”

Serena waited until they were safely encased inside the Mercedes before leaning over for another kiss. When a flashback of the previous night's sexual marathon hit her, she snaked a hand into his lap. She had just started a soft stroking motion when Tony started the car, shifting just enough that she lost her grip.

“
What
are you doing?” She wasn't accustomed to her man turning down sex play, regardless of time or place. She and Tony
enjoyed pushing each other mentally—whether the subject was education reform, the authenticity of the Bible, or Clinton versus Bush 41, they were always bickering—but that energy always spilled into the bedroom, and anywhere else they could steal a private moment.

“Hey,” he said, a chuckle softening his insistent tone, “we need to get over there, is all. I want to make sure you meet Devon's date and her friend.”

“Oh, God, is this that Kym girl and her friend Jade? Why would two Northwestern AKAs bother with a girl from UIC who lives with her spinster aunt?” Serena knew Chicago's University of Illinois campus had a good rep, but Northwestern was the Harvard of the Midwest.

“Serena,” Tony replied as he weaved and bobbed toward the Dan Ryan Expressway, “you gotta work with me here. Kym and Jade are
thorough
. You start studying with them, you'll be the top accounting student at your school before you know it.”

“That's assuming I can even keep up with them,” she sighed, just loud enough for him to hear.

“Just give it a try, please?” One hand on the wheel, Tony placed the other on her knee. “You're a natural, trust me.”

She still couldn't explain it, but something about the confidence Tony transmitted with his touch seeped into her veins; it always had. He was the one who got her to admit she'd always had a knack for numbers, even though she viewed math and accounting as nerd fields. Tony called her out, though, pointing out her facility with things numerical and mathematical, from her ability to instantly calculate each person's share of a big restaurant tab to her uncanny knack for predicting their grocery bill to a near-penny. His gentle, nearly subliminal prodding convinced her to switch her major to accounting from general studies. Now that she was making her way through the coursework but questioning her ability, he had taken it on himself to introduce her to Kym and Jade, who were accounting stars at Northwestern and might make great study buddies.

Tony hadn't always shown the soft touch, though. She
recalled one of their first dates after she moved to Chicago, when she lit vanilla-scented candles on his glass coffee table and sang her two favorite standards for him—Patti LaBelle's “If Only You Knew” and Anita Baker's “Sweet Love.” Even though they hadn't slept together yet and she'd shared her desire to quit college and pursue a singing career in New York, he said exactly what was on his mind. “Don't take this the wrong way, sexy, but you suck.” Singing being her deepest passion at the time, Serena reacted with a stream of profanity, followed by her best attempt to nail him with a carefully aimed potted geranium.

That day as they drove to meet Kym and Jade, who would become not only great study buddies but her best friends, Serena looked at her scrappy, cocky boyfriend and felt nothing but blessed by his contradictions. Foul mouthed, full of himself, and materialistic, he was a man with an earnest, sensitive core.

He would come to cause her great pain, but in a sense Serena owed Tony. Without his influence, she might be waitressing in New York today, awaiting her elusive big break and still burdening her parents with raising Dawn. By now, she'd surpassed her own mentors: although Jade was a successful accounting manager for a manufacturing company and Kym was a vice president at her parents' mortgage bank, they both agreed Serena's job—managing the $500 million budget of an urban school system, along with a staff of dozens—outclassed theirs.

He didn't stand by you.
As her eyes popped open, reason warned Serena to release her revisionist history. Propping herself up on her elbows, she turned toward Jade's bed, only to find her girl knocked out, as worn from the day's pace as she felt. Feeling too wiped out to check in with her parents, Serena toyed with her cell phone and considered trying Tony again. She'd sneaked a peek at his cell number during a visit the other night to Kym and Devon's condo, when they'd let her use their home PC to check her work email.

She dialed the first three digits of his number but stopped suddenly. He hadn't answered last time, and she knew Tony Gooden was not the type who hadn't had the phone on when she
called. Cell phones hadn't been that common in their days together, but she had no doubt that a motormouth like Tony abused his cell, probably taking calls in hushed churches, public libraries, likely even in the middle of making love, for all she could guess. If he hadn't picked up, it meant he was as through with her as she liked to think she was with him.

Accepting reality for what it was, Serena punched her phone back to life and grimly did her duty, dialing another number. “Hi, Jamie,” she sighed when he answered.

A
long line of excited young buppies and gangbangers—many of them scantily clad young women—clogged the sidewalk outside Excursions, a West Side nightclub. As Tony bobbed and wove through the crowd, mouthing respectful “excuse me's” to the most belligerent-looking roughnecks, he smiled with pride at the evidence of his success. He had coordinated several “off the chain” book parties the past year, but tonight's would set a new standard. Folk from across Chicago were out in full force, eager to hear his little sister Zora's first public reading from
One of the Boyz,
her recently released novel. The excitement charging the air was unmistakable: after reading
Boyz
, the hottest urban novel since
The Coldest Winter Ever,
Chicago readers hungered for a glimpse of its creator.

Tony's financial ambitions—and debts—had fueled Zora's growing career. Just a year earlier, he started generating extra cash by investing in up-and-coming artists. For his first project, he financed the reprinting of his old friend Mitchell Stone's self-published novel
Out of His Shadow
. The book sold out three additional printings, earning Tony a 15 percent return on his money, a nice improvement over his stock portfolio.

He was hooked after that, carefully selecting writers, painters, and poets with untapped potential and helping them spread their
wings. By the time his twenty-year-old half sister brought her first manuscript to him for feedback, he'd already started doing public relations for his artists, scheduling them on local radio like WHOT and V103-FM and coordinating high-profile readings at popular clubs like Excursions.

As the club's head bouncer frisked him and ushered him from the nippy night air into the club's brick-walled, fluorescent-lit lobby, Tony had only one regret. Though Trey had promised to swing through, his other two best friends, O.J. and Mitchell, wouldn't be by tonight. O.J. was away hosting a benefit for the United Negro College Fund, and Mitchell was in Atlanta visiting his older son, Clay. Tony was on his own tonight; he didn't know why, but the realization was unsettling.

Squirreling away his unrest, he coolly surveyed the growing crowd. Brimming with a few excess ounces of Coors Light, he savored the warm sensation flowing through his veins. He was in a much better mood than earlier, at Devon's wedding. The suds distracted him from everything but one fact: Serena hadn't left a message. It had taken a few hours to admit he wished she had.

He should have just skipped the wedding. He loved his boy Devon, but his loyal attendance had done nothing but stir up pointless memories, starting with the chilly autumn day she strutted into Chicago's DuSable Museum, where he was a high school senior giving tours to out-of-town visitors. Looking over the group of students from Cincinnati's Princeton High, he'd considered stepping to several of the girls, but even at sixteen Serena was singular.
Petite, curvaceous figure . . . close-cropped, boyish haircut . . . the face of a young Lena Horne.
Tony applied his charms with the stealth of a panther, sidling alongside her as a movie summarized trader Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable's early adventures. By the time the auditorium lights came up, he had her hotel name and room number.

Imagine his surprise that night, when an innocent postcurfew stroll along Michigan's shore revealed something beyond Serena's intriguing package. Her cutting, liberating wit tantalized while whittling him down to size. “You're gonna have to work for this,”
she said before delivering a confident, knowing kiss laced with cherry Blow Pop. “I don't get through Chicago much, so get ready to do some driving.”

Another eighteen months would pass before they saw each other again, but Tony's sense that night that a thrilling, occasionally humiliating roller coaster lay ahead was dead-on. Their on-again, off-again tortured romance blossomed when she moved to Chicago to enroll at UIC, then stuttered its way through his remaining years at Northwestern, until the night she met Jamie. No other woman's allure had survived the bearing of another man's child, no other girlfriend kept him faithful while they were exclusive, and there was certainly no other ex whose wedding he'd tried to stop.

His attempts to erase those memories were interrupted when Owen, the nightclub's paunchy, well-dressed manager, rolled up beside him. Throwing a wrist shimmering with gold bracelets over Tony's shoulder, Owen ticked his head to the side. “What's up, young man?”

“You are, sir,” Tony replied, knocking fists with the old head. He and Owen had been cool since Tony's days working for the mayor, when Owen ran the city's license bureau. He'd been axed under the new administration, landing at Excursions when a friend bought and renovated the place.

Glancing hesitantly over each shoulder, Owen asked, “Is your girl ready to turn this place out? She's had people talking about this event for weeks. The young girls especially seem pumped up about tonight.” Just as Zora had planned,
One of the Boyz
's feminist message of self-empowerment had connected with the wives, girlfriends, and baby mamas of the streets' toughest toughs.

Tony smiled like a proud papa. “I have faith in her like you don't know, man. She's been itching to do a public reading, meet her fans, the whole nine.” He was fronting in a major way, but Owen didn't need to know that.

A sudden darkening in Owen's expression took Tony by surprise. “We've had a situation,” he growled in a confidential tone, using a heavily starched handkerchief to dab sweat drops from his full salt-and-pepper beard. “Let's rap.”

Tony let the manager lead him to a less cramped section of the bar before asking, “What's the problem?” Owen better not be having second thoughts about letting them hold Zora's party for free; Tony had done his part by ensuring a packed house, and every fan here knew they'd be buying a meal and a minimum of two drinks.

“You all are scaring this old man,” Owen said, dropping his arms to his side before dabbing at his forehead. As he stepped closer, he flooded Tony with the stale cigar smoke on his breath and the spicy fumes of his cologne. “I've been hosting readings for your authors for months now, Tony, but something about this crowd don't feel right.”

“Owen, let's talk facts, not feelings.” Tony stepped back, sweeping an arm behind him. “You're gonna make a mint tonight. What you got to be scared about?”

“It ain't about the money,” Owen replied, motioning toward him with a wiggling index finger. As Tony crooked his neck closer he said, “You heard of some fool named J. T. Dog?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.” He religiously held to his poker face, but the hairs on Tony's neck stood at attention. This time last year, he'd been no more familiar with J. T. Dog, a former rapper turned novelist, than Owen was now. That changed the minute
One of the Boyz
hit bookshelves.

Owen wasn't sold by Tony's calm response. “Is this fool as crazy he sounds? I need to know, Tony. Right now.”

Frankly, Tony wished he had an answer for the older man. In truth, he was still learning how to play this game of hip-hop chicken with J. T. and other rapper types who resented the message of self-empowerment Zora had baked into her writing. On top of that, while she was too shy to conduct seminars based on
One of the Boyz,
she had conducted several major print interviews—think
Essence, Ebony, Vibe, The Source
—in which she urged young women to use their “power” to enforce change in their men. “If every woman in the community shut her legs for one day and made the same demand on their men before reopening them, we could change the game for real,” she said in just about every feature.
There was even talk of a black feminist group organizing a march based on Zora's suggestion, sort of a weeklong Million Women's March designed to give women the courage to leave abusive and unfaithful men. Tony had been proud of her radical stance and confident it would help sell books, but he hadn't been prepared for the insecure reactions of J. T. and his ilk.

Still facing Owen, Tony huffed air through his nostrils and straightened his leather blazer, trying to look unflappable. “Was J.T. actually
here
?”

“My bouncers just shoved him back into his limo,” Owen said, his hands on hips now. “You're worried; don't try to tell me you ain't.”

Tony crossed his arms. “What did he say? Why'd they have to put their hands on the fool?”

“He was talking crazy! Rolled up in line with a ridiculous entourage of thugs, and when the bouncers got tired of their foul mouths and the mess they were spouting about Zora, they really went crazy.” Owen sidled closer to him, sticking a hand alongside his mouth and lowering his voice. “My boys had to flash the hardware at 'em, if you know what I mean.”

“Great.” Tony reached into his coat pocket and retrieved a plastic toothpick. Once he'd popped it between his lips and calmed himself with the chewing rhythm, he clapped Owen on the shoulder. “It'll be all right,” he said, raising his voice over the Kanye West track booming through the club. “Your boys did the right thing. I'm confident there'll be no more trouble.” He hit Owen's shoulder again. “Let's get this show on the road, come on.”

Owen didn't look convinced, but he sighed and bore his way back into the crowd. Checking his watch and seeing it was nearly time for Zora to take the stage, Tony slipped past the bar and seating area, where he knocked on the faded wooden door of the dressing room.

After ninety silent, uncomfortable seconds, a half-dressed Zora finally swung the door open. She still wore a rumpled white T-shirt, but at least she had changed into the lower half of the
outfit he'd purchased for tonight, a pair of black silk slacks. Tony was relieved to see his sister wearing anything besides her usual faded khakis and scuffed penny loafers, which she usually complimented with a mismatched wrinkled blouse.

“Hey,” she muttered before sighing and trudging back to the low, dented oak desk and chair across the room.

“Hey yourself, beautiful,” he said, striding behind her and placing his hands on her high, tight shoulders as she took a seat. “We only have a few minutes left. You need some more privacy while you finish dressing?”

“It won't take me a minute to throw on that shirt,” Zora replied. Staring into the smudged oval mirror before her, she scratched nervously at her close-cropped wrap of a hairstyle, advertising dandruff for the whole world to see. “Is there really a sellout crowd out there?”

Shutting his eyes at a stray flake, Tony took a deep breath. Mitchell's wife, Nikki, had scheduled Zora for a morning appointment with a beautician, one she'd obviously skipped. Given that she shared half his genes, Zora definitely had the raw material to be an attractive girl; for some reason she showed no interest in using it. Eyeing her ragged do, he kept calm by reminding himself of the matching low brim hat he'd bought for her; the girl would be wearing it all night.

Determined to keep his cool, Tony addressed her question. “Zora, a capacity crowd's out there, waiting just for you. Now you know why they call me Mr. Too Good.” He was overselling his role, of course; these three hundred folks had piled into Excursions because they knew Zora's novel was all that.

One of the Boyz,
which Tony was promoting as “the literary love child of Donald Goines, George Pelecanos, and Zane,” told the story of a young girl on Chicago's South Side who plots, sleeps, and bludgeons her way to the head of a major gang. After racking up a body count that would make Shaft blush, the heroine's life is changed forever when she ends up pregnant by a rival gang leader, one she murders before learning of the bun in the oven. A harrowing, sensual, and bold story of “girl power,” the
book had already made major moves. Tony knew the stats by heart: fifty thousand copies sold in a month, soon to be number one on the
Essence
list and twenty on the
New York Times
. The
New York
fucking
Times
!

Tony's happiness at his sister's success was matched only by a lust for his share of the upcoming profits. If Zora wowed the crowd with a strong reading at tonight's party, the buzz around the book would take on legendary proportions. As his sister stewed in silence, however, Tony remembered his work for the night wasn't finished. One obstacle lay before both him and Zora: the paralyzing stage fright that nearly ended her career before it began.

Shortly before they decided to self-publish
One of the Boyz,
Tony arranged Zora's appearance at a poetry slam in Hyde Park. The organizers had invited novelists to read excerpts as well, and Zora agreed it was a good chance to tackle her fears. Tony still believed she would have killed that night, if she hadn't been struck mute the minute she stepped onstage. After a minute of silent fumbling, she fled the stage in tears. She would have burned the
Boyz
manuscript and diskettes if he hadn't followed her home and stopped her.

“Are you ready for this?” Still leaning over her, noticing she also hadn't bothered to use the Chanel perfume he'd bought her, Tony waited patiently for her answer. Zora was content to play deaf, reading intently from her leather-bound journal.

When she finally turned to look at him over her shoulder, she moved with the hesitation of a beaver peeking into sunlight. Sliding her gold wire-rimmed glasses up and down her narrow nose, Zora frowned as she said, “I'll know when I step onto the stage, won't I?”