Young Wives (51 page)

But now she was here and could look across at her husband. It still amazed her how attractive he was, and how unaware he seemed to be of the damage he’d done. Unconsciously, Angie put her hands over her belly. Sitting across from the man she had married and planned to spend her life with, hearing but not hearing the lawyers drone, she thought of how very odd it was to be in the same room with the father of her unborn child. A man who didn’t even know about the son or daughter she was carrying. Somehow all of it seemed surreal, a feminine Kafka novel.

Angie definitely didn’t like the feeling of boredom combined with horror. It was kind of like what she’d thought the Basketball Hall of Fame might be like. The divorce proceedings didn’t take long. Neither did breaking a bone or removing a tooth, but the sense of loss and the pain was just as acute. It was odd for Angie to be the client, not the lawyer. And it was equally odd to realize that love, or whatever it was that Reid had felt for her, could be there one day and gone the next. What could she count on?

What she could count on was that Anthony and Natalie began bickering the moment they all left the courtroom together. And the bickering continued in the taxi, at the airport, and boarding the shuttle. Angie finally turned to them. They were arguing about whether she should sit with Anthony or with Natalie, because the two of them didn’t want to sit together.

“This one’s an easy one,” Angie said. “Thank you for your support, but I’m sitting by myself. I might as well get used to it,” she said. Then, in silence, the three divorced members of the Romazzano family boarded the plane.

In which Jada gets her parents back

Even though Jada left early, the traffic to JFK had been backed up at the Whitestone Bridge and she was late getting to the airport. She parked and walked what seemed like miles to the baggage claim area for her parents’ flight, but she realized she must be
very
late—the area was virtually deserted, with just a few forgotten or abandoned suitcases lined up in the center of the floor, her parents standing beside them with their own battered baggage, looking equally abandoned. Even from a distance, Jada was surprised at how much more gray there was in her mother’s hair, how smaller and more stooped her father looked.

These people had worked hard all their lives, had been good parents, good church-goers, and good to one another. Now, Jada would reward them by letting them get a look at the shattered pieces of her and their grandchildren’s lives. Perhaps this had been a terrible mistake on her part. She shouldn’t have involved them.

But it was too late for an attack of conscience now. “Mama,” Jada called across the empty terminal and rushed up to embrace the older woman. Jada was a lot taller than her mother, so she bent a little at the knee. It allowed her mother to reach around her shoulders and give her a proper hug.

“Oh, don’t you look like a warm stove on a cold night,” her mother said, reaching up to pat her face. “We thought maybe you’d forgotten us.”

Her father, as always, stood a step behind his wife, patiently waiting for his turn. Jada kissed him and he smiled with pleasure, then hugged her, and looked up into her eyes. “I’m sorry for your troubles, daughter,” he said.

Jada almost burst into tears at that, but wouldn’t let herself. Oh, it felt good to be with people who had taken care of her, who knew her when she was four, and when she was nine, and when she was eleven, and when she was a very bad teenager. “I’m sorry I was late for you,” she apologized. “There was some kind of accident on the way and the traffic was horribly backed up.”

“Anyone hurt?” her father asked.

Jada almost smiled, remembering in a flash how different island people were. “I’m not sure,” she admitted to her father.

“Well, let’s say a prayer for them just in case,” her mother suggested. They did, and then gathered the bags to go.

“Was it a good flight?”

“As good as being thirty thousand feet in the air can be,” her mother told her.

“I’m afraid the car is parked way on the other side of the lot.”

“That’s all right,” her daddy assured her. “We’re used to walking.”

But they weren’t used to the weather. It wasn’t a particularly cold day, but the temperature seemed to attack and diminish both of them. By the time they got to the Volvo, her mother was shivering and her father’s face (he’d insisted on carrying both of the big bags) looked ashen. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

“Be a damn sight better when you put some heat in the car.”

“Benjamin! You watch your language,” her mother scolded. Jada got in and turned the temperature control to max heat. It would be too stuffy for her, but it was the only part of the Volvo that worked perfectly. Before they were back on the highway, her parents, like delicate plants brought into a hothouse, had bloomed again.

“Now tell us again, now that we’re not paying overseas telephone rates, how all this here sad business happened to you,” her father suggested.

Jada, watching the road ahead, hated the idea of letting them know just how bad it was, but that’s why they had come, after all. And so she launched into the story, sparing them and herself nothing. Her father asked a few questions, but her mother was silent, though she let a few gasps and tooth-sucking noises escape her. The recitation got them past the BQE and the Van Wyck, past LaGuardia and almost to the Westchester county line. Then they were all silent for a little while, taking it in.

“Well, what I can’t understand,” her mother said, “is how your mother-in-law could let her son behave that way. Benjamin, I think you should go and box Clinton’s ears. What all could make a man behave that way?”

In the rearview mirror, Jada could see her father shaking his head. “When you never had no daddy you don’t know how to behave like one,” he said. It was as critical as he ever got.

“No kind of excuse. A person can always learn,” her mother said. “How he could take his two daughters away, his daughters who need their mama…?”

“What kind of example is that for his son? Showing the boy how to be no-account trash?” Jada’s father asked.

Her mother turned to her. “We will get to see them, won’t we?”

Jada didn’t have the heart to tell them that she didn’t know yet, that she’d asked Ms. Patel and that her attorney—who was also her roommate—had called the judge to find out. She had another bit of news to tell them, as well. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay in a motel,” she said.

“Why is that? Clinton won’t let us in the house?”

“Clinton won’t let
me
in the house,” Jada explained, and told them the last bit—about how she had lost her home as well as her job and the payments she was supposed to make. Both of her parents were silent for a moment.

“Why, that’s just plain crazy,” her mother said. “So where is it that you’re living?”

Jada explained about Angie and the apartment. Also about Michelle, along with a brief rundown of her problem. “They both hooked up with LUMPS—Lying Ugly Male Pigs,” Jada said. “And they’re both white girls.”

“Has everybody in this country gone crazy?” her father asked. “Clinton wants you to support him? And he takes away your home and your children? Don’t these men know how to be men?”

“It doesn’t seem so,” Jada told him.

Jada’s parents had settled into the inexpensive motel room. They had, thank the Lord, gotten to see their grandchildren, and now they were just finishing up the remains of a big Bajan dinner that Jada and her mother had cooked for Angie, Michelle, and her children. It was hard to imagine squeezing even two more people into Angie’s tiny apartment, but that was one thing that hadn’t bothered her parents, though Jada had to smile at their discomfort with Pookie.

Now, after cleaning up the dishes, both Angie and Michelle had retreated to the two bedrooms with the kids, leaving Jada in the living room with her parents. It was odd how over the last month or two Jada had finally become truly color-blind: her friends were her friends and the people who didn’t wish her well were as often her race as any other.

“They’re nice girls,” Benjamin said with approval as he brought their coffee cups over to the sink and then settled himself, as best he could, on one of the tiny dinette chairs.

“They’re good girls and they’re good friends to you,” her mother said. She said nothing, Jada noticed, about them being white. “I’m surprised, though, that the women from the church didn’t rise to the occasion. Didn’t any of
them
offer to help you out?”

“I think,” Jada began, “they were…almost happy to see me fall. It proved that you couldn’t do what I did. Not without being punished.” It was the only way Jada could understand the little support she’d been offered. “And Tonya Green is a member. I think long before I saw this coming, she managed to put in a lot of bad words on my behalf.”

“And they believed her? Well, if Reverend Marsh was still there, he wouldn’t listen to some Magdalene woman,” her mother said.

“But he’s been gone a long, long time,” Jada told her mother. “I don’t even know this preacher very well. He’s only been there two years, and with work and the children and all I haven’t been as active as I once was. I didn’t get to really know him.”

Her mother looked up from her lap and—for the first time since she’d arrived—she criticized her daughter. “Well,
that
was a mistake on your part,” she said. “How can you not know your preacher, and for over two years? Part of your work must always be helping the congregation. The poor will always be among us.”

The words weren’t said harshly, but even so they brought a sting to Jada’s eyes. How could she explain to her mother about how busy she’d been? About how draining the job at the bank was, about taking care of the house, and paying the bills, and having to dress right, and tutoring the children and all the rest of it?

“The church will always help you,” her mother said. “I don’t want you to forget that.”

Jada wondered about that in silence as she drove them back to the motel. Could the church help her? How? “I have to work tomorrow,” she reminded her mother as they said goodnight. She’d taken two days off from Price Chopper but she needed the money—such as it was—and the job. “Will you be all right?”

“It will give your dad and me some time to talk and to think. This is some mess you have here, Jada. We’ll see you tomorrow night?” Jada nodded. “All right, then,” her mother said, and gave Jada another big hug. It wasn’t an apology, or total understanding, but it comforted Jada. In fact, as she stood there, bent at the knees, she felt she never wanted to leave the comfort of her mother’s arms.

“You have to bring the children back home,” Jada’s father said. He was speaking in a low voice, as if each table at the Olive Garden had microphones, listening to desperate grandparents’ plans.

“They
are
back home, Papa,” Jada reminded him.

Her mother shook her head. “They need to be back in the islands,” her mother said. “They need to be around their own kind, their own kin.”

“Well, over the school holiday, in the summer, I may be able to bring them down for a week or two. But right now I don’t know if we could afford—”

“Jada, we’re talking about sooner, not later. And we’re not talking about a holiday. We’re talking about a permanent move,” her mother said.

Her father nodded in agreement. “We can help you. You could stay with us at first, if you wanted to. If not, we could find you a place and a job. Your mama could watch the children after school.”

“Papa, you don’t understand. I couldn’t get permission from the court to take the kids overnight right now, much less permanently out of the country,” Jada explained.

“Well, then you’d have to do it
without
permission,” her father told her. “Certainly they can’t go on this way. They need a sense of family and of home.” Her mother nodded. “I don’t like to say it, but Clinton Jackson never knew what he was doing and he doesn’t know it now. He’s hurting his own children. The man must be crazy. And if the court can’t see it, well, you can, we can, the children can, and heaven knows the Lord can.”

Her mother reached her hand out to Jada. “We have prayed over this, Jada. We have prayed and we know that you must render up to Caesar that which is Caesar’s. But not your children. We want you and our grandchildren to get on the plane with us when we leave.”

“Mama, I can’t do that. I could never come back.”

“Well?”

Her parents looked at her. She couldn’t believe they were thinking of the same ideas that Jada had earlier. But did they didn’t understand they were asking her to leave her country, her home, and become a lawbreaker. Plus, there might be extradition. Maybe the courts or Clinton could remove the children. And she might be banned from the island, or jailed there, or here. “Mama, I don’t know what the laws say. I don’t know about schools for the kids. And I’m not a Bajan. I’d be a stranger on the island. And the children, for them it would worse. The adjustment to school alone would be—”

“You wouldn’t stay strangers for long,” her mother told her. “Not on Barbados.”

For a moment, the idea of a tiny bungalow, endless sunshine, and her parents always nearby beckoned to Jada. But then she thought of the children and how big an adjustment it would be. They were American kids. The British-based school system would be difficult, at best, to adjust to. And there would be no work for her. Her parents, so conservative, so good, were trying to rescue her, yet their solution was not as simple as they made it seem. “Mama, I just don’t think so,” she said. “I could never come back here, and if the children did, if they had to, I couldn’t visit them. I know you wish I were, but I’m not a Bajan. Neither are they.”

Her mother and her father paused. Silence filled the room. “Well then, we want you to talk to Samuel.”

Her father nodded. “Samuel,” he said.

“Who
is
Samuel?” Jada asked. The way they said the name he sounded like some archangel from the Bible.

“Samuel Dumfries. He’s a barrister. Very big man in Bridgetown. He’s the son of the husband of my cousin, Arlette. Well, you remember Arlette, don’t you?”