AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Whoa, Mother Wildren, I can’t!” Troy stopped her.
“Oh, you’ve been there?”
“Yes, ma’am…”
“Okay, well, I have too. How do you think I’ve been married for so long?”
The women laughed and Mother Wildren grabbed Troy’s hand.
“Now, let’s get out of here. Pastor don’t want nobody in the church and I—”
“I know…I know.”
?
The trouble with planting flowers in someone else’s garden is that you tend to forget about your own. Tamia would find this out when she walked, using her own two feet, from the Columbus Circle subway station to her front door at Trump Towers.
Full of so much pride she was able to push her trouble over Malik out of her mind for a few minutes, she reveled in the power of her new freedom, of her acceptance of the world and the way things were—the way they really were, not how she’d wanted them to be—that she was nearly singing when she walked into the door.
Bancroft looked past her, out into the drive for a car to connect her to, but there was none.
“Finally all the way off her bloody rocker,” Bancroft thought, watching the spectacle Tamia now seemed to cause every day when she walked into the building with her bald head and sari. “Walking today, madame?” Bancroft said understatedly as Tamia walked past him.
“Hopefully from now on,” Tamia said, smiling. “Living things need to spend more time in the sun. Don’t you think?”
“Certainly. Maybe not all of us. Those with Nordic blood…burn.”
Tamia nodded.
“Good point.” She handed Bancroft a package of incense she’d made at Kali’s after planting the tulips.
“Why, thank you.” Bancroft took the sticks and peered at them strangely.
“Just burn them,” Tamia instructed him. “You’ll love it.”
“Yes, of course.” From behind his back, Bancroft produced a thick envelope bearing Tamia’s name. “And for you. It came today by certified mail.”
“What is it?” Tamia asked, taking the envelope.
Though she read the contents of the letter sent from her bank on the elevator, Tamia wasn’t able to respond to its declaration until she was upstairs and hidden in the confines of her residence.
This moment had been sixty days in the making. Tracings of its possibilities had been mounting in her life for days. Standing in the foyer, draped in a sari and as bald as the day she was born, Tamia remembered the one thing she was trying to forget—Charleston.
“Sixty days late?” Tamia said. “He stopped paying the mortgage?”
In seconds the sad twist of fate actualized itself in Tamia’s mind. There was no need to consider how she could pay back the bank’s missing $20,000, late fees, and taxes. She just couldn’t.
Instead, her mind bathed itself in a river of memory—how this moment had come to her. In flashes, she saw Charleston and then Malik and wondered how this all began. When she walked into the office that day after seeing Maria in the bathroom and then the women looking on in the hallway—was it his face, his voice, or his scent that she’d encountered first? And how had it pulled her so far and so fast away from the person she was once so confident she was?
?
Venus Jenkins-Hottentoten-Hoverslagen-Jackson was waiting in a chair at the back of a dark restaurant, on a questionable side of town, wearing big black glasses and a white and gold fleur-delis-print scarf wrapped around her head.
“Memorial Day passed without me knowing?” was all Tasha said when she took a seat before Venus at the table. “I know I’ve been busy, but I thought it was a week or so away.”
“What are you talking about?” Venus whispered, taking the glasses off and looking around the room all suspicious.
“The white scarf…you look like the Flying Nun or something. What’s up with the whole getup? And why did you ask me to meet you here? Why did you ask me to meet you, period?” Tasha looked around for any bugs she could find on the ground. Her get-up-and-go30 account was far from running low and she wasn’t even considering subjecting herself to this low level of culinary cracker barrel.
