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“I’m not talking about Zora. I’m talking about my wife.”
Luckily, by the time Jamison had pushed through a few more of these middling exchanges, Countess was nowhere to be found. Emmit had taken her place beside Clara and Kerry.
“Your boy’s got a pretty good swing there,” Emmit said as Jamison hugged Clara.
“We’ll take all the compliments we can get,” Jamison said. Tyrian’s swings hadn’t been any better than Zora’s. Then, again, none of the children had really hit the ball just yet.
“Compliment? I was just pointing something out. My grandson’s swing is better,” Emmit added.
“By better, you mean Alexander came closer to hitting the ball?” Clara said, jumping in on the joke. She was thinner than Jamison remembered from the last time he’d hugged her. But her hair was coming back in and the summer sun had her skin less pale.
“Thank you, Mrs. Clara,” Jamison said, adding an additional kiss to her cheek.
The couple waited in silence, looking away as if nothing was going on as Jamison greeted his ex-wife.
“Oh, you made it,” Kerry acknowledged weakly, hoping Jamison couldn’t read anything she was thinking behind her greeting. Her coffee had been replaced with a bottle of water.
“Yeah, I did,” Jamison said. “Had to see my little man.”
“Well, I’m glad you did. It’s all Tyrian’s been talking about for days.”
There it was. She couldn’t just say hello and leave it there. She had to add some kind of meaning. Something that was meant to diminish what was being done right by invoking the specter of what had been done wrong.
Slammed on top of an endless mountain of uninvited evaluation of his personal life from everyone from Internet-crazed nurses to blood-seeking reporters, this felt especially unwarranted. Jamison was about to react when Emmit knew he should step in with a lifeline for his fraternity brother.
“Jamison, you have a look at that WorkCorps city place proposal? The committee sent it to your office earlier this week.”
“Yes. It looks good. Brother Perry Watson came to my open office hours with it. Training and jobs for young brothers who graduated from high school with no skills? I can’t see why the city couldn’t get behind it. We’ll just have to figure out how much support we can give. The governor has my hands tied on some of these funding projects.”
“Well, all we need from you guys is to push the contract through the public school system. We want to know that we have their commitment to passing these kids along to us. We can get them to work in the city where they live,” Emmit said. “People want to know why crime is so bad in this city? I see it all the time in my courtroom. These young men don’t have jobs. They have no way to make money. And no one to teach them how to do it.”
“No fathers at home,” Clara added.
“WorkCorps will bridge that gap,” Emmit went on. “Get them off the streets and tracked to work.”
“And speaking about getting them off the street, what’s going on with that fella from the midnight basketball program?” Clara asked. “Drugs? Guns? White girls? Is that where our tax dollars were going? Hard to believe.”
“No,” Kerry said. “That’s not Ras. He’s a great guy.”
“Well, he’s a good guy with a long rap sheet right about now,” Emmit reminded everyone after they stopped to clap for Alexander, the first to swing and hit the ball within feet of the hole.
“And I don’t believe any of those charges against him,” Kerry added passionately. “Not one of them.”
“Do you believe it?” Clara asked Jamison.
Everyone, even inquiring ears in circles beside them, stopped to listen to Jamison’s response.
“I can’t say it sounds like something Ras would do,” Jamison said, picking his words wisely.
“Doesn’t sound like?” Kerry’s face called the sincerity of Jamison’s comment into question. “You lived with him for one year.”
“Yes, and that was more than a decade ago,” Jamison pointed out.
“So you’re saying he is capable of being some kind of pimping, drug-dealing underlord who’s planning to arm every little black boy in Atlanta? Is he capable of that, Jamison?” Kerry pushed.
Clara and Emmit traded stares. There was nothing they could do to stop Jamison and Kerry from sparring at that point. They were wise enough to know that maybe the little debacle was about Ras bei
ng in jail, but likely it wasn’t. Conversations between divorcees were seldom that first level.
