Page 49 of His Third Wife

Mrs. Taylor was that mother, and one dewy late summer morning, she returned to her son’s doorstep to terminate the matter of her worry after a morning walk she begrudgingly took with her doctor’s orders.

Her daughter-in-law had come to her room the night Dax Thomas had been murdered. Val was hysterical, pointing down the hallway to her bedroom, crying that Jamison was going crazy. With her bedroom door open, Mrs. Taylor could hear cracking and breaking, trashing and thrashing about in the room down the hall. She hopped out of her bed like any mother would if she heard such a thing coming from her child’s room at 3 in the morning. No robe on. No slippers. Her sagging breasts dented the fabric of her nightgown just above her navel. Her wig was off. Two gray plaits flanked her shoulders. In her son’s bedroom, she found Jamison in the middle of a tirade. He was throwing anything he could get in his hands. Crying. Sobbing. Hollering about a boy being dead. “Just a boy. Just a boy.”

A clock barely missed Mrs. Taylor’s head at the door. She hardly moved. With the fortitude of a sergeant sent thrice into combat, she stood at attention and held her hand up to keep Val out of the room.

“Stay out here,” she’d ordered the woman before stepping into the room and closing Val out. Mrs. Taylor moved into a corner and let Jamison wreck his world until he was exhausted. Soon, her little boy was sitting on the floor at the foot of his bed crying into his knees. Funny how he looked so small to her. How every man could always look like a little helpless, grinning baby boy to his mother. She was the only person who could never be surprised by his tears. She’d seen them first. Nursed most of them herself. Mrs. Taylor sat on the bed and moved Jamison’s head to rest it against her knee. “Tell Mama,” she urged with a stern voice black mothers reserved for business they knew their sons would bring in from the street. “You tell your mama everything.” And Jamison told. Everything. About the phone call he’d made. About how his fraternity brothers had killed that reporter, put the body in that house, and planted their own evidence. About how he was responsible. Back straight up, eyes dry as egg shells, Mrs. Taylor held her son’s head tight to her knee and let his tears run down her leg. He said how he’d never wanted this. How he wanted it all to stop. To go back. To stop everything.

“Shhhh,” she began to quiet him as he got louder. “Shhh.” She rocked and rocked. “Shhhh.” Soon Jamison was quiet and a mother was giving orders. The first thing she told him was to never repeat what he’d said to her to anyone else in the world ever again. Not to Val. Not to Leaf. Not to Jesus Christ if he came down to earth himself. Never. Second, she said, “Let this shit go.” There wasn’t anything he could do about a dead reporter. Third: “Watch your back. Never stop watching your back. I don’t care what you thought this was going to be. I don’t care what it is. You watch your back like I told you to do. You never stop. We may not be in the West End anymore, baby. But the trick is that the West End don’t stop when you get on the highway.”

Two weeks later when Mrs. Taylor stepped into the house after her walk, she was sure Jamison had followed two of those points, but the lasting evidence of the mayor being holed up in the dark den watching television meant he wasn’t exactly letting it go. She vowed to put that motion in order right then. And she knew she could do it. If she had to lift Jamison off the couch herself and carry him on her back out of that house and down to city hall to work, she would. It was just a matter of positioning.

But there was more than that to her matter of worry. There was the silver Maserati she’d seen parked around the corner. A man sitting inside. Her daughter-in-law sitting beside him, shaking her head like she was arguing with him. Mrs. Taylor had been approaching the car from behind, but she knew Val’s facial silhouette. She’d studied it the way a lion memorizes the angles of the lock keeping his cage closed. She’d stopped in her tracks. Watched for a few seconds and turned around to return to her son dying of a dream deferred.

“Get up! Get your ass up!”—there was tough love when Mrs. Taylor walked into the den in her orange velour sweat suit and brunette walking wig. She left the light off, and went right for the window curtains—the shock of daylight would be far more of a threat to dilated eyes.

Jamison moaned like a sleeping giant at the white light. A thin beard was growing in from ear to ear. He had on glasses with one arm missing, boxers, and flip-flops. A bag of apples he’d been eating since the day before was on the floor beside the couch where he was lying. “Close that. I can’t see.” His hand was shielding his eyes from the light.

“Good. Now, get up. Tired of you laid up in here on this damn couch.” Mrs. Taylor went for Jamison’s feet first.

He pulled away from her and huddled in annoyance into the corner of the sofa. “Mama, stop!”

She continued to prod, standing over him. “Get up! Get out of this house!”

“I can’t. I’m sick!”

“Sick? Well, what’s wrong with you? How are you sick? What’s aching you?” She shoved her hand through his force field of flailing hands to pat his forehead and feel the lymph nodes beneath his chin. “And don’t tell me what you told that white boy, because I been your mama since you been on this earth and ain’t not one of those summers found you with a flu. Not u

nder my watch, they ain’t!” Mrs. Taylor continued her fake health inspection as they tussled, and gave up with, “Ain’t nothing wrong with you, boy!” She walked to the television and turned it off after an elongated search for the hidden power switch. “Now, get up!”

“You’re killing me!”

“No, you’re killing you!”

The word “kill” sat in the air for a second.

“I can’t go outside.” Jamison looked at the window.

“Sure you can. One foot in front of the other. How long you think that white boy can run city hall? Cover for you? Before he starts thinking he is you? Before other people start thinking he is you?”

“That’s not how it works.”

“You tell me how it works then. You going to quit at being mayor because things are getting hard?”

“This ain’t hard,” Jamison said, looking at his mother. “This is—this is bad. It’s crazy. Out of control.”

“Then get control. Take control.”

“I don’t know if I want to. If I can.”

“You have to. Too many things out of order around here. Everywhere.”

Mrs. Taylor sat beside Jamison and told him about Val parked around the corner in the gray Maserati.

“It could be anything. Don’t jump to conclusions,” Jamison said, trying to consider why the color and the make of the car sounded so familiar to him “You sure it was her?”

Mrs. Taylor ignored this. “What kind of married woman sits in a car around the corner from her house arguing with another man? Wasn’t nothing right about it.”

“Maybe it was nothing,” Jamison said.

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