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“I don’t have to read a list of phone numbers to know what is going on with my sisters. Did you talk to them?”
“I . . . uh . . . talked to Denise. I wanted to talk to Noney, but there was no listing for her on the search engine.”
“That’s how much you know about my family. Of course you couldn’t find anyone named Noney. That’s what I called her because when I was a little boy, I couldn’t pronounce the word ‘Noreen.’”
“Anyway, that’s the only number that Denise doesn’t have.” She stood up. “May I have my coat, please?”
“No. Not until you understand what you’ve done. I suppose you told Denise everything about my new life?”
“No, I didn’t. I simply told her that I was in touch with her long-lost brother and was going to surprise him with the information she gave me. She got very excited and can’t wait to see you. She asked a lot of questions, but I figured it wasn’t my place to answer them. She can’t wait to see you.”
“See me?” Lloyd laughed bitterly. “When I hired someone to find them a few years ago, he came back and told me that Denise has five fucking kids, no man, and runs the street all day. Pamela was a cable TV installer living in the Bronx with two kids and no husband. Annie was a drunk. No one knew where Noreen was. Brenda was the only one who graduated from college. The last I heard, she was headed for medical school. She was the only one who made something out of her goddamned life. Yeah, I’ll just bet Denise wants to see me. She probably wants to know if I have any money to give her and that bunch of squalling brats.”
Adrienne was disgusted. “Do you know how much it costs to go to medical school? Do you know how many loans and grants Brenda will have to get in order to make it? How much debt she’ll be in when she completes her residency? How can you not want to contact her and do what you can to help?”
“Because she’ll want to talk me into seeing the others, and it won’t stop there. It’ll be one thing after another until I’m dragged deep back into that world, and this time I’ll never find my way out. Can’t you see that?”
“No. I can’t.”
“Well, that’s just too bad, Adrienne. If I get involved with those people again, they’ll bring me down with them! God only knows how many kids, boyfriends, and bail bondsmen I’ll have to pay for. I busted my ass so I wouldn?
??t have to go through that again!”
“You hang out in five-star restaurants, ride around in a limo, and don’t even know if your nieces and nephews have enough to eat. If success makes a person act like that, then maybe I was better off in the secretarial bull pen.”
“You can go back there if you choose, but I worked hard to become a success, Adrienne, and I’m not letting anyone take it away from me.”
Adrienne had heard enough. “You’re not a success, LaMar Jenkins. Anyone who can turn their back on family like this is the worst kind of failure. I don’t even see you as a man anymore. You’re just a scared, sniveling, well-dressed coward. Now, I’m going to ask you one more time for my coat, and if you don’t give it to me, I’m going to start screaming until someone calls upstairs to find out what is going on.”
Adrienne snatched the coat from his hand, and when the elevator door opened, she left without saying good-bye.
Her heels clicked across the marble lobby floor, and she swept past the doorman and out onto Third Avenue. Although there were several cabs parked in front of Lloyd’s building, Adrienne started to walk.
Charlene’s words came and went as she made her way to the West Side. Poor Mel, it was his loss, too, you know. . . . You shut Mel out when he needed you most . . . LaMar is gone, Adrienne . . . The man who came to dinner is nothing like the teenager you described.
The more Adrienne remembered Charlene’s observations, the more she realized that she had been running away from her problems for many years.
She had run away from her challenges in the music industry and buried her true self in a marriage to Mel. She ran away from Delilah’s death by refusing to talk about it and hiding in darkness. She had been running from the reality of Mel’s drinking problem for months by just ignoring all the signs. And Lillian! She had never stopped running from unpleasantness long enough to pin him down about that.
Adrienne paused at the corner to wait for the traffic light. Lloyd had just been a fancy place to run toward because her marriage was troubled.
No wonder Lloyd had achieved so much at such a young age. He was a coldhearted, selfish son of a bitch who thought only of his own needs. Mel had plenty of faults, but he always looked out for Debra. Mel believed in family. “I’m going to quit that job and make it without Lloyd’s help,” she told herself as tears of disappointment and rage stung the backs of her eyelids. “I don’t need a knight on a white horse to ride in and save me from my pathetic life.”
The light changed to green, and as Adrienne stepped into the intersection, she knew that neither Lloyd nor Mel was the source of her problems. It was time to stop running, turn around, and face her demons head-on.
Adrienne Montgomery Jordan was about to regain control of her life, and the place to start was in the unoccupied bedroom in their apartment, which held her stash of infant gear. Maybe someday she and Mel would be ready to have another baby, but they were a long way from that. The baby clothes were going to the Salvation Army first thing in the morning.
Adrienne allowed herself to feel the pain. By the time she got home and called Charlene, the events of the past hour already seemed part of the distant past. Much of her shock and anger had been replaced with sorrow for Lloyd. He was no longer a giant in her eyes. He was a punk.
After he finished his shift and parked his bus at the uptown depot on 125th, Mel found himself walking, and when he couldn’t walk anymore, he ran. He ran down the inside of the streets and out in the middle of dark, dirty alleyways. He thought if he could just run fast enough, he could outrun his own desire, the need that seemed to be swelling up inside him until he couldn’t hear anything but the longing and the blood. His body was calling for the cocaine, and the call was growing stronger with every minute. He would have called Debra, his wife, maybe even Lillian if he thought she’d give a damn, but he was too ashamed.
A man was supposed to be able to meet his needs, to know them and not be crushed by the weight of them.
Mel ran until his chest burned, and then he walked until his feet felt heavy and leaden, his hands trembling so, he could barely hold them in his pockets. No one met his eye as he stumbled past silent buildings and ramshackle storefronts, his MTA uniform not dark or formal enough to disguise the need in his walk. Back in another life, before a burning heartache sharp as a baby’s cry in the middle of the night, he would have called his walk a junkie stroll. If he could have seen himself coming down the street as he was now, movements jerky, erratic, equilibrium off balance, lips all chapped, that would have been the first thought that crossed his mind. There go one of them junkies, walk-running, skittering down the street. When he was young and running the streets himself, he and his roughneck friends liked to shoot hoops and throw rocks at the drug addicts, to watch them run, jaws slack, eyes vacant at first, then wide and frightened. They thought that shit was funny back then, but that was another life. Now Mel found himself doing his own version of the junkie stroll, and he couldn’t stop himself to save his life.
Why bother? he thought as he turned a corner, searching for Little Jimmy or any other dealer with a pocketful of cocaine and an answer to quiet his hellish dreams. And it was the same dreams always. Delilah. Delilah dying. I ain’t worth saving, he thought. Couldn’t even save my own child. What kind of fool would fall asleep with a lit cigarette?
He couldn’t tell Adrienne that he blamed himself. He didn’t have to. She never pointed a finger at him, but he already knew she blamed him. It was in her face when she thought he wasn’t looking, in her voice when she wasn’t even saying anything, and in her heart when he held her close to his chest, and he still didn’t feel any closer to her. But those weren’t the kinds of things you said to your wife, not to a wife who’s grieving, half out of her mind from grief. Mel carried those feelings down low, where nothing could touch them but the coke, where his need outweighed every thought, even Delilah. Even Adrienne . . .
