Welcome to Serenity

by Olivia Gaines

  By

  This...is Jamar.

  Written by Olivia Gaines

  Edited by Teri T. Blackwell, Ed.S.

  Davonshire House

  Augusta, GA

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s vivid imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely a coincidence.

  © 2016 Olivia Gaines, Cheryl Aaron Corbin

  Copy Teri T. Blackwell

  Cover: Koou Graphics

  ASIN:

  ISBN:

  ISBN-10:

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means whatsoever. For information Davonshire House Publishing LLC, PO Box 9716. Augusta, GA 30916.

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 9 8

  First Publishing May 2016

  Also by Olivia Gaines

  The Slice of Life Series

  The Perfect Man

  Friends with Benefits

  A Letter to My Mother

  The Basement of Mr. McGee

  A New Mommy for Christmas

  The Slivers of Love Series

  The Cost to Play

  Thursday in Savannah

  Girl's Weekend

  Beneath the Well of Dawn

  Santa’s Big Helper

  The Davonshire Series

  Courting Guinevere

  Loving Words

  Vanity's Pleasure

  The Blakemore Files

  Being Mrs. Blakemore

  Shopping with Mrs. Blakemore

  Dancing with Mr. Blakemore

  Cruising with the Blakemores

  Dinner with the Blakemores

  Loving the Czar

  The Value of a Man Series

  My Mail Order Wife

  A Weekend with the Cromwell’s

  Other Novellas

  North to Alaska

  The Brute & The Blogger

  A Better Night in Vegas (Betas Do It Better Anthology)

  Other Novels

  A Menu for Loving

  Turning the Page

  An Untitled Love

  Dedication

  This series is dedicated to the Tuesday Sushi Club.

  I love you guys.

  This...is Jack.

  Table of Contents

  This...is Jamar.

  Chapter 1. And the Winning Number is....

  Chapter 2. Mo’ Money...Mo’ Problems

  Chapter 3. I’m out...

  Chapter 4. Clearing Out...

  Chapter 5. Making Friends...

  Chapter 6. Let’s build something...

  Excerpt Holden – Book 2

  Excerpt Farmer Takes a Wife – Book 3

  Excerpt Wyoming Nights

  About the Author

  Coming Soon

  Chapter 1. And the Winning Number is....

  Soft brown eyes stared over the steering wheel of the Jeep Grand Cherokee as it barreled down the paved roadway of I-80, the driver going no place in particular. It was difficult for Jamar to comprehend how drastically his life had changed in a mere three months, with more changes looming over the next horizon. In truth, he didn’t have a Plan B because in his head, failing Plan A had never been an option. Jamar hadn’t failed; fate simply dealt him another hand.

  The main issue was that everything was always in his head. His heart, which thumped against his breast plate, unfortunately too, was always in his head. So much so that it never made any room for the woman who shared his life or his bed. Frequently accused of being distant or cold, Jamar held on to the vision that he visited in his head. He wanted to live in a better world. If not a better world, build a better city with people who gave a shit about one another.

  He worked for a company where the corporate culture was, “I got mine, you need to get yours.” It wasn’t as if any of the employees in the company were interested in helping a body to “get yours;” instead, it felt more like an “up yours” every single day. Drudgery filled his soul each Monday as he opened the doors to Levinston and Schooplar, the engineering firm that paid him a hefty salary to clear away pockets of annexed woods to continue that nasty trend of urban sprawl. Year after year, more houses went up, followed by more strip malls, which inevitably led to a big box store that boasted lower prices. Lower prices than whom? Their prices were lower than the neighborhood grocers whom they put out of business, which reduced the number of opportunities for neighbors to chat over the butcher counter about what's for dinner.

  Jamar hated it all. He hated the mid-sized SUVs that bogarted the freeways as he tried to get home in the evening to an empty townhouse filled with stuff he really had no use for. The weekends, usually spent with some woman with daddy issues, which always ended up the same way—bad takeout and mediocre sex. It seemed no matter how hard he tried to find a good woman, he always ended up with some lady whose name was a variation of something that ended in isha. Moneisha. Quinisha. Latavisha. To break his pattern, he once dated a nice lady from Peoria named Debra. She was so boring he remembered why he favored a woman whose name ended in isha. Isha always brought some flavor to the party.

  The drawback was that Isha liked to fight. Not the type of cat fighting where she would take off her earrings and high heels shoes to come at you windmill type, swinging wildly until her tightly balled up fist made contact with something kind of fighting. Jamar was never lucky enough to get one of those Ishas. He always managed to get the Isha who had trained in a boxing gym and wanted to punch his lights out.

  Keneisha, his latest horror story for the romance chronicles, was no different. Less than three months ago, she sat beside him on his couch as they watched a horrible episode of some reality show that starred overly made up black women fighting over a piece of man, of which Jamar paid little attention. At the end of the show, the channel was turned to watch the Powerball numbers.

  Seldom, if ever, he played, but during a dream two nights before, a sequence of numbers popped up in his head. As he stirred from his slumber the next morning, the figures were still fresh in his head. On a scrap piece of paper, he jotted down the figures in the same order they appeared in his dream. The numbers appeared in the exact same sequence on the lottery ticket that was in his wallet. The winning jackpot was ninety-three million reasons why he no longer needed Keneisha in his life. Yet, it wasn’t the only reason.

  When Jamar spoke calmly with his girlfriend of a few months, casually explaining why he no longer wished to see her, for some odd reason, this became her motivation to engage him in a fistfight.

  “I’m not going to fight you, Keneisha. This is just not working out for us. I have some things in my head that I have to figure out,” he told her.

  It was the last thing he told her after she turned into Mike Tyson and punched his timeclock. Keneisha also had a few choice adjectives she used each time she kicked his unconscious body with a pointy toed red-bottomed shoe. Luckily for her, she did not draw blood because the neighbor, who seemed to always have a pair of binoculars for bird watching at night, saw the whole shameful scenario and called the police.

  Jamar awoke to two officers dashing water on his face as he held tightly to his bruised ribs. Keneisha, who was still cursing him as everything but a recipient of Jesus’s Grace, left with a parting shot at his manhood.

  “...And you ain’t even that great of a lay, you midget dicked moferker!” Keneisha yelled at him over her shoulder.

  “Do you need an ambulance, sir?” the police officer asked.

  “No, I’ll be fine,” Jamar whispered as he was helped to the soft leather couch.

  The second officer spoke up, “If you want t
o press charges against her for assault...”

  “Not necessary,” Jamar said again as he leaned into the leather, allowing it to hold his aching body.

  “Fine. We will leave you to it,” Officer Number One told him. This officer was worried that he was too calm and would retaliate when the dust settled. In Jamar’s head, he was in the middle of nowhere, standing on land which extended as far as his eyes could see. Land that belonged to him as he set out to create something magnificent. Even if he took the payments in an annuity, he still never had to work a day in his life for anything other than what made him happy.

  His heart, which rarely thumped over 120 beats per minute even after vigorous aerobic exercise, was now beating so fast his breastplate felt the after effects of the tremors. Stiff legs raised him from the couch as his feet shuffled across bamboo wooded floors into his home office. Plastered on the walls were sketches, ideas, dreams in stasis which had never received a breath of life.

  “I’m rich...” he said with a sigh. “I am filthy damned rich!”

  The changes that came with the newfound wealth altered his life in ways he had only imagined in his head.

  Chapter 2. Mo’ Money...Mo’ Problems

  Edna Monroe Smalls sat on her front porch, rocking in her favorite chair as her grandson pulled up in his fancy German car. Of all her grandbabies, Jamar was the one she prayed for the hardest. Unlike his brothers and cousins, when faced with fight or flight, he preferred to spread his wings and fly away. Camille, her youngest daughter, had possessed the same temperament that she passed down to her youngest son. A son who was very successful in his own right. No matter what Jamar set his mind to, he always made happen.

  His two brothers had no desire to be anything other than cool, hip, and well known in the wrong circles. Earl, the eldest, currently serving 25 to life in Menard Correctional Facility for accidently taking the life of his live-in lover. Both were high on Ecstasy, cocaine, and whatever else they chose to swallow, and he honestly thought his girlfriend had turned into a zombie and shot her. Although it was considered to be accidental, because of the drug usage and quantities of drugs in Earl’s possession, little leniency was given.

  The middle brother, Anthony, decided the pawn shop owner on Brower Street was giving him a raw deal on the stolen merchandise he brought into the Big Willie’s store. After several minutes of heated words, Mr. Willie Lipnicky, the owner of the store, put three bullets into Anthony’s chest. Mr. Lipnicky told the police that Anthony had tried to rob him although he had no weapon.

  Edna took special care with Jamar’s upbringing, especially after his mother took to using heroine to console herself after she found her man in bed with Susannah Monroe, the one woman that Camille despised more than anyone else on their street. It was Jamar who found his mother knocked out on the couch, or at least that is what he told his grandmother after he called 9-1-1. The paramedics did not have the heart to tell the 12-year-old-boy that his mother had been dead for some time.

  Being that Edna was old school, she kept an insurance policy on each and every one of her four children. Camille was the last one. The insurance money was used to put Jamar through college.

  Camille she cremated. Edna saw no fit reason for good money to be wasted giving her daughter a fancy send off to the next world when the one she lived in she had polluted with toxins.

  “Jamar,” she told her grandson. “As you grow older and make friends, it is important to be your brother’s keeper. If the brothers you choose ain’t worth keeping, then you need to change the people you call family.”

  Those words stuck with him throughout his life. Chicago was not a place to find the types of people he wanted to call brother. The means to start a new life was in his wallet and he was ready to do just that once he had a long conversation with his grandmother and saw to her comfort.

  “Good afternoon, Gigi,” he said as he climbed the front stairs. The banister on the old porch he’d repaired more times that he could remember. In the winters, he coiled strands of lights around the spindles to brighten the house for the holidays. This winter, his Gigi would be somewhere warm, if not tropical. She was a feisty old bird that took no crap off of anyone in the neighborhood, no matter how much it had changed. She had raised her grandsons to be the same way, but somehow, the wickedness of the world had been stronger than her teachings.

  “What’s this I hear about some hood rat knocking you out cold?” she asked him.

  Jamar licked his bottom lip before answering, “Gigi, it was a sucker punch; she caught me off guard.”

  “Did she also catch you off guard with her foot? It looks like a shoe print is upside your damned head!”

  “Thanks for your concern, but I’m fine,” he told her as he sat in the chair beside her. “I have a question for you, Gigi.”

  “And I have one for you...why you let that skank get the better of you?”

  “You taught me never to hit a woman,” he said.

  “Yes, but I never taught you to be one either. You should have knocked that heffah out!” Gigi said as she sipped her tea.

  He laughed at little at her quick wit, but to continue the conversation was a lost cause. He asked her, “Gigi, if money were not an object, where would you like to live out your days?”

  She chuckled loudly as she rubbed her arthritic right knee. “Oh, that’s easy. I would like to live in Orlando in one of those gated senior communities where everyone has their own golf carts. The doctors are right there on staff and there are trips, and dances, and quilting bees...oh Chile...that is what I call living. I’m too old for these cold Chicago winters...”

  “What if I could do that for you, Gigi? Would you be willing to go?”

  “Hell, I would throw three pairs of drawers and a few pictures in a suitcase and be on the first thing moving! You know Rosemary Brady that used to live down the road a piece, she moved down there last year. Hold on, she sent me a postcard from where she is at...” Edna told him as she used her old arms to push herself up from the rocker as the joints and bones creaked in protest. “Let me go grab it,” she told Jamar as she opened the storm door.

  The postcard read Mayflower Community in Orlando. Gigi was excited, “Jamar, I know Rosemary used her 401k to buy into her condo, which brought her monthly payments way down. I don’t know how much it is, but I’ll be okay with the smallest unit in the building as long as I get in,” she told him as she looked longingly at the photo.

  “Do you mind if I hold on to this, Gigi?” he asked her.

  “Keep it as long as you want,” she smiled at him. “You know, I’ve never been on a plane in my entire life, Jamar?”

  He leaned over to kiss her on top of her head, “I am my brother’s keeper, Gigi.”

  “I ain’t ya’ damned brother!” She told him with grey haired church lady attitude.

  “Doesn’t matter, I will keep you close as well,” he told her. “I have to be out of town for a few days next week.”

  “You better have your scrawny ass here for dinner tomorrow night, Jamar Smalls,” she called after him.

  “I have never missed a Sunday dinner in my life. See you tomorrow,” he told her.

  He held tight to the postcard. Monday, it would be the third thing he took care of before deciding what was next for his life.

  Chapter 3. I’m out...

  Jamar called the office early to inform his boss that he was going to be late due to a few appointments. Somehow the message was never relayed and he arrived at his desk at 11:00 amid a bunch of ooooh, you’re in trouble faces. Children. They were all overpaid children.

  Richard Levinston called him into his office. A stern look covered Richard’s face as he asked Jamar to have a seat. Once more lost in his head, Jamar was happy to know that after taxes on his lottery winnings, he deposited into his bank account almost a hundred million reasons to not listen to this long-winded speech by a man whom he held in absolutely the same regard as the current presidential candidates. Levinston was a trust fun
d baby with too much money and no concept of how to manage, let alone treat people. The man was a pompous ass who talked down to everyone in his wake.

  “Jamar,” he started. “You have been with us for almost eight years. I was thinking that by now you would be ready to move into management, but you seem to always be daydreaming...doing the bare minimum...just getting by. I get the feeling, son, that you are not happy here,” he said, leaning back in his chair. The scent of the room smelled like old money and moral judgement.

  It was a silly conversation. The same one he had with the man three years ago. Today, it was even less effective as a motivator than it had been then. Jamar stood looking at his boss and told him, “Mr. Levinston, it has been a great eight years and my heart still is not in this job. You are right; I have been cruising and getting by, which is not fair to you or the projects I have been working on.”

  Levinston was pleased. “Glad to hear you are ready to step up and do better, Jamar,” he told him.

  Jamar returned the half-warm smile. “I am going to do better. I am quitting. I have learned a lot here. I am thankful for everything, but it’s time I set out to do my own thing.”

  Jamar gave nothing more than a nod of his head as he made his way out the door. Levinston sat there speechless, his jowls hanging about his neck, moving as if a silent command had been issued to warrant the flapping of excess skin. Jamar didn’t even bother to go to his desk to collect his belongings. There wasn’t much there anyway. No personal items from eight years on the job. There wasn’t a plant or even a picture of him and Gigi. The only thing his workspace included that signified it was his desk was a nameplate. For the oddest reason, that is the one item that he lifted as he walked by his old life, out the front door to his new one.

  Three weeks passed while Jamar worked diligently to gather the thoughts bandying about in his head. His first priority was Gigi. A rash of home invasions had occurred on her street in the past month. It was only a matter of time before some young thug filled with courage inspired by something snorted or injected made a move on the street matriarch. It was an unspoken rule that she was off limits, but Jamar knew that not everyone followed the rules.