God Only Knows

by Xavier Knight

  Relieved at least by the idea that he’d somehow missed Julia’s role in everything, Cassie fought a shudder and turned her car back on. It seemed negotiation was not an option with this man —should she just beg for mercy now?

  “By the way,” Whitlock said, leaning so far into the car that his lips were now inches from her right ear, “coming at me with money will never slow me down. I want the truth.” He paused suddenly, took a hand, and ran it underneath her chin. “Well, that’s not really all I want. Like my ex said at the divorce hearings, money’s not my weakness —it’s women.”

  Not sure what to expect, Cassie just stared blankly as Whitlock continued, still leaning over her. “I think Eddie would agree you’ve held up pretty well through the years. You’re a very beautiful woman, sort of like Will Smith’s wife with a few excess pounds, but in all the right places.” His lips grazed Cassie’s right ear, his bacon-laced breath assaulting her. “I don’t really know how far I could actually press charges against you. I’d probably get more joy out of experiencing what Eddie dreamed of the day you turned him into a vegetable. You want to protect your precious son and family? Get a little more creative with your next bribe. You have two weeks.”

  When Cassie finally opened her eyes, confirming that Whitlock and his car were gone, she shook with a frightening combination of fear and rage, still overcome by the lust in his tone and the overpowering smell of his cologne. Tears flowing, she shrieked uncontrollably and slammed fists against her dashboard.

  She hadn’t been so humiliated in decades. The horror she had felt the night that Eddie was attacked, when he arose out of the bushes behind the soccer field, didn’t compare to the afternoon that followed a few years later —junior year —when Gil Darby stole her virginity.

  The most controversial couple in the school —even more tongue-wagging than Maxwell Simon and his string of “secret” white girlfriends —Cassie and Gil had spent most of the preceding months together, aided by her status as a varsity cheerleader and Gil’s starting position on Christian Light’s soccer and basketball teams. Each convinced they were untouchable, they had skipped school together, at least one afternoon a week, to hang out at his house.

  For months Gil seemed content to tiptoe toward sex with Cassie in those precious hours before his parents returned home from their shifts at a local plant. Each week she would let him progress from hand holding to kissing, then to French-kissing, then to petting, then heavy petting. Cassie wasn’t sure what type of schedule she was on, but she figured eventually she’d know when it was time to let Gil “round home,” as he suggested she do every such afternoon.

  When the time came, though, it had not been on Cassie’s schedule. She would come to learn that Gil, pressured by his parents to get a “respectable” girlfriend, had decided to collect the return on his investment before cutting her loose. With little warning and a style both swift and brutish, he had set Cassie on the promiscuous course that didn’t end until her first bout of morning sickness.

  It had taken Cassie years to forgive Gil Darby for his sin against her, but a few seconds with Pete Whitlock had nearly set her back almost twenty years. Gasping for breath, she threw her car door open, swung about violently, and vomited onto the pavement. Shoulders heaving, fighting for every breath, Cassie raised her hands heavenward, ignoring the stares of a woman parked adjacent to her.

  “I give, Father,” she whimpered, eyes cast to the cloudy skies overhead. “I can’t solve this alone.”

  10

  Look here, Julia,” her father said as soon as he answered his phone, “it’s ten o’clock on a Saturday night. Used to be I was just heading out into the streets at this hour, but them days are over. You know I don’t take to folk ringing me up this late.”

  “Excuse me,” Julia replied, her tone sharper than it should be. She collapsed back into her office chair, wiping another puddle of sweat from her brow. “Daddy, forgive me if that sounded disrespectful. It’s just that your little girl is worn-out. We’ve been working this phone bank all day.”

  “Uh-huh.” Julia’s father made a gagging sound, and she could easily picture him grabbing his nearest spittoon —whether one of his old shot glasses, a cracked cereal bowl, or a long-neglected vase —and clearing his throat the old-fashioned way. “I suppose you’re calling about Amber.”

  “Yes, just making sure she’s asleep and not sitting up watching some trifling movie with Dejuan and Tracy.” Julia knew that her nephew and niece, who happened to be Amber’s oldest brother and sister, were addicted to Ice Cube films —like Friday and Barbershop — really to anything that featured questionable language, crass behavior, and sexual innuendo.

  “Julia,” her father replied, his throat sounding drier with each passing minute, “I know I ain’t really help raise you, but can you cut me a break every now and then? I’m all over this. I do not let Amber stay up late with the other kids, and I certainly don’t let her watch stuff I know you don’t approve of.”

  “Thank you, I was just checking.”

  “What time should I expect you?”

  Julia scratched at the nape of her neck, feeling the occasional longing for the lengthy curls she had abandoned for this natural hairstyle. “It will probably be another half hour, I’m sorry. The phone bank’s lead alumni volunteer and I are the only ones left at this point, but we can’t leave without getting a clear count of all the pledges received tonight.”

  “Okay, take your time.” Her father cleared his throat, which told Julia he was struggling to erase any protective emotions from his tone. “You got someone to walk you to your car this late?”

  “It’s okay, Daddy. I’ll just walk out with Dr. Simon.”

  “Simon? This the son of those Simons who graduated from Dunbar, the highfalutin folk?”

  Julia could feel her own frown as she looked at the phone’s receiver. “His name is Maxwell, Daddy. What do you know about him anyway?” It wasn’t like her father should have the first clue that she and Maxwell had been classmates; Daddy had done well in those days to attend her eighth-grade and high-school graduation ceremonies. To this day, he had never met Cassie, Toya, or Terry.

  “I know of the Simon boy’s parents, don’t know him personally,” he replied, chuckling. “Seem like Amber knows plenty about him, though. According to her, he’s the only man on your volunteer board she thinks you should be dating.”

  “Oh no she didn’t.” Julia shook her head. “Your granddaughter has a vivid imagination. Ignore her. I’ll see you guys in a bit.”

  • • •

  As she headed back toward the conference room, where Maxwell and a dozen other Christian Light alumni had spent the evening dialing for dollars, Julia fought back an embarrassed grin. Amber was definitely eight going on eighteen, convinced she knew how to manage her aunt’s social life. Julia made a mental note to call Cassie for advice on how to deal with the shifting nature of the mother-daughter relationship in these preteen years. She wanted to encourage Amber’s maturity, but at the same time, she felt a need to keep the little booger’s nose out of her business.

  Opening the conference room door, Julia was surprised to hear not just the hum of the laptop computers the volunteers had used to record their pledge activity, but the ragged rhythm of Maxwell’s snores. Reclined in his seat, near the center of the table, he sat with his head cocked back and mouth wide open, a sheaf of printouts in his lap. His chest rising and falling, his eyes closed, and a thin trail of drool easing from one corner of his mouth, Dr. Maxwell Simon looked like a candidate for America’s Funniest Home Videos. Strangely, Julia found herself staring in admiration.

  Her own next move surprised her even more. Before she knew it, she had stepped to the table, crumpled up a stray sheet of printer paper, and sent the makeshift ball sailing toward Maxwell’s forehead.

  “Uh, yeah?” Maxwell popped forward in his seat as the paper glanced off his cheek. His neck jerking as his eyes met Julia’s, he collapsed forward, elbows landing on the table.
“I was, uh, just resting my eyes.”

  “You’re only human, Doctor,” Julia replied, grinning and sliding into the chair on the opposite side of the table from him. “I came to help. Why do you need all the printouts? I thought everyone uploaded their pledge sheets to that SharePoint site my IT manager set up.”

  “Oh, really?” Maxwell frowned. “I knew they were capturing their calls and pledges on spreadsheets, but everyone printed theirs out before leaving. I figured I had to manually summarize them into one sheet.”

  Julia raised an eyebrow. “Maybe if you’d been here on time, you would have heard me ask them to print hard copies just in case we had any problems reading the copies they uploaded to the site.” She gave a benign smile. “Just how much time have you spent manually typing in everyone’s data?”

  “Let’s just say, if I told you,” Maxwell replied, “you’d have even less respect for me than you already do.” Yawning, he rubbed at his right eye. “Especially given that I’m still only about halfway through these forms.”

  “Maxwell,” Julia said, her tone casually professional now, “I have plenty of respect for you, just none for your understanding of technology. Not to mention, I know you couldn’t help being late, given the extra patients you had to see this evening.” She stood and walked over to his chair. “Is your PC still connected to Internet Explorer?”

  Maxwell grimaced, wiping at his eyes. “I haven’t really checked.”

  “Well,” Julia replied, leaning down next to him and sliding the laptop over in front of her, “let’s just see.” As her fingers moved across the PC’s keyboard, she wondered if she should scoot farther down the table from the doctor. Barely an inch separated them now; she could smell his bold cologne, as well as the minty smell of the gum he had quickly popped into his mouth.

  “Okay, this is the SharePoint site,” Julia said when the desired screen popped up. In minutes she had walked Maxwell through the steps required to locate each volunteer’s uploaded pledge spreadsheet and build the formulas necessary to pull the data into one consolidated view.

  “You mean that’s it?” Maxwell shook his head as he reviewed the summary statistics in the pivot table that Julia had already built into the Excel file. “Good thing you didn’t leave me to my own devices, Julia. I’d have been here until sunrise.”

  “Hey, we’re all pulling together for this important cause,” she replied, laying a hand on his shoulder and instantly questioning her move. “You spent three hours overseeing everyone’s activity, which was time I didn’t have.” She shrugged, relieved that she had moved her hand before Maxwell showed any sign of unease. “My day job didn’t let up the past few hours —creditors to beg mercy from, wayward students to motivate, and one of my weekly mentoring sessions with a group of teenage mothers.”

  Maxwell stood, but whipped around and leaned onto his chair, his tired eyes brightening as he stared at Julia. “Always knew you would save the world,” he said. “Or Dayton, at least. That’s no small feat.”

  “I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment,” Julia replied, rubbing her eyes despite herself, “but I’ll take it. What’s your excuse?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Doctor,” Julia said, leaning back a bit in her chair. “If you thought I would save the world, I expected you to rule it. I mean, if I’d predicted where you’d be by this age, I would have said either corporate CEO, insanely wealthy surgeon, or maybe big-time politician.”

  Maxwell stood, crossed his arms, and actually sighed before saying, “Any of those would have sounded right to me back in the day. I guess, sometimes life has a way of changing our ambitions.”

  Julia cocked her head, surprised that her innocent question seemed to have set off a sudden bout of self-examination. “You know, some in the Jack and Jill and Greek organization communities say this is all part of your family’s master plan. Now that the family business is a statewide success, your parents need to send one of you into Congress, to help grease the skids and take the company national. I have to say, it doesn’t sound crazy —you could lose your shirt with this clinic, but build a heck of a bio for a future campaign.”

  Maxwell’s hearty laugh, a deep-throated boom, filled the large, airy conference room. “Oh, Dr. Julia Turner,” he said finally, “you have no idea. Rest assured my clinic has nothing to do with my family’s desire to have more wealth than God. You’re looking at a proud black sheep here.”

  “That’s hard to believe.” Something told Julia it was time to back off. Over the past several weeks, she and Maxwell had developed a surprisingly easy, friendly rapport, but she was under no illusion. Yes, even though she had successfully called on God’s peace and could now look at him without reliving the pain of his rejection from years before, she still found him handsome. And, yes, the more she inadvertently scratched the surface of the apparent do-gooder motivation behind his opening the clinic, the more impressed she became.

  All that meant, though, was that in a different life she and Maxwell Simon could have been friends. Nothing more. She had no place digging into the details of his past or into why he had left a glamorous job in Dallas to return to dreary Dayton.

  Once they had straightened up the conference room, Maxwell trailed Julia to her office. Standing just outside, near the receptionist’s desk, he tossed a question as she gathered her coat, purse, and briefcase. “I’ve been meaning to ask, besides Cassie and me, did you invite any black alumni from our class to serve on the board?”

  Shutting her office door after her, Julia chewed her bottom lip, thinking out loud. “Let me see. I think you two were the only African-Americans.” As long as she was in Christian Light’s hallowed halls, her professionalism forced her to use politically correct language. “The only other classmates of ours I even invited were Sarah Rice and Jerry Connell, if you remember them. Sarah’s a mayor of a small town near Xenia, and Jerry is a successful car salesman down in Cincinnati. They’ve both pledged money but didn’t have time to volunteer.”

  “Hmm.” Maxwell followed Julia out into the main hall, let her arm the building’s alarm system, then opened the front door for her. “You could have aimed a little higher, frankly. I think my boys —you remember Jake Campbell and Lyle Sharp —would be willing to help out in a bigger way. You realize they’re now —”

  “A megachurch pastor and a city councilman, respectively,” Julia replied, her back to Maxwell as she locked the three double-bolts on the school’s main doors. “To be honest, Maxwell, I didn’t think they’d be interested.” Hold me steady, Lord. Julia really didn’t want to get sucked down this path with the doctor, just when things were getting to be so civil. Jake Campbell, a short, thin, clean-shaven brother with an outdated Afro, lived out in Springboro, the far south suburb, where his fast-growing, racially diverse church was located. Julia knew for a fact that he had enrolled all four of his children in the well-funded public school system out there. She had heard through the grapevine that Jake had declared the “new” Christian Light to be beneath the standards he set for his children’s education. On top of that, Jake had been the most visible local minister to publicly support Pastor Pence’s criticisms of the Christian Light Schools’ decline.

  As for Lyle Sharp, well, if Maxwell had accidentally damaged the self-esteem of the black girls of Christian Light, Lyle had been a willing destroyer. A tall, sleek, and smooth-talking wisecracker who went on to win a college basketball scholarship, he hadn’t taken well to Toya and Terry’s teasing about his taste in predictably white, busty, airheaded girlfriends. He always gave worse than he got when it came to trading insults, and as a result, Julia had personally intervened time and again to keep her girls from clawing Lyle’s eyes out. When considering alumni volunteers, she had considered Lyle, based on his local contacts and his deep pockets, but in the end, she had left him off the list. Julia had a sense that even decades later, dealing with Lyle Sharp carried the same hazards.

  “All I’m saying,” Maxwell
continued as they arrived at her car, “is that I’ve talked to them a lot about what you’re doing, and their eyes are opening. I’d like to get them formally involved in this effort, Julia.”

  Sighing, Julia opened her driver’s-side door and squinted at Maxwell in the dark. “Well . . . you and I seem to be getting along okay, so how bad can those two be? Tell them they’re welcome to join next week’s meeting.”

  Maxwell raised a finger toward Julia, a weary smile on this face. “Thanks. You won’t be sorry.” He snapped his fingers suddenly, startling Julia as she climbed into her seat. “I’ve got it.”

  Peering up at Maxwell, she frowned. “What’s that?”

  “Maybe we should thaw the ice first with a social outing,” he replied. “I hang out with the guys and their wives a couple of times a month. Why don’t you join us sometime? We’ll probably do a movie and dinner this weekend or next.”

  What? Julia hoped the snap of her neck wasn’t visible. A shaky hand on her keys, she started the ignition and grabbed her door handle with the other. Eyes facing the dashboard, not Maxwell, she tightened her spine as she said, “I should really get going. Good night.”

  11

  In one form or another, Marcus and Julia’s initial responses to Cassie’s revelation boiled down to exactly what she had feared: You should have told us sooner.

  Understandably, Marcus was more taken aback than Julia. As they sat around the glass table in the Gillettes’ morning room, Cassie’s husband folded his arms, his tongue lodged at the front of his closed mouth. “Why am I only now hearing all this, Cassie?” He turned toward Julia, who was to his right. “I love you, Julia, you know that, but once again I’m learning about secrets you and my wife have kept from me. Why are you here now, when this should be a private conversation between Cassie and me?”

  “Baby, please,” Cassie replied, rising and standing over Marcus. “I didn’t have the strength to relive this separately with the two of you.” She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “I had to get it all out at once —the past and the present. Can you forgive me?”