by Neta Jackson
And then there was Chris Hickman. At least his mom was an out-and-out, in-your-face believer, trying to raise her kids up right. Florida would tell you in a minute that she was “six years saved and six years sober!” Her husband, Carl, too—though he was a lot quieter about it. But those early years when their family was in disarray had to have been disaster on the kids. DCFS took the kids away. That’s what really shook Florida sober. Even then, it took her five years to find Carla, her “baby.” Only got her back a year ago.
“Hey,Mom. Dad—catch.” Josh, eighteen and newly graduated, tossed his duffle bag at his dad. “Take this home for me, will ya? I gotta run some kids home.”
“Not so fast!” I protested. “Welcome home, you.” I gave him a hug.
He grinned and hugged back, looking more like our “normal” Josh now that he had quit shaving his head. His sandy hair had grown out about an inch. Needed a trim over the ears, but still—
Wait a minute.Was that a tattoo peeking out beneath the sleeve of his T-shirt? “Josh!” I grabbed his arm. “What’s this? ”
Josh pulled his arm loose. “Nothing much,” he called over his shoulder, trotting off. “Tell you later. Mr. Reilly! Who are the kids who need a ride? ”
Later? I wanted to see it now! A tattoo? A forever design needle pricked into my son’s skin that would never wash off? My kid? I thought sending Josh and Amanda to Cornerstone would be safe! It was a istian music festival, for heaven’s sake!
“Jodi? ” Denny interrupted my inner muttering. “Have you seen Chris? I can’t find him.”
I did a quick glance around. “Uh, no. Ask Rick. Or Josh. They had to bring him home in one of the vans.”
We trailed after Josh,who was talking to the youth group leader. “Either of you know where Chris Hickman is? We’re supposed to see that he gets home.”
“Oh. Didn’t know that.” Rick Reilly pulled on the brim of his Cubs cap. “He was riding with me in the Suburban, took off just as soon as we got here. Said he was taking the el home.”
I eyed Denny. Oh, brother. Florida was going to be as mad as a bee with its stinger in backward.
4
Chris, I learned later, didn’t get home until midnight. I called Florida right away to let her know we’d failed to hook up with him, but I had to leave the message on their answering machine. She called me back around seven, fuming. “That boy gonna be grounded for the rest of his natural life! —which ain’t gonna be long if I get my hands on him. I tol’ that boy he was s’posed to go straight home an’ wait. Lord, help me!”
Guess I should’ve asked Flo to call me when Chris got home, just to be sure he got there safely, but I was a bit distracted by all the dirty laundry and the huge appetites Amanda and Josh brought home from Cornerstone.Not to mention the tattoo etched permanently into Josh’s right arm.
“OK, show me.” I held up my hand like a traffic cop when he came through the back door after dropping off José and the other kids who needed a ride home.
“Chill,Mom.” Josh snitched a handful of grapes I was about to toss into a fruit salad. “I’m eighteen. A high school grad. I don’t need permission to get a tattoo.”
“I didn’t say you did.” OK, I’d been thinking it. “Just . . . show me.”
He popped another grape in his mouth, gave me that amused smile he reserved for his maternal parent, and pulled up the left sleeve of his T-shirt. I squinted at the deep blue-green calligraphy etched into the bulge of his left arm. Looked like an “N,” a “T” linked to the “N” with a circle, and a jazzy “W.” N . . . circle/T . . . W . . .
I gave up. “I don’t get it.”
He grinned. “That’s the whole point. You don’t get it. You ask me what it means. I tell you NOTW—stands for ‘Not of This World.’ If you’re a kid on the street who’s clueless, I tell you that I’m in the world, but not of it—you know, a conversation starter to talk about Jesus.”
“Oh.” I resisted rolling my eyes. “Couldn’t you have just bought a T-shirt? ”
“Mom! That’s wimpy. You wear it a few days, toss it in the dirty clothes, and put on a Bulls shirt or something. They challenged us at Cornerstone to lay our bodies on the line one hundred percent for Jesus—like He did for us.” He pulled down his sleeve. “What’s a few needle pricks compared to Jesus getting pierced by railroad spikes and the pointed end of a spear? ”
I was having a hard time making the connection between Jesus laying down His life for us and Josh getting a permanent tattoo, but I bit my tongue. At least he didn’t put something stupid on his body like Born to Booze or Josh Loves Edesa. In fact, I had to admit I was touched by his all-out faith. Not that I wanted to encourage any more tattoos!
I swatted his hand as he tried to snitch more fruit salad. “Glad you’re home.”
THE HOLIDAY WEEKEND FADED into Chicago history, and the summer rut took over. Denny and Josh left first thing the next morning for their jobs coaching summer sports for the Chicago Park District. Amanda slept in while I took messages from Uptown and neighborhood moms who wanted her to babysit. Most of them had figured out by now they had to get their bids in early. I was proud of Amanda’s knack with children. She got raves from both kids and parents as a top-notch babysitter. Maybe she’ll be a teacher someday, Lord, I thought, scribbling yet another message. Like me.
Which was why I didn’t dare say it aloud. Suggesting that my daughter might follow in her mother’s footsteps was a sure way to kill that idea.
Both Denny and I had jobs with the Chicago public schools—Denny as an assistant coach at West Rogers High, and me teaching third grade at Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary, where Avis Johnson-Douglass was the principal. I was still taking summers off, though it was getting harder and harder to make our minimal teachers’ salaries stretch for an entire year.Moving into the city two years ago had put both of us at the bottom of the pay scale again—and we didn’t get tenure for another year! But God had been good, so good. He had provided everything we really needed. Maybe not everything we wanted—a real vacation would be nice, somewhere exotic, just Denny and me, no kids, no dishes or laundry or dog poop—but I wasn’t going to complain. “Thank You, Jesus,” I breathed, hiking into the living room where CNN News was blab-bing away. Another suicide bombing. The manhunt for Saddam Hussein was on. The president admitting that intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may have been flawed . . . I clicked the TV off. There were a lot of things I didn’t understand about the world we lived in, and sometimes it seemed like the only thing I knew to do about it was pray. Which used to seem like a cop-out to me.
But not any longer. Prayer was becoming my second language, me and God having a running conversation all day long. About Denny and the kids . . . about my sisters in Yada Yada and all the challenges they faced . . . about tensions in the world and our city . . . about the nameless girl I’d seen at the campus rally, caught up in that hate group. Have mercy on us, Lord . . .
I was stuffing a load of dirty whites into the washing machine in the basement of our two-flat when the phone rang yet again. “I’ll get it!” Amanda yelled. Good, I thought. She’s up. She can answer her own phone messages.
“Mo-om! It’s for you!”
Huh.Wouldn’t you know it. I hustled back up the stairs as fast as the rod in my left leg allowed and picked up the kitchen phone. “Hello. This is Jodi . . . Oh, hi, Nony!” Rats! I’d meant to call Nonyameko and ask when Mark was coming home. Another good intention that fizzled like a wet firecracker.
“Hello, Jodi. You have heard the good news? Mark is coming home tomorrow.”
“That’s what Denny said,Nony! I’m so glad. How can we help? That’s going to be a big adjustment for you and the boys.”
A brief silence met the obvious. “Yes.” Her voice had lowered. Softened. “Yes, it will. But that is why I am calling. Is Denny home? I need help moving some furniture and putting up a bed in our dining room. Until Mark can manage the stairs.”
“Oh, Nony.” My voice ch
oked up. Nony lived with the aftereffects of Mark’s beating 24–7. How easy it was for me to put it out of my mind for hours, even days, as life went on. “Denny’s not home now, but we could both come up there tonight. Is that soon enough? ”
JOSH CAME WITH US THAT EVENING to help move furniture in the Sisulu-Smiths’ ivy-covered brick home in north Evanston, not far from the university. I peeked into the family room where Hoshi Takahashi was playing War—the card version—with Nony’s two sons, Marcus and Michael, while Josh and Denny took apart the polished oak dining room table for its trip down to the basement.
“Say hello to Mrs. Baxter,” Hoshi ordered, even as she took the next hand.
“Hello, Mrs. Baxter,” the two boys chorused, never once taking their eyes off the cards as they each slapped down the next one from their shrinking stacks.
Hoshi smiled smugly as she took the last two hands. “I won! Now scoot. Get ready for bed.”
As the boys headed upstairs, I hugged the slender university student. “What would Nony do without you, Hoshi? ”
She waved off my comment. “It is I who am blessed, Jodi,” she said in her heavily accented English. “The Smiths have given me a family and a home. It is—how do you say it? —working out for both of us.”
Hoshi had been one of Dr. Mark Smith’s history students. Knowing how it felt to be an international student far from home, Nonyameko had taken the young Japanese woman under her wing, told her about Jesus, and brought her to the Chicago Women’s Conference a year ago. That’s where we had met the rest of the motley crew that became the Yada Yada Prayer Group. When Mark was attacked by members of a local White Pride group—for daring to expose their particular brand of free speech for the hatemongering it was—Hoshi had practically moved in to help care for the boys so that Nony could spend long days and nights at the hospital.
I followed Hoshi’s sleek black ponytail upstars and peeked into the Smiths’ guest room while Hoshi supervised the boys brushing their teeth.Whoa!What happened to the framed African prints and bold black-and-gold décor that Nony loved? The room had undergone a transformation. Pastel watercolors of Japanese countryside hung on the walls. A pale-blue-and-cream comforter matched a cream knotted rug. And at least a dozen framed family photographs sat on the dresser, the desk, the nightstand.
With Mark’s long convalescence looming, it looked like the living arrangement had become permanent.
Crossing the room, I picked up a gold frame on the bedside stand with a portrait of a man and a woman, obviously Japanese, with rather flat features, straight black hair, and . . . smiling. My heart squeezed. I recognized the woman—Hoshi’s mother. The man must be her father. I was surprised to see the smiles. Mrs. Takahashi certainly had never allowed even a hint of a smile when she visited the Yada Yada Prayer Group with Hoshi, nearly a year ago. In fact, the image of Mrs. Takahashi etched in my mind was her stubborn refusal to relinquish her pocketbook to a knife-wielding Becky Wallace, who—
“Yes,” said Hoshi’s voice behind me. “My parents.” She gently took the frame from my hand and gazed at the portrait, her teardrop-shaped eyes misting. “Takuya and Asuka Takahashi. I . . . miss them very much.”
I wanted to ask if she’d received a letter yet after that disastrous visit, when they’d basically disowned Hoshi for abandoning her ancestral religion, but I knew she hadn’t. She would have told us. Instead, I followed her around the room as she pointed out a favorite aunt, two younger sisters, her grandmother, more aunts and uncles, a bevy of boy cousins with laughing eyes and casual good looks. “They were my playmates growing up,” she said fondly.
No wonder Hoshi adored Mark and Nony’s two boys.
I TOOK AN ENCHILADA CASSEROLE—Delores’s recipe—over to the Sisulu-Smith household the next day, but I didn’t stay long. I’d hoped to say hi to Mark, but he was asleep on the bed in the dining room, exhausted after the stressful move from the hospital. Nony told me that Pastor Joseph Cobbs and another brother from New Morning Christian Church had taken off a half day from work to pick them up and get Mark and his wheelchair and other equipment into the house. To top it off, they’d gassed up the Smith’s Audi 200 sedan and taken it through a car wash.
“I didn’t realize it was so dirty until they washed it,” Nony said sheepishly.
I giggled. “That’s what you get for having a car the color of beach sand. Doesn’t look dirty even when it is.”
“Champagne! The color of champagne, not sand.” She started to laugh—the kind of laughter born of exhaustion, bordering on tears.
I gave her a squeeze. “You’re going to get through this, Nony. God’s going to see you through. Look what He’s done so far! Just take it a day at a time.”
Yeah, right. “Easy for you to say, Jodi Baxter,” I mumbled to myself a few minutes later, pointing our minivan toward Sheridan Road and heading south toward Howard Street, the border between Evanston and Chicago. “It’s not your husband who still has brain trauma from getting smashed in the head with a brick.”
Rain started to splatter on my windshield. I turned on the wipers. Pieces of a Bible verse I’d memorized for Sunday school years ago darted around in my head like the huge drops chased by the wipers on the windshield until it came together with a swoosh . . .
“If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? ”
I snorted. “Are you talking to me, God? ” I knew He was. OK, OK. I should get on the phone and call Yada Yada. Line up some meals. Sit with Mark so Nony can get out. Make sure somebody keeps the car tuned up . . .
But my spirit was troubled, even as I made mental lists and tried to think of things that would be most helpful to Nony. For how long, Lord? How long?
5
I sent e-mails and made phone calls for the next couple of days, trying to line up at least two or three meals each week for the Sisulu-Smith household—make that the Sisulu-Smith-Takahashi household—for the next month. Most of the Yada Yada sisters were eager to pitch in. But I ran into a few hitches.
“Ooo, Sista Jodee,” Chanda said. “Would be glad to cook Jamaican oxtails and red beans for dem, for true. But mi movin’ in less dan t’ree weeks! Mi kitchen all tore up! ”
Of course. Chanda was moving into her new house! But what woman packed up her kitchen three weeks ahead of time?
“That’s OK, Chanda. I understand you’re busy getting packed. Uh,what day are you moving? ” I seemed to remember a rash promise on the behalf of Yada Yada to help her move when the time came. Just thinking about it put my brain on overload.
“Oh, now, don’t you worry about dat. I hired a mover—an’ not dem college movers either. Don’t want mi new neighbors tinkin’ some trash moving in nex’ door.”
I let out a slow breath of relief. “That’s great, Chanda.” Chanda was doing everything first class these days—and I, for one, was grateful. It’d be hard to feel obligated to pack and move Chanda and her kids on top of giving Nony and Mark the practical help they needed.
“Oh, sure. Did I tell you, Sista Jodee, mi tinking about a vacation ’ouse? Right on de beach! ”
I nearly dropped the phone. “What? ! Chanda! You didn’t buy another house, did you? What beach? ”
“Jodee, Jodee.” Chanda’s tone was patronizing. “Dat not how dese tings work. Mi don’t have to buy it. Dey call it a time-share! You be knowin’ what a time-share is, don’ you? ”
“Vaguely.” I didn’t usually run with the time-share crowd.
“An’ dat not all. Mi won a free vacation to Hawaii! Free, Sista Jodee! ”
This was too much. “Uh, Chanda. I want to hear all about it. Really. But I still have a bunch of other calls to make. Later, OK? Bye!”
“Wait! Sista Jodee—” But I hung up. I’d apologize later.
Avis was the other hitch. I tried calling her at home several times that week, even tried the school office but only got the answering machine.We hadn’t talked since she
and Peter got back from Ohio after the Fourth. I didn’t get hold of her until Saturday evening, and even then she sounded rushed. “Uh, I can’t make a meal for Nony and Mark right now, Jodi. I’m sorry. Things have gotten a bit complicated here . . .”
In the background I heard a toddler screaming, throwing a tantrum.
A baby? At Avis’s house? What in the—
“Jodi, got to go. I’ll call you back. Or see you tomorrow at church.” She hung up.
Avis didn’t call back. But I did see her at church the next morning. She was at the front of Uptown’s all-purpose room huddled with Pastor Clark when we Baxters clattered up the stairs with only minutes to spare. I ducked into the church kitchen with my seven-layer salad for the Second Sunday Potluck—the weather was too hot and muggy to actually cook anything—then scanned the room. Josh had come early to set up the soundboard, Amanda was sitting with some of the teens who’d gone to Cornerstone, and Denny had saved me a seat. Didn’t see Peter Douglass. Rats. He’d been attending New Morning’s services lately, which met in this very room Sunday afternoon. That in itself was a good reason to merge our two congregations—he and Avis wouldn’t have to choose between churches.
As Avis laid her Bible on the simple wooden podium and said, “Good morning, church! Would you turn with me in your Bibles to—” I saw a young African-American woman sitting alone on the far side where Avis often sat, a squirming toddler on her lap. She looked so familiar . . .
And then I remembered. One of Avis’s daughters! I’d met all three of them at Avis and Peter’s wedding two months ago. Had Charette come home with them from Ohio? No, Charette had twins, a boy and a girl, a year or two older than this little one. This had to be Rochelle,who lived here in Chicago on the South Side—the one with the little boy named after Avis’s first husband. Conrad Johnson the Third.
