Man Enough For Me

by Rhonda Bowen

  “You know, you ought to move out of that mess,” Jules said in a slightly scolding tone.

  “Geez, now you starting to sound like her,” Easy said. “Every day she be on that same trip, talking ‘bout I’m gonna get myself killed on them streets.”

  Jules could understand his grandmother’s concern. In the last month alone there had been three separate gang related shoot-outs in the area that had left several people in the hospital and two people dead.

  “You know she’s right though, Easy. Every day I read something worse about that area in the news. I wish both of you would get on up out of there.”

  “That’s the thing, baby girl. She don’t wanna go nowhere—she just wants me to go. She says she’s too old to be moving into some new neighborhood. So I was like, why you think you gonna be safe here if I’m not? She says God will take care of her.”

  “I thought you didn’t buy into all that God stuff,” Jules said, using a phrase Easy had repeated to her many times before when she tried to get him to come to church with her.

  “I still don’t know about none of that,” Easy said. “What I do know though is that one of them nights that she was extra heavy on me about staying off the road, was the same night them boys got shot at on the corner.”

  “Well, you know your grandmamma is crazy close to her Lord. I wouldn’t be surprised if He’s been talking to her directly.”

  Easy rolled Jules’s pen between his palms and stared pensively into the distance. She could tell that there was something bothering him—and it was more than his usual anger about his mother leaving. In fact, of late it seemed like Easy had more than his normal share of demons tormenting him.

  He looked down at his hands and shook his head sadly.

  “Them boys ain’t got nobody else but me, Jules,” he said, referring to the few young men he kept an eye on in the neighborhood.

  “Everybody else done walked out on them. I know what that feels like. I couldn’t do that to them.”

  “But if you’re lying dead in a gutter, you’re not much use to them there either, now are you,” Jules said. “You can’t take care of you, Easy. You need to let go and let God take care of you completely.”

  Easy chuckled. “You don’t quit, do you, baby girl.”

  He stood up and kissed Jules on the forehead before heading for the door.

  “Don’t worry ‘bout me. I’ll be fine. You just remember what I said ‘bout that dude.”

  “Easy …”

  “All I’m saying is be careful,” Easy threw back, before disappearing through the door.

  As Jules sat staring at the doorway through which Easy had just left, she silently wished that Easy would worry about his own self even half as much as he worried about her.

  *  *  *

  It was about 1 p.m. when Jules stepped through the doors of the Sound Lounge. She scanned the place quickly in search of Germaine. Instead she saw a heavy crowd characteristic of fifty percent Fridays—the one Friday in the month when the Sound Lounge sold all of their CDs at 50 percent off. It was a great marketing strategy, and an excellent way to clear stock before the new releases hit the shelves the following Tuesday.

  Undeterred by the crowd, Jules weaved her way to the checkout counter, where she found a skinny cocoa-colored teenager working the register.

  “Hey, Tina, is Germaine here?”

  “Yeah, Jules,” Tina said, not taking her eyes off the CDs she was cashing out. “I think he’s in the back.”

  “Thanks.”

  Shuffling through the thinning crowd toward the back, Jules couldn’t stop the tingle that ran up her spine. She was glad that Germaine was here. She had actually taken a chance, showing up without calling first. But she had wanted to surprise him and take him out to lunch for a change.

  The sound of muffled voices drifted toward her as she continued down the narrow corridor and followed the bend to the back where Germaine’s office was located. As she got closer, she noticed that the door was slightly ajar, and that there were two other men inside the office with Germaine. Their backs were to her, so she couldn’t see who they were, but from the expression on Germaine’s face, Jules could tell he wasn’t too happy to see them.

  Jules slowed her steps as she wondered whether she should interrupt and let him know she was there, or just wait until he was done. She personally hated when people marched into her office unannounced. But when it came to Germaine, she didn’t consider herself “people,” and in any case, his door was open. Maybe she should let him know that she was there.

  Before she had a chance to make a move, Germaine spotted her hesitating in the hallway. Jules watched as a mixture of shock and unease framed Germaine’s features. Before she could say a word, or his visitors could see her, he swiftly stepped outside the office, pulling the door securely closed behind him.

  “What are you doing here, Jules?” he asked in a tone that betrayed his discomfort and annoyance.

  Jules stepped back and looked at Germaine in confusion. He had never spoken to her like that. Or looked at her like that. In fact, everything about Germaine’s behavior right then was foreign to her.

  “I … I thought I would surprise you by taking you out to lunch,” Jules stammered, still recovering from his coldness.

  “Now’s not a good time. I’m kinda in the middle of something,” he said. Jules didn’t miss the slight edge in his voice, or the way his eyes kept darting back and forth between her and the closed door. It was almost as if he expected it to burst open any minute.

  “I can see that,” Jules said, unable to hide her own annoyance. “I’ll just wait out front until you’re done.”

  Germaine shook his head.

  “Today’s not a good day, Jules.”

  His hand was on the handle of door, and his fingers were tapping the knob in a quick uneven rhythm.

  Jules narrowed her eyes as she watched him carefully. There was an ominous feeling stirring inside her gut that she could not ignore. Something was off about Germaine. Everything from his twitching arm, to the way he kept glancing back toward the room, to the way his eyes didn’t quite meet hers, told her that something was up. And that something had to do with the two men who were standing in his office.

  Only a couple moments passed as she stood there watching him, but the nervous air Germaine was exuding made it seem like hours.

  “What’s going on, Germaine?” Jules finally asked.

  There was that vein in his temple again.

  “Look, Jules, I can’t talk about this right now. But you probably should go. I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”

  “But Germaine—”

  “Jules, I don’t want you here now,” Germaine snapped. “Just go, okay?”

  Jules opened and closed her mouth several times, but nothing came out. She was dumbfounded at Germaine’s behavior.

  Her eyes searched his for some recognition of the man that she knew. Instead the detached eyes of a stranger stared back at her.

  After a few uncomfortable moments, Germaine seemed to accept Jules’s silence as consent. With one last glance, he cracked open his office door, slipped inside, and closed it with a quiet but firm thud.

  Jules stood in the empty hallway staring at the door for almost a full minute before it registered to her that he had walked out on her. Slowly her shock evaporated, giving way to feelings of irritation. Turning sharply on her heel, she made her way swiftly back out of the store the way she had entered.

  Jules spent the rest of the day in a foul mood. Back at the office she snapped at Michelle twice and slammed the door so hard once that she heard the walls rattle. It was good thing her boss, Penny, was not in the office, as Jules surely would have had some explaining to do.

  It didn’t help that her in-box kept getting flooded by e-mail complaints from nurses. Their main issue seemed to be the security at the hospital, or lack thereof. By the time Jules had received her eighty-sixth e-mail, she decided to find out exactly what was going on.
>
  “Ward Five nursing station.”

  “Hello, can I speak to Nurse Simpson, please?”

  “One moment, please.”

  Jules watched two more e-mails come into her in-box as she waited for Maxine to come on the line.

  “Nurse Simpson speaking.”

  “Maxine, it’s me.”

  “Hey, Jules, what’s up?”

  “What’s with all these nurses spamming my in-box with e-mail complaints? Did I just become the hospital president and no one told me about it?” Jules asked, unable to keep the annoyance from her voice. She had just received an alert that her inbox was approaching the storage limit.

  “Uh, no problem, Jules. You can borrow my car. Just meet me in the parking lot in five minutes, and I’ll bring you the keys,” Maxine said.

  “You can’t talk, huh,” Jules said, understanding Maxine’s code. Something was definitely going on.

  “Yeah, I’m on the first level. I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  Jules hung up the phone and waited the five minutes it took Maxine to find a secluded spot and call Jules back from her cell.

  “Okay, so what’s the deal, Max?” Jules asked when she picked up her phone.

  “Some of the nurses in the union have organized an e-mail campaign to complain about the cuts in security. We’re all supposed to e-mail the public relations director about it today between noon and five o’clock,” Maxine said.

  “But why the public relations director? Why not the hospital president?”

  “Because everyone knows the president won’t make a move without that mouthpiece giving the okay,” Maxine said dryly. “And she hasn’t even come down to the wards since her first couple of weeks. The e-mail thing was the only way we could think of to reach her.”

  Jules sighed. She had mentioned to Penny before that it was important for her to walk around the hospital and get to know the staff. That’s how you learned who had the real power in the hospital. It was also the only way she could keep abreast of what was going on and get a handle on things before they got out of control—as was happening now.

  But every time Jules mentioned it, Penny would bat her heavily lined eyelids and say, “That’s what I have you here for, Jules.” And then Jules would leave, before an unchristian side of her said some things to Penny that would probably get Jules fired.

  Jules sighed. “I had no idea the nurses were so upset about things.”

  “Yup,” Maxine said. “And the union reps are really stirring things up. I hear this is just the beginning.”

  Jules groaned. Suddenly something occurred to her.

  “Wait, if the plan was to e-mail the public relations director, why am I getting all these e-mails?” Jules asked.

  But even before Maxine said it, Jules already knew the answer.

  “I guess your boss forwarded them all to you.”

  Jules narrowed her eyes, even more upset than she had been when she first got into the office. After hanging up with Maxine she had even more time to think about it, and the more she did, the angrier she became.

  Penny knew what was going on between the nurses and the hospital administration, so she was the best person to handle it. Jules would have been more than willing to help if Penny had asked for her input. But Penny had actively excluded Jules from the process, telling her that she had everything under control. That fact alone had amazed Jules. How could the head of public relations handle an issue if she wasn’t even willing to communicate the issue with her own department team?

  Jules sighed and picked up the phone to try to call Penny. This was turning out to be a really bad day.

  By the time Jules got home she had gone from being angry to livid. After finally tracking down Penny at about 4:30, she had to sit on the phone for half an hour working out a strategy to address the nurses’ protest, based on the limited information Penny was willing to share with her. Then she had spent the next hour and a half preparing a statement from the hospital to the nurses to be placed on the intranet, and drafting a letter from the president to the union reps inviting them to a meeting to discuss their grievances in the coming week.

  During those hours Jules couldn’t help but muse that if Penny had let her in on the issue from the beginning, then they would already have had a meeting with nursing representatives, and things would never have come to this. But Penny, in her all-knowing wisdom, had not told her a thing.

  To add to all of this her earlier conversation with Germaine continued to run on a loop in the back of her mind.

  Fortunately for her the next day was church, so she had the chance to work out all her frustration on the preparation of Saturday’s lunch.

  She was just about to put the chicken in the oven with the cornbread when the knock on the door came. She didn’t have to look through the peephole to know who it was. A couple hours after she had gotten back to work Germaine had started hitting up her cell phone.

  Tossing her oven mitt on the counter, Jules went to the door.

  “What?” Jules asked sharply after looking through the keyhole and confirming that it was indeed Germaine. She didn’t move a hand to lift the safety latch from its place, as she had no intention of letting him in.

  “Jules, we need to talk,” Germaine said, his voice sounding muffled through the door.

  “Oh, so now you wanna talk,” Jules said. “Sorry, it’s not really a good time. I’m kinda in the middle of something.”

  She heard Germaine groan.

  “Okay. I know you’re mad. But can we please have this conversation inside your apartment? I’m sure you don’t want your neighbors listening in on your business.”

  Jules sucked her teeth loudly, annoyed that he knew her so well. Reluctantly she removed the safety latch and unlocked the door.

  “I’ve been trying to call you all afternoon,” he said, coming inside and closing the door. Jules was already in the kitchen placing the tray of chicken pieces in the oven and readjusting the temperature.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” she said without turning around or stopping. “Thanks to you, there’s no more space left on my voice mail.”

  “Jules, I’m sorry.”

  “Whatever,” Jules said, letting the oven door swing shut as she continued to move around the kitchen, her back still turned to him.

  “Babe, it was a really bad day, and I was trying to work some things out—”

  “I don’t care,” she said, finally turning to face him. “You don’t get to talk to me like that.”

  As she watched him leaning against the entrance to her kitchen, looking like a lost little boy, her anger slowly began to evaporate. She could tell that he was really sorry. But even though she wanted nothing more than to put her arms around him and forgive him, a part of her was holding back.

  “Germaine, you can’t take out your bad days on me like that,” Jules said softly but firmly. “I was trying to do something nice for you, because you’re always doing nice things for me, and you made me feel like dirt.”

  Germaine nodded silently in agreement.

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. Baby, I’m sorry,” he said pulling her close to him and burying his face in her neck.

  All the remaining anger drained away from Jules as she wrapped her arms around his tall, lean frame.

  “Apology accepted,” she said, sighing. She hated that she could not stay angry at him.

  “So who were those guys in your office anyway?” she asked, once the embrace was over.

  “Just some guys we do business with,” Germaine said dismissively. His hands were still resting loosely around her waist, but his eyes were doing the wandering thing she had seen earlier. The ominous feeling that had disappeared moments before was slowly making a comeback.

  “Well, you didn’t look too happy to see them,” Jules said, trying to keep the suspicion out of her voice. “What kind of business do you have with them?”

  “Jules,” he began, almost
apologetically, “I can’t talk about it.”

  Jules’s body grew stiff, and she tried to pull away from him, but he held her firmly in place.

  “Jules, you can’t get upset every time I don’t tell you what you want to know,” Germaine said in frustration. “There are just some things that I can’t tell you yet.”

  Jules took a deep breath and decided to try a different approach.

  “Look, Germaine, you don’t owe me any explanations,” Jules said firmly. “But your store is in business with my company, and I don’t want it or Truuth being put at risk because of anything that’s happening at the Sound Lounge.”

  Jules knew she was playing dirty by drawing the business card, and from the look in Germaine’s eyes, he knew it too. But neither of them could deny that it was a legitimate concern.

  “I understand that, and, Jules, you should already know I would never do anything to jeopardize that. Come on, Truuth is my family; I would never put him in any kind of danger.

  “And as for you,” he continued, looking directly into her eyes. “I know I don’t have to tell you everything, but I want to. But I … I just need some more time. Please try to understand.”

  Jules looked at him long and hard. She saw the way his eyes pleaded with hers, and she knew that he meant what he said. But inside she wondered if his non-answers could continue to be enough for her.

  “Okay,” she answered quietly.

  Germaine wrapped his arms around her again.

  “Thank you,” he whispered against her hair.

  Jules returned the embrace and tried to push the whole thing to the back of her mind. But even as she did, she still couldn’t shake the nagging thought that things were not as simple as they appeared to be.

  Chapter 8

  “I think Germaine is hiding something from me.”

  “What?” Tanya and Maxine asked in unison, as they stopped in the middle of Scarborough Town Centre to stare at her.

  It was a Wednesday evening after work, and Jules had met Maxine and Tanya at the mall so Tanya and Maxine could do some shopping. Jules was on a budget this month, so the only thing she would be buying any time soon was groceries.