The Reluctant Prophet

by Nancy Rue

  “I’m going to think about it,” I said. “And I mean that.”

  I didn’t have to think long. I was just finishing up Bible study with the women Monday morning when a St. John’s County sheriff’s car pulled up out front. It was as if they smelled it coming. Geneveve ran upstairs, and Jasmine whimpered in the corner of the red chair. Although Mercedes held her ground, she couldn’t keep the fear out of her voice as she cussed all law enforcement under her breath.

  “Everybody just needs to cool their jets,” I said as I headed for the door. “He could just be collecting for a charity.”

  “You believe that?” she said.

  “Okay, no. But whichever one of you is in trouble, we’ll handle it.”

  The one who was in trouble was me, as I found out when I opened the summons handed to me by the deputy with mirrored sunglasses and a shaved head.

  “If you’ll sign here just to show you’ve been served,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t sign nothing, Miss Angel,” Mercedes whispered across the room.

  The deputy tried to look in, but I handed the paper back to him, signed, and told him to have a nice day. Mine was going down the tubes fast, and I didn’t want it to get any worse.

  “Would you go tell Geneveve she can relax?” I said to Mercedes and Jasmine. “This is for me.”

  They didn’t ask what it was about, though I was sure they would have laughed when I told them Maizie J. Vernell of Number 1 Palm Row had filed a formal lawsuit against Allison Chamberlain of Number 2 Palm Row for disturbing the peace and violating a zone law. That wouldn’t even sound like breaking the law to them. It didn’t to me either.

  But I knew it was serious. Miz Vernell had lived in St. Augustine all her life, and although she may have looked like a bag lady in her housecoats and fuzzy slippers, she had the kind of money and influence to make some judge take a second look at this. And I knew all too well where the power of that influence could land me. I’d seen my father exert it more than once.

  I needed a lawyer, and I knew where to find one.

  Chief came right over from the office that evening, on his Road King but wearing a suit. Once he sat down at the dining-room table with me, however, he was every bit the professional.

  “They’ve got a case,” he said when he’d looked over the summons. “You received an official warning, promised to keep the noise down, didn’t, et cetera, et cetera.” His lips twitched. “Now, this part about you bringing questionable people into the neighborhood, I’m a little offended by that.”

  I had to laugh. “Nah, she’s got to be talking about Nita and Leighanne and Hank, don’t you think?”

  “That’s got to be it.” He smeared his hand over his mouth. “I don’t think she’ll get far with that part, but this other—the noise ordinance—you could have a problem there.”

  “So what do I do?”

  He looked at me squarely. “We figure out a way to get this dropped, and the only way to do that is to show this Vernell woman that she has nothing further to worry about. How you’re going to do that is—”

  “I know how I could do that.”

  “And that is?”

  “A realtor friend of mine suggested I rent a place for the women. I could do the same things there that I do here, only it wouldn’t—be here. He said he’d show me some properties, help me get a good deal.” I yanked on my ponytail. “It’s going to have to be a spectacular deal. Just the first and last month’s rent and a cleaning deposit is going to make a significant dent in my savings, and I’d have to find another job to pay rent and utilities after that, which would mean I can’t do all the things that are making this work in the first place.”

  “Look what you’re doing, Classic,” he said.

  “What am I doing? I‘m being realistic and practical.”

  “And you’re getting way ahead of yourself. It’s one ride at a time. You go as far as you can, you stop and fill up, you set out again. But if you slow down—”

  “You lose momentum and balance and you fall over.”

  “That’s it.”

  “So you think I should go for it? Find a rental?”

  “Does it matter what I think?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It does.”

  I expected the fatherly look, or another piece of Harley wisdom. What I saw in his eyes was something like gratitude, from one friend to another. The urge to hug his neck came on me wistfully. I was horrible with relationships with men—I’d given them up long ago. And this man belonged to a woman I deeply respected.

  But if I weren’t and if he didn’t, I would have hugged him. And I could definitely picture how that would feel.

  “So—you going to call him?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Your realtor friend.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I think I have to.”

  He folded the summons and tucked it inside his suit coat. “I’ll start working on this.”

  I groaned. “How much is this going to cost me?”

  “Pro bono.”

  “No, Chief, you can’t keep doing this for me.”

  “So I’m doing it for Desmond. That make you feel better?”

  “Oh, you are good.”

  “That’s why you hired me. I’ll be in touch.”

  I had to fight back the need to say, “I hope so.”

  He was no sooner out the door when all three women were at the table with a bowl of popcorn and a liter of Coke and a stack of glasses.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  “This is support,” Geneveve said. “You give it to us all the time, so we need to be giving you some.”

  “And we know ’bout bein’ in trouble with the law,” Jasmine said.

  “It’s going to be okay. Chief’s working on it and—”

  I cut myself off. Now didn’t seem like the time to tell them I was going to have to move them. We were definitely talking one ride at a time here.

  “He just a lawyer,” Mercedes said. “He ain’t got no rap sheet.”

  “Well, no, probably not,” I said. Though it struck me that I knew zilch about Chief’s past.

  “You need some advice from some people who been there,” she said.

  Geneveve put up a finger, and I noticed she actually had nails now. “Number one: Don’t volunteer nothin’ you don’t have to. They might promise that’s gonna help you, but they lyin’ when they say that.”

  Jasmine nodded solemnly. “Number two: If you got to do any jail time, just keep your head down and don’t talk to nobody. You can’t trust nobody in there.”

  “Ladies, I doubt I’ll be doing time—”

  “And number three: Don’t never look the judge in the eye, ’cause he think you bein’ arrogant,” Mercedes said. “I know that thing, now—you just keep your eyes to the floor no matter how much you want to tell that man he fulla … stuff.”

  I sat back and looked at them, passing the popcorn and the Coke and the hard-won wisdom. My heart was bursting.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I hate that you know this stuff, that you’ve had to live it, but, really, thank you for sharing.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ I don’t know about it,” Mercedes said.

  Geneveve rolled her eyes, but I motioned for Mercedes to continue.

  “Before I was twenty years old, I got picked up for possession so many times, and I’d do my time and go back out there and pick right up. And then this one time I got me a young judge thought he was gon’ save the world one addict at a time.”

  “I never got that judge,” Jasmine said ruefully.

  “Instead a sendin’ me to jail, he sentence me to rehab. And you know, it wasn’t that bad.”

  Geneveve gave her a soft grunt.

  “It wasn’t,” Mercedes said, voice
shooting into space on the “wasn’t.” “Once I got clean, I thought I was cool ’cause, you know, that was always what I be lookin’ for, to be cool.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Jasmine said.

  The conversation was developing a rhythm, and I found myself moving with it.

  “And me bein’ cool was gettin’ in the face of every addict that come in there acting the fool, like they was gonna get clean and make everybody think they was rehabilitated and then go right back out there and start usin’ again. I’d get all up in they business.”

  “I know you did that,” Geneveve said.

  “When I completed that program, they asked me to come on staff.”

  “No they didn’t!” Jasmine said.

  “I ain’t lyin’ to you, girl. And you know what—I put all my energy into helpin’ other addicts and I never did do nothin’ to change myself. I was clean, but I still had all the hate and the disrespect for other people. I was still a punk. It was all about me and bein’ cool.”

  “So what happened?” I said.

  Mercedes spread out her hand. “I was clean for five years. And I got me a husband and I had my baby.”

  I froze.

  “And then my husband, he start beatin’ on me, and I couldn’t handle it, so I started usin’ again. ’Fore I knew it, he took my baby son away and divorced me, and I was down so far I just give up and went back out on the street.” She tossed a handful of popcorn back into the bowl. “I been there ever since, thinkin’ that was the only thing I could do since I had done lost everything. And then Geneveve, she come back tellin’ me I might could have another chance.”

  “And you’re going to have it, Mercedes,” I said. “No matter what it takes.”

  Geneveve tilted her head. “Now I thought we was comin’ in here to support you, and here we are runnin’ our mouth ’bout our own stuff.”

  “It’s my stuff too,” I said.

  They had absolutely no idea.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I had never seen Bonner in his element before we went out Saturday to look at properties. For once his navy blue blazer and his khaki slacks and his shiny loafers didn’t make him look like he was going off to prep school, and a sort of gentle confidence kicked in as he led me through three different properties in various parts of St. Augustine.

  “Now this one has an open living space with a lot of natural light,” he said, “which you and the women could use for your Bible studies and such.”

  About another he pointed out, “It has three bedrooms, which, granted, are small, but they could each have their own space, and I would think they’d like that.”

  The third had a great kitchen, in which he envisioned them, “doing communal meals, getting a sense of family. That’s where families always end up anyway, in the kitchen. The rest of the house can be a pit, but as long as the kitchen’s good, you’ve got something.”

  I was so enchanted by his presentation, I would have rented any one of them. The rent was also reasonable and the neighborhoods were perfect. The landlords, however, were another matter. All three were bothered by the idea of renting to a “group” rather than an actual intact family, and I wouldn’t let Bonner represent it any other way. The only one who didn’t seem to mind owned the fourth place Bonner took me to. A three-bedroom bungalow three blocks from West King Street.

  “Granted, it’s a fixer-upper,” Bonner said as we walked through it.

  “Fixer-upper? Whoever lived here last trashed the place.”

  There were fist-sized holes in several of the walls—the bathroom looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the first Bush administration—and the kitchen bore the faint odor of something that had died under the sink at one time.

  “The landlord’s willing to make improvements,” Bonner said, “and utilities are included in the rent, which should help you out a lot.”

  I peered into the oven and closed it again. “It’s the location I’m worried about, Bonner. It’s too close to West King Street to suit me.”

  “I get that, I really do, but the neighborhood has street lights, and the police station’s—what?—two blocks down.”

  “That’s been such a crime deterrent in the past.” I pressed my temples. “I’m sorry—you’re right. This is the best deal we’ve seen yet.”

  “It’s really the only deal, Allison.”

  “How much is the landlord willing to put into fixing it up?”

  “I can find out.”

  “Okay, do. And I want Geneveve and Jasmine and Mercedes to see it. I can’t just stick them someplace where they’re not going to feel at home or they’ll end up back on West King.” I shuddered involuntarily. “That can’t happen.”

  Bonner inspected the stovetop and frowned. “Have you told them about the move?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And?”

  “I was actually surprised. They were just dumbfounded that I would trust them to live on their own—I felt like I was launching three teenage girls into the world.” I considered that. “I guess, in a way, I am. That’s about the time they all started using, so that’s where they stopped growing.”

  “I’m hearing a ‘but’ in there,” Bonner said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “The only objection they had was that some other house wasn’t going to look like mine inside. I was amazed that they even noticed things like curtains and throw pillows.”

  “So why can’t they pick out their own curtains and throw pillows?” Bonner shrugged. “No reason they can’t decide on the paint colors too. I doubt this landlord is going to care.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It might not be what you or I would choose, but you want it to be their house, right?”

  “That’s all going to be included in the cost?” I said.

  Bonner closed his folder and gave it a tap. “Let me just see what I can do.”

  What he did was perform a miracle—and miracles, I learned, beget more miracles.

  When Bonner said the landlord’s budget covered materials but not labor, Chief assembled a crew of HOGs that put Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to shame. Who knew Stan dabbled in finish carpentry on the side, or that Ulysses could plumb with the best of them? And Kyle, the African-American who turned me on to the barber? Master electrician. The work they did on that house in a week was right up there with the loaves and fishes.

  But Bonner walked on water when it came to the women.

  Early in the week he brought over paint colors and fabric swatches for them to review at the dining-room table. I evidently hovered too much, because fifteen minutes in, he sent me to the kitchen to make tea. By then I was following Bonner’s orders with no problem.

  When I returned, I stopped in the doorway from the kitchen, and the tray tilted in my hand. Sylvia’s teacups jittered. The sugar bowl slid into the creamer. But no one seemed to notice, because their heads were all bent over the paint chips Bonner had fanned out on the table. Geneveve held an array of blues like a hand of cards and studied it with the intensity of a poker pro. Jasmine touched each shade of pink with the ragged edge of her index fingernail and moved her lips without sound. Mercedes watched as Bonner placed a pale lavender next to an olive green and raised a questioning eyebrow at her. They were no longer prostitutes from West King Steet. They were three women choosing the colors of their lives.

  Friday was painting day, and Chief’s crew showed up in full force, but he still suggested that the women help paint their own rooms.

  “I ain’t never painted nothin’ in my life,” Jasmine said, shrinking back from the roller Nita put in front of her.

  “I never rode a Harley till the day I got on one,” Nita said, in that marvelous, soft half–Penelope Cruz, half–Dolly Parton voice. “You never know what you can do until you try.”

  T
hey quickly ran out of ladders, so I drove home in the van to pick one up. While I was there I stopped by the kitchen to grab some snacks for the paint crew—which was when a wave of homesickness swept over me.

  Something was about to be removed from this house. The constant aroma of popcorn. The bickering and bantering of female voices. The sassy retorts of a young male. The concern, the confusion, the confession. It was all going to leave with them, and I was missing it already.

  I got out of there before I could change my mind.

  Back at the house Bonner had arrived in a getup that was, by his standards, grungy, and he was waiting to unload the ladder from my van. Something besides the clothes had changed, and I knew what it was when he said, “They’re going to be so happy here, Allison.” His focus had shifted from doing this for me, to doing it for them, and maybe even for him. It made me say what popped from my mouth.

  “When we’re done today, what do you say I take you for a ride on my bike?”

  He laughed.

  “I’m serious. You’d love it. And for once you’re not dressed like the Fortune 500, so we could totally make it work.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, though his eyes were glowing green. “Not my thing.”

  “You’re scared, aren’tcha?”

  “Yeah, just like you should be. Haven’t we had this conversation about twelve times?”

  “I’ll get you on it yet,” I said.

  It wasn’t until he carried the ladder into the house that I realized Chief was standing a few yards away, fiddling with the hose.

  “I’m not trying to be a jerk,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  “What?”

  “Carrying him as a passenger.”

  “And that would be because …”