Playing the Hand You're Dealt

by Trice Hickman

  I thought about his question as I played with the soft, curly hairs on his chest. I had to be honest. “I’m not a good mother,” I said.

  He stopped massaging my scalp and unhooked his right arm from around me. He turned onto his side and faced me. “Sam, why are you so afraid of connecting with your son?”

  “Who says I’m afraid?”

  “Your face lights up when you talk about CJ, yet you make excuses not to spend time with him. The other afternoon you made an offhanded comment, something like, ‘I’m trying to protect him from me.’ I know that your relationship with your mother is messed up, but . . .”

  I sat straight up in bed and pointed my finger at him. “Hold on one freakin’ minute. You don’t know shit about my relationship with my mother or my son. Not everyone grew up with a loving mother like Clair Huxtable, okay!”

  “Not everyone grew up with a mother at all,” he replied.

  I was sorry that I had made such an insensitive comment and I regretted it as soon as it flew out of my big mouth. I was still working on my impulsive tendencies, and I knew that Tyler didn’t deserve the bad attitude I was dishing out. He allowed me to be myself and not feel ashamed of my past. But now that he was talking to me about motherhood, I was freaking out. It was a subject I didn’t like to discuss for a variety of reasons. But truthfully, what really lit my fuse was the mention of my mother. I’ll be damned if she couldn’t spoil everything, even a night of great sex.

  Tyler sat up in bed beside me. “Sam, I love you. But I’m tellin’ you straight up, I’m not gonna let you go off on me and talk shit to me like I’m some kinda punk just because I ask you a tough question.”

  What? Wait a minute! Back up! Did this man just say that he loved me? Forget that he just called me out and that he was on point with everything he had said. What was more important was that he verbalized the three little words that made every woman’s heart beat fast, and mine was racing. No, it was pounding inside my chest.

  “If we’re going to be together,” he continued, “we need to be able to talk about things openly and honestly. I’m not going to judge you. All I want to do is understand you.”

  There was a pause filled with silence before I spoke. “You love me?” I whispered.

  Tyler nodded his head and smiled. “Yes, Sam. I love you.”

  I threw my arms around him so hard we fell back onto the bed.We laughed and kissed and jostled around on my damp sheets. “Tyler, I love you, too.”

  He held me on top of him and looked deep into my eyes. “Sam, don’t be afraid. You can do anything, and I won’t let you fall.”

  When Tyler kissed me this time, it erased everything. If I had a dollar for every bad decision I’d ever made I’d be a millionaire, and half of that money would come from dealing with Carl alone. I had been involved with so many knuckleheads and, as Gerti would say, shady no-good scoundrels, that I couldn’t remember them all. I had been in trouble with my parents, friends, employers, the law . . . you name it. But right now, all those transgressions were wiped clean from my record. I was finally making good choices and I was in as much shock about it as anyone. But there would be no more mistakes from this point forward, ’cause, baby, I was in love!

  Chapter 15

  Ed . . .

  Let’s Not Dance Around This

  I was standing on the pristine hardwood floors of my daughter’s spacious new living room as I watched the movers bring up the last of her boxes. I decided to check in at the office, so I dialed the number to the general line and punched in my passcode. I had already cleared nine calls out of my box an hour ago, most of them consisting of congratulatory praises for the big case I had won last week. I listened and hit Delete as I plowed through each message until I came to the last one.

  “Um . . . hi, Ed. This is Emily. Um, can you please give me a call when you get this message . . . I need to talk to you. Thanks,” she said before quickly rattling off her number.

  I hit Replay three times and listened over and over to Emily’s voice as I concentrated on the cadence and inflection of each word she spoke. Although she sounded hesitant and unsure, there was a definite urgency layered in her softly delivered request. That she wanted to see me was a thrilling proposition, that she hadn’t said why was an unnerving concern. Emily had never called me for any reason, not even after the few times that I was bold enough to extend the invitation in case she ever needed anything. So I wondered why she was contacting me now.

  I hadn’t spoken to or seen her since last Saturday when she moved into her new house. I wondered if the reason behind her call had anything to do with the connection we made. Many thoughts rushed through my mind, but I knew I wouldn’t find the answers to my questions standing in Sam’s living room. I was normally very good at keeping my composure, but many things about Emily could throw me off my game—like the simple sound of her voice. Sam sensed that something was wrong by the look on my face.

  “Daddy, is everything okay?”

  I put my BlackBerry back in its holster and tried to appear casual. “Something came up at the office,” I lied. “Sorry, kiddo, I’ve got to get back down there so I can handle a situation that just came up.”

  “It must be pretty serious.”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  I walked out of my daughter’s door, wanting to believe my words.

  I dialed Emily’s number and listened as it rang into my Bluetooth. I was behind the wheel of my truck, making a right onto Sixteenth Street, headed toward Springwood Preparatory School. I had a feeling that whatever she wanted to discuss, it needed to be face-to-face. I was convinced after the fourth ring that my call was going to land in her mailbox, and just as I’d given up on a live voice, she answered.

  “Hello,” she whispered.

  “Good morning, Emily. It’s Ed.”

  “Oh, um . . . hi, Ed. Thanks for calling me back.”

  She sounded tentative and her voice was so low I could barely hear her.

  “I got your message, is everything okay?” I asked.

  “Hold on for a minute, I’m going to get my teacher’s aide to take over.”

  I could hear the chatter of students slowly fade into the background and the sound of her breathing pattern change as she walked down the hall for privacy. I tried to picture what she was wearing. Whatever it was, I knew she looked beautiful in it. “Is this a bad time?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t. I needed to know what was going on.

  “No, I just left my classroom. I can talk now.”

  I turned onto a side street and parked my truck so I could concentrate, anticipating what she was going to say next. I took a deep breath and remained silent. If you allow someone who’s withholding information the opportunity to speak without interruption, they will eventually, and unknowingly, give you the answers you’re looking for without you having to ask. So I listened as Emily struggled to speak.

  “I know you’re very busy, and I apologize for intruding upon your time,” she began, “but I need to talk to you about something, and it’s not exactly a phone conversation.”

  I felt a smile come to my lips as I spoke. “Is this about you and me?”

  “Um, it’s complicated.” Her voice sounded low again.

  I could see that I was going to have to work for the answers I wanted. “When and where can I meet you?”

  “Hmm, uh . . .”

  I knew that her trepidation came from the thought of meeting with me in closed quarters. We’d have to meet on neutral ground, so I made a suggestion to put her at ease. “I can pick up CJ this afternoon and we can meet in one of the conference rooms.”

  “I have after-school duty, can you come a little early?” she said, sounding relieved.

  “I can do whatever you like.”

  From that moment forward my day unfolded like mental torture. I couldn’t get Emily or our brief conversation out of my mind. I was a fifty-four-year-old, grown-ass man, acting like a schoolkid toying with the question—she loves me, she lov
es me not. At one point around lunchtime I got so frustrated I couldn’t even concentrate on the brief in front of me. I wanted so badly for three o’clock to roll around so I could see Emily. Gerti always picked CJ up from school, but I called and let her know that today I was doing the honors.

  At a little after two, I told my secretary that I was leaving. I arrived at the school in record time and could have probably driven here with my eyes closed. Both Jeffery and Sam had attended Springwood, and I had been on its board of directors for the last few years. My long association made me intimately familiar with the school and its layout, so I parked my truck in the lot around back that was reserved for the head administrators.

  I had called Emily when I left my office and told her to meet me in the Lowery Conference Room, which was the smallest and least used meeting room in the building. It would give us the privacy we needed. When I opened the door to the stately, wood-paneled room, she was already there.

  I had hoped to arrive early enough to gather myself before we met, but my ten-minute cushion couldn’t match her promptness. Emily was more time-conscious than anyone I knew. Over the years, I often heard Sam speak of Emily’s money-in-the-bank punctuality, and how if it hadn’t been for her best friend, Sam would have slept through nearly every exam she had when they were in college.

  Slowly, I closed the door behind me and took a moment to appraise her. Even though I could only see her from the waist up, she was so beautiful the rest didn’t matter. No woman should possess the ability to completely capture a man the way she did me, but she had that power. And the irony was that she didn’t even know it, but if she did, I knew she wouldn’t abuse it.

  Emily was sitting in a high-back chair near the head of the conference table, sifting through a small stack of papers. She looked up at me and smiled nervously. I smiled back, but no words were exchanged between us as I entered the room. Instead of taking a seat opposite her, or at the head of the conference table where she cleared her papers and motioned for me to sit, I pulled out the chair directly beside her, unbuttoned my jacket, and settled in close. She didn’t move her chair to put distance between us, which surprised me. She simply sat there, darting her eyes from me to the wall and then back to me again. I knew I needed to start slow and then ease my way toward getting to the bottom of what had prompted her message. “It’s good to see you,” I said, smiling to let her know how much I meant it.

  She blushed, and it made me want to kiss her. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  We engulfed the silence in the room, waiting to see who would speak first. I took the lead. “So . . . what you wanted to talk about is complicated?”

  She took a deep breath and ran her delicate, clear-painted nails through her shiny black hair. My eyes zeroed in on her, watching her every movement as she returned her hands to her lap, resting her palms on top of her skirt. “Why are you doing that?” she asked.

  “What? Staring at you?” I knew I’d been caught.

  “Yes, why are you staring at me like that?”

  “Why are you answering my question with a question?”

  There was silence again.

  “Emily, let’s not dance around this.” I moved my chair closer to hers and hoped she wouldn’t move away and that no one would come in and interrupt us. The angels were smiling down on me because neither happened, so I proceeded. “Did you want to talk about the feelings we obviously have for each other?”

  She looked at me for a long moment. “No,” she said. “I want to warn you.”

  For the next ten minutes I listened as Emily told me the most harebrained story I’d ever heard. Something about spirits and soothsayers. She was such a trusting and good-hearted person, but her naïveté startled me. She rambled on for a few more minutes about a mysterious friend of hers with the gift who had warned her about impending danger.

  “My friend told me to keep the ones I love close,” Emily said in a whisper. Suddenly, her eyes flashed with panic as they landed on mine before darting back down to her papers. She fidgeted in her seat.

  I could see from her sudden nervousness that she hadn’t meant to say that last part. “You want to keep the ones you love close to you, that’s why you wanted to talk to me?”

  “I needed to warn you to be careful.”

  “Emily . . .”

  “Ed, I can see by your expression that you don’t believe in premonitions.” She sighed, gathering her papers as she placed them into the tote bag beside her chair. “I know you think this is all so silly. I apologize for my hasty call, but it was prompted out of concern. I’m sorry that I intruded upon your valuable time with this,” she said, sounding deeply remorseful in her always warm and gentle tone.

  I cleared my throat. “You’re right, I don’t give much credence to psychics.”

  “People who have the gift of prophecy aren’t psychics.”

  “Excuse me.” I nodded. “I don’t give much credence to that kind of thinking, but that’s not really the point. And the warning that your friend gave you isn’t the point either, nor is the fact that you said you called me in haste.The point is that you want to keep the people you love close to you.” I paused, lowering my voice to a slow and soft whisper. “You want to keep me close.” I leaned back in my chair and hoped she wouldn’t leave me hanging.

  Emily’s back stiffened. “Um, I have to go,” she said abruptly, looking down at her watch. “I should’ve been in my classroom five minutes ago.”

  I put my hand on the arm of her chair and leaned forward, sitting so close I could smell her sweet skin and feel her warm breath. If I bent my head at an angle our lips would touch. She didn’t move and I didn’t back down. I could feel the heat rising between our bodies. When she breathed out, I breathed in, exchanging the air between us. Her heart was racing, and I could see it through the rise and fall of her breasts beneath her cotton blouse. “Emily, I know this is difficult for you, it’s difficult for me, too. But we can’t keep dodging the obvious.”

  “CJ’s waiting for you and I need to go to my classroom,” she said, pushing her chair back, disengaging from the intensity of the moment as she rose to her feet.

  I could see the anxiety on her face. I took a deep breath as I rose from my chair, following suit. “Emily, I’m sorry if I’ve made you uncomfortable.”

  She bit down on her lower lip. “You’re an honest and good man, Ed. You have nothing to be sorry about. In a perfect world things would be different. But we’re in this . . . this situation.”

  “We don’t have to be.”

  “But we are.”

  “Things could be different.”

  “There are rules,” she whispered.

  “Rules? Whose rules?”

  “Unspoken rules that we live by. Rules that have kept us from making a mistake.”

  I took a step forward, moving even closer to her so that our bodies slightly touched. “Rules are broken every day,” I said.

  “And so are people’s lives, and it’s usually at the hands of those who break the rules.”

  I was beginning to wonder who was the litigator here, Emily or me. She was good, and she made a hell of an argument. But I knew what I wanted, and now I knew without a doubt that she wanted the same thing, too. This breakthrough, albeit not the way I had pictured it, was worth the cost of laboring through her story about spirits and prophecies.

  This was what I had been waiting eleven years for, so I relaxed my body and reminded my big head to look at the larger picture. I knew that patience was a virtue, and lucky for me, I was a patient man. I knew this wasn’t the time or place for revelations beyond what we had just shared. There would be another opportunity, of this I was sure, so I let it go. Again, I could feel Emily’s relief.

  We walked toward the door, our bodies close, still lightly touching, and it felt better than any courtroom victory.We headed down the long hallway to Emily’s class as several students ran up to her.

  “Bye, Ms. Snow. See you tomorrow,” a freckled face little bo
y said as he grinned like Emily had just given him a year’s worth of allowance. I smiled because it was the way CJ grinned at her, too, and so did I But unlike the young boys, I had mastered the art of hiding it.

  “How’s Samantha’s move going?” Emily asked out of the blue. She had changed the subject, returning to her safe world of structured rules.

  “Just fine.Tyler’s over there helping her.And because she doesn’t have much furniture she’ll be settled in fairly quickly.”

  “Hey, Papa!” CJ yelled as he ran up to me from his classroom down the hall.

  I bent down and rubbed the top of his head the way I did his mother’s when she was his age.“What’cha know good, sport? How was your day?”

  “Good!”

  Emily smiled. “I guess it was. I heard that someone got a gold star for his perfect handwriting today. I wonder who that was?”

  “Me!” CJ shouted, smiling with pride. “Auntie Emee, are you coming home with us?”

  I looked at Emily as she answered. “No, CJ. I’m staying here for the after-school program, and then I’m going home to my house.”

  “Can I come to your house, too?” CJ asked, then turned to me. “Papa, you promised I could go to Auntie Emee’s new house.”

  “Yes, I did. But you have to be invited first. Once you receive a proper invitation, I’ll take you over anytime your aunt Emily says it’s okay.” I smiled.

  CJ turned and looked at Emily as if to say, Hey, where’s my E-vite?

  Emily paused for a moment, then looked directly at me as she spoke to CJ. “It’s not that I haven’t wanted to extend the invitation, it’s just that the timing hasn’t been right. But now that it’s out there, you’re welcome to come over anytime.”

  CJ and I both smiled, but for vastly different reasons.

  Chapter 16

  Brenda . . .