The Preachers Son

by Carl Weber

  I turned to her and nodded nervously. “Yeah, I’m sure. Besides, my mother would kill me if I backed down now.”

  I chuckled, trying to hide my nervousness, but Tanisha didn’t laugh. I nudged her and smiled, hoping to lighten her mood. She finally cracked a smile before we started up the stairs. I opened the heavy wooden doors and we walked in, to be greeted by a security guard. “Can I help you?”

  “My name is Dante Wilson. I think they’re expecting me.”

  The guard looked down at a clipboard and said, “Yes, they’re in the chapel. Can I see some ID, please?”

  I pulled out my wallet and handed him my brand-new Howard University ID card. He glanced at it then handed it back, pointing down the corridor. “Third door on your right. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks.” I took Tanisha’s hand and we walked the fifty or so feet to the large wooden door. The sound of voices emanated from within the room behind it.

  “We’re late,” I said as I reached down to open the door. Tanisha grabbed my arm and stopped me.

  “Hold on a second, boo.” She looked like she was going to cry.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothin’. I just wanted to tell you how much I love you before we go through that door.”

  “I love you, too.” I smiled, leaning over to kiss her. She wrapped her arms around my neck and we kissed like the world was going to end tomorrow. When we finally broke the kiss, I asked, “Are you ready now?”

  She nodded and I reached for the doorknob. Waiting for us inside was a small, select group of our loved ones. Inside the chapel, on the front pew, sat the first lady, the bishop, Marlene, a gangly preadolescent Aubrey, and my sister Donna. Donna held my fat five-month-old nephew on her lap. She was glowing and looking radiant, as if motherhood and being a wife definitely agreed with her.

  “Where y’all been? Dang, y’all twenty minutes late to your own wedding,” Donna yelled out.

  Standing before the pulpit was Shorty wearing a purple robe. He gave us a huge smile. “Are you ready?”

  I stepped forward. “Yes.”

  Tanisha stood at my side and said, “Let’s do this.” She gazed at me with tears in her eyes.

  I looked around at my family. Everyone’s life had changed over the last six months. None more than Shorty, who walked into the bishop’s office the night after his son’s birth and told him he’d gotten the calling. Don’t ask me what strings the bishop pulled, but Shorty was now attending Howard University’s School of Divinity and, with the bishop’s guidance, was about to perform my wedding ceremony. Needless to say, my mother was overjoyed by Shorty’s choice.

  I, on the other hand, had enrolled in and was about to begin classes at Howard’s School of Law, and believe it or not, I had my mother’s blessing. You see, now that Shorty had gotten the calling, my mother had lightened up on me about going to divinity school. I guess all she wanted was to have one son carry on the family business, and now she had Shorty.

  With both our families going to live in the D.C. area, Donna, Tanisha, Shorty, and I all shared the same house in order to cut expenses. Everyone was able to help Donna with the baby while she finished up her undergraduate degree at Howard. Tanisha was going to be starting cosmetology in February and was working in one of the most exclusive beauty shops in D.C. as a hair washer.

  Even Marlene had moved down to the area with Aubrey, whom she had regained custody of, and she was doing a good job with him. She had gotten a job as a clerk in a social service agency and seemed to have found her life’s calling, too. She liked encouraging other recovering addicts. “It helps me stay straight,” she would say. Marlene now planned to go back to community college to become a social worker.

  As for Donna, she looked down at her fat baby boy, Thomas Kelly, named after his grandfather, then smiled up at her husband. She’d told me in private that she had planned on having her marriage annulled before that day we all confronted the deacons board. She said that was the day she realized how lucky she was and truly fell in love with Shorty.

  I had laughed when Tanisha told me Donna rushed straight home from the doctor’s office the day of her six-week postpartum checkup so she could consummate their marriage. And boy, had it been worth the wait! She was surprised at what a good lover Shorty was. She respected how he had waited until she was truly ready for him, and she was surprised—the sex was even better with a man who truly loved her and who had proved it in every way.

  Yes, Shorty had definitely won her over. Most of all, she loved how Shorty loved their baby. She was even more sprung than she had been with Terrance. She was deeply in love with her husband, the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life.

  Donna had learned her lesson the hard way. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean that person loves you. She finally understood how Reverend Reynolds had been using her. Theirs had been a one-sided love. Although at first Shorty had had a one-sided love for her, she’d also learned that, as a woman, you can learn to love someone back, particularly if that person is good to you.

  My mother was so into being a grandmother that it seemed like she was making weekly trips to D.C., although I think she really enjoyed having the bishop all to herself. The only person that hadn’t changed was the bishop. He was still the rock of our family and the church, a good man and a better father.

  I watched as Donna cuddled her baby close to her. Shorty coughed against his fist then cleared his throat. He balanced his Bible in his right hand. “Dante Wilson, do you take Tanisha Jones to be your wedded wife, to cherish and to care for until death do you part?”

  I looked deeply into Tanisha’s eyes. Without hesitation, I said loudly for my close friends and family and the whole world to hear, “I do.”

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  THE PREACHER’S SON

  CARL WEBER

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  The suggested questions are intended to enhance

  your group’s reading of Carl Weber’s

  THE PREACHER’S SON.

  We hope you have enjoyed reading this novel.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  Is Dante the type of man you would want to date or have date your daughter?

  What did you think of Tanisha and would you let her date your son?

  This book could just as easily have been called The Preacher’s Kids; what were your thoughts on Donna?

  What would you have done if you were Donna and the first lady asked you to have an abortion for the sake of the family?

  There are a lot of things positive and negative said about men of the cloth; what is your opinion of Bishop T.K. Wilson? Would you want him as a father?

  Do you think Donna was fair to Shorty? And would you have married him in her situation?

  The first lady seemed to warm up to Tanisha. Why do you think that happened?

  Were you surprised that Bishop Wilson was Tanisha’s father? Could you imagine him and Marlene as a couple?

  After he found out the woman he loved was his sister, Dante went into a depression. What would you have done if you were him?

  Were you surprised to find out Reverend Reynolds was married and do you remember his wife from Carl Weber’s Lookin’ for Luv?

  If you were the bishop would you have kept the first lady’s secret?

  Were you happy with the ending?

  Take a look at an excerpt from Carl Weber’s

  highly anticipated book,

  The First Lady. Available in stores December 2007.

  Prologue

  “Hey, Charlene, you ready to get started?”

  My good friend and confidante, Alison Williams, smiled as she walked into my hospital room. I tried to smile back when she kissed my forehead, but the abdominal pains I was experiencing wouldn’t allow it. So, I lay there in my bed, grappling through the pain as I watched her sit in the chair next to my bed and pull out a notebook and pen. I pressed the button that controlled the morphine drip in my arm, and Alison waited patien
tly for my pain reliever to kick in. Six months ago, I refused to use any type of pain medication, but now I understood why the Lord invented addictive drugs like morphine and Demerol. Without them, I probably would have died from the pain of my cancer weeks ago. As it was now, I was pushing the damn drip button every fifteen minutes and I was on the highest dose there was, which meant I only had a few weeks left to live.

  I wasn’t afraid of dying, though. I’d lived a good life, married a wonderful man, Bishop T.K. Wilson, raised two fantastic children, and had the honor of being the first lady of absolutely the best church in Queens, New York. If the Lord was ready to call me home, although I considered myself still pretty young, I was ready to go. The only thing I was afraid of was what would happen to my family—more importantly, my husband, T.K., after I was gone. So, I was making preparations to make sure my man was taken care of from the grave.

  You see, as good and honorable a man of God as T.K. was, he was still just a man with desires and needs; and men, no matter how bright they may appear to be, are very naive when it comes to women, especially slick-ass church women. I could see it now. Fifteen minutes after they put my body in the ground, those church heifers would be in my house trying to figure out the best way to redecorate my shit out. Say what you might about my choice of words, but I’d seen these so-called church women in action too many times in the past.

  Last year when Sister Betty Jean White passed away, within six months her worst enemy, Jeannette Wilcox, had weaseled her way into that woman’s house and was sleeping with her husband. A few months after that they were married, and if you walk into that house today, there’s not one memory that Sister Betty even lived there. So, I could envision T.K. in his moment of grief and loneliness letting somebody manipulate him into doing just about anything she wanted, and I was not about to allow that. That’s why, with the help of Alison and possibly my daughter Donna, I was making plans to stop her and any other threats to my family.

  I hope you don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t trying to stop my husband from moving on with his life after I was gone. On the contrary, I wanted him to find someone to spend the rest of his days with and be happy. I just wanted to make sure that whoever the woman was, she had his best interests at heart and wasn’t just some ambitious, gold-digging floozy disguised in a church hat and a flowered dress.

  I felt the pain medication finally kick in, and Alison helped me as I struggled to sit up. She placed a pillow behind my head then sat back in her seat to take notes as I began to dictate the fourth of seven letters to be given out after my death. The first one was to T.K.; the next two were to my son, Dante, and daughter, Donna. The final four letters, which we would write this day, were to the four women I thought were possible candidates to one day replace me as T.K.’s wife and become the first lady of First Jamaica Ministries.

  I started my dictation with a letter for T.K.’s first love, Marlene, the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Tanisha. I never really told anyone this, but I liked Marlene. She had spunk, and from what I heard, a loyalty to T.K. that almost rivaled mine. I must admit, though, that I liked her more when she was living in D.C. with her daughter and my son, who, believe it or not, were married. But that was before I was diagnosed with cancer, when I made it a point to keep any women that might interest T.K. as far away as possible. Now I was happy to hear that she had recently moved back to Queens and had even shown up at a few church services. She, unlike any of the other candidates, had a connection to my family, which made her a very favorable competitor in the race for T.K.’s heart. Her only flaw was that she was a recovering drug abuser…but then again, so was my husband.

  The next letter was to be written to Ms. Monique Johnson, the first lady of plastic surgery and implants. I’m sorry, but there was no way a forty-year-old woman with two kids could have a body like hers without something going south. Not only was her body fake, but so was her personality. I’d never met a phonier woman in my entire life. She was always smiling in my face and grinning at my man. She knew she wanted him. Rumor has it that she’d had relationships with at least two high-profile members of the church, both of them married. In fact, when Monique was around with her flirtatious self, every wife in the congregation had her man on lockdown. Like I explained earlier, there was no doubt in my mind that Monique had her sights set on T.K. Some of my girlfriends from the church confirmed that her overtures toward him had become even bolder since I’d become hospitalized. I was sure T.K. hadn’t even given the woman a second thought with me being sick and all, but a question still remained: Would he be strong willed enough to stay away from her after my death?

  After we wrote Monique’s letter, the pain was starting to come back, but I fought through it as we started on Savannah Dickens’s letter. Savannah was the church’s new choir soloist. She was a quiet, attractive woman in her midthirties who kept to herself. I didn’t know much about her because she was new to the church and the community, but I will admit I wasn’t much for quiet folks because they were usually hiding something. She was, however, the niece of Trustee Joe Dickens, one of the more prominent older members of our church. Joe was looking to become the chairman of the Board of Trustees. I was sure that after my death he would be trying his best to push T.K. and Savannah together in an effort to consolidate power. It was a move I wasn’t against, because it would probably benefit T.K. in the long run. What I didn’t like was the fact that she was only thirty-five years old. I wasn’t objecting to her age so much; she was only ten years younger than T.K. What I was worried about was the fact that she was thirty-five and didn’t have any children. A woman under forty who hadn’t had a child probably wanted kids of her own, and that was out. The last thing T.K. needed after raising Dante and Donna and putting them through college was another baby to support.

  Right before we finished the sixth letter, the pain hit me hard and I had to push the drip. I lay back down and Alison insisted that we’d done enough for the day. God willing, we’d finish the seventh and final letter the next day. It was to my good friend, Sister Wilma Mae Jenkins, one of the church’s Holy Rollers. Although I’m not going to reveal its content, I can assure you that it would shake up a whole lot of people. Six months from now, I’d be dead, but I could guarantee my presence would still be felt.

  Can you dictate the lives of your family, friends and enemies from the grave? Those were the thoughts I contemplated as I waited for the new dose of pain medication to take effect. I could picture the scenario now: The first lady of First Jamaica Ministries is dead. Who will win the bishop’s heart and become the next first lady? Time would only tell.

  Six months later

  1

  Bishop

  I leaned forward in my chair and opened my desk drawer, taking out two glasses and a bottle of cognac that I saved for special occasions. I poured myself a drink and one for my best friend and confidant, James Black. There was nothing like drinking some good old-fashioned cognac with James, especially after a day when the fish weren’t biting worth a darn. James and I spent a great deal of time together when it came to both business and pleasure. He was a loyal friend, a former deacon, and now the chairman of the board of trustees of our church. He was also my eyes and ears amongst the members of the church since my wife, Charlene, passed away, God bless her soul, six months ago.

  Lately, James seemed to be seeing and hearing more things that I was oblivious to in the church. I hated that because I tried to remain close to all of the members of the congregation, but there are some things that church folks just won’t tell their pastor. That’s where my wife, and now James, had come in handy. They both had a knack for discovering things before they blew up in my face. My wife, because she was very nosy and intimidating, and James because…well, let’s just say he was a ladies’ man, and I had to turn my head every once in a while to his lustful behavior. Nonetheless, they both got the job done in their own way, and I was appreciative.

  “T.K.,” James said, swirling his cognac before taking a sip.
He stared at me long and hard, as if he was trying to find the proper words to express himself. Normally, this was something James never seemed to have a problem with. I also took note of the fact that he’d called me T.K. instead of Bishop. He only did that when he wanted us to step aside from our roles as heads of the church and deal with each other as men of flesh.

  “What’s on your mind, James? You got something to tell me? You haven’t been yourself all day.”

  James took another sip of his drink. It was obvious to me he was stalling. “Well, yes, I do,” he finally said.

  “All right then, man, spit it out,” I encouraged.

  “All right. T.K., I’ve been talking to some of the sisters of the church, and well…they think it’s time.” He leaned back patiently in his chair, obviously relieved to get this off his chest. I just wished I knew what he was so relieved about. I didn’t have a clue what he thought it was time for.

  “Time? Time for what?” I stared at him as I lifted my glass and took a swallow.

  “Time for you to make a choice. So, I hope you’re ready because life around here isn’t going to be easy until you’ve made your choice.”

  “And what choice do I have to make?” I asked calmly, still not sure where he was going.

  “Whether we’re going to have Armageddon around here or peace,” he replied between sips, staring back at me with so little emotion he could have been a professional poker player.

  I sat up straight in my chair, trying my best to read my friend’s face because Armageddon was not a word to be used lightly. “What are you talking about, James?”