Somebody's Knocking at My Door

by Francis Ray

  “You work hard. I won’t take no for an answer.” He walked over to Rafe. “I’m giving Kristen the rest of the day off. Please see that she gets home. It’s still raining outside.”

  Rafe, who had appeared to be studying the pattern of the hardwood floor by his feet more than the art display, lifted his head. “Yes, sir. You have your umbrella?” he asked Kristen.

  She pulled it out of her purse. “I really think I should stay.”

  “I don’t.” Jacques took both their arms and led them to the door, opened it, escorted them onto the stoop under the awning, then closed the door behind them.

  “Which way is your car?” Rafe asked, shifting nervously from one foot to the other.

  “I’m all right, Rafe,” Kristen said. “You don’t have to watch over me.”

  He let his gaze sweep the crowded streets and sidewalks before coming back to her. “I took something from you that can’t be replaced. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t cared. If you hadn’t cared. I just want you to know that it can’t be the way you want, but it mattered to me. You matter.”

  He was giving all he could. She shouldn’t be greedy. She raised the umbrella and handed it to him. “We never did see that movie.”

  “Afterwards, you can find us another restaurant,” he suggested.

  “I’d like that.” She stepped onto the street. For the time being she’d have to accept him as a friend, not the lover she wanted—and live with the possibility that he might never be again.

  * * *

  Sunday found Angelique and Kristen subdued. Neither had to explain the reason why. After church, both opted to return home. Angelique to continue working on her dissertation with the suggestions her advisor had given her; Kristen to start working on the database for nineteenth-century African-American art. Each was dealing with the possibility that the man she loved might never be hers.

  * * *

  Kristen didn’t know what to expect when she and the students arrived at Rafe’s shop Monday night. She caught him watching her more than once Saturday at the movie and later at the restaurant. It was almost as if he were trying to peer into her and determine if she were pregnant. His fear that she was, was a constant source of pain for her. After speaking to him, she’d gone to her assigned work area in his shop.

  “Kristen, you’re working with me tonight,” Rafe said, picking up the pieces to her box from the card table. “Tonight we work on installing the hinges, and they have to be done exactly right.”

  She followed him back to his workbench, wishing she didn’t have the feeling that if they hadn’t made love she’d still be working with Jim, and that guilt, not concern, drove him. She watched his strong hands, remembered them heating her body, stroking, loving. He picked up a chisel and demonstrated how to cut a series of shallow cuts for the mortises or joints. Too bad she couldn’t chisel away the hard shell around his heart so he’d let himself love her.

  “Your turn.”

  Without comment, Kristen took the chisel. It was going to be a very long week.

  * * *

  Saturday morning found Angelique typing furiously in her office. With Professor Jones’s help, she’d been able to rethink her paper and make it more even. It wasn’t the stuff that a talk show would want, but it presented a fairer picture of relationships between the sexes. She had to admit that some women, like men, were users and often had their own agenda.

  She didn’t even blink when she heard the doorbell. The last time she’d gotten up for a soft drink it had been close to four in the afternoon. Kristen didn’t get off until five. The professor and her associates knew to call first. That left solicitors, who occasionally snuck past the doorman. She wasn’t going to delude herself that it might be Damien. She’d done that too much already.

  The phone rang twice. Stopped. Then rang twice again. Her foster parents’ signal. Hitting “save,” she was up and running to her bedroom for the phone. She snatched it up. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Angelique. We’ve come to visit,” said her mother in a voice always filled with love and happiness.

  “You’re here?”

  “Open the door. These heels are hurting my feet.”

  “I’ll be right there.” Smiling, she went to the door. Her foster mother bought shoes for beauty and style instead of comfort. Angelique opened the door and blinked in surprise. With her foster parents were two of her foster siblings. “What are you all doing here?” she asked when they were inside.

  “Visiting,” answered her foster father, thin as the proverbial rail, dressed in his favorite clothes, khaki shirt and pants. “We thought we’d drive up and see how that paper is going.”

  “Yeah,” David Hall said. “Papa Howard can’t wait to wear that suit you bought him. Gia and I are working on getting him out of his old shoes into some cap-toed lace-ups by Ferragamo.”

  Elmo Howard snorted. “Can’t even pronounce the name. I’m not about to put ’em on my feet.”

  It was an old argument. David, trim and well-dressed, with almond-colored skin and gray eyes, managed a department store in Baton Rouge. The family teased him that the women customers made up problems so they could stop by to see him.

  “Now, Papa Howard,” Gia Sample said, her tone placating. “You’d look great.” Petite and pretty, she had coal-black skin and hair. She was the last of the Howard “brood” and had graduated in May and now worked as a dietician in a hospital in Baton Rouge. “Mama doesn’t mind.”

  “And she can’t go twenty feet without sitting down, either,” he reminded them.

  Bette Howard, full-figured and proud of every ounce, wiggled her stocking-covered toes. A true Southern lady, she never stepped out of the house without being in full make-up and dressed to the hilt. Today she wore a pretty white suit. She relished David’s job as much as he did. “But I sure look pretty.”

  “It’s good to see all of you.” The rest of the infamous twelve were scattered over the state. Whatever her beginnings, she had a family who loved her.

  “Get dressed. We’re going out to dinner,” David said. “And don’t take all day. Breakfast is just a faint memory.”

  “I’ll be right out.” She ran to get dressed and missed the conspiring wink between David and Mama Howard.

  * * *

  The five of them piled into the fifteen-year-old van. Its odometer had stopped at one hundred thousand miles when Angelique was in high school. Fortunately, Papa Howard was a shade-tree mechanic and kept the vehicle running smoothly. “What do you want to eat?” she asked, propping her arms on the back of her mother’s seat as she had done so many times in the past.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Mama Howard said. “Just so I don’t have to cook it.” In the passenger seat, she gazed out the widow. “They sure have some pretty houses here. Seems like, as many times as we’ve been here, we never get to look.”

  “Papa Howard can take St. Charles Avenue and we can be in the Garden District in nothing flat,” David said. “Some of the most beautiful houses in the city are there.”

  Angelique started to protest, but then remembered that Jacques, not Damien, lived there. “Sure, why not?”

  As her foster father cruised through the beautiful neighborhood, she tried to remember what Jacques’s house had looked like. She had been paying more attention to Damien than where they were going.

  “Look at all these cars lining the street. Someone’s having a party,” Gia said, scooting closer to Angelique and looking out her window. David sat behind them at the other window.

  “What a hunk! Too bad he’s with someone,” Gia said. “Don’t you think he’s all that, Angelique?”

  Angelique, still trying to remember Jacques’s street, wasn’t interested, but she looked anyway. Her eyes bugged and before she knew it her nose was pressed to the window. Damien stood on the lawn with some long-legged woman.

  He turned and looked directly at her. He didn’t even have the courtesy to appear embarrassed. He waved.

  “Look! He’s wav
ing. My goodness! He’s motioning us to stop,” Gia said, excitement in her voice.

  “Keep going!” Angelique’s fingernails dug into the back of Mother Howard’s seat.

  “Where are your manners, Angelique?” her foster mother admonished. “Pull over, Elmo.”

  Angelique slumped in her seat.

  Damien came to the passenger side of the van. He was all smiles and so handsome Angelique wanted to kiss him until neither of them could breathe, then toss him off the nearest cliff.

  “Hello.” He looked at her. “Hi, Angelique.”

  Four pairs of eyes centered on her. “You know Angelique?” Gia asked.

  “We dated until she dumped me,” Damien confessed with a smile.

  Once again, Angelique felt the scrutiny of her family.

  “You seem to have gotten over it quickly,” she said, then could have bitten off her tongue.

  He laughed and extended his hand to her foster mother. “Damien Broussard.”

  Her foster mother introduced everyone. “You have a beautiful home.”

  “Actually, it’s my father’s but I know he wouldn’t mind if you’d like to come inside. He should be arriving any moment.”

  “No.” Angelique glared at him.

  “Yes,” Gia said.

  “There’s no place to park,” Angelique pointed out happily.

  “I’ll move the orange cones I had for another guest and you can park there.” Damien picked up the three cones directly in front of his father’s house and stacked them on the sidewalk. Elmo quickly pulled in.

  “What a nice young man,” Mama Howard said.

  Gia nudged her foster sister in the side. “Are you crazy, giving up a man like that?”

  “Yeah,” David piped in. “He looks like he’s a BMW to me.”

  Angelique scrunched up her face. She detested the acronym for “black man working.” “I’m staying in the van.”

  “No, you’re not. You get out of this van now,” Mama Howard said from the sidewalk.

  Angelique got out of the van. No one crossed her mother when she spoke in that tone or had “the look” that could pick you out from a hundred feet away in the choir stand or on a playground, and said, Your butt is mine if you don’t straighten up.

  “Don’t slouch,” her foster mother said, straightening the straps of her pink sundress and finger-combing her hair as if she were a little girl. Angelique thought of protesting, but Mama Howard still wore “the look.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Damien waiting patiently. So was the long-legged woman, who had moved to the black wrought iron gate leading up to the Georgian mansion.

  “This way,” Damien said.

  With her foster mother holding her arm, Angelique had little choice except to follow. With each step toward the woman who had taken her place, Angelique’s shoulders became a little straighter, her chin a little higher. She had walked away from him. No. She had tossed him away. As stupid as it seemed, she wasn’t going to have his last memory be of her looking pitiful or being spiteful.

  “You were right about my dissertation. Thank you.”

  He sent her a look that turned her legs to water, then he spoke to Mrs. Howard. “You and your husband raised quite a woman.”

  Bette Howard beamed with pride, then chuckled. “She fought us every step of the way until she was in high school.”

  “My parents tell me I did, too.”

  The long-legged, and yes, disgustingly beautiful young woman in a multicolored chiffon peasant top and light blue denim jeans opened the gate. “Hello.”

  Damien waited until all of them were on the walkway before he did the introduction. He made points with everyone by remembering their last names. “This is Simone Fairchild, my cousin.”

  “Cousin!” Angelique exclaimed.

  “Thanks for the compliment,” Simone said, smiling knowingly.

  Angelique looked away in embarrassment; then she was shoved aside by David, who was practically drooling over Simone. So much for family loyalty.

  “Let’s go inside, and you can meet the rest of the guests.”

  twenty-nine

  The rest of the guests were friends and family members. Jacques showed up while Damien was still introducing them. He didn’t seem to mind that five extra people, four of them total strangers, were thrust upon him unexpectedly. He pointed out that there was enough food on the three buffet tables on the terrace and enough chairs and tables set around the pool and in the gardens beneath the trees.

  As with her family and Simone, Damien mentioned in his introduction that Angelique was a candidate for her doctorate in psychology and that she had dumped him.

  “Will you stop saying that,” she hissed.

  Elizabeth Fonteneau-Fairchild, Simone’s mother, smiled indulgently. The elegant woman was the essence of wealth and social grace. Dressed in a white silk blouse with embroidered sleeves and midnight blue crepe pants, she was chic and looked comfortable. She wore one ring, her wedding ring. Since the diamond was the size of a marble, it was enough. Even beneath the shade of a magnolia, the stone winked each time she moved her hand. “My nephew has always been impertinent. Just like his mother, my sister,” she said with amusement.

  “I heard she could handle him, though,” Angelique said. “He told me about the tennis racket incident when he forgot to call.”

  “Jeanne was all of five-feet-two and even then, Damien was six feet.” Elizabeth’s slim arms circled her stomach as she laughed. “From then on, she kept a chair by the back door so she wouldn’t have to go get one. He didn’t try that again, but there were other incidents.”

  “Like what?” Angelique asked.

  Damien groaned.

  Elizabeth ignored him and regaled her with stories about Damien’s wild youth. Angelique was enjoying hearing them until her foster father wandered over and started telling them about her past.

  He still had nightmares thinking about some of the headstrong things she did. For instance, the time she wanted Kentucky Fried Chicken instead of meatloaf for dinner.

  Angelique groaned.

  He went on to tell them that his wife had three sick children at home and made the mistake of giving Angelique two dollars and saying if she wanted chicken, to go get it. The restaurant was two miles away on a busy street near the freeway. They’d thought she was in her room until they couldn’t find her for dinner. They discovered her at the restaurant, happily eating. They’d learned never to try and bluff Angelique.

  Damien looked straight at her. “We have something else in common. I don’t bluff, either.”

  “Time to eat,” Jacques announced. People converged on the buffet table laden with shrimp rémoulade, blackened fish, a variety of fried seafoods, crawfish étouffée, Creole brisket of beef, bread pudding plus an assortment of fruit, cheeses, and bread.

  Angelique took her plate of fried oysters and fried green tomatoes and sat at one of the long tables. Damien passed by with her foster parents and went to a smaller table near the pool. His aunt joined them. Their happy laughter drifted to her.

  Angelique stabbed a crayfish viciously. For a man who had been dumped, he was disgustingly happy.

  * * *

  It was dark when Damien and his father walked Angelique and her family to their van and waved them on their way. He hadn’t missed the furtive looks Angelique kept sending his way. His plan was working out perfectly.

  “Nice family,” Jacques said as he walked back to his house.

  “Yes,” Damien agreed, opening the iron gate. “I got that impression when I called them Tuesday. Do you know how many Howards there are in the Baton Rouge phone book?”

  Jacques slapped his son on the back. “You certainly are sneaky. Guess you chose the right profession.”

  Damien winced, then laughed. “You think?”

  “You’re going to a lot of trouble just to get a woman to go out with you,” Jacques said, pausing on the wide front porch.

  “Angelique makes life interesting.
Besides, she impugned my character.”

  “In other words, she’s a challenge you can’t resist?”

  “Yes.” Damien opened the front door, “What makes it so great is that she can’t resist me, either. It’s just taking her a little longer to realize it.” His eyes narrowed in determination. “But she will. I guarantee it.”

  * * *

  Damien stared out the living room window of his apartment later that night, feeling restless and edgy. He knew the reason, but there was nothing he could do about it until Angelique learned to trust him, to trust her feelings for him. That might take a while. In the meantime, he was sleeping alone and waking up as hard as a rock.

  He sipped his wine. His father was right. He was going to a great deal of trouble just for a date, but he didn’t regret the elaborate planning if it brought the results he hoped for.

  The doorbell rang just as the mantle clock on the marble fireplace struck eleven. He’d had late visitors before, but they usually called first. Setting the flute on the glass coffee table as he passed, he went to the door and opened it.

  Angelique stalked inside, then whirled on him. She looked magnificent with fire in her eyes and he instinctively knew the perfect way for her to release all that energy. “You must think I’m an imbecile.”

  He closed the door and locked it. Now that she was there, he didn’t plan for her to leave until morning.

  Her gaze flicked to the lock and then back to him. “You set up everything.” She folded her arms. “The cones set out for the van should have tipped me off sooner. Kristen wouldn’t have given you their phone number. How did you find them?”

  Since she wasn’t throwing things, he figured he was relatively safe. “I called all the Howards until I located them.”

  “You mean your secretary did?”

  “I called,” he said. Somehow it had been important that he did so.

  Her delicate eyebrows shot up. “People don’t like being manipulated.”

  “What made you finally figure it out?” he asked, picking up his wine, trying to keep himself from breaking down and begging her to stay.