Once Upon a Project

by Bettye Griffin

  Shay got up, yanking the sheet and remaining draped in it. “Bruce, I’m thirty-five years old and I’ve never had a family of my own. Both my parents were drug addicts. I grew up in foster care. I made sure I didn’t get pregnant in tenth or eleventh grade like most of my girlfriends did, or afterward, either. I wanted a complete family, not to be another woman with kids and no husband. I did everything the right way. But I’m starting to run out of time. And I’m telling you now, Bruce, I’m not going to waste the best years of my life on a man who uses his sick wife as an excuse not to commit to me.”

  He sat up, the wood headboard hard against his upper back. He knew about her difficult childhood, about how she’d managed to get a college degree through the tuition-reimbursement plan at work. And she had a point. The fact that she had no family made her more accessible to him. It would be awfully difficult to carry on an affair if Shay had family obligations equal to his. She’d never be able to accompany him to conventions and other out-of-town business functions. He could call her at a moment’s notice, like he had when Susan stayed at her friend’s house overnight when she went to that tenants’ reunion. Susan didn’t know it, but he spent that night with Shay, arising at 6 AM to drive home so he’d be there before she and the children got back.

  Yes, he understood Shay’s position. But he wasn’t ready to give her up. “Shay . . . I need you to be patient.”

  “It’s been six months, Bruce. You say you care for me.”

  “I do.” Bruce spoke the truth. He loved Susan, yes. She was the mother of his children, and she’d been a damn good wife to him. It pained him to know he was causing her such anguish. Bad enough that his body betrayed him that night when she took off her nightgown. All his excuses about getting older had gone out the window when his erection dwindled before her eyes. That night she hinted that he had to be sleeping with someone. She’d accused him before, but she had no hard proof. He’d been careful, flying Shay out on different flights to meet him and arranging for her airport transfers himself. Susan had said nothing about him cheating on her since that night she slept in the guest bedroom, and of course neither had he. They’d formed a somewhat uneasy truce, but he knew it wouldn’t last.

  Bruce wished he could feel differently, but he just couldn’t help how his body reacted to her. At this point he wasn’t sure if plastic surgery would help. He knew that disease lurked in her breast, and perhaps grew elsewhere in her body. Maybe that made him an awful person, but he couldn’t control his true feelings any more than he could control the receding hairline that had led him to eventually start shaving his head.

  Any way he looked at it, asking for a divorce would hurt his family. In spite of Susan expressing her suspicions to him, he knew it would break her heart to learn that he really did seek fulfillment elsewhere. He also wanted to protect his children against coming from, as it used to be called, “a broken home.” Sure, divorce was the only way to go when it came to truly warring spouses, but he and Susan got along fine. They did all their arguing behind closed doors, and they both worked hard to keep Quentin and Alyssa in the dark about the true state of their marriage. Even when Susan stormed out that time and went to sleep in the guest bedroom, she returned to their bed before Quentin and Alyssa awakened. Their welfare mattered as much to her as it did to him. On the surface they were a happy family, but that was as deep as it got.

  He suddenly realized Shay was speaking and his ears sprang to attention.

  “Sure you do. But not enough to divorce your wife.”

  He hedged. “Shay, you know I love you. But I also care about my wife . . . our family. I’m afraid I can’t make you any promises.”

  “Then I think you should leave.”

  Without a word, Bruce slid to the side of the bed, where he’d carelessly dropped his clothes in his haste to make love to Shay. It sounded like she’d made a decision, and he had no argument. Maybe it was best to let her go. She had a right to make her dream of a family come true, preferably with someone closer to her own age. And he had no right to try to take that from her.

  As he drove home, he realized he was going to have to make a decision.

  He knew Susan well enough to know that surface happiness wouldn’t be enough for her, at least not for any length of time.

  Just like it wasn’t enough for him.

  Chapter 35

  Early June

  Chicago

  Grace was stretched out on the down-filled chaise lounge in her bedroom, her favorite place for curling up with a good book, when the phone rang. She reached for the extension that she deliberately kept on the side table so she wouldn’t have to get up every time the phone rang. She was enjoying her book and wasn’t thrilled about being interrupted, but Pat’s name appeared in the caller ID box. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Hi,” Pat said. “Do you have a few minutes to talk, or is Eric there?”

  “No, I got rid of him first thing this morning.”

  “I need your advice about something.”

  “Sure, go ahead. You know me . . . Dear Abby. Is everything all right with you and Andy?”

  “Fine. Maybe a little too fine.”

  Grace rolled her eyes. How could anything possibly be too fine? If she knew Pat, she was probably upset about something silly.

  “When we were in L.A. he said a couple of things that made it sound like he plans on being around for a while.”

  Grace felt a pang of envy in the pit of her stomach. First Susan snared probably the only black millionaire in Wisconsin, in Kenosha of all places; and now Pat had snagged herself a rich white dude. All right, so she’d had Danny, and he’d been no slouch in either looks or money, but that marriage had ended years ago. Wasn’t it time for her to meet another man who had more than two nickels?

  She quickly put her feelings aside to answer her friend’s question. As she suspected, Pat had gotten all worked up over something that was just plain dumb. “Would that be so awful? I’d grab him if I were you, Pat. Eligible men the right age, and with money to court you . . . They don’t grow on trees. Most of the single ones with decent jobs are struggling to pay their kids’ college tuition and don’t have much left over.”

  “I know. It’s just that I’ve kept telling myself nothing would come of it. Even though I lost my head and slept with him that first night we had dinner.”

  Grace made a choking sound. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I didn’t think you’d believe it.”

  “Believe me, I’m having trouble with it. Pat Maxwell, giving it up on the first date?”

  “The bad part is that it wasn’t even a date, not really. We were just meeting to have dinner and catch up. But I’ve always had a crush on him, Grace. He looked real good when he was in his twenties, and he’s aged extremely well. I mean, he’s not like Mel Gibson, who looks every year of his age. Andy barely looks forty.”

  Grace shrugged. Andy did look pretty good for a fellow his age, but she didn’t know about barely looking forty. “Do you think he’s had plastic surgery?” Hell, most white folks aged badly, unless they’d been blessed with good skin and had the brains to not smoke or stay in the sun. Sometimes she couldn’t believe some of the celebs who were her own age. Either they looked all wrinkly or they’d had everything pulled so tight they could hardly smile.

  “Of course not. He’s always been a health nut. Anyway, when he told me I always looked good to him, even back in the day, well, I decided there wasn’t any point in waiting any longer. It’s already been nearly twenty-five years.”

  “You and your white men. One of these days I’ll have to try me one.” She’d had Ricky, of course. But he wasn’t white . . . at least most white people wouldn’t say so.

  “That’s what I’m calling to talk to you about. He already mentioned introducing me to his daughters.”

  “He has?”

  Pat chuckled. Grace sounded so surprised. “I know. It took me off guard, too. But if I meet his family, it’s only fair that he meet
mine. And you know my parents.”

  “That I do. Pat, what happened to all that talk about standing up to your parents if you and Ricky got back together? Why would that apply to Ricky and not to Andy?” She paused. “You’re still in love with Ricky, aren’t you?”

  “No, of course not. That would be silly.”

  “You might say it’s silly, Pat, but everything you do or say suggests it’s the truth. You wouldn’t let your parents’ feelings interfere if you had a second chance, but with Andy you’re hesitant. And then there’s the way you interrogated me about what he said that night when Stephanie and I went to Nirvana. Like it could possibly matter after all this time.”

  “I was just curious—”

  “Bullshit. Listen, I hate to be blunt, but if you’re still afraid of your parents at this point in your life, you deserve to lose Andy. Your brothers, rest their souls, have both been gone a long time now. Maybe you were in a tricky spot thirty years ago, but there’s no need to tiptoe around a sensitive issue for your parents, not now.”

  Grace had always felt that Pat should have asked Ricky for another year before going public with their engagement. Her parents’ wounds were still too raw from losing their son Melvin. The timing was all wrong. If she’d done that, everything probably would have worked out, even if her parents still weren’t thrilled about the match. By the time the Maxwells’s oldest child, Clarence, took his fatal heroin overdose three years later, Pat and Ricky could have been married. Instead, Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell grabbed at her like she was their lifeline. No child should have to bear the responsibility of all his or her parents’ hopes and dreams. “It’s your damn life,” she added.

  “I know, Grace, but—”

  “No. I don’t even want to hear the excuses, Pat. I’ve heard them all before. You’ve got a good thing going. Hell, if you don’t want Andy, maybe I’ll take him.”

  “Thanks, Grace. And I did hear everything you said.”

  “I hope so.”

  Grace hung up, shaking her head. What the hell was wrong with Pat? Didn’t she know to jump on a good thing when she saw one?

  She certainly hadn’t hesitated the day she read that article in the Tribune about Enrique “Ricky” Suárez, Chicago’s rising new restaurateur. She started planning right away to show up at his restaurant and renew old acquaintances. There was the sticky matter of what to say when he inevitably asked about Pat, but she quickly decided to tell him she was unavailable.

  He’d hugged her hello as an amazed Stephanie from the gym looked on, then sat down beside her in the booth, and in conversation mentioned his recent divorce. She quickly told him that her marriage to her second husband was officially over. “How’s Pat?” he asked, almost too casually.

  Grace hadn’t been fooled. Ricky still carried a torch for Pat, after all these years. It was only natural to start wondering about old flames when a marriage ended. Lord knew she didn’t have much to say to Jimmy, her first husband, whenever he came to Chicago to visit his mother and Shavonne, while she was married to Danny. But once Danny and she broke up, she didn’t hesitate to hit the sheets with Jimmy during his visits for some good, unencumbered sex. She forgot all about Jimmy after he returned home, and she knew the nonfeelings were mutual. It angered her that all Ricky could think about was Pat, especially when she just told him she was available. So what if he and Jimmy had been friends, and if she and Pat were still friends. Hell, high school was eons ago. Jimmy was long gone, and as for Pat, well, she didn’t want Ricky enough to tell her parents to stay out of her business, so how could she complain if she took him?

  Grace heard herself saying, “Oh, she’s fine. She’s seeing someone, and I’m waiting for those wedding bells to start ringing.”

  She got even angrier at the sight of Ricky’s crestfallen expression. “I should have known,” he said sadly.

  Sure, like he really thought anything would have changed in twenty years, Grace thought with annoyance. The moment Pat told her parents she was seeing Ricky again, they would have told her that she should forget about him and find herself a nice black man. And Pat would be too afraid of disappointing them to go against their advice.

  Pat hadn’t been seeing anyone, of course. Grace justified the lie by telling herself that she’d saved Ricky additional heartbreak against the inevitable—Pat choosing her parents over him a second time—if he resumed their old romance.

  Moving quickly, Grace excused herself to Stephanie, stood up and linked her arm through his as she steered him out of Stephanie’s earshot. “Tell you what,” she suggested. “You and I both have the postdivorce blues. What say we have a nice buddies’ dinner at my new condo? I’ll even cook, and we can drown our sorrows together, with the understanding that come morning, we leave all those woe-is-me feelings behind us.”

  Ricky had grinned. “Sure, why not? I think you’ve got a point there. Get all that self-pity out of the way all at once.”

  She quickly pinned him down to coming that Friday night, by which time she knew she had him. How wonderful life would be. Grace imagined stopping in at Nirvana to have dinner with him nightly at their reserved table, making suggestions for new dishes, having her photo taken with celebrities whenever someone took over the private room upstairs for a function . . . The only fly in the ointment was how Pat would take the news. Even after twenty years, Grace knew she still carried a torch for her first love. If you asked her, it was silly. Pat knew damn well that she’d never defy her parents, and her parents—especially her father—were bullheaded enough to rather see her alone than with Ricky Suárez, just because he wasn’t black. The irony was, no one would consider him white. He was certainly darker than Susan, nearly as brown as Pat herself.

  She could readily understand why women deemed him so attractive. He’d been blessed with his mother’s good looks: soulful brown eyes, thick black hair. He’d been an all-around athlete in high school, participating in most sports the school offered: football in the fall, basketball over the winter, and baseball in the spring. That old conditioning from high school and college—he had gone to the University of Arkansas on a baseball scholarship—had likely remained with him, judging from his toned abs.

  But in the end theirs was nothing more than a quick fling of wild sex. That was all it was supposed to be, at least in Ricky’s mind, but Grace hoped he would want to keep her in his life. Instead, after a scant two weeks together, he told her that he just didn’t feel right about sleeping with her when she was supposed to be Pat’s best friend.

  “I am Pat’s best friend, and what you’re saying doesn’t make a lick of sense,” she’d protested. “If you and Pat were together now, we wouldn’t be sleeping together. I’m certainly not the type of woman to cheat with my friends’ men behind their backs.” In her indignation, she conveniently forgot all about how she’d lied about Pat being in a serious relationship. “But all that happened over twenty years ago, Ricky. It was nothing more than kid stuff.”

  “Pat and I might have been kids, but we were truly in love, and something like that you never forget. Do you regard Jimmy as kid stuff, Grace?”

  She bristled at the mention of her first husband. “We were kids,” she said. “Kids who got caught. I love my daughter, but my being pregnant was the only reason Jimmy and I got married in the first place.”

  “Well, I’m sorry you don’t harbor any special feelings for Jimmy, but the fact remains that I’ll always have good memories of being with Pat.”

  “Yeah, and when she had to choose between you and her parents, she dropped you like you had a contagious disease.”

  She hoped that would rile him, bring him to his senses, but Ricky merely shrugged.

  “That devastated me, but she did the only thing she could have done. One of her brothers had just been killed, and the other one had become a junkie. In hindsight, the timing wasn’t right for us to get engaged. Her parents transferred all the hope they had left into her future. And it wasn’t all about my being Mexican. No one would mistak
e me for white, and I’ve known as much discrimination as you have. I think they would have felt a lot better about our being engaged if I wasn’t poor. Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell were afraid Pat would waste her life on me.”

  “And she didn’t have faith in you to believe that you’d make something of yourself one day. Such devotion,” Grace said sarcastically.

  He shook his head, not speaking, but not giving in, either.

  She lost her temper. “Too bad you didn’t knock her up. Then you two could have gotten married—the Maxwells wouldn’t have wanted Pat to have a baby out of wedlock any more than my parents did—and your memories of her would be as fond as mine are of Jimmy,” she snapped.

  “Grace, we need to admit we made a mistake.”

  His calm demeanor infuriated her. He made breaking up with her sound no more complex than deciding which wine to drink with dinner. It hurt for her to face the truth: He never even considered her as a serious love interest. Instead he saw her as no more than someone to jump in the sack with while he adjusted to the life of a single man after separating from his wife.

  He was no better than Douglas Valentine, a damn cocaine addict whose life was going nowhere fast. She’d gone after Douglas after Susan quit him, thinking she might be able to keep him under control and get him back into the NBA. She’d still been low on the career totem pole back then, and life in the NBA seemed so exciting. Besides, she had to be on the lookout for a successful man. Her mama had warned her that men didn’t like it when women had more education or made more money than they did, and pro athletes made plenty of money.

  Within two dates she knew Douglas was hopeless and left him alone. Susan would never know what she’d done, but Grace doubted she would have cared. At least Douglas didn’t hold on to any stupid romantic notions about Susan and her being friends . . . or that he and Jimmy were buddies as well. She and Jimmy were on the rocks by then, anyway, and Grace knew Jimmy was messing around.