His Third Wife

by Grace Octavia

  Val was telling me everything I needed to know in her way. The way women shared secrets. She weighted the words “house” and “cute” and “father” with a taunt that said, “I’m fucking your ex-husband.”

  And I didn’t care. After our divorce, Jamison had been spotted in strip clubs and was being courted by half of the social-climbing single sisters in Atlanta. I knew he wouldn’t be on the market for long. But there was something about Val that made me . . . just interested. She was so much younger than me. Maybe ten years. Had a skinny neck and skin that might’ve looked like butter even if she wasn’t wearing makeup. She was the kind of woman most black men would stop and look at—ask out on a date just because they had to try. But something about her was dark, angry, and I thought that was probably what attracted most men to her. Attracted Jamison to her. She seemed complicated. Like a trip. A wild ride.

  Her cell phone rang. A picture of Jamison was on the screen. I looked at her clear, chunky high heels as she spoke to him softly. Laughing. Twirling around in her seat.

  Then I heard my name—mentioned from her lips like she’d said it before.

  “Kerry, he wants to talk to you,” Val said, looking up at me like I was her mother about to speak to her boyfriend. She held the little cell phone out to me. I almost didn’t want to touch it, but knocking it out of her hand like I wanted to would reveal too easily my emotions. I decided to talk to Jamison instead.

  “I told you I’d email the list to you, Kerry,” Jamison hammered in without saying hello.

  “I said I would come get it,” I answered. Both he and I knew this was just nonsense—my stopping by the office for a document that I probably hardly needed. But in the face of my desire to see where he was working, I had to rest my wants on a visit. During the divorce I’d assumed fifty percent of the current and future profits of a lawn care business Jamison had started when we got married. Rake It Up was the Southeast’s most profitable black-owned manicuring corporation. Jamison made more than five million dollars a year and he wasn’t happy about giving me a dime associated with what he’d called his success, but a judge wasn’t convinced that my connections and assistance early on in the business hadn’t contributed to its success. So after months in battle, I got half. When Jamison decided to run for mayor, he needed capital, so I bought him out for another ten percent and loaned him ten percent. I then had the lion’s share of the power over a self-sufficient business that had a CEO and needed little more from me than a signature here and there. I was rich. I didn’t have to work another day in my life. And so was Jamison. Rich and free. And when he won the election, he became rich and free and powerful.

  “Fine, then,” Jamison said on the phone. “I’ll just have Val give you a list. Can you wait?”

  “I’ll wait,” I said.

  Jamison said something to Val and she powered up her computer like it was the “flux capacitor” in Back to the Future. The thing struggled to attention like it hadn’t been turned on in days.

  I sat down and watched her type out the letter with one finger. I took a picture and texted it to Marcy with a note: Jamison’s new assistant.

  She responded as only a best friend could: Assistant dick holder?

  When I finally gave up and was about to leave the office without the letter, I heard the printer begin to churn out a page and Val turned to me announcing that she was “All done.”

  “Great,” I said, standing up to get the letter.

  She stood, gathering the letter from the printer, and I saw that her skirt barely covered her upper thigh and a large red butterfly that looked more like a bleeding bat was etched into the space just above her right knee.

  She handed me the letter and I read quickly what sounded like something Tyrian had written a year ago when he was in kindergarten. There was no date, no address, she’d managed to misspell “Kerry,” and her sentences sounded like she’d typed exactly what Jamison had said over the phone. She’d misspelled “sincerely” and had the nerve to try to take the paper back from me so she could sign Jamison’s name.

  “No need to sign it,” I said. “I’ll just take it like this.” (I was going to toss the thing as soon as I walked out.)

  “Okay.” She rolled her eyes at my quick movement and went back to her seat.

  “Hey, how long have you been working here? For Jamison?”

  “Just a few weeks.”

  “And he’s paying you?”

  Val must’ve caught onto my tone because her next response was tampered with a mix of braggadocio and defensiveness.

  “Yes, seventy-five-K. You looking for a job or something?”

  “No. My days of working for Jamison are long gone,” I said. I folded the letter and was about to walk out, but I saw in Val’s eyes that she was about to say something.

  “You ain’t better than me,” she said.

  “I didn’t—”

  “No, you didn’t, but I know what you’re thinking. I saw you take a picture of me when you were waiting. What, you into girls now?”

  “I didn’t take a picture. I was just—”

  “It’s fine. I know what you were doing. Because I know what women like you do. But remember that you ain’t better than me. We want the same things. We just go about getting them a little differently,” Val said. “And you don’t have to worry about my job, or how much I make. I’m Jamison’s assistant, and trust me, he’s well taken care of. I earn every dime of that salary.”

  “Allies and Alpha Males”

  For a politician, the media machine is a gift and curse. A complex casino where a loser can come out a winner or a winner could emerge a pauper or champion of the world. Interestingly (or ironically—depending on how things turned out), one just never knew how things might end up from one day to the next. The media machine is a ferocious eater and a man who looked lucky at 9 AM might be pulse-free by noon . . . and then resurrected like Jesus Christ by seven that night. It all depended on the spin. How the chips fell on the green craps table that looked like life. How the pundits polled. How the little grandmas who sat glued to their televisions from dusk to dawn clicking from CNN to FOX News felt the headline related to their church or their checks or to the mundane choices they made each day and felt some politicians were set to take control or take away a right they weren’t even using.

  The calamity outside the courthouse in Forsyth could’ve gone so many ways for Jamison. A new mayor in an old city like Atlanta is born with a mark on his back. There was too much money and too many powerbrokers in the city that housed the world’s busiest airport for backstabbing and treachery not to be a factor at play for the man who was in charge of it all. It wasn’t just par for the course. It was the religion of Atlanta politics. Polite smiles over mint juleps. Knives in necks over an unsigned contract. And one little pseudo stripper turned assistant turned wife made Jamison a next target. An easy mark. He quickly became a joke. Something no one needed to worry about.

  But then . . . everything changed.

  A baby was born at the Atlanta Zoo. No one even had known the mother was pregnant. But one morning a pink little miracle was screaming and hollering begging not to be crushed by his mother. The news vans that had been parked outside of the mayor’s mansion got on the road and headed to I-20 to descend upon what seemed to make men and women and children gasp in amazement—a little furry baby bear. Polls went up on websites. What would they name the panda bear? How long would it be before he took his first steps?

  The furry thing eclipsed the mangled mayor. New news was new news. And after a while, Jamison’s old deed seemed less spectacular and shameful and more ordinary and predictable. Men in barber shops were saying things like, “Man, she probably pregnant. This stripper from Macon got my cousin caught up on some shit like that, too. I feel sorry for the brother.” Women were saying things like, “A man is a man. Always gonna be a man. Wonder what kind of awful things his first wife did to him that he turned to some back-street trash like that.” There were variations on t
hese sentiments, of course, but the point was that in just one month, Jamison went from being a media loser to being a media winner. And his purse was filling up fast.

  Apparently, the viral video had gotten him more attention both nationally and internationally. People laughed at him, yes. But after they laughed, they looked into Jamison’s profile and it was what they found that ultimately endeared him to them. His life read like a comeback-kid novel. Born to loving parents in the poorest neighborhood in Atlanta. His father had died when he was a kid and Jamison’s mother had been left to raise a man on her own. He had always been good in science. A mentor paid his way through Morehouse so long as he promised to go on to medical school upon graduation. But he was in love with a Spelman coed named Kerry and though he’d been accepted to Cornell medical school, he stayed in Atlanta to help her through a rough patch. He married her. He started Rake It Up with a cousin and a van and a lawn mower. In three years, he took over most of the commercial lawn care contracts in Atlanta. In three more years, he was opening offices in other states. Soon, he was a millionaire. He decided to run for mayor when the current mayor had shut down all of the midnight basketball programs in the city and used the money to build a new wing at the airport. Jamison’s campaign slogan: “For every resident, a new promise.”

  Jamison walked into the back door of the Bill Campbell Community Center in Kirkwood just as the monthly fraternity meeting for his alumni chapter was concluding. He was wearing a deep black Italian suit and a lavender shirt. His fist-shaped fraternity pin was centered on his left lapel, right over his heart.

  He seldom attended the fraternity meetings. It was something he just hadn’t had time for since he started Rake It Up, but every now and again he used the meetings as an opportunity to be in an assembly of brothers who’d made a verbal vow to have his back and most of whom had actually followed through on that during his uphill battle of a campaign. And it didn’t hurt that many of the men huddled in the forty-to-fifty-person meeting were major movers in the city. The president of the chapter was also chair of the board of trustees of Grady Hospital. The only black man on Georgia’s Supreme Court was head of the mentoring program. The sergeant-at-arms was the chief of police. There were clinic-owning doctors. Practice-owning lawyers. Principals. Professors. Pastors. And professional athletes. And they were all connected to three Greek fraternity symbols and could be found in one place at the same time.

  When Jamison walked in, there were hugs and whispers in his ear. Some brothers reminded him of promised lunch dates. Others just asked that he let them know if he needed anything at all. The other brothers fell into pairs and small groups to gossip and plan, project and remember. Barbershop talk in suits.

  The meeting space at the back of the community center looked like a huge cafeteria. Many of the brothers had been vying to move the meeting to a more luxurious locale. They had connections to ballrooms in major hotels downtown. Boardrooms in Midtown. “Shouldn’t the men of this frat have the best?” But the old guard, the men who’d made an Alpha male out of Jamison, reminded them of otherwise. The brothers were to be a beacon of manhood and prosperity within the community. If they were going to serve the people, they had to be with the people. And that included chapter meetings where the service was being organized. “If one young brother sees us with our pants up and our heads high and thinks, ‘I want to be like that man when I grow up,’ then our job is halfway done,” one gray-haired brother once said. The meetings at the Bill Campbell Community Center were to continue.

  “Mr. Mayor Taylor . . . in the flesh!” Judge Emmit Lindsey was a sometimes active member of the chapter who leveraged his power on the bench and lined pockets to become a political juggernaut and general back-page-news gossip churner. His arms were open toward Jamison, though Jamison never really knew where he stood with him. He was slim. In his late sixties, but obviously took good care of himself.

  “Judge Lindsey!” Jamison fell into the man’s embrace and gave him a tight fraternity grip only an old-timer like Emmit could appreciate. “Just the man I’ve been looking for. I thought I heard you retired and moved to Montego Bay!”

  “That’s a kind joke, son,” Emmitt said laughing. “And if I had my way, it wouldn’t be too far from the truth.”

  “I’m sure Judge Clara Neale Lindsey wouldn’t mind making a move like that,” Jamison added, making sure to say the woman’s full name as she liked it called in her courtroom. Emmit’s wife was also a judge and a member of Kerry’s mother’s sorority chapter.

  “Yeah, that Clara likes to soak up the sun . . . yes, she does,” Emmit countered solemnly.

  “How’s she been feeling, man?” Jamison asked, while embracing another brother who’d walked up to say hello.

  “Feeling better. Not good. But better,” Emmit said. Two years earlier, Clara had found a lump in her right breast. Being the fortuitous leader she was, she had taken the news that the lump was malignant as a call to act. She had a full mastectomy on both breasts and returned to work a month later with a pink ribbon on her shirt. Three months later the doctor found new sick cells in her spine. The answer to that battle wasn’t as clear. She was still fighting. “Glad you asked.”

  “She’s a good woman, you know? Just let me know if you two need anything.”

  Emmit grinned. “Don’t you mean, let us know?”

  “Us?”

  “You speak for two now, Mayor Taylor.”

  After a pause and a thought, Jamison said jokingly, “Oh, you heard?”

  “The whole fucking world heard!” Emmit blasted Jamison so hard the other brothers around them started laughing with him. “What the hell is wrong with you? On my flat-screen television looking confused as hell? Got that young Morehouse man all in your face? Don’t you all have a code against that or something?” Emmit was an Emory University grad who loved picking on the Morehouse brothers in the chapter.

  “I can’t call it. You know?” Jamison laughed at the brother. People had been making fun of him for weeks, but there was something about the jokes from his brothers. It was coming from a place he knew. There was no disrespect or name calling going on. Just a little comical honesty.

  “I do know. I just hope you know,” Emmit said, winking at Jamison.

  “Shut your old angry ass up!” an older man with a round belly that made him look thirteen months pregnant ordered, bumping into Emmit purposefully.

  “Oh, Scoot, ain’t nobody talking to your crusty ass,” Emmit said as Jamison greeted the other man with a hug, as well.

  “You fools should be. I say let the man make his own decisions. Live his life. Make mistakes.” Scoot looked into Jamison’s eyes with careful speculation. He was a retired detective who’d been serving as the chapter’s historian for seventeen years.

  “Oh, there’s no mistake here, gentlemen,” Jamison proclaimed. “I love my wife.” He smiled as he had practiced in the mirror before the press conference he’d held with Val just three days after the wedding.

  Emmitt and Scoot looked at each other with wide smiles and then, after a little straightening, back at Jamison. They knew what he was doing. They knew why he was doing it.

  “Well, that’s wonderful, young brother,” Scoot said as earnestly as he could after having three shots of bourbon before coming to the meeting. He patted Jamison on the shoulder.

  “Young love. Good as gold,” Emmit added, patting Jamison’s other shoulder.

  “Good as gold,” Scoot repeated. “And, on that note, I believe I have a date with my favorite friend—Jack Daniel’s.” He laughed a little and pointed both index fingers at Emmit before starting out the door.

  “Oh, I’m coming,” Emmit said. “Jamison, you coming out with the old men for drinks? It’s fellowship time.”

  “Drinks? Where?”

  “You know. The Rainforest,” Emmit revealed, referring to the rainforest-themed basement bar of another brother.

  “Oh, hell, last time I hung out there I almost lost my wallet,” Jamison recalled. />
  “That’s all?”

  The two laughed, and Jamison quickly looked over both shoulders before he spoke again.

  “Hey, I actually wasn’t joking when I said I was coming in here to see you.”

  “What’s going on?” Emmit’s softened demeanor matched Jamison’s new low tone.

  “I need some information, and I know you’re the guy to get it from.”

  “Oh, my ear hasn’t been to the streets in a minute,” Emmit said, using his normal bow-out in a routine that both parties knew would end with Jamison getting the information he needed—if he begged in the right way.

  “Come on now, Judge. Everyone knows the streets don’t move unless you allow the stop lights to change. I’m just the man in the pictures.” When Jamison was running for mayor, Emmit became a kind of unofficial mentor to the new politician. He knew the right hands to shake. The right shoulders to rub. And the snares to avoid. His friendship promised Jamison reprieve from a testy old guard that Emmit knew well. All the old-timer sought in compensation was loyalty and privilege. Though Jamison wasn’t always sure from which pocket Emmit was drawing, he knew he needed his insider knowledge and influence.

  “Stop it, now,” Emmit said. “I’m just an old judge on his way to retirement. You said it yourself.” Emmit pushed his fingers into his pocket to begin to play with his car keys.

  Jamison knew then that he was prepared to talk. “I need to know what’s up with Ras. With his case.” Jamison stepped back and put his hands up to show how serious he was about needing the information.

  “Ras? Come on, man. Everybody knows that’s a done deal. Eleven pounds of marijuana in his trunk? Easy felony. The judge will take a nap on that case. Bring the gavel down on the side of justice.”

  “It isn’t that simple,” Jamison said. “He’s a Rastafarian. It was his weed.”

  “Well, he must be getting pretty fucking high.”

  “You know the particulars of the case, Emmit. It was for his brothers at his house.”