His Third Wife

by Grace Octavia

  “I will.”

  Val and I locked eyes in a conversation, and Dawn’s heels clicking against the wood became more faint.

  “Someone told me about this place,” Val said, looking at a banner on the wall. “I didn’t know you worked here. I wouldn’t have—”

  “I don’t work here,” I said, cutting off her frantic statement that seemed to make more tears spill out of her eyes. I handed her a box of tissue. “I’m a volunteer. Nothing between us—none of that matters here. How can we help you?”

  Marcy has this saying she always uses when she has to do something really tough. She says, “It’s time to put my big-girl panties on.” Forever, I thought she was talking about the size of the panties and laughed just because the image she painted in my mind was so funny. But as I moved a chair to the table for Val and listened to her talk about how things were dissolving with her and Jamison, I knew the saying was about handling the big things and letting the little things slide. Who Val was married to wasn’t important. She and I may have had our differences in the past, but right there in HHNFH, she was another sister who needed help. She had nothing. Nowhere to go. No one to go to. She kept talking about how someone was going to come after her because she’d opened her mouth about something. She was scared.

  I had to make myself a bigger person to see a way to comfort her. Remind myself that she’d had nothing to do with my marriage falling apart. By the time she’d shown up, the ink on my divorce decree had been good and dry. For whatever reason, Jamison had chosen to let her into his life. And for whatever reason, I had chosen to be in the position to help women like her when their part in someone else’s story was over. If my father and his military mind had been sitting there, he’d call it my “true test.” How I moved forward would determine my grade.

  “I felt so bad for you that day—the way she was talking to you in front of Tyrian,” Val said to me, talking about Jamison’s mother and how Val felt she’d only moved into the house to ruin her marriage. “I wanted to say something. I kept telling myself, ‘It’s your house, Val! It’s your house!’ But I don’t think I ever really believed that.”

  “Well, you know the law is on your side with this. Right? You can stay in that house no matter what—at least until you figure out what to do next,” I said.

  “I can’t. I won’t stay in that house with that woman.” Val leaned in toward me and wiped tears from her eyes so I could see she was speaking from her clear mind. “I think she did it—she killed my baby. I know it.”

  “Val, you’re very upset, and I know Mrs. Taylor is a handful, but she’s not—”

  “She is. She is. She did,” Val said harshly. “You tell me what else could make me come in here like this? See you and not walk right out the door? You think I want to sit here in front of you of all people and talk about how my marriage is falling apart?”

  “No. I don’t,” I said.

  “I feel like everyone thinks I’m crazy and I’m running out of options. The woman killed my baby.”

  “But it was on the news that you had a miscarriage,” I said. “How could she have anything to do with that?”

  “She poisoned me,” Val explained.

  “Come on, that doesn’t happen in real—”

  “Well, it happened to me,” Val said, cutting me off like she’d heard my response a dozen times.

  “If you’re sure she did, then did you call the police? Have her arrested?” I imagined Mrs. Taylor being dragged out of Jamison’s house in handcuffs. How much losing his grandmother would hurt Tyrian. How horrible his grandmother had always been to me.

  “I had the doctors at the hospital run extra blood work. They didn’t find anything,” Val answered.

  “Okay—so she didn’t—”

  “She did,” Val said firmly this time and so clearly I knew she believed every word. “Look, I’m not here to make you hate Mrs. Taylor. I know you have to live with her because of your son. I just want to know what my options are. You know, moving forward.”

  “Well, I’m sure whoever sent you here told you this is a counseling services center for divorcing women. Our first priority is to keep our members happy. And we advocate that in every way. So, if you decide you don’t want to get a divorce, we’ll support you. If you do, we have legal services, counseling, scholarships, grants, group sessions. Whatever you need to make it through, we can arrange it,” I explained. “You said you don’t want to go back to the house—I can get you a hotel room. And if you don’t feel safe, you can stay here overnight. We have people here around the clock who can help you.”

  Val started crying again and the shock of her situation made her breathing heavy like that of a child who’d survived an angry beating. She rested her arms on the table and cried into the palms of her hands.

  “Val? Val?” I called, trying to hand her a tissue. “Lift your head. Look at me. Listen.” I reached over the table to the woman on the other side and touched her gently.

  She shook her head in defiance of my demand and I remembered just how young she was. Beneath all of that old attitude, she was still a growing thing. Just like I had been when I went through this.

  “Val, you can do it. Look up at me,” I said again. “Look!”

  She slowly lifted her head and the full exhaustion was in every fold of her face.

  “Good,” I said. “Listen to me. Can you do that?”

  She agreed with a nod.

  “You’re going to be the one doing the work here. You. No one else. We help. But you work,” I said. “You remember that girl in the red suit and red heels and red lipstick and nails and phone I met in Jamison’s office?”

  “Yes,” she said weakly.

  “You’re going to need her now. You’re going to need her strength to get through this,” I said and I was crying then too. “You’re going to have to summon her up, so you can be fit for your fight. Now is not the time for being weak or being nice. Now is the time for you to stand up for yourself. Time for you to be a woman.”

  Val caught a smear of snot and tears on her arm and sat up again to look me straight in the eyes.

  “Now, you say that woman did something to your child?” I said and honestly had no idea as to where that statement came from. “If that’s true, you have every right to defend yourself. If it was me and someone did something to Tyrian—if I believed they did something to my boy—there’d be payment. And you have every right to collect.”

  Emmett Louis Till was murdered over a lie that he’d wolf-whistled at a white girl. After the little black boy’s body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi with a seventy-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire, his muddled remains were clothed, packed in lime, and placed in a pine box so they could be returned via train to his grieving mother in Chicago.

  Like most black children growing up in the South, Jamison had learned the true story of poor Emmett Till during a Black History Month lesson when he was in middle school. While the other kids in the classroom turned away when the teacher, an ambitious recent Clark Atlanta University graduate with long dreadlocks who was determined to teach the children the truth of what happened to Till, showed them a picture of his battered body, Jamison cried and walked out of the room. When the teacher caught up with him down the hallway, Jamison said he was afraid that would happen to him someday. The teacher explained that she hadn’t shown him the picture to scare him; it was supposed to illustrate what happens when people stick together. How Till’s mother’s insistence that every newspaper run pictures of her son’s dead body had resulted in an international uproar about racism in the American South that eventually led to a trial in the most racist state in the union—a trial against two white men for the murder of a black boy. And though the men were later acquitted, the trial itself was a success because it sent a message to everyone that shining a light on injustice was the best way to get justice where none seemed possible.

  Jamison remembered that moment in the hallway with his seven
th-grade history teacher the morning he got the call that Ras was being released from jail. He knew that it was his work, his belief in his friend, dedication to finding any way he could to support him and shine a light on the injustice for all to see, that had led to Ras’s release. The news story on Fox went viral like every other video of Jamison. The story and copies of police reports Jamison had left at the news station were picked up by the Associated Press, and soon every major outlet in the nation had a story about the names missing from Ras’s police report. Every article had its angle. Some argued police brutality. Some for Ras’s right to practice his religion. There were even the conspiracy theorists who felt the entire case was just the government’s way of sending a message to militant men like Ras. So many voices. A threat of the Georgia Supreme Court getting involved. The local court had to act.

  When Ras was released from the jailhouse later that morning, there was a swarm of local reporters, journalists, bloggers, protest groups, and plain old nosey folk waiting to hear what he had to say about his arrest. Who was he fighting? How would he fight back? And what would he do next? There were folks in Free Ras T-shirts and others handing out handbills with www.freeras.com printed on the back. There was an Internet campaign. A fund. Followers. Fans. Stringy-haired white women who’d vowed to name their children after this man. Stringy-haired black women who vowed to have children with this man. All aligning themselves with the likes of Mumia Abu Jamal, Fred Hampton, and even Malcolm X.

  His lawyer pulled him to a podium where open ears were waiting to hear Ras’s first wise words.

  Jamison stood toward the side of the crowd with Leaf looking on.

  “You think he has any idea what all of these people want from him?” Leaf asked Jamison.

  “Yeah, he does. And I know Ras—he’ll give it to them,” Jamison answered as the crowd began to cheer, “No justice, no peace!”

  Following revolutionary etiquette, Ras began pounding his fist at the podium. The crowd was enlivened and the chanting grew louder as supporters closed in tighter around the podium.

  By then, Jamison and Leaf had already put together the pieces of the puzzle of Ras’s arrest. Everything Ras had told Jamison was true. There were evil eyes all over that scholarship program. Even with Ras’s release, suddenly none of the basketball players would talk to him again. And Jamison’s biggest backers had made calls to his office to say they would pull out their dollars if the mayor did business with Ras. The siding with one team or the other was par for the course for a man whose main job was signing contracts, but the pressure made it clear the message was coming from somewhere up top. Keet was clear about that. Jamison just needed to figure out who it was.

  “What I’m about to say isn’t for anyone standing out here,” Ras said when the crowd quieted. “Because if you’re out here, you recognize truth. You know I stand for truth. You support the truth.”

  The crowd began chanting “truth,” and Ras waited until the noise petered off.

  “This message is for everyone at home. For those of you who are still trying to understand what is really happening here. I want you to know this is a war. A war these people are fighting against our children. Against our black children. Against our poor children. This isn’t about them trying to lock Ras up. This is about them trying to lock your children out. Out of this process. You ever wonder why in nations like Demark and Germany and Brazil and Finland, a college education is free, but in this nation, the most wealthy nation in the world, poor children are either denied a college education because they don’t have the money or they’re forced into massive student loan debt they’ll be paying off for the rest of their lives just to get a decent job? Why? It’s because more and more in order to get somewhere in this country, you need a college education. If you don’t have one, you can forget it. And if you don’t have one they approve of, you can forget it. The system is forcing you out. Forcing us out. Forcing our children out. I, Glenn Roberson, was just trying to do my part to stop the educational caste system in this country. That’s why I ended up here. Don’t let anyone else tell you anything different. Look it up online. Find out the facts before you fall for the okeydokey. That’s what they want you to do.”

  Ras threw up the peace sign and attempted to step back from the podium, but people started yelling questions. The loudest was from Alina Blue, who was up front with her new camera crew.

  “Ras, what do you want the people to do?” she asked. “What can they do to help you?”

  Ras looked over the crowd as if he hadn’t considered that someone would ask that very obvious question (though he had). Then he refocused and looked into Alina’s camera, which was pointed at him.

  “Go into your neighborhood and find a kid and make sure he knows what’s coming. Make sure he’s prepared,” he said. “If he’s not prepared, he’ll lose for sure. And stop giving your money to these churches. If each of you donated your ten percent to a local scholarship fund to make sure the kids in your communities went to college, it would be a different place in four years. Put your money where your mouth is. Back your prayers for change with action.”

  The crowd dispersed quickly when Ras was stuffed into the back of his lawyer’s black minivan. A few reporters lingered to ask Jamison questions about his support of Glenn Roberson and he engaged them with planned responses about seeking the truth no matter how many feathers he’d ruffled. He made it clear that the situation with Ras was far from over. While Ras couldn’t face any charges concerning the guns because he had a license and there weren’t any laws in the state of Georgia that stated how many guns he could actually own, he still faced felony charges for the marijuana and the police department still hadn’t released the names of the other three officers involved in the arrest. When asked if the mayor’s office would continue to follow the case, Jamison said it was his job to ensure the safety of Atlanta residents, so yes, he would.

  Emmit was waiting beside Jamison’s car. Standing up straight with a cell phone in his hand.

  “Something about this car and parking lots,” Jamison said, approaching Emmit with a grin. He’d already realized that Emmit was somehow connected to Ras’s arrest and knew once he spoke out on the news, Emmit would come around with one of his warnings.

  “Better to have people meet you here than at night in your bedroom, you think?” Emmit replied darkly, but then he quickly smiled. “Can’t be too safe from the forces of evil.”

  “That’s why I’m wearing a cape.”

  Emmit looked over Jamison’s shoulder playfully. “Must be invisible.”

  “Just so the bad guys can’t see it.”

  The two laughed uneasily.

  “You a bad guy?” Jamison asked.

  “Nah. I’m an old guy. What they call mature. Experienced.”

  “Is that so? I guess that’s why it was so easy for you to kill Dax,” Jamison said.

  “Hold up now, son—”

  “Don’t call me son!”

  “No one knows what happened to him. He played the game. He knew the rules. He broke them,” he said.

  “So, you killed him?”

  “I’ve never killed a man in my life. Not even when I was at war. I’m smarter than that. Smart men have men killed. Right?”

  “I didn’t tell you to do anything—” Jamison exclaimed.

  “You think you had any say in that, son? That all of that was for you?” Emmit laughed.

  “Then who was it for? Who’s pulling the strings?” Jamison asked. “Look, I get it. You didn’t want me behind the scholarship fund; you were on the job to get me to support that WorkCorps proposal. That’s all you kept saying. Trying to get me to bet on that horse. Did you think I’d be that predictable?”

  “You’re being predictable right now,” Emmit spat. “Putting all your cards on the table like a cheap prostitute.”

  “You assume these are all of my cards,” Jamison replied, opening his car door. “And you know what they say about people who assume.”

  “So, y
ou think you have it all figured out?” Emmit asked as Jamison got into the car.

  “No. But I think I have you thinking. All of you.”

  “I was trying to help you.” Emmit held up the fraternity hand sign. “On the brotherhood, I was trying to help you. I’m your brother. Not your enemy.”

  “Yeah, well, with brothers like you, who needs enemies anyway?”

  Val was driving down 20 West in that shiny new Jaguar two-seater with the top down, shaking something awful. While the sun was out and the flowers, all pleasant purple and happy yellow, were sprouting randomly out of the green grass on either side of the highway, setting an irresistible tone of happiness, her heart and mind and spirit were in dread. Someone, her mama or some wise woman with gray, kinky hair, should’ve been riding beside her in that car to tell her that this was what moving on felt like—contractions hard against your very soul on earth, pushing you forward no matter how much you wanted to stay behind. To stay small. The truth was that Val, with a heart so angry from birth, was about to begin a journey that would take her into her destiny. Someplace where she’d find the love she wanted in her own reflection. And that love would blossom into a beautiful life. There’d be a man, three babies, tall trees in the yard out back, and cooking and baking contests on Sundays. She’d be a rich woman someday, and not only in her heart. But she still had to survive this. And not knowing the end made this all the more painful.

  While Dawn and another woman from the Hell Hath No Fury House volunteered to go with Val to get her things from Jamison’s house that afternoon, she felt she should go alone. She wanted it to be quick and easy, and when Jamison answered his phone and said she could take whatever she wanted from the house without so much as asking where she was going, she thought she’d get just that.

  She remembered what Kerry had said about her old red self when she pulled into the circular drive with the perfectly shaped creamy stones and purple pebbles. She’d thought about how she’d changed over those months trying to patch things up with Jamison—holding her tongue and watching what she wore and locking herself in the bathroom all day long. None of that was her, and while she didn’t want this new self, she wasn’t sure she wanted the old Val back either. She wanted the fighter, but even fighters get tired sometimes. When she stopped her car beside Jamison’s, she wondered who she’d be when she got her things out of that house in front of her and turned the key in the ignition. She looked up at the windows staring down at her. In one rectangular pane that completed a series of windows toward the back of the dining room, she saw the fading face of her mother. She was wearing the dress she’d worn the day she came to Atlanta for the wedding. Val remembered that the rectangular pane was the very window Mama Fee had been standing in that morning when Jamison came home. While the image was fading in and out like an old vision, Val realized it wasn’t her memory because she’d been sitting in the room when her mother had been standing there, and when she went down to greet Jamison at his car, she hadn’t looked up. Mama Fee smiled at Val. She waved. She beckoned her daughter with a pointed index finger that slowly led her to the front.