Should Have Known Better

Coreen had seen so many pictures of Val on the Internet. At first, she was standing beside Jamison at the podium after he’d won the election. Val was smiling in her red business suit with the high split, trying hard to look like she was just there supporting her boss, but Coreen could tell there was something there. Something Jamison had to see in her. Her complexion was a milky tawny, just a few shades darker than Coreen’s, and she had a hard body wired into the perfect figure of an S. She looked like the kind of woman a man would brag about sleeping with. The kind a man couldn’t resist. Her assumptions proved correct just months later, when she learned on a gossip Web site that Jamison had married his assistant and was expecting a child. His second child. But she knew better right then. It would be his third.

Coreen sat silent, eyeing Val’s real diamond earrings and Oyster Collection Rolex watch as she ordered a cotton-candy martini and fruit salad. It wasn’t even noon yet.

“So . . .” Val batted her eyes at Coreen, like she was a man who’d asked her out on a date, and grinned. “Remind me of why we’re here. You know, my schedule is so crazy these days.”

“Please stop. You know exactly why we’re here and what I want,” Coreen snapped. “I’m here for my money. The ten thousand dollars Jamison would owe me for this month, the fifty K for the last few months, plus the two he missed before he died. You said you’d have my money.”

“No. I said I’d look into having your money,” Val snapped back, correcting Coreen as the waiter dropped off the drink and fruit tray. “Besides, I can’t possibly have money ready for a child my dead husband never claimed. How do I know how much he was giving you? What you all agreed on?”

Actually, Val was lying. Before he’d died, he told Val all about Coreen and the little boy. Well, she figured it out the old-fashioned way—snooping—and then he’d told her. Jamison admitted that he’d produced a little boy with the mistress he’d run off to California to be with after Kerry found out about their affair. After he’d left Coreen high and dry on the West Coast when Kerry decided to take him back, Coreen kept the child a secret, planned to raise the boy on her own. But then Jamison’s name ended up in the news and . . . well . . . Coreen couldn’t resist coming for what she felt was rightfully hers—or her son’s. A part of Jamison’s growing fortune.

“Jamison loved his son,” Coreen said. “He wasn’t the best father, but he claimed his son. He knew Jamison Jr. was his. He accepted him.” Coreen’s voice faded thin as her statement was clearly meant for her own ears and Val had long blocked her out. But Coreen really needed to hear herself say that to someone other than herself. She hadn’t expected her relationship with Jamison to produce anything. She learned early on after his mother introduced them that Jamison had a pregnant wife at home. She tried to push away from him, to move on, but when he’d come into her life she was splintered wide open from an old thorn in her heart. Her husband had died. She wanted a new start, a new love, and while she knew inside Jamison couldn’t be it, one answered e-mail led to another answered e-mail, and then so went the story. His hands were big enough to hold her. His words were healing. His promises were just endless. And then he left. And then she realized she was pregnant.

“What was he like with him?” Val let out after her third sip of cotton candy–flavored vodka. She was still trying to sound detached and tough, but she had her own needs lingering in her voice.

“Patient. Funny.” Coreen looked away. “They were always in their own little world when Jamison came to L.A. to see him. He’d just take Jamison Jr. and they’d go into their space.”

Val felt a little flutter in her stomach and pushed the fruit tray away from her. She took another sip of the martini, though.

“Look, if you’re not going to give me the money—if you’re not going to give us the money—I’ll just move forward with my original plan. Just like I told Jamison before he—” Coreen stopped. “I know every news station in this country will be happy to hear—”

“No, no, no,” Val said with her full attention on Coreen then.

This was Coreen’s ongoing threat: how she’d gotten money from Jamison and now was working on Val—taking her story of a love child to the media. As dated as this kind of dirt was, it was the sort of information that could start a domino effect that could dismantle the carefully built house Jamison had tendered to the public, his friends, and business associates. All of whom supported Rake it Up, the corporate landscaping and preservation service Jamison opened in lieu of going to medical school after college. Since then, the company had amassed a list of loyal corporate clients whose businesses dotted the entire Southeast. Corporate clients who still maintained old-world values that could mean they would have to disconnect from an evildoer. Though a love child produced in an affair wasn’t nearly a new concept, it was mucky. And in the South, mucky was supposed to stay behind closed doors. Moreover, all those contacts and connections that had made Jamison a rich man wouldn’t think twice about taking their business elsewhere if they had any reason to disconnect from him. And he was black. And he was dead. Or, as Val’s lawyer had put it, “First, the big clients would leave, then the small, then the money would dry up, and then you’ll be broke.” Val had to stop this.

“I need some time to get you the money,” Val said abruptly. “I don’t have it right now, but I can get it. I just need time.”

Coreen sat back in her seat and observed Val suspiciously.

“You’re lying,” Coreen stated.

“No. I’m not. I don’t even know how Jamison was getting you that much cash.”

“He owns a multimillion-dollar company. Don’t play me. I know exactly how much he has, how much Rake it Up made last year alone,” Coreen said.

“Kerry took over fifty percent of the business after the divorce and then Jamison sold her another ten percent when he ran for mayor.”

“That means when Jamison died, he still had forty percent of that company and my son will get his share,” Coreen said. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing—what both of you think you’re going to do?”

“Who?”

“You and Kerry—you think you can get rid of me. Cut me out of the money. But I’m not going anywhere.” Coreen rolled her eyes and looked at the waiter who was standing nearby and clearly struggling to listen in on the gossip. “I don’t know what I was thinking—meeting you. Like you would really be looking out for me. Like you’d understand.” After uttering that last sentiment, Coreen gave Val a long, hard stare and then picked up her purse. “Jamison was right about you.” Coreen got out of the booth and leered down at Val. “You’re a fucking mess.”

Val had to grab the ends of the table in front of her chest to stop herself from going after Coreen. To let her walk away without causing an incident that would shut down all of the Buckhead Diner and end up all over the Internet, like all of the other public battles she’d endured since becoming the lady on Jamison’s arm. Back then, she was a different person. A country girl with a quick temper and a mean left hook. Back home in Tennessee, Val wasn’t ever afraid of a tough fight; in fact, most times she was the cause of it. It just always seemed like someone or something was trying to steal something away from her.

Val gulped down the last of the cotton-candy martini and reminded herself that she wasn’t that person anymore. Everything she’d been. Everything that had happened. She’d come out on top. Maybe Jamison never loved her. He’d j

ust married her because she was pregnant and would add an ugly blemish to his political portfolio. But he was dead now and she was left with the best part of him. All that money. And she was willing to do anything to keep it. Even if it meant shutting her mouth.

Sometimes.

“You know, I don’t give a shit what Jamison said about me!”

Val had run out of the booth and surprised Coreen in the parking lot from behind by pulling her arm and spinning the red head around.

“He wants to call me a fucking mess? No, he’s the fucking mess. He’s the one who was fucking his assistant raw and had a child in another state and wasn’t even man enough to claim him publicly. He was the fucking mess! Not me! Not me!” Val was pointing a sharp finger at herself and tears were coming from her eyes. “After everything I gave that nigga? Everything? And when my baby—our baby—died in a goddamn toilet, he couldn’t wait to leave me in a hospital-room bed. That’s fucked up. That’s a fucking mess.”

“Val, if he did all those things to you, then why are you protecting him? Why are you still out here protecting him?”