His Third Wife

“The New South”

After a predictable rising sun had rolled through hopscotch maps of plantations, crawled along the tips of decaying steeples in suburban enclaves, and made its way to the ambitious stacking skyline that marked Atlanta’s city center, a body was found all akimbo in the middle of Peachtree Street. People who’d come from pollen-covered cars that had been slowed to a crawl in both directions along the venous strip, which connected all of what was being called the official “capital of the New South,” looked to the sky, like maybe the bloody brown mess had fallen from the sun’s fiery rays. One person pointed. Then two pointed. Three. Then four. A reporter arrived. And then a police officer. All pointed to the top of the Downtown Westin. The body in the street in the bloody gray suit had come from there. Had to have.

One pointing son asked his mother, “Was that a woman up there looking down at us?” Further along in the crowd, a co-worker asked a driver, “Was that a man dressed as a woman standing at the top of the Westin?” A wife said to her husband and then later to a police officer, “It was a woman. A woman in a dress.” Her husband disagreed: “It was a man dressed as a woman. The shoulders were too broad.” Then they started arguing about there being two women up there. Well, a woman and a man dressed as a woman. But some hadn’t seen anything. Just a shadow. Maybe a bird sitting on the edge looking down at the body like prey.

Soon it was a scene. And someone in a white cloth jumpsuit lifted what was left of the head that had been crushed by the weight of the fall, and in the pieces and fragments of a once familiar face made out a truth. This was no angel that had fallen from the sun to halt rush-hour traffic. It was the new mayor.

That was when the talk started. When it would never stop. Because that man, the mayor who’d fallen from the top of the Westin to the black tar, was Jamison Taylor. Everything the chocolate side of the city could be proud of and the white side could use as an example of Southern progress. Born poor in the SWATS. A Morehouse man. Fraternity guy. Self-made millionaire. A heart that won the old guard. A voice that had vowed to repave the very street that had become his deathbed. A soul that wanted everything he could imagine. And he was dead. The city dressed in black for the funeral. And from the boardrooms in Buckhead to the lunch counters at the Busy Bee and Chanterelle’s in the West End, chatter was king. There was a first wife. A new wife. A mother. A son. A fat pig’s belly worth of secrets. A mess of shadows that everyone thought they could see clearly. Politics at its finest. Headlines.

But that was just the tipping point of it all. Stories like that never begin with a body falling from a mid-level hotel.

PART I

“. . . to have and to hold, from this day forward . . .”

“His Next Wife”

Everything started when a mother came to town. Quiet and all alone, she got off a Greyhound bus across the street from a conveniently placed strip club. Had on fake pearls and a red lace-front wig. Her daughter picked her up in a shiny new Jaguar with two seats and the top down.

After maybe thirty minutes of silent riding, the mother was standing at the window in the big house—there were pillars out front and all. She was looking away from everything beautiful behind her. Clutching her purse like she wasn’t staying. Thinking. Trying to decide how she should tell her smiling baby girl, who always wanted more than she could hold in her arms, that she ought to get on the next bus and go back to Memphis with her.

“I don’t know why you didn’t accept the tickets I sent you. First-class flight? I thought you’d like that,” Val, her daughter, said. Maybe she

was sipping her mimosa or waiting for the maid to pour her another glass.

“Memphis ain’t but a stone’s throw away,” the mother mumbled. Her name was Mama Fee—everyone had always called her that, even before she’d had children. “Takes more time to get on the plane and fly than it does to get on the bus and ride. And I don’t do big birds. Like to see the earth.”

“That’s old talk. This is a new world.”

“Is it? Is it really, Val? You tell me.”

“Yes, Mama Fee. You still act like flying is just for white folks. Or rich folks—”

“Ain’t said nothing like that.”

“Well, that’s good, because it isn’t. As long as you can pay, you can play. That’s the Atlanta way.” Val chuckled and looked at Lorna, the maid holding the pitcher of mimosa to her glass, to support the comedy of her play on words with laughter. “I’m just saying, it’s 2012—not 1902!”

“What does that matter?” Mama Fee asked. “Po’ folks still the same. Rich folks still the same.”

Lorna was only able to produce a half smile before Val shooed her away with a tired wave. As soon as Lorna stepped over the threshold, the mother turned and looked at her daughter.

“Seems like you shouldn’t be drinking,” she nearly whispered before turning back to the window. “Not in your condition.”

“Condition? Please! What do you know about it?”

“Plenty. Had you and your sisters. Doctor says it’s bad.”

“No. Doctor says it’s good. Helps to relieve stress. A little won’t hurt the baby at all.” Val downed the last of her drink. There was an audible gulp that resonated with pangs of short nerves or anxiety. “And I need it today—with it being my wedding day and all.” She looked at the big blue diamond on her ring finger. She’d purchased it a week ago with her fiancé’s credit card and full blessing. “I need to relax.”

Mama Fee was still looking out the window and thinking. The shiny Jaguar was resting in the middle of a circular drive that was filled with perfectly shaped creamy stones and purple pebbles that made the whole world outside the house look like a giant fish tank.

“Maybe you should’ve waited until the baby was born,” she said. “At least until we could’ve had a proper wedding—your family come. You know? Like Patrice and Rhonda did. Still don’t see why you couldn’t invite your own sisters to your wedding.”

“Would you stop it? I didn’t invite you hear to go drilling me about everything.”

“I ain’t drilling you. They’re your sisters. You were in their weddings.”

“Yeah, and they married big fat losers. Is Patrice’s husband out of jail yet?”

“You watch your mouth,” Mama Fee said, finally turning to look at her daughter again. But she needed no confirmation that it was Val who could bring up such a thing. Her youngest child had been born spitting fire at anything that didn’t seem to pick her up in some way that she deemed acceptable. This might’ve been considered gross ambition or maybe even unapologetic drive if it weren’t for the fact that sometimes Val’s desire for uplift went beyond frustrated tongue lashings and straight to unmitigated evil—well, the kind of evil a girl from Memphis who’d barely graduated high school could spin.

When Val was fifteen, Patrice had just finished beauty school and her prized graduation gift was a beauty box filled with emerald and sea foam and lavender and canary eye shadow. Lipsticks of every shade of red and pink. After Val had begged to sit and try just one shadow, paint her lips in one red, Patrice balked and hid the box beneath her bed. The next morning, the rainbow of shadows and lipsticks were floating in a river of bleach on the bathroom floor. Mama Fee nearly killed Val with her switch in the backyard after that incident, trying to teach the girl a lesson. But Val didn’t cry one tear.

“Patrice’s husband is a fucking jailbird. Don’t blame me for that,” Val said nearly laughing.

“And what about you? What about your husband?”

“Fiancé. And what about him?”

“Well, where is he?” Mama Fee asked, fingering a small Tiffany frame she’d found in the windowsill. It was a picture of a handsome brown man standing beside an older woman at what looked like his college graduation.

“He had to work this morning,” Val replied.

“On your wedding day?”