“Everything all right?”
“I’m coming out. Just finished cleaning up. I threw up, but I’m fine.”
“Okay.” Jamison stood there for a second. Keet turned one of the faucets on at the sink and let the water run loudly to make him think I was washing my hands or something. He turned off the water and we heard Jamison walk away.
“Isn’t that sweet? Mr. Mayor coming to see about his wifey,” Keet teased. “If he only knew.”
“I’m not doing anything for you, Keet,” I said.
“Yes, you are.”
“Jamison will figure out who you are. He’s not stupid.”
Keet laughed and walked to the door. He unlocked it and looked at me.
“If he’s so smart, don’t you think he’ll figure out who you are, too?” he said harshly. “That is, unless he doesn’t have to figure it out at all. Like if someone tells him first.” He smiled like a used-car salesman. “I’ll be in touch.”
I walked back to the table with what sounded like police sirens blaring in my brain. When I sat down and fumbled through dinner, from a distant place in my mind, I watched Jamison eating and talking to me through my eyes like he was on television and so far away from everything that was happening in the world. Behind him, Keet was at the bar laughing with some of his other fraternity brothers. He’d turn and look at me and smile. I felt dizzy. Like someone was sitting right on top of my chest, bouncing up and down.
I’m sure it didn’t look quite like that to Jamison. I laughed when he laughed. Answered his questions. Asked some of my own. I pretended for the rest of the night to be present for a conversation I knew I needed to have.
Jamison touched my stomach again. Put his hand on top of mine. He softened. Spoke about us needing to get along. To make it work for the baby. He wanted to try. He had to.
With the blaring sirens in my mind and the man sitting in front of me, I wondered which world was real. Which one would survive what was coming.
PART II
“. . . for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health . . .”
“Old Acquaintances”
In the capital of the New South, for as long as time could remember, the heat of the summer meant more shootings. Random gun violence. A robbery gone bad. Street crimes. Gang tiffs. Scores to be settled. There was something about the months of June, July, and August that made the city become a wild world where white women with baby strollers jogging along dark streets or black boys walking to the corner store to buy a bag of potato chips fell victim to a bullet that could’ve been meant for someone else.
For Jamison, the heat in the streets mean
t heat on him. He’d have to go around to make speeches, declarations to stop the violence, make the streets safe, and save everyone from themselves. He’d attend funerals where the caskets were so small they’d looked like they’d been made to contain kittens and not humans. Hold a mother’s hand and say what he really believed—someday things would be better. Sadly, the longer he was in office, the less he actually believed that.
Just when the headlines seemed to need a break from Jamison and his personal life and Ras and his white girl, weed, and guns, a home invasion that had left two Mexican men dead from gunshot wounds on the Southside of the city became the bloody steak the media could sink its teeth into. Jamison, of course, felt the pain any young leader would feel for his people, and he made a few phone calls from his office and then saw the situation for something else it could be: a distraction. With eyes off of him and his old roommate, he could do what had been on his heart to do for days since Kerry had implored him at the golf course.
He didn’t tell anyone on his staff that he was going to the jail. He didn’t want opinions or projections, a script of what to say and do. This wasn’t about politics. This was about what he had to confirm he knew—his friend.
When Ras walked into the visitation room, his long locks braided tight to the back of his head and his orange jumpsuit barely holding on to a slender frame, Jamison did exactly the opposite of what he’d thought he was going to do. He stood up and smiled, clasped hands with his friend, and hugged him.
“Taylor! Word!” Ras said, smiling back at Jamison.
“Ras!”
The guard at the door signaled for the men to sit at the only table in the small room that was actually reserved for prisoners meeting with their attorneys. Jamison had pulled a few strings so he didn’t have to talk to Ras through a Plexiglas wall and old phone that was attached to a tape recorder. Jamison thought maybe when Ras walked in he’d look worn down, beat up, and starved near death—the way prisoners looked in movies when friends and family came to claim them. That there’d be feces on the wall and the stench of loss in the room so wicked it would bring tears to his eyes. But there was none of that. The room looked like some space in a community center and Ras looked as scruffy as any Rastafarian who didn’t believe in touching a comb or cutting his hair. If it wasn’t for the guard, orange jumpsuit, and silver cuffs, it might look like the two old friends were on their way to have a beer.
“How are you?” Jamison asked and immediately thought it was an odd question.
“Been better, man,” Ras answered. “I could use a beach in Montego Bay and a spliff right about now, but it ain’t so bad. We’re all brothers in here.”
“That’s good to hear. But you know I’m not just talking about your current living situation.”
“I know. I know.” Ras kind of looked over his shoulder at the guard by the door, who was looking back at him.
Jamison and the guard exchanged glances and the guard nodded before stepping outside the room and closing the door behind him.