His Third Wife

“Sit down, baby. Eat!” Mrs. Taylor beckoned Val to the seat.

Something in the expectant mother’s toes felt numb or cold or reluctant. She considered moving her feet, but with even the thought of progress, there was a little sting, preventing any movement. It wasn’t sharp or painful. More like a pulse of a vibrating alarm set to low.

“Sit down,” Mrs. Taylor urged more directly this time. “The soup is for you.” She smiled when Val looked at her. “Come on. Sit and eat.”

Mrs. Thirjane Jackson had never been the kind of mother to make a meal for her child. She never expected that from herself, so no one else ever expected that from her. She was better at other things—writing checks in support of sorority fundraisers, ordering furniture for furnished bedrooms, predicting if the sun was too high in the sky for a disinterested person of any hue to go outside expecting acceptable results. With this in mind, when Kerry called her mother to set up taco night at Grandma’s for Thirjane’s only grandchild, Tyrian, it went without saying who would do the cooking . . . and cleaning.

When Kerry had pulled up in her mother’s driveway in a more dated section of Cascade where first-generation Cascadians whose parents had moved them to the Westside upper-class black utopia when they were just children still ruled the roost, she had brown paper bags in her backseat.

“No, you can’t sell your sneakers on eBay. I don’t care what Spenser’s mother let him do,” Kerry said to Tyrian in her mother’s kitchen. She was standing by the stove, tossing softening onions and green peppers in a skillet.

Tyrian was sitting at the kitchen table beside his grandmother, showing her how to buy a Herman Miller Eames chair off of eBay on his iPad.

“But I can make money,” Tyrian said. “A lot of money.”

“What do you need with money?” Kerry asked. “I give you money. You don’t need anything extra than what I give you. And I don’t give you sneakers to sell on eBay.”

Thirjane was struggling to keep up with Tyrian’s finger moving so swiftly over the screen. She squinted in her glasses and thought maybe she should’ve just bought the Herman Miller in the showroom like she’d planned in the first place. She was redecorating her fourth bedroom for the third time. The saleswoman at the showroom, who was actually just tired of trying to satisfy Thirjane, had suggested the old woman search for the perfect chair on eBay. The items were shipped straight from their warehouse and for half the price.

“Slow down, Ty,” Thirjane ordered her grandson. She’d refused to call the boy by his name or bother committing the jumble of syllables to memory. When Tyrian had been small and couldn’t talk to tell his mother, Thirjane would take him to tea parties with her and lie and tell people her grandson’s name was Thomas. Sometimes Thurgood. Depended on the crowd.

“Sorry, Grandma,” Tyrian said, backing his hands up off of the screen to let Thirjane get a peek through her silver wired Laurent glasses. He clicked on a chair and handed her the iPad, so she could zoom in closer herself. “What about Daddy? Can he do it?”

“Do what?” Kerry asked. Hearing “daddy” had sent a little tingle up her spine.

“Sell my sneakers on eBay.”

“No one is selling anything on eBay,” Kerry ordered finally. “Not you or your father. No one.”

“Maybe I should sell my old furniture on eBay,” Thirjane said, making it clear she was half listening to the conversation.

Kerry sighed and turned the fire off on the skillet. She took a sip from a glass of Coke she’d managed to spike with rum from her mother’s old mirrored bar in the living room. Her little rum nips were the only way she was guaranteed to make it through taco night with Tyrian and Thirjane a sane woman. Family dinner always seemed like a good idea in theory, but up close and personal, it was more like a country song that had death in the chorus.

It couldn’t be said that Kerry had a strained relationship with her mother. It was simply appropriate for its place and time. Southern stalwarts like Thirjane with her real diamonds and real pearls and classic St. John sweater at the dinner table didn’t have children to love and protect them. It was more of a mission of communal continuance. A new generation to continue a legacy of comeuppance. A tradition to ensure that a talented ten percent would carry on. And Kerry had been born into this world. She had been raised by a list of traditions relegated through Jack and Jill, sorority cotillions, prep school, summers at Hilton Head, and a list of acceptable HBCUs, sororities, neighborhoods, dates, and mates. And, for sure, the promise that eventually she’d meet a young man who’d been pushed through the same muck and birthed anew, fit to marry her to continue the tale. But Kerry had met Jamison at that Spelman /Morehouse Valentine’s Day ball. And, well, that had broken her mother’s heart. And when the new husband had danced with his new mother-in-law at his wedding, she’d whispered in his ear, “You’ll be her first husband.”

“So, how’s old Jamison?” Thirjane asked her daughter after they’d argued about eBay through dinner and Tyrian had happily excused himself to the den, where he’d sneak to watch music videos. She’d finished watching Kerry clean the kitchen and they’d moved to the sofa in the living room.

“Who?” Another little tingle went up Kerry’s back and kind of tickled the hairs at the nape of her neck, so she moved her hand to scratch there.

“Jamison, I asked about Jamison,” Thirjane repeated, slapping her daughter’s hand away from her neck. “And stop scratching your neck. You’ve been doing that all night.”

Kerry moved away from her mother in annoyance. “So, how is Jamison.”

There was the tingle again.

&nbs

p; “Fine. I guess.” Kerry sighed and promised not to bother with the tickle at her neck. She’d been trying to ignore it for days. Since she’d seen Jamison at the golf course there were all of these dreams she kept having of him. The two of them together. Sometimes in a pool. Sometimes in his old dorm room. Sometimes in his office. Always naked. Always panting hard. She’d told Marcy about the dreams and her friend just laughed. She said it was because Kerry hadn’t gotten “laid in like a year” and that it was probably just a little internal fight she was having about Val and the baby. She’d get over it . . . after she finally got laid. Kerry had no sexual prospects—she spent all of her free time at the divorced women’s group therapy house—so she found herself at a sex shop buying a vibrator in hopes of getting rid of her fantasies about her ex-husband. When she returned home, she loaded the pair of triple A batteries into the back of the skin-like plastic penis that had come in three color choices—knight black, brother brown, and mellow yellow (she’d gone with brother brown)—in the middle of the night for fear Tyrian would hear the noise and come rushing into her bedroom. She locked her bedroom door, turned off the lights and the volume on the television up to drown out the incessant sound of the vibrator. She initially found a little reprieve from her agony and was gaining confidence in her best friend’s advice. But then, when desire pulled the lids over her eyes and she found herself floating in the oasis of blackness in her mind, she found Jamison waiting for her. He was in the pool again. It was dark outside, but the lights shining from the bottom of the pool met the moon in a spectacular light show on the surface of the water. Kerry was standing on the side of the pool watching Jamison float naked on his back through the lights, his brown skin floating under and over the waves as they lapped against his back. “Come in,” he called to her. And suddenly she was in the pool beside him and he was undoing her bikini top. “I’ve missed you,” he whispered in her ear before kissing her there and then licking her earlobe. As they floated along, legs intertwined, he continued to caress her as he stroked her nipples and promised to be so gentle. Kerry’s bikini bottom was off then, sinking or floating away. His hands were between her legs and his tongue was in her mouth. There was silence but she felt him say, “I love you” as he slid his penis into her vagina and pulled her on top of him. He kept them afloat until he made it to the side of the pool where a Romanesque fountain sent trickles of cool water between them. Their bodies moved with the water pushed by the moon. Slow and ethereal. They moaned into each other and their human sounds became a vibration that united their sensations. Kerry thrust her legs up and down over Jamison’s waist, wrapped her arms tight over his head and felt them move against the waves. Hard and harder. She was about to forget where she was, but then, Jamison looked into her eyes and she saw that he was feeling the same thundering palpitation. She widened her legs and squeezed her middle, pulling him into her. Their moans became an animalistic crescendo into the open sky, chins facing the moon, they bayed and bayed and bayed.... and bayed.

“Girl, are you listening to me?” Thirjane plucked her child in the forehead. “Sitting there like you’re a zombie or something. Hello?” She plucked Kerry again and again until Kerry came out of the memory of the pool.

“What?” Kerry queried distantly.

“Finally,” Thirjane said. “If I wasn’t mistaken, I’d think you were fantasizing about something.” She cut her eyes.

“What? No. What are you talking about?”

“No, what are you talking about?”