His Third Wife

“No. Better you sit aside. Keep your own name intact for when it all comes down. My name.”

Kerry looked down at her glass nervously and said lowly, almost as if she didn’t want her mother to hear, “I called someone.”

“Come again?” Thirjane leaned over.

“I called someone to, you know, to get some information for me,” Kerry revealed. She hadn’t told her mother about the detective she’d hired to follow Jamison after the divorce.

“Someone like who?” Thirjane leaned into Kerry and whispered, “Like a detective?” She backed up. “For what?”

“I can’t tell you now, Mama. It’s just a lot going on. I feel like I need to talk to him . . . but I promised some people I wouldn’t say anything. Do anything.” Kerry looked down into her empty glass. It was times like this when she missed her old aunt Luchie, Thirjane’s sister, who had worn heels with sweat suits and had run off to Paris with the love of her life when she was what most people called a senior citizen. Aunt Luchie had taken Kerry in when she first walked out on Jamison. She would’ve understood about the detective. Told Kerry to follow her heart and back it up with her brain. She’d died a month after Kerry’s father. Kerry had flown to Paris alone and sprinkled her ashes into the sea in Cannes. “But I need to protect my family. I have to say something. That’s my son’s father.”

Thirjane was shaking her index finger again. “No-no-no. You stop yourself right there. You have to let this go. To let him go. He’s not yours to protect. That man has a wife and a child on the way. You let them handle his mess.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because of my child—because of Tyr—”

“No, that’s where you’re confused. You need to let him go for Tyrian. Not hold onto him,” Thirjane said. “You move on for him. So he can move on too. You got that boy thinking his parents can still get together, because you won’t move on. You don’t think he knows his mama has one foot still in the water? I think both of you do.”

“One foot in the water? No, I don’t,” Kerry said. “And he doesn’t either. We’ve moved on. Both of us.”

Thirjane grinned like a wise woman. “I know what you’re doing. I know how you feel. I’m your mother. You can’t hide anything from me. Not even what you hide from yourself. You still love that man.”

“No, I don—”

“All that schooling you have. Talking about how you’re getting back on your feet. Went and cut off all your pretty hair. Joined that yoga studio. The divorce group. And no man in your life yet?”

“So?”

Thirjane laughed. “So? That’s not moving on. You’re still young. Still beautiful. You should be remarried already. Dawn, Ethel’s daughter, found someone after her divorce. Married that news anchor. Had two more babies. That’s moving on.”

“That’s different,” Kerry said. “And I’m not competing with Dawn. I’m living my life how I choose.”

“I guess you choose to live it alone then,” Thirjane pointed out. “But Jamison sure isn’t. Heard he even slept with that tart Countess Lindsey. And now he’s put a ring on a stripper. Got her pregnant.”

“You already said that,” Kerry said.

“And I’ll say it again soon. As many times as my heart pleases. I’m hoping you’ll hear it. Someone needs to.” Thirjane got up from the couch and went to the bar to make herself another drink—without the Coke.

So many years later, when recalling this night with a friend at a bar in Memphis, Val would remember that the pain started in her right side. It was nine o’clock at night. She was lying in bed and she felt the pain, clear and sharp like a razor blade over her thumb; it flashed through the right side of her body, from back to navel. She rolled over and called Jamison immediately. She just knew to do that. Told him to get in the car and get home faster than he could.

Jamison would never tell anyone that he didn’t do that. He told Val he was right on his way, but he wasn’t. It actually took him ten more minutes to leave the bar where he was having scotch with the chief. And this was for nothing but a hunch. The cameras were gone. The chief wasn’t talking, agreeing, planning. Jamison kept thinking if he could say the same thing in a new way, maybe, just maybe, he’d get somewhere with the person he’d put in office. But there seemed to be some closed door between them.

The chief, whose sheer size, both physically and mentally, was bigger than that of any man Jamison had ever known, was talking about wanting to stick to protocol where Ras and his dying project to get scholarships for boys in the hood was concerned. So, Jamison said it in a new way: “What if they took Ras’s name off the project?” It could be the chief’s project. He could be the one to get all the hugs and shine from connecting the feathers of hawks with the earthly beings who watched them fly. Then the giant man who led a force of giant men mentioned not wanting to ruffle someone’s feathers. So, Jamison asked, “Whose feathers?”

To that, the chief said the kind of thing that ensured little boys outgrew their belief in giants: “I can’t do it. My hands are tied on this.” He jumped up from his half-finished scotch and put the straw fedora he was wearing back over his massive head.

Jamison simply asked, “Why?”

The chief, a man Jamison knew had a good heart, smiled and said something that would prove to be the mayor’s greatest teacher: “When you’re in the police academy, you’re taught that the truth you’re seeking is right in front of you. It’s seldom as mysterious as you believe.” He held out one arm to hug Jamison but used his other hand to give him the fraternity handshake. In the embrace, Jamison felt the chief’s fraternity ring stabbing into his gut.

Val was sitting on the bathroom floor. Shaking. The white sides of her hands were turning blue. Her pink nightgown was warm and sticky and crimson at the bottom. She was saying something to no one. Not even herself. Just a litany of sorrowful syllables that might sound like a cry to someone listening on the other side of the wall.

Jamison found the bed empty. The sheets stained. He called Val’s name as he stepped into the bathroom. Looked from her sitting there shaking to a mess in the toilet no person should see or recall.

Val pointed to the toilet. And then there was a mother’s wail. It commanded every sense. Shook the very walls of the house, sent ripples along the concrete sidewalks, set a fire in a forest someplace far away.