p; “You know. Listen to your heart. Do you think this man is a killer or a man in love? I think that’s what Pete was saying. I think that’s what you have to decide.”
“But that still doesn’t answer why he left me alone. He said he regretted bringing me there. He said it was a mistake,” I reminded Kweku as I started to cry again.
“Wait,” he said, patting my shoulder. “You missed some of what Pete said. The biggest part.”
“What?”
“No man wants to feel vulnerable. We try all of our lives to be cowboys, separating our hearts from our minds, and when you pushed Dame over the edge, you reminded him that his heart will always win out. No man wants to remember that. That’s female territory.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Never listen to a man when he’s angry—in a rage. You ought to listen to him when he’s resting. When he thinks no one else is listening and you’ll discover, without fail, what’s in his heart.”
Hearing this, I could finally rest. While I hadn’t solved what happened, I knew that Dame loved me. If I never saw him again, I knew that, at least.
I was awakened from my nap by an announcement that the plane was preparing for landing in Atlanta.
“Ooooooh,” I said, stretching and looking out of the window at the sun. “How long was I sleeping?”
“Quite a while,” Kweku said. “Long enough for me to get through the last of the contracts.” He pointed to the empty tray table where the contracts had been.
“Wow,” I said. “I guess I was good luck.”
“You certainly are.” Kweku took a pen from his jacket and reached for my pad. I was holding it in my hand. “I want to give you my number—at the office. I work in the music industry and I think maybe you should come to our office.” He wrote down his number on a blank page. “I can’t promise anything, but I can put you in front of the right people.”
“Are you serious?” I asked, looking at the Georgia number.
“After hearing what I heard last night, I know I can’t leave that voice in Alabama,” Kweku said. “It’s time for the whole world to hear it. Give me a call.”
I took the pad from Kweku and slid it back into my purse. After I promised him a dozen times I’d call, the voice over the speaker asked that we buckle our seat belts for arrival. I was home.
PART FOUR
Taste
Chapter Twenty-eight
June 24, 2008
Tuscaloosa, AL
I could hear my mother’s screams from outside the house. After driving the three hours home from the airport in Atlanta in silence, I pulled into the oval-shaped driveway that came right up to the door-way at my parents’ house not knowing what to expect. Either they’d be angry at me and force me to suffer as they listed everything I’d ever done wrong, or miss me so much the fact that I’d run off didn’t matter anymore. Either way, this was the only place in the world I had to go and the only place I could begin to get back into what I’d left unburned in my life. My home with my things in it wasn’t but a handful of miles away, but I wasn’t ready to face what was waiting there yet. I wasn’t ready to face who was waiting there.
When I opened the car door to get out, I heard my mother screaming, saw the front door fling open and her body come shooting out as if seeing me from a distance had in some way shaved twenty years off her age.
“Oh, my Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she cried, wrapping her arms around me and holding me so close I couldn’t move. One of my legs was still halfway in the car and I was twisting out, but this didn’t matter. In a second, I was crying and holding my mother, too. Shaking and rocking as if we hadn’t seen each other in years. And even though it had really been only a few weeks, the way I’d left, the way things were, made it feel like an eternity. Yet, here was my mother, in my arms, smelling like the raw cinnamon she kept in dishes around the house and the summer Alabama breeze. Everything. Everything that had happened before I’d left and while I was gone came through my tears in an outpouring of emotion. I’d tried so hard to stand on my own as an adult. To believe that my solitude could prove something about who I was, but in my mother’s arms, I was still a little girl—longing to have her family back together, wishing everything would be okay.
“Mama, I missed you,” I cried. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I opened my eyes and saw that around us was everyone—my entire family, standing there and looking at me. They were arm in arm in a bunch behind my mother. May was crying. My father’s arm was around Jr. And Justin ... Justin was standing there with his hands pressed to his mouth. That’s when I saw it. In his eyes was more than a look of anticipation. It was fear. I went back along the stares of everyone else and saw this there, too. They weren’t simply looking at a Journey they’d missed. They seemed to be looking at a ghost.
“My baby’s home,” my mother said, holding my face delicately with both hands. “Praise God!”
“What is it, Mama?” I asked. “Why are you all looking at me like that?”
“We been praying all morning,” my father said, “that you’d come home.”
“We thought you were dead,” May added with her voice cracking.