His Third Wife

“You control me!”

Jamison’s hands fell to my hips and he continued his strokes until his breath sounded like a cry and he shook from his waist to his knees.

He backed away from me coldly. Pulled up his pants and went back to his side of the car.

“His First Wife”

“You can’t make a man do nothing he don’t want to do. Not a thing. You can try. But you can’t make him do it. Mark my words! My mama told me that. Her mama told her that.”

Kerry was sitting beside Marcy in a hot-pink Adirondack chair. Marcy’s chair was painted neon green. Their children—Kerry’s son, Tyrian, and Marcy’s daughter, Millicent—were steps away in a pool, engaged in a fiercely competitive game of Marco Polo. While six-year-old Tyrian was nearly ten years younger than Millicent, he was a better swimmer and he didn’t mind getting his hair wet.

“I know that. But it just doesn’t make sense. His assistant? Val?” Kerry responded to Marcy’s declaration before adding in a lowered voice, “She’s a fucking hoodrat, Marce! A fucking hoodrat.”

“A hoodrat Jamison chose!” Marcy pointed out before Kerry tapped her arm to remind her to lower her voice so Tyrian couldn’t hear them talking about his father.

“I hear you, but I know what Jamison is capable of. I was married to the man for ten years. This just doesn’t fit. Something’s up.”

“Humpf,” the two old friends said together, and both took the moment to reflect on what added up to those ten years that Jamison had been Kerry’s and, more importantly, she had been his. Fanning away the summer heat that had them in bikinis and acceptable mommy cover-ups, the women looked up at the behemoth of a house that cast a cooling shadow over the pool. This had once been Jamison’s home too. He’d claimed he wanted to live out the rest of his years with his college sweetheart in that Cascade Tudor. But where was he now? And how had he gotten there?

“You think she’s pregnant?” Marcy posed the question Kerry had been considering ever since she’d seen the now-infamous news footage of Jamison walking outside of the courthouse with Val beside him in a white suit on their wedding day. It had since gone viral on the Internet, and in days the shotgun interview had been chopped up and bloggers and political gawkers had commented on everything from Mama Fee’s terrible wig to Mrs. Taylor’s jaw dropping to the cement when the reporter had revealed that Val had been a stripper.

“No,” Kerry said solemnly. “He wouldn’t sleep with her without a condom.” She paused and listened to the children calling “Marco!” and then “Polo!” to one another and then turned to her best friend. “You think he would?”

“I don’t put shit past a man—not even my own husband,” Marcy said, pulling her sunglasses down beneath her nose and sitting up to look at Kerry. “And you know what happened with that shit. Thank God for late-term abortions and stupid office temps.”

Kerry laughed uneasily.

And picking up on her best friend’s discomfort, Marcy added, “I don’t know though. Not Jamison. Not with that girl. Didn’t you say she was damn near illiterate? He likes the smart types. The deep girls.” Marcy sat back in her chair and looked back up at the house with Kerry. She had been there when Jamison and Kerry had met. She’d put them together.

Kerry Ann Jackson had been Marcy’s roommate at Spelman. The girls had had nothing in common—Marcy being a loud-mouthed, loud-dressed, big-haired New Yorker and the first in her family to go to college when Kerry was a third-generation Spelmanite and heir apparent of a blueblood, old black Atlanta dynasty that dated back to black men who’d passed as white and owned slaves. Kerry Ann was everything Marcy was at Spelman to become. A legacy. Someone who was “in.” Had a good name and good blood. Marcy just needed somewhere to begin. The beautician’s daughter decided to set her course to being and mattering on the traditional route that most new to the Atlanta socialite scene took—get the right clothes, join the right sorority, and marry the right man with the right family name. “Right” wasn’t subjective here. And Marcy had been making all of the right decisions—all the way down to the man of her dreams. Morehouse man of honor and frat boy supreme was Damien Newsome—the spawn of a select bloodline of Atlanta

tradition that crisscrossed both the white and black sides of Peachtree Street. He was bright light beige, had features like a white man, and hair that curled without a curlkit. What the women on campus called a “Good Breed.” Pre-med. Smooth. A ticket to something spectacular. Marcy dug into him and wouldn’t let up. By senior year, she was getting desperate and needed to drag Kerry to the annual Valentine’s ball to act as a decoy to distract Damien’s frat brothers while she got her last chance for romance. Back then, there was a belief that a Spelman girl needed to snag her Morehouse man by graduation. She needed her ring by spring, so she’d be jumping the broom that next summer. If she waited, she could lose him—or worse, go back to New York empty-handed. She couldn’t—and wouldn’t—have that.

The only problem was that Kerry scarcely went to campus functions, hadn’t pledged the sorority—though she was a legacy, she seemed to have an aversion to any specimen that lived across the street from her sacred Spelman. She was about her books and her future. No man needed.

But, since Tyrian had been born and was here beating Millicent at Marco Polo in the pool, obviously Kerry had agreed, after much debating, to go to the Valentine’s dance with Marcy senior year. There, as usual, the Spelman girl who’d been given the moniker “Black Barbie” by other coeds due to her long black hair and toasty brown skin, broke the hearts of any man who dared approach her. But then there was Jamison. And a spot of luck. A smile from a frozen heart. A spark. New love.

Marcy got her man and the machine moved forward to bind Kerry and Jamison. Marcy got pregnant before she got her ring (or got pregnant to get her ring—it depended on who told the story). Jamison popped the question to Kerry before a serenade compliments of his suited fraternity brothers and happily ever after was planned.

But “ever after” is a long time for two people from different worlds. And in ten years, “ever after” ended.

“Did you ask him about Val?” Marcy asked, turning to Kerry beside the pool. “Like ask him if they were dating?”

“There was no need, Marce. It was obvious. The girl couldn’t write a decent sentence and she was making seventy-five-K a year? Where does that happen?”

“Fucking shame! Tax dollars at work!”

Kerry laughed with Marcy.

“But still, it’s none of my business. You know? Who he’s dating? I don’t really care. Our shit is beyond in the past. I dealt with his bullshit for too many years.”

“Well, I’m glad you feel that way now,” Marcy said, “because that shit you had going on last year with that detective following him around everywhere was beyond crazy.”

“I told you, I was just doing that to make sure he was handling the business correctly.”

“And I told you, Miss Black Barbie, you can go and tell that lie to someone else. I’m your best friend and I know better. I’m just happy you stopped paying that man.”

There was a telling silence.