A Special Relationship (3 page)

 
“You’re still a minor,” Robert said to her.
 
“And this is still your home.”

 
“She’s going with me, Robert,” Gloria said.

 
“And I said she’s not. I’ll fight for custody if I have to.”

 
“She’s going with me and her father, Robert.”

 
Robert began to speak again, to continue to voice his firm resolve, but when he realized what Gloria had just said, when he realized the meaning of the words that had just come out of her mouth, he was dumbstruck.
 
“
What
?” he finally asked.

 
“Go on out to the car with Paul,” Gloria said to Ashley and Ashley, unable to conceal her relief, hurriedly followed Paul, who had gathered up the last of the luggage and was heading out of the house too.

 
Robert, however, could not stop glaring at this stranger of a wife that stood before him.
 
He should have been angry with Paul.
 
He should have decked him before he even had a chance to get away.
 
But he couldn’t stop staring at Gloria.
  
“What did you just say to me?” he asked her.

 
She looked at him, at the man who always knew he had it all figured out, and a sudden feeling of triumph rushed through her body.
 
“She’s not your daughter, Robert,” she said.

 
Robert ran his hand through his rich black hair, a sense of great sadness beginning to overtake him.
 
“Don’t do this, Gloria.”

 
“I’m not doing anything.
 
Paul is her father, that’s just a fact.
 
We took a DNA
test,
I’ll provide your attorneys with the results.
 
We took it when she was fifteen years old and it confirmed what I had suspected all along.”

 
“Wait a minute.
 
Wait a minute here.
 
You mean to tell me you’ve known the truth about this for
two years
? Since Ashley was
fifteen
?”

 
Gloria regretted the deception but at the time she felt it was best.
 
Paul was married with children.
 
She was married.
 
What else could they have done?
 
“Yes,” she said.

 
Robert was devastated.
 
Had his entire married life been a lie?
 
A web of lies?
 
He swallowed hard.
 
“Ash knows the results too?” he asked.

 
Gloria nodded.
 
“Yes.
 
That’s why we took her in for the DNA, when she first started rebelling against your authority.
 
Paul was able to keep her in line.”

 
“Paul?”

 
“Yes, Robert, Paul.
 
Her father.
 
Now I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is.
 
If you would have paid me more attention then you would have realized something was wrong.
 
But you never had time for me.”

 
Robert just stood there, staring at his wife.
 
At this woman he thought he knew.
 
At this woman he thought had loved him.
 
“And Robert, Jr.?” he asked nervously, painfully.
 
“Was he
mine
?”

 
Gloria shook her head.
 
“What difference does it make?” she said bitterly.
 
“He’s dead anyway.”
 
She said this knowing full well how insensitive it sounded, how hurtful it would be to her husband, but she didn’t care.
 
She wanted him to hate her.
 
She wanted him to understand that their sham of a marriage could never be repaired again.
 
She had no regrets whatsoever with what she said.
 
She, in fact, felt a sense of relief after saying it.
 
And she left his presence equally empowered.
 
She left without looking back.
 

 
When she had gone, when she and Paul and the daughter he had never even considered could not be his, finally left the premises, Robert Kincaid, the man who was supposed to be able to fix any disaster that loomed large on any horizon, stood dumbfounded in his foyer.
 
His strong body was weak with exhaustion. His expressive eyes were wide in disbelief.
 
And his chest, his powerful, broad chest, pounded in and out in hyperventilation like the syncopated beat of a haunting, distant drum.

TWO

Two years later, two years to the day that Robert Kincaid stood in his foyer stunned witless by his wife’s shocking news, Carrie Banks, only a couple hundred miles away but in a world apart, received a shock of her own.
  
Earlier that day she and her mother, Honey Banks, were seated out on the porch of their shack of a house in tiny Attapulgus, Georgia.
 
They were trying to enjoy the sun before it became too hot, and to ignore the flies and mosquitos before they became too onerous to ignore.
 
Dale Mosley, Carrie’s fiancé of only three weeks, a dark-skinned, handsome young man with a winning smile and an abrupt, some would say arrogant manner, drove up in his shiny Mustang, walked up the steps of the porch, and told her without shame or hesitation that she either give him a sample, or there would be no marriage.

 
Carrie, at first, thought he was joking.
 
She even laughed about it and told him he looked constipated. But Dale, she quickly discovered, could not have been more serious.
 

 
“A sample of what?” she asked when his foul mood wasn’t abated.

 
“You know what,” he said, his voice shaking in agitation.
 
“I’ve got to know what it’s like to be with you.
 
My daddy told me the truth.
 
He said I’m a Mosley for Pete’s sake.
 
We ain’t got to be buying no pigs in
no
pokes. What if we ain’t compatible?
 
What if you’re frigid or something?
 
I’ll be stuck with somebody I’m not even compatible with.
 
I’ve got to have it, Carrie, that’s all there is to it.”
 
When Carrie didn’t respond, but just sat there staring at him, he became angry.
 
“If I don’t get a sample,” he said bluntly, “if you don’t treat me like the man I am and give me a taste of what I can expect, then the wedding’s off!”

 
Carrie didn’t even think about it.
 
There were certain things she was willing to do for Dale.
 
She’d cook for him or clean for him or even wash his dirty clothes for him.
 
She was, after all, soon to be his wife.
 
But there were other things she wasn’t going to do for anybody.
 
“The wedding’s off then,” she said without hesitating either, “because I don’t give out
samples
.”

 
Dale looked at Carrie as if he suddenly hated her, as if he’d finally saw a side of her his daddy had been warning him about, and then he began to shake his head.
 
“Fine,” he said.
 
“Don’t give it up.
 
My daddy said you wouldn’t.
 
He said all you ghetto girls like to play hard to get.
 
So keep on playing with your bad self.
 
But don’t you think for a minute that you can
come
running back to me.”
 
He said this and looked at her again, to be sure she understood him clearly, and then he was gone.
 
In his mustang and speeding off, the dust of the road kicking up behind him.
 
Gone.

 
It took nearly half the morning for Carrie to realize what had just transpired.
 
It all happened so fast.
 
But it only took her a moment to realize that it was probably for the best.
 
She never loved Dale, she’d even told him so herself, but she cared deeply for him.
 
And the idea that he would so easily dump her like this, a man who had professed to love her so much that he didn’t care that the feeling wasn’t mutual, was shocking on every level.
 
She knew he was spoiled, she knew he was the only son of the wealthiest property owner in town, a young man ready, willing, and able to take over the family business as soon as his time came.
 
But for him to leave her because he couldn’t have his way with her was more than she’d ever thought possible.
 
It was devastating, in fact.
 
But she also knew that it was better to have him leaving her now, before the marriage, than after she’d taken those solemn vows.
  

 
Honey Banks, however, wasn’t as resolute.
 
She took it far harder than her daughter.
 
She sat out on that porch and fumed.
 
Dale Mosley was one of the most successful men in town, she reminded her “crazy” daughter.
 
His family owned more rent houses than they could count, including the one they themselves lived in.
 
How in the world could she have turned down a man like that?

 
“I’m saved, Mama,” Carrie said as she closed her eyes and attempted to forget all of this drama swirling around her, the Georgia sun bright and beaming against her light brown skin.
 
“That’s why I turned him down.
 
What would I look like sleeping with a man that’s not my husband?”

 
“You’ll look like a woman with some sense,” Honey insisted.
 
“And it don’t matter what you’ll look like anyhow.
 
He’s
gonna be your husband, he’s no stranger to you.
 
You might as well say
y’all
 
married
already.”

 
“Not in the eyes of God we aren’t.”

 
“Here we go,” Honey said and shook her head in angry resignation.
 
What in the world was she going to do with that darn daughter of hers?
 
Carrie was always her favorite, everybody knew it, and Honey saw this engagement to Dale as Carrie’s last big chance to be somebody.
 
She once had so much hope for that child, beginning in her school days when she was so smart that she aced every test they put in front of her, to the night when she graduated with honors and was supposed to go on to college and make a success of herself.

 
But Honey suffered a massive stroke two days after Carrie’s graduation and Carrie, being who she was, decided without hesitation to put a hold on her college plans and stay at her mother’s side.
 
Honey would have forbid it if she would have known, but she didn’t know because her condition deteriorated rapidly and, within hours of her stroke, she’d lapsed into a coma.
 
By the time she came to, nearly three weeks later, she was unable to so much as feed herself.
 
She needed Carrie then.
 
And Carrie was right there with her, even taking a job as a waitress in a local diner to help pay the bills.