A Special Relationship (4 page)

Honey didn’t like it but what could she do?
 
Carrie’s father was a rolling stone alcoholic and was never around, and when he was around he was useless.
 
Her oldest daughter, Popena, had disgraced the family by running off with some married man who any fool could see didn’t mean right by her.
 
But Popena seemed to hate her and she could never tell that child a thing.
 
Honey had nobody else but Carrie.
 
And as the months came and
went,
her dependence on Carrie grew and grew until she forgot about her daughter’s future for worrying about her own.
 

 
It was the reality of her condition that did her in.
 
She hated being partially paralyzed on the right side of her body. She hated walking with a limp and having to practically drag her foot along.
 
She hated having to rely on a small disability check just to survive.
 
She was forty-one years old the year she had her stroke, still a young woman she felt, but her entire world changed that day to where she now, at forty-seven, couldn’t do hardly any of the things she used to do with ease.
 

 
Some of the locals believed that she took her bitterness out on
Carrie, that
she didn’t give her daughter half a chance to breath, let alone get on with her life, but Honey didn’t see it that way.
 
She had to have help, that was a hard, cold fact, and Carrie was the one who had to help her.
 
Besides, she reasoned, Carrie was young and beautiful and smart as they come, she’d have no trouble whatsoever finding her a successful man to take care of her.

 
When Dale Mosley took a liking to Carrie, Honey was on cloud nine.
 
“You done it now, Baby Girl!” she said gleefully one night after she had enough liquor in her to dismiss all of the few inhibitions she had left.
 
And then Carrie had the nerve
to
 
turn
the boy down?
 
She had the best she could ever hope to have wrapped right around her finger, and she turned him down?
 
Honey shook her head again and looked at that daughter of hers.
 
It was no secret why Dale wanted Carrie.
 
It wasn’t just because Carrie was beautiful, but because her eyes were light green like her daddy’s, creating an astonishing glow to her small, brown face that often had strangers staring in admiration.
 
Her thick, black hair had more bounce than a basketball and she wore it trimmed into a low-cut bob-style that was flipped under and pushed behind her small ears.
 
Even in her simple, dress style, usually jeans and t-shirts, she had an air of gracefulness about her, from the way she walked in tip-toe, bouncy strides, to her thin, swan-like neck.
 

 
And she had an innocence about her that men just loved, a sweet, compassionate side to her that Honey was counting on to serve both of them well one day.
 
Any man in Attapulgus would give dearly to be with a woman like Carrie, and many tried.
 
But she was so stubborn, and so into that religion of
hers, that
Honey was convinced she scared them away.
 
Men didn’t mind having a good Christian woman, one who feared God just as much as they feared Him.
 
But they didn’t want some sanctified nutcase.
 
And that daughter of hers, if she was anything, was sanctified, and nutty, to the core.
 
“You’re just like your sister,” she said to Carrie in a purposely harsh tone.

 
Carrie, however, laughed.
 
“Mama, please,” she replied.
 
“You know good n’ well
me
and Popena are nothing alike.”

 
“You just like her I tell you!
 
Both of y’all crazy as chanks.
 
Both of y’all ain’t got the sense you was born with. She was running around with a married man, creating all kinds of hell around here, so much hell that she had to be run out of town like the tramp she is.
 
And now you.
 
Defying me too.
 
But you so saved.
 
You too good to do what females have to do every day to wrangle them a man.
 
God will forgive you, child.
 
He understands what’s going on.
 
But nooo.
 
Not Carrie.
 
She’s got to be all sanctified.
 
She’s got to be all filled with the Holy Ghost.
 
No man can touch her.
 
Not even a successful man like Dale Mosley!
 
The man, as if you done forgot, that promised to give me this house free and clear after y’all got married.”

 
Carrie almost laughed again.
 
That was the point.
 
A house for mama.
 
Carrie could sell her soul to the devil, but at least her mama would get a house out of the bargain.
 
She stood up quickly on her trim, five-five frame.
 
The reality of it was too painful to even think about.
  
“I’ve got to get to the diner,” she said.

 
“I thought you said you ain’t on the schedule to work today.”

 
“I’m not.
 
I’ve gotta pick up my check.”

 
“Yo’ check,” Honey said and began turning around in her seat.
 
“
That don’t
be enough money to even pay the rent.
 
And yo’ crazy butt could be married to the man that owns the house! You can’t be this foolish, Carrie.
 
I didn’t raise you to be this crazy.
 
You got to think about your future, child. You’ll be a sagging-breast old woman still working at that diner down yonder if you don’t stop expecting so much from these men!”

 
“I gotta go, mama.”

 
“Why don’t you just give Dale a call?
 
Just talk to him.
 
That’s all you got to do.
 
Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

 
“But I won’t, mama.
 
I’m saved and I’m not about to compromise my salvation for nobody, don’t you understand that?
 
You act like I’m enjoying this.
 
You act like I don’t care for Dale.
 
Well I do.
 
I thought he was gonna be my husband.
 
I thought . . .
 
.”
 
Carrie hesitated.
 
That same pain she felt when Dale broke off their engagement was beginning to reemerge.
 
“I thought he loved me enough to wait,” she said.

 
“He’s a man, crazy woman!” Honey said.
 
“A man!
 
And men don’t wait.
 
Yo’ daddy a good for nothing, he’s the example.
 
All you got to do is remember his runnin’ around and you’ll know exactly how men are.”

 
“Every man ain’t like that.”

 
“Uh-hun,” Honey said and folded her big, burly arms.
 
“Name one.”

 
Carrie stood on the porch and stared at the children playing in the wooded field across the street.
 
There was one out there.
 
She just knew it.
 
A good, strong, Christian man God was going to bless her with in a mighty way.
 
And unlike Dale Mosley, her dream man wouldn’t let the need for some fleshly pleasure, for a
sample
, to break them up.
 
It was just a matter of time.
 
It was just a matter of putting all her trust in God’s plan for her life, regardless of what her mother or anybody else had to say about it.

 
She left and went to the diner.

By the time she got back home, however, things had changed for the worse.
 
Carrie’s heart dropped as she walked onto the dirt road of row houses and saw what was going on at hers.
 
Her mother, along with her mother’s latest boyfriend of the week
,
 
had
undoubtedly drank themselves into a drunken stupor and was now putting on a show for the neighbors.
 
A show, Carrie was dismayed to realize, that included her mother leaning against her cane and tossing all of Carrie’s clothes out onto the porch, screaming obscenities as she did.
 
Her mother’s boyfriend was seated out on that porch, his bottle of liquor still in his hands, laughing at the display.
 
Laughing as if this horror show was actually entertainment.

 
Carrie slowed as she approached the wooden-framed house that looked almost dilapidated, and then, when her mother nearly tripped over in her drunkenness and rage, she hurried up the steps.
 
She tried to calm her, she tried to get her to understand that it was her life and she couldn’t live it on anybody else’s terms.
 

 
But Honey didn’t want to hear it.
 
She pushed Carrie aside, even slapped her, and called her every harsh name she could recite.
 
Carrie endured her mother’s wrath, as she’d always endured it, convinced that her mother was just disappointed with her own life and didn’t mean half the hateful things she was saying.

 
But then, as if Carrie didn’t have enough to deal with, another ultimatum was dropped on her.
 
Honey staggered and then pointed at her daughter.
 
“Either you marry Dale Mosley,” she said in no uncertain terms, “or you get out my house.
 
You so good, maybe you too good to be livin’ with a big-time sinner like me.
 
You a grown woman, anyhow.
 
You twenty-four years old.
 
I ain’t taking care of your sanctified butt another second!”

 
Less than an hour later, when the afternoon sun was at its brilliance and the sense in trying to find a reason for staying was no longer worth the time it took to think one up, Carrie Banks got away.
 
Without saying another word to her mother, who was still staggering around the house lamenting her terrible life and sorry-behind daughters, and without calling Dale Mosley and telling him anything about her plans, she placed her discarded clothes into the only suitcase she owned, cashed her check at the local Pigly Wigly, and caught the first Greyhound bus out of Georgia.
 

 
She was headed for Florida, the sunshine state.
 
Her big sister Popena had written countless times about the new life she had made for herself in Jacksonville and how Florida, of all places, was fast becoming the
promised land
, the place of refuge where even a marked woman like Popena could find her way.
 
That was why Carrie made up her mind and left without looking back.
 
She was going to find her way too.

THREE

In downtown Jacksonville, on a rainy, dreary day, Marva Cox walked into the extremely large office on the top floor of the Dyson Corporate headquarters building and sighed in great frustration.
 
Robert Kincaid, her boss, a man she’d known and worked with for nearly ten years, was standing there in shirt sleeves staring out of his huge, wall-sized window as if he didn’t have a board meeting in less than thirty minutes and needed to get prepared.

 
She was worried about him.
 
He’d been this way a lot lately, where he’d just stare out into the wide blue yonder as if such penetrating, hard looks could make what happened to him two years ago finally stop haunting him.
 
And she wanted so much to help him, to reassure him, but she knew she couldn’t.
 
He was not the kind of man who opened up to anyone, especially not to his fifty-four-year-old black secretary who wanted, as he once told her, to
smother him with mothering
, and especially not on a day like today.
 
On any other day over the past two years, Robert Kincaid was not a soft man.
 
He was not an easily affectionate individual on his best day.
 
But today was different.
 
It was the second anniversary of his wife’s shocking news, the day his life changed forever, and he could not have been
more hard
to reach.