Baby Brother's Blues (16 page)

“I’m afraid we can’t afford anything in that area yet.”

“That’s where the favor comes in,” Bob said. “My wife and I moved three years ago, but I designed and built this house from scratch. It’s my baby, so I can’t part with it.”

“You want me to
live
there?”

“Well, there would be rent, of course, but mostly I’m just desperate to get somebody in there who will appreciate it and stick around for a while.”

He pushed the keys across the table toward Kwame. “It’s empty. Go by and take a look at it. I’ll write the address down for you.”

“I know where it is,” Kwame said, trying to fathom his good fortune.

“I think you and Aretha will love it. Take a look and let me know next Saturday when I get back to town.”

“All right.” Kwame slipped the keys into his pocket. “I will.”

Bob handed Kwame a snifter, tapped it lightly with his own, tossed back the brandy in one big gulp, and stood up.

“I’ve got to go before I miss my flight, but that’s no reason for you to rush your brandy,” he said. “I think you’re going to be a great addition to Watson and Associates.” He extended his hand and grasped Kwame’s firmly. “We’re going to do business, young Hargrove. You wait and see. We’re going to do big business.”

27

I
t was Zora’s kind of day. The spectacularly lovely Atlanta weather drove people out of their houses and into the streets. The West End Growers Association had enjoyed their first drought-free year in four summers, and even now, with the bountiful growing season officially over, the famous gardens were still bursting with sweet, impossibly juicy tomatoes, summer squash the color of sunshine, violet-hued eggplant, and sweet corn. The flower gardens were equally bountiful, overflowing with sun-flowers, zinnias, assorted wildflowers, and all kinds of roses, from the palest amber to a red so deep it was almost purple.

Abernathy Boulevard, still the commercial heart of West End, was alive with shoppers and street vendors, all pursuing their small bit of the area’s commerce with great enthusiasm. The West End Mall had as many people sitting on the pedestrian-friendly benches outside as it did window-shopping, but nobody seemed to mind. The twenty-four-hour beauty shop next to the West End News was full of patiently waiting women who knew this rare humidity-free moment would allow them to toss their freshly done hairdos around fearlessly for at least the next forty-eight hours.

There was a line inside and outside of the Krispy Kreme. Baseball legend Hank Aaron, the new owner, had destroyed a hundred people’s dieting efforts by installing a drive-through where you could get a dozen doughnuts in that flat, thin signature box so hot that you had to put them on the backseat to avoid burning your lap just carrying them home. The Jamaican jerk-chicken specialists were in full swing next to the African clothing store where merchandise had been hung outside to flutter up some paying customers.

Walking this route from her Lawton Place apartment to the University Center a few miles away was always an adventure for Zora. She enjoyed the crowded sidewalks, the spicy smells wafting from the restaurants on every corner, the greetings of the guys leaning in the barbershop door, waiting their turn. She even looked forward to buying a bag of fruit from the earnest young Muslim brothers on the corner in front of the bank who always called her “Sister Zora” and invited her to services at the mosque.

Twice a day, sometimes more, Zora engaged in the street life of her neighborhood, but today, its charms were merely background. Her thoughts were focused on that soldier she’d met in D.C. She didn’t know whether it was the unexpected beauty of Wes’s face or the equally unexpected vulnerability she’d glimpsed behind the macho facade, but Zora couldn’t get him out of her mind. He was only nineteen and he was contemplating walking away from his post in the United State military in a time of war. If he got caught, he would be jailed or shot for desertion. If he wasn’t caught, he would be forced to live as a fugitive. In that case, he would need all kinds of support, but would it even be legal to provide it?

Zora couldn’t imagine Wes being a fugitive for long. He was so striking—“too fine” would be a more accurate description—to blend into the population easily. With those high cheekbones, big brown eyes, and impossibly long lashes, he was certain to draw admiring female glances wherever he went. All it took was one disgruntled girlfriend to blow his cover and his days as a fugitive would end with a trip to jail, or worse.

By the time she got to the Morehouse Medical School and took the steps to the tiny second-floor offices where Samson Epps ran his veterans’ outreach program, Zora had dozens of questions she hoped he could answer. She’d been volunteering with Dr. Epps for only a few months, but she knew he was a walking resource guide to services available for vets and their families. If anybody would know how to guide Wes through whatever the military might throw at him, Dr. Epps would.

The door to the outside office was almost always open. A part-time secretary and two volunteers, plus Zora, shared the desk and the computer since they were rarely all there at the same time. But today, Dr. Epps himself sat at the desk, scribbling a note on a pink phone-message pad. His large head, old-school Afro, bushy beard, and broad shoulders raised the expectation of a much taller man, but Samson Epps was exactly five-six and one half inches tall. Zora had a good two inches on him. He had been divorced twice and Zora could see why. He was passionate about his work and dedicated to it, but in the name of being focused on a righteous cause, he was also overbearing, judgmental, unnecessarily brusque, and hard to please. Working for him was a challenge. Being married to him was probably a nightmare.

When he looked up and saw her, his habitually serious face lit up with a smile.

“There she is!” he crowed like she had just been nominated for an Oscar. “You just missed a call from
The Sentinel.
They’re running Mr. Johnson’s piece on our program in their weekend edition.”

“This weekend?”

Dr. Epps nodded, tore the message off the pad, and handed it to Zora, still smiling. “They said Mr. Johnson especially wanted to thank you for bringing the program to his attention.”

“I didn’t expect it to be in the paper so fast.”

“Frankly, I didn’t either, but it couldn’t come at a better time. This is exactly the kind of exposure we need.”

The Sentinel
was Atlanta’s premiere black newspaper, with fifty thousand paying subscribers and a slew of Ida B. Wells Awards for journalistic excellence. A few weeks before, their investigative reporter, Burghardt Johnson, had done a terrifying story on the sudden spike in domestic violence and child abuse as the veterans of the Iraq war came home; confused, angry, disoriented, and disillusioned. The story painted a bleak picture of sad, violent, shell-shocked soldiers, long-suffering spouses, and frightened, helpless children.

It was a well-researched, well-written piece, but the conclusion offered no assistance or hope to those in the sometimes life-threatening situations the reporter had described, and Zora didn’t appreciate it. She’d called the paper and invited Mr. Johnson to come and see what Dr. Epps was doing and write a follow-up story.

“Otherwise,” she had said to Burghardt Johnson, “people are going to be left with nothing but fear and helplessness, and what good does that do?”

“None of this would have happened without you,” Samson Epps said. “This is a real coup for us.”

Zora smiled, remembering how nervous she had been before the interview.

“I probably shouldn’t start counting our chickens,” he said, heading back to his small office behind the reception area, “but come in my office for a minute, will you? I want to share something with you.”

She followed him into his office. It was so full of books, magazines, and newspapers there was hardly room left for a desk and a chair for a visitor to squeeze into next to the door.

“Sit down, sit down.”

He was reaching for a bright green folder on his desk. She could see the label on the outside said
FUND
-
RAISING
.

“Do you know what this is?” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially even though there was no one in the office but the two of them.

Zora shook her head. It seemed too obvious to say “stuff about fund-raising?”

“This is a proposal that I’ve been working on for us to conduct a series of writing workshops for vets and their spouses. I’ve got some real interest from a few corporations, and with
The Sentinel
story, I’m sure we’ll be able to get the funds raised in the next few months.”

“That’s great,” she said, amused that he seemed to have forgotten she was the one who’d brought him the idea in the first place. “If there’s anything I can do to help, I’d love to be involved.”

Samson Epps nodded slowly, his hand still on the folder. “I knew you would say that, so I’m going to take you up on it.” He extended the green folder. “I want you to review the preliminary work I’ve done and let me know if you think I’m headed in the right direction.”

Zora was surprised and delighted. This was a huge increase in her role and responsibilities. “Of course. I’ll look at it tonight and—”

He interrupted her pleasantly. “You don’t have to do it that quickly. I’ll be in Washington until Friday. Are you in on Monday?”

The schedule called for her on Tuesday, but that was the schedule for
interns.
She was now a
grant reviewer.
She could set her own schedule. “Yes.”

“Good,” he said, his attention already drawn to another folder before him. “We’ll talk then.”

“Okay,” she said, getting up to go and suddenly realizing that she hadn’t had a chance to ask him about Wes. “Dr. Epps?”

He looked up as if he was surprised to see her still standing there. “Yes?”

“I just wanted to ask you about…”

She hesitated. She couldn’t just say,
I met this fine soldier who’s thinking of dropping out of the war. Can we help him?

“About what, Zora?”

“Last weekend when I went to D.C. for the student leaders’ conference—”

“I’ve heard nothing but positive reviews of your participation.”

“Thank you,” she said, still casting around for the right words. “But while I was there, I met a soldier…”

“At the conference? I didn’t know there were military involved.”

She didn’t correct the misunderstanding. Meeting at a conference sounded a lot more respectable than picking somebody up at a coffee shop. “He was on leave from Iraq. He had been there eight months. He’s only nineteen and he’s already seen so many of his friends killed or wounded that he’s lost count.”

Dr. Epps nodded, a sympathetic look on his face. He was a veteran of the Gulf War and understood the rigors of combat.

“And he said he was considering not going back.”

Samson Epps raised his eyebrows. “What did he mean by that? Desertion from the field of battle?”

The way he said it, Zora instantly knew Dr. Epps didn’t approve. She was sorry she had brought it up.

“I guess,” she said. “He wasn’t real specific or anything, but there are more and more guys thinking that same way and I was wondering if we were going to be offering any services to them.”

“To deserters?”
He sounded amazed that she would even suggest such a thing.

All she could do was nod. Dr. Epps just looked at her for a minute, a frown bunching his already bushy eyebrows even more.

“I’m glad you asked me about this, Zora, so we won’t have any confusion about it later. This is a program dedicated to rebuilding the lives and families of men and women who have served their country honorably. We have no obligation to, and I personally have no use for, deserters. Do I make myself clear?”

Zora clutched the green folder to her chest, suddenly fearful he would grab it out of her hands for even bringing up Wes’s plight.

“Yes, sir,” she said quietly. “Thank you for clarifying that for me.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “I don’t think our federal funding would last very long if the army found out we were aiding and abetting deserters, do you?”

She shook her head. “I understand.”

“Good. Then let’s get back to work.”

She pulled Dr. Epps’s office door closed behind her and sat down to collect her thoughts. She hadn’t expected such a strong negative reaction. She understood completely, but that didn’t mean she had to agree.

28

L
eaving the 191 Club, Kwame immediately drove to Bob’s empty house. A gleaming glass-and-chrome showpiece, it stood proudly at the top of a hill at the end of a tree-lined street crowded with stately old mansions and the large, rambling, perfectly restored homes favored by the city’s younger traditionalists, who kept the facades but gutted the insides to add skylights, playrooms, entertainment centers, and home offices. Kwame had read about the opposition to Bob’s house and it was easy to see why the neighbors had balked when the three-story structure began to take shape in their midst. The house grabbed your attention and held it. It made everything around it look stodgy and fussy and certainly not
of the moment
in any way that mattered. Bob said they had learned to love the house, but Kwame suspected they had simply made peace with it. This house was not looking for love. It was asserting dominance.

Using the key Bob had given him, he opened the front door, stepped inside, and took a look around. He could imagine himself living here. The vast open spaces and floor-to-ceiling windows in almost every room reflected Bob’s design ideas, creating an environment that was as starkly modern on the inside as it was on the outside. Kwame liked the clean lines and the light. He admired the hardwood floors and what looked like a new coat of expensive ivory-colored paint. The kitchen was fully equipped with a Sub-Zero refrigerator and a stove that looked big enough to service a restaurant. The kitchen windows looked out on a large, startlingly green yard with a peaceful stand of hardwood trees rather than the ubiquitous Georgia pines.

The upstairs rooms were large and bright and featured a master suite with an opulent bathroom that boasted two showers, two sinks, a Jacuzzi, and a bidet. Kwame smiled.
This Negro is living,
he thought, wondering how many of the people who had been in this room had ever seen a real bidet, much less used one. The third floor was one large open space with a huge fireplace and a wall of built-in bookshelves. This was the room he would claim as his sanctum, he thought. The place to which he could retreat in the evenings for reading, reflection, creative contemplation. A man needed some personal space in his household, space he didn’t have to share with his daughter’s dinosaur collection.

Heading back downstairs, Kwame tried to imagine Aretha’s reaction to this house. She would probably hate it at first. Looking out of the living-room windows at the terraced front yard, he knew this was a big leap from West End, but he was confident she could handle it. It wasn’t really up to her anyway.
Not this time,
he thought. If Ansley Park could get used to Bob’s baby, Aretha could, too.

He closed the glass front door behind him with a soft click and stood listening to the sound of what was soon to be his neighborhood. Birds. That’s all he heard. No traffic. No sirens. No boom boxes blasting the latest offering from the hip-hop nation.
Birds.
Heading for his car, parked in what was soon to be his own driveway, he knew that was at least one thing Aretha would like about this place. She was big on birds.

As he pulled away from the house, stealing one last glance in the rearview mirror, he could hardly believe how much his life had changed in the last few hours. He’d been offered a great job and he had no doubt the salary would be competitive. He’d been handed the keys to a fabulous house in one of Atlanta’s most prestigious zip codes and he’d been invited to bring his wife to meet the boss on Saturday night. If he had written down his hopes for the day, his imagination could never have come up with anything this perfect. It was, he knew, one of those moments in life when you have to just
go for it.
Even when it seems crazy to other people, even when those other people love you, you have to keep your eye on the prize and step out on faith. That’s exactly what Kwame intended to do.

He pulled out his cellphone, threw caution to the winds, and dialed Teddy’s number in D.C. After all, it had been his friend who had set all this in motion. It was time to share the good news.