LOVING THE HEAD MAN (19 page)

      
“To save the house.”

      
“Right.”

       “You ain’t gonna find that kind of money around here, Bree, even if you do get a job right away.  Not no forty-thousand dollars.”

      
“Forty-two thousand, to be precise.”
  She looked at Malcolm.  “I was hoping to get some kind of advance, and try to bid on the house myself at auction.  Jerlene,” she yelled to her eight-year-old sister, “stop throwing that ball like that or you can take your behind in the house right now.”

       “They
be
throwing it hard at me,” the pint-sized Jerlene yelled back.

       “You heard me,” Bree warned.

       “I still can’t believe your mama did that,” Malcolm said.  “And while your father was on his dying bed.”

       “Yeah, well,” Bree said, sipping more Coke, “believe it.  It’s done now.”

       “If you ask me you should just let her lose it.  Maybe she’ll learn her lesson then.”

       “And my five younger siblings will be homeless until I can get a job and find a place to stay.  Yeah, Mal, that’s a real solution.”  Then Bree exhaled.  “Sorry,” she said.  “I’m just fed up, that’s all.”

       Malcolm stared at Bree.  “What happened in Chicago?” he asked her.

       Bree looked at him, wondering if he had heard something,
then
realizing it would be an impossibility.  “Nothing happened, what do you mean?”

       “You don’t talk about it?  You wasn’t hired, that’s obvious, but you said just being selected was a victory in and of itself.  But it’s a funny thing: you don’t seem victorious at all.  In fact, you seem downright defeated.”

       If he only knew, Bree thought.  “I’m just . . . disappointed, that’s all.  And I don’t like to talk about my disappointments.”

       “Your mama said something about you having a sugar daddy while you were there, and that’s how you got up her bail money.”

       Bree snorted.  “Believe that if you want.”

       “But you did get up that ten thousand awfully quickly.”

       “Yes, I was able to borrow it.”

       “Couldn’t you borrow
--
”

       “No,” Bree said quickly, definitively. 

       Malcolm stared at her longer, deciding that she’d changed since she went to Chicago and he wasn’t altogether sure if he liked that kind of change in her.  But he didn’t dwell on it.  He sipped his Coke.

      
A silver
sports Mercedes drove onto Rooney Street and stopped at the curb in front of the Hudson residence.  Malcolm was the first to see the visitor, and then the children. 

       “Looks like you got company,” he said. 

       Bree looked too.  When Robert stepped out of the car, in his tan sports coat and khaki pants, and began walking toward the porch, her breath caught.

       “Wait a minute,” Malcolm said, shocked.  “Isn’t
that.
. . that looks like.  . . Isn’t that
 
Robert
Colgate
?  But it can’t be!”

       While Malcolm was in a conversation with himself, Bree was staring at Robert.  Because she knew it could be.  Even Jerlene ran up to the porch rail. 

       “A white man coming,” she alerted her big sister.

       Bree almost rolled her eyes.  “Yes, I can see that,” she said.

      
Jerlene,
and the other children stared at the novelty of it, as Robert walked toward the porch, but children being children the novelty quickly rubbed off and they continued their kickball game.

       Robert, however, found the entire scene more enchanting than novel.  A poorly paved southern street filled with pecan trees, magnolias, and bushy hoptrees; small but neat frame houses; little children running around kicking what looked like a beach ball, and Bree.

       She was seated on the porch, looking stunning in the prettiest sundress, her spaghetti straps revealing her small but muscular deep-toned arms, that oh-so-smooth neck of hers, and the fullness of her sizeable breasts.  He also saw, however, that she wasn’t alone, but was sitting and talking with a very attractive young man.

       His heart began to hammer as he approached her.  It was ridiculous really.  He was Robert Colgate, a man considered to be the best criminal defense attorney of his generation, a man handpicked to defend the former Vice President of the United States for crying out loud, and he was nervous about seeing young Bree Hudson?  But it was a fact.  He was nervous as hell.

       Malcolm wasn’t nervous, but he was shocked as hell.  “Are my eyes deceiving me, Bree,” he asked her, “or is that Robert Colgate, THE Robert Colgate, walking up this very driveway on this Rooney Street in this Nodash, Mississippi?”

       Bree would have smiled at the way Malcolm phrased that, if she wasn’t so jittery herself.  “Yes,” was all she could manage to
say.

       “Hello, Brianna,” Robert said as he walked up the steps. 

       “Hi,” she said, unsure what else to say.

       Robert’s bright blue eyes, however, immediately moved to Malcolm as he approached them.  Malcolm, still stunned, stood up.

       “Robert, this is Malcolm Burgess. Malcolm, Robert Colgate.”

       “Hello,” Malcolm said, shaking Robert’s hand.

       “Hello, Malcolm, how
are
you?”

       “I’m . . . shocked, actually,” Malcolm admitted.  “Never in a million years would I have expected to see Robert Colgate in Nodash, Mississippi.  Let alone at Bree’s house.”

        “Quite frankly,” Robert admitted with what Malcolm could only describe as a grim look, “neither would I.  But it was Bree and I had a few days off. 
Why the hell not?”

       “That’s
right,
you’re defending our illustrious former vice president against rape allegations.”

       “Correct.”

       Malcolm shook his head.  Bree braced herself for a confrontation.

       “I take it you do not approve, Mr. Burgess,” Robert said.

       “Of you defending him?  Of course I approve.”

       “Malcolm’s a civil rights attorney,” Bree said, hoping not only to simply point that out, but to steer the conversation away from hostilities.  It didn’t work.

       Malcolm kept on.  “But you’d better believe I don’t approve of the fact that a former vice president would even dream of having consensual sex with a hotel maid.  Because that’s his defense, right?  That the sex was consensual?  That he checked into the hotel and they both agreed to have a roll in the hay?  Well I say that’s a load of bullocks!  How in the world could a lowly maid trying to keep her job, trying to provide for her poor family, turn down Jason Bradford, the former Vice President of the United States?  There’s nothing consensual about it, Mr. Colgate, and that’s only if it was consensual, which, in my view, is a mighty big if.”

       Bree could tell Robert didn’t like Malcolm’s assertions.  But instead of battling with a civil rights attorney whose mind was obviously already made up, he looked at Bree.

       “May I sit down?” he asked her. 
Before I fall down with exhaustion
, he wanted to add.

       “Yes, of course,” Bree said, sliding over on her swing seat.  Although it was a seat built for two, it wasn’t exactly roomy and Robert wasn’t exactly skinny.  That was why, when he sat beside her, their bodies had no choice but to touch.  For Robert it was perfect, as he placed his arm over the back of the seat, effectively staking some demonstrative claim to Bree.  For Bree, however, their closeness was too unexpected for her to find it anything but unsettling.

      
Malcolm, whose chair was almost in front of, but slightly more
p
arallel to them, sat back down.
  As soon as he did, a burst of laughter went out from the front yard as one of the children fell on her rump.

       “Your siblings I take it,” Robert said with a smile.

      
“Three of them.
  The other two, Candy and TT, are over to their friends’ houses.  You know how teenagers can be.” 

       Malcolm, a master at seizing the moment, saw an opening and took it.  “Do you have any children, Mr. Colgate?” he asked, and Bree was mortified.  Not because of the question, it was a simple question, but because she had never thought to ask it herself.

       “I have a son, yes,” Robert said, to Bree’s shock.  Somehow she had never equated Robert with children.

       “Boy or girl?” Malcolm wanted to know.

       “Boy.  He’s in college.”

       “Ah,” Malcolm said, noticing Bree’s discomfort, but caring about her too much to see her unnecessarily hurt by a man like this, a man he already had heard was a womanizer.  “So you’re married?”

       “No,” Robert said, knowing where this was leading, and therefore deciding to be clear. “I’ve never married.” 

       “You never married the mother of your son?”

       Bree could tell that Robert didn’t like the question, that he felt Malcolm was digging a little too deep with that one.  “No,” he said in a voice that bespoke finality. 

       Malcolm smiled.  Mr. Colgate was easily riled, he thought. 
Which meant he had pushed a button.
  But he let it slide, for Bree’s sake, but in so doing he created a vacuum of silence in the conversation.

       Robert, for his part, looked at Bree as the threesome sat silently, at her curvy legs crossed with her feet pointed downward in a ballerina pose, at the bottle of half-consumed Coke in her hand, at her face.  He lingered on her always interesting face.  “You left early,” he said into the silence.

       Bree really didn’t want to discuss the most shameful episode of her life in front of Malcolm, or anybody else for that matter, but Robert’s stare would not relent.  “Yes,” she said.  “I didn’t see the point in staying.”

       “You stay to complete what you started.”  Her sunglasses were annoying him.  He wanted to see her gorgeous eyes.

       Bree looked at him through the dark tint of those glasses.  “Did you select me?” she asked pointblank.