The First Lady (3 page)

“Nope. Never.”

“Okay, hold it over my head. Just don’t forget I’ve seen you in a few compromising positions too. You seem to have forgotten about Las Vegas.”

He laughed. “Hey, whatever happened to what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas?”

“Same thing that happened to what goes on in the Bahamas stays in the Bahamas. At least I was with my wife.”

“Aw’ight, I get your point. Look, I gotta get outta here. I got a big date tonight with Sister Renée Wilcox.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know why these sisters let you get away with your foolishness, James.”

“Same reason they’re filling the front rows of the church these past few Sundays, Bishop.”

“And why’s that?” I asked.

“ ‘Cause a good man is hard to find.” James smiled as he opened my office door. “Remember, Bishop,” he called as he gave me one last warning. “Deacon Dickens and Savannah are just the first.”

I smiled, nodded, and waved as James exited the room, halfway closing the door behind him. I proceeded to remove the empty liquor bottle from my desk drawer and stuffed it down in my leather briefcase with the intent of disposing of it in the Dumpster in the back parking lot. I carried the two glasses we’d been drinking from down the hall to the church kitchen to rinse them out.

As I turned the corner to return to my office, I spotted an envelope taped to my door. It actually gave me déjà vu because for years, Charlene would leave me messages in the same exact fashion. By the time I got to the door, my hands were shaking and my heart felt like it was going to beat out of my chest, I was so nervous and confused. She’d been dead for six months, but the envelope taped to the door was from my wife’s personal stationery.

Somehow, I managed to remove the envelope from the door, make my way into my office and into my chair. I stared at the envelope for the better part of five minutes before I opened it and began to read. The note was indeed from Charlene. Although it wasn’t in her handwriting, the words were definitely hers. James was right about one thing: Armageddon was about to start in our church, but what he probably never suspected was that its creator was going to be my deceased wife, Charlene Wilson.

For almost three years I’d asked God to bless me with a job so I could get off public assistance and not have to look for handouts from my son-in-law, Dante, and my daughter, Tanisha, to take care of my teenage son, Aubrey. But perhaps I should have been a little bit more specific when I put in my request. Shopping at Key Food is one thing, but working there is a completely different story, with all the rude customers and sexual harassment I had to put up with from my pain-in-the-ass manager. Every day when I left that place, I felt like I needed a drink. Don’t get me wrong, I was grateful for the job in these troubled times, but how was I supposed to support a teenage boy on $320 a week in New York City?

Aubrey’s birthday was in two weeks, and the only thing he asked for was one of those new PlayStation 3 video game consoles, but those things cost $400, and that doesn’t include the games he wanted. How can a kid’s video game console cost more than what a parent makes in a week?

Oh, well, I guess the landlord’s wife isn’t gonna be shopping at Lord and Taylor on my money next week,
I thought. My son was going to get that gaming unit if I had to be late on my rent to get it. Just thinking about it made me depressed and ready to give up, but instead I decided to take my butt home to shower and go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.

“Whatchu need?” the young drug boys hollered, interrupting my thoughts. I was only two blocks from home.

Every day, for as long as I could remember, the drug boys had manned the corner of 109th and Guy Brewer Boulevard, selling almost any junkie’s drug of choice: weed, heroin, Ecstasy, and my personal favorite, crack cocaine. Back when I was smoking crack, they were like my own personal Walgreen’s pharmacy, open twenty-four hours a day for my convenience. Thank God, those days were long behind me, but even so, that still didn’t stop the drug boys from asking me that same question.

“Whatchu need, Ma?” Reggie, a dealer in his late twenties, asked as he ran up to me. I used to cop from him, and I’m sure he missed me as a customer, for various reasons. When he was close enough, he opened his hands to reveal two nickel bags of crack. “I got a two-for-one special just for you, Ma. Guaranteed to solve all your problems.” He smiled, showing me a mouth full of gold teeth.

“Fool, now you know got-damn well I don’t fuck with that shit no more,” I replied, and kept walking toward my building.

“You may be clean now, Ma,” he shouted out behind me, “but it’s all just a matter of time. Sooner or later you gonna need to get that monkey off your back. But don’t worry. I’ll be right here waiting for you with your only real friend.”

The scary thing about what Reggie had just said was that I had considered getting that monkey off my back. I thought about it every day, but as a recovering addict, I had to constantly fight through that temptation. For two years, I’d been winning the battle over crack cocaine and the Reggies of the world, but the war, the war over my sobriety, continued daily.

Once I reached the stoop, I reached in my bag and dug out the key that unlocked the security door. I entered the building and headed straight for the elevator, though I don’t know why. I guess I hoped that today it would actually be working, but that same tired
out of service
sign was still taped to the doors.

“Thank goodness I didn’t take the apartment on the seventh floor,” I said to myself as I finished off the last of three flights of steps. As I headed down the hall, now immune to the odor that was a combination of piss and shit, I noticed an envelope taped to my door. Immediately, my heart dropped.

“Dammit, what’s cut off now?” I asked myself. My rent wasn’t due until next week, so that wasn’t it. I paid my electric bill with my check on Friday, so what the hell could it be? The gas, maybe, or the cable? Damn, I bet they shut my cable off. Oh, God, Aubrey would kill me.

As I continued my slow steps toward the door, my brain raced to figure out what bill I had neglected to pay. The more steps I took, the farther away the door seemed to be and the more labored my breathing became. Three flights of stairs always had me breathing heavy, but the anxiety I was feeling had me about ready to pass out. Nonetheless, I finally made it to the door, where I removed the envelope that had my name handwritten across it.

Entering my apartment, I locked the door behind me, went straight to my bedroom without even saying hello to Aubrey, and sat down on my bed with the envelope in hand. I held it, still trying to guess what could be inside before actually opening it.

When I gathered my nerve and slid out the paper contained inside, I was surprised to see that it was a handwritten note on paper with First Lady Charlene Wilson’s letterhead on it. This confused me, because she had been dead for a while now. How could this letter have gotten here, and who was using her stationery? I wondered. As I kicked off my shoes, I began reading it aloud:

At that point, the letter really had my attention. Even with the envelope open and the letter in my hand, I was more curious now than when it was sealed, taped to my door. I got into a comfortable position on the bed as I continued to read:

I placed the letter down on the nightstand next to my bed, almost afraid to look at it again. I stared off into space, actually wondering for a moment if I was dreaming or awake. I pinched myself, and the pain that shot through my arm told me I was indeed awake. Suddenly, I had so many questions. Was the note real? And if it was, who had left it on my door? Was it one of his kids, or was it T.K. himself? I went to Charlene’s funeral and watched them put her casket in the ground, so she obviously didn’t leave this envelope on my door.

The bigger question, of course, was, Who had written the letter? Had Charlene, before her death, really given me her blessing to be with T.K.? I guess it was possible, but if so, why? And even more importantly, was I going to act on her request? I closed my eyes and buried my face into the palms of my hands.

I’d been in love with Thomas Kelly—T.K., as they called him now—since I was sixteen years old. He was the captain of the football and basketball teams, and I was the head cheerleader when we were in high school in Richmond, Virginia. I let him take my virginity the last day of my sophomore year, and I never regretted it once. He had always treated me with respect. We both attended Virginia State University, and he even asked me to marry him during our freshman year.

I messed that all up a few days after school let out for summer break, when some guys from New York introduced me to crack cocaine, or as we in the South called it back then, cook-'em-up. Hell, they were giving it away back when it first came out, just to get you hooked.

Thomas Kelly tried to warn me about messing with that stuff from the start, but I didn’t listen, and he didn’t press the issue because I had him under control. The power of pussy is a dangerous thing when it comes to men, young and old, and Thomas Kelly was no different from the rest. The last thing he wanted was for me to cut him off from the poontang.

Nobody knew how cook-'em-up really was back then, so I was oblivious to the danger I was putting myself in, until it was too late for both me and Thomas Kelly. I tricked him into smoking some crack about two weeks after I started. We’d gone to a cheap motel on Jeff Davis Highway that night, like we always did on Friday nights. I’d already smoked up my check from working at Church’s Fried Chicken before we got there. I wanted some more of that rock so bad that I flat out refused to have sex with him unless he gave me twenty dollars to buy some more. Well, he was a horny nineteen-year-old boy, so you know he gave me what I wanted. By the time we got back to the room, I’d promised to give him his first blow job if he’d try smoking with me. Well, to make a long story short, we ended up smoking up his check from Home Depot by the end of that night.

Within six months, everyone on our side of town referred to us as “Mr. and Mrs. Crackhead.” The community joke about us was, “The couple that smokes together stays together.” And I guess they were right to an extent because we were crackheads, and we did smoke together. What most people didn’t understand was that despite our addiction and the foul shit we did to our bodies, we still really loved each other.

Unfortunately, that love we shared wasn’t strong enough to overcome the love I had for crack. At some point, Thomas Kelly found God and cleaned himself up. When he asked me to get clean with him, I refused. He ended up moving to New York with his new mentor, a man named Reverend Jackson. He never knew that I was pregnant when he left me, and I never blamed him for going. It wasn’t until many years later, by the strangest coincidence you could ever imagine, that Thomas Kelly and I reconnected. I had moved to New York but was still too strung out on crack to go looking for him, even if I had wanted to. Anyway, by that time he had his church, a son and a daughter, and his wife, Charlene. Our paths probably never would have crossed if it weren’t for Tanisha.

Thomas Kelly didn’t know it at the time, but Tanisha, the woman his son Dante was about to marry, was his child, the daughter I gave birth to after he had cleaned himself up and left Virginia. Now, you know all hell broke loose when the truth was revealed at Dante and Tanisha’s wedding, but it’s not really as bad as it sounds. It turned out that Charlene was already pregnant when she met Thomas Kelly, so he was not Dante’s biological father. Things were crazy for a while until all the facts were pieced together, but Dante and Tanisha were eventually married, and I became a part of the bishop’s extended family. After some initial strained feelings, they accepted me into their family and even helped me finally get clean, but I had no idea that Charlene had felt the way this letter said she did.

I glanced at the letter one more time, then reached for my phone, dialing my daughter’s cell number. Tanisha and I never really had a mother/daughter relationship, mostly because my addiction made me incapable of properly mothering her. By the time she was able to take care of herself, Tanisha was trying to be the mother to me. She was a good kid and made a lot of sacrifices for me over the years. I was so happy she’d found happiness with Dante.

“Hey, Momma, whatchu doing?”

“Nothing. Um, just wanted to ask you something.” I picked up a cigarette and lit it.

“What, Momma? Everything all right? Is Aubrey okay?” That girl sure knew how to worry. She must have got that trait from her father.