The Yada Yada Prayer Group Gets Real (36 page)

“Cool,” Denny said—which struck me so funny, I started to laugh. The pent-up emotions of that day suddenly erupted like a Texas oil well, and I leaned against Denny's shirt to stifle my torrent of wet giggles, pointing silently upward at the ceiling, not wanting Stu to hear my hysterical laughter. Denny circled me with his arms till I'd calmed down and wiped my eyes on his T-shirt, leaving black mascara smudges. “You did good, Jodi,” he murmured into my hair. “Go back upstairs. I can handle the Alamo down here all by myself.”

FLORIDA HAD PUT TOGETHER a taco salad from Stu's pantry and refrigerator, and Carla kept us entertained with her new repertoire of vampire jokes. Carla: “What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire?” Three ignorant adults: “We dunno.” Carla: “Frostbite!” Laughter punctured the tension, and supper almost felt like a party.

Later, while Florida and I cleaned up the kitchen, we could hear Stu reading Shel Silverstein's
Where the
Sidewalk Ends
to Carla in the front room with much giggling at the silly poems. “Maybe I overreacted,” I murmured, loading the dishwasher while Florida tackled the dirty pots in the sink. “Stu seems okay.”

“Nah.What you told me 'bout how she was actin' this morning? She shouldn't be alone. We're okay, Carla and me. Don't have church clothes with us for tomorrow, but I did grab some clean underwear.” She smirked.

Stu appeared in the kitchen doorway just as we gave the counters a last swipe. “Carla's asleep. I put her in the spare bedroom. Hope that's okay.”

“Good,” Florida said. “Now we're goin' to talk.” She steered Stu toward the living room. To my surprise, Stu didn't resist but curled up in one of her wicker basket-chairs while Florida and I took the futon. The fading daylight outside the front windows filled the corners of the room with shadows, leaving the three of us in a small pool of lamplight.

“You carried this too long by yourself, girl,” Florida prodded. “Get it off your chest.We're listening. An' God already knows about it; no surprise to Him.”

The hours of just hanging out, giggling at dumb jokes over taco salad, and putting Carla to bed seemed to give Stu the needed strength to bring the dreaded memories into the light. It was a common story, yet strangely peculiar coming out of Stu's mouth. All my stereotypes of “Ms. Perfect” crumbled as she spoke, and in their place was a wounded, vulnerable woman, opening her soul and letting it bleed.

She'd been dating the guy for several months, some-one she met through a friend. Said she didn't know for sure what had happened that night—they'd gone to a singles' nightclub, had some drinks, woke up the next morning in her apartment—until she skipped a couple of periods and the home pregnancy kit tested positive. When she told the boyfriend she was pregnant, “He just disappeared,” Stu said, her forlorn features betraying the sense of abandonment. “I couldn't prove I'd been date raped, couldn't face telling my family, couldn't bear raising a child alone. I'd seen too many single moms trapped, struggling, ending up on welfare. And I . . . I was embarrassed. I was thirty-two, for heaven's sake! I've got a master's degree! How could I let this happen to me? I'm smart, I'm educated, I'm supposed to be helping people who make dumb mistakes!” Stu's eyes glittered for a brief moment, and then her shoulders slumped. “So I . . . I told myself I had no choice. But I cried for days. Everyone wondered what was wrong. To cope, I . . . I shut every-body who knew me out of my life. Distanced myself from my family, stopped going to St. John's, quit my DCFS job, took a real-estate course, moved, started a new life. Put it out of my mind. Proved to myself I could survive one mistake and start over. But . . .”

She picked at a loose thread, lost in her thoughts. Florida and I exchanged glances but said nothing. Stu looked up. “Then I heard about the Chicago Women's Conference last May. I was so
hungry
for something—I didn't even know what.” A wry smile twisted the corners of her mouth. “Ended up in this crazy group of women. The Yada Yada Prayer Group! Don't know why I stayed. You were all so . . . so . . .”

“Weird,” Florida finished. “Uh-huh. Thought the same about you.” I stifled a giggle, but Florida plunged right on. “It was God who called us into this here prayer group and gave us that name, Yada Yada, even when we didn't know it had all sorts of God-fearin' meanings. Called each one of us by name too—Jodi, here, been helpin' us with that. Called you, Stu. Called you by name and said, ‘I'm puttin' that Leslie Stuart in Yada Yada, 'cause they need her. An' she needs them.' ”

Florida's hopeful words raised goose bumps on my arms, but Stu began shaking her head, and the tears welled up again. “No . . . no . . . I ruined it! Ruined my name. ‘Caretaker,' Jodi said . . . but I didn't . . . I didn't . . .” Stu rolled herself up into a ball and gulped air between sobs. “I didn't take care of my baby!”

Florida shot off the futon and pulled Stu's flaxen head against her small chest. “Jesus!
Jesus!
” Her own brown face was wet with tears. “Now we
know
Your blood done already covered this terrible pain in Stu's life. You came to take the sin and the pain and cover it with Your own. An' Jesus, we know You've got that baby in Your hand right now. You've called that baby by name too. He . . .”

Florida stopped. “Stu. Did you name that baby?”

Stu shook her head between Florida's strong hands. “No. I . . . told myself it was just a blob of tissue—you know, so I could go through with it.”

“Stu, now you listen to me, girl. Somewhere in the Bible it says God
knows us
even before we was born, still inside our mama's womb. An' somewhere else God says, ‘I called you by name, you are Mine!' Hear that? Your baby belongs to God, and nothin' you did changes
that.
” Florida held Stu at arm's length, eye to eye. “So we goin' to name this baby, an' give him back to God, where he's already safe and waitin' for you when you get to heaven. What name you want?”

Stu shook her head, bewildered. “I don't know.” She looked at me, pleading. “Jodi, you're good at this naming business. You pick a name. For a boy. I just know in my heart it was a boy.” The tears kept running—her nose too—and I handed her another wad of tissues. But a light had come into her eyes.

My mind scrambled.What did I remember about the meaning of boys' names? Biblical names.
Isaac?
No, that meant “laughter.” Not so good.
Jacob? Matthew? David?

Yes.

I knelt down beside Stu and took her hands, which were busy wadding the damp pile of tissues. They stilled under my touch. The moment felt sacred, and I could hardly find my voice. But I whispered, “His name is David. It means . . . ‘Beloved.' ”

35

T
he three of us cried a lot and talked until late. Then we tucked Stu into her bed and fell out ourselves—Florida in the double bed with Carla, and me on the futon with an afghan. In the middle of the night, I woke up confused and sweating. I felt overwhelmed by loss. Someone had died! But who?

Oh God.
Stu's baby. David. David Stuart.

And . . .
Jamal Wilkins.

I struggled upright under the afghan, which had knotted itself around my body, pulled my knees up to my forehead, and wept. I wanted Denny—needed Denny to hold me. Yet Denny was downstairs, out cold and oblivious, no doubt. God was here, though . . .

God is gracious.
That was the meaning of my name.
God is gracious . . . God is gracious.
“My grace is sufficient,” Jesus said. Did I believe that? I laid back down on Stu's futon and imagined crawling up in God's lap, a lap already cradling a baby named David and a teenager named Jamal. And Stu. And Florida and Carla. All on God's lap. And God had His arms around us all.

I DIDN'T THINK STU would be up for going to church the next morning, but Florida just said to her, “We're goin'.”We let her take
one
antidepressant, and I took the bottle with me as I hustled downstairs to take a quick shower and change out of my sweats—and discovered José eating breakfast cereal with Denny and Josh. I blinked and counted noses. The shower was running in the bathroom—Amanda, no doubt, unless there were more gremlins hiding in the woodwork I didn't know about.

“Good morning,
Señora
Baxter,” José said politely. I burbled something I hoped sounded like “Hi,” but I was so startled, I probably sounded like I was gagging. I shot Denny a look that said,
“What's the meaning of this?”

Denny chewed placidly. “Gotta drop José at the el on the way to church. You play drums at Iglesia this morn-ing, José, right?”

José nodded and poured another bowl of cereal.
“Sí.”

Florida and Carla rode with Stu in her Celica, and I rejoined my family, feeling as if I couldn't be gone twenty minutes, much less twenty hours, without
something
going amiss. “Thought you said you had the Alamo covered,” I hissed at Denny as we trailed Josh and Amanda up the stairs at Uptown.

“I did.” Denny leveled his eyebrows at me. “Gotta trust me, Jodi.Tell you about it later.” His tone also said,
“Don't push me.”

I pressed my lips into a firm line, but they fell open when we reached the second-floor meeting room—and there was Peter Douglass, urbane and handsome as ever, sitting by himself on the far side, halfway back. My head swiveled. Avis was huddled with Pastor Clark; she must be worship leader today. Florida and Stu, who had arrived before we did, saw me staring at Peter and grinned. Florida pumped her fist surreptitiously.
Yes!

Denny immediately headed over to Peter Douglass, and the two men spoke and nodded, as if agreeing to talk more after service. When Denny came back, we sat behind Florida and Stu, and I noticed Stu dabbing at her eyes throughout the entire service. But I also noticed that when we sang the Israel Houghton song,
“We worship You, for who You are . . . You are good! All the
time! All the time, You are good!”
Stu lifted her hands and her face upward—the first time I'd ever seen her worship like that.

Now I was the one who needed the tissues.

“YOU FIRST,” I TOLD Denny, wrapping my hands around a double decaf cappucino at the Heartland Café while we waited for our nachos grandes. Denny sipped the head off an iced mug of beer—the first beer I'd seen him drink in months.

I'd been so exhausted after church that I took a long nap. Denny had finally shaken me awake at five o'clock. “Jodi! You'll be up all night if you don't get up. C'mon. We're going out. You and me. Oh—Avis called. I said you'd call her back.
Later.
”

Yeah, I bet she did. She'd caught me after church and said,
“Stu's pretty weepy.What's going on? My caller ID
showed you called yesterday.”

“Uh-huh, big stuff. You can either ask her or I can fill
you in. But”—I jutted my chin in Peter's direction, who'd
been cornered again by Denny, and grinned wickedly—
“only if you fill me in, sister.”

Now I looked at Denny across the “naturally stressed” wooden table of the Heartland's sidewalk café, still enclosed till the weather warmed up a bit more. I was curious, but the steam I'd felt when I'd first seen José at our breakfast table had dissipated.
“You gotta trust me,”
Denny had said.
And Me,
the Holy Spirit had echoed in my spirit. Hadn't God been at work all weekend on the second floor? Had to spill down to the first floor of our house too.

“Okay, me first.” Denny shrugged. “I took Amanda and José grocery shopping, like you said. At the fruit market the kids threw a couple of cans of salsa verde, some cornmeal, and a package of corn husks into the cart, and José promised to show us how to make authentic Mexican chicken tamales.”

“You're kidding. Amanda helped cook?”

“Uh, well, she found the salt and stuck the corn husks in some warm water to soften.” He grinned. “Wasn't exactly the cooking breakthrough we've been hoping for. But José knew what he was doing.”

“Amazing,” I murmured. “José can cook.”

“I think he's had to do a lot of things as the oldest of the Enriquez brood.Working mom, blue-collar dad who's gone a lot driving trucks—you know. But José and I had a good talk; he kinda opened up. Amanda, bless her, pulled back and just let José and me talk. I was kinda surprised—ah! Here's the nachos.”

A blue-jean clad waiter put a huge plate of corn chips covered with beans and melted jack cheese on the table between us. Lettuce, tomatoes, salsa, and sour cream toppings made the plate look like an ad for the Rocky Mountains.We each pulled out a crisp corn chip loaded with stringy cheese and spicy beans. “So what else?” I mumbled between crunchy bites.