“What’s stopping you from suing?” I asked her.
“You know you rarely ever get as much as you ask for in these court cases,” she responded. “We would probably end up being awarded less than two million.”
“That’s still a million and change more than nothing,” I told her. “I would take it.”
Denise chuckled. She was wearing short gray one-piece pajamas and black socks with her slippers. She slid the slippers off and tossed her feet into my lap. “I’m just debating whether or not I want to go through with all of this. I mean, we’re talking about a major change in Walter’s life here.”
“Yeah, a change that could set him up for life,” I responded, rubbing her soft feet. I didn’t see what the problem was. From what I had been told, she had a definite case against the school.
“Do you realize how much of a big deal this would be if I go through with it? We’re talking about a lot of media attention.”
I thought about that and nodded my head again. “Yeah, you’re right. Good-bye private life.” That changed the entire thing for me. How, indeed, would everything come together? Would I be pushed aside as an outsider again? What role would I play?
“Or, I could settle this out of court with the school for a lot less money, but without all of the extra drama involved,” Denise added.
I couldn’t think about my selfish insecurities, I had to think about the greater good of the case. “Then again, Denise, this could set a precedent for all of the other black kids in America who are stereotyped as troublemakers. The school systems from coast to coast would be forced to watch how they treat black children from now on.”
“Yeah, and it could also give them another excuse to be afraid of enrolling us. Then the media would come in and dissect my life and my family, and start talking about the shoplifting incident Walter was involved in last year, and me having two sons from two fathers and never being married, and then get into my sister’s life, and I just—” She stopped and shook her head, exhausted from thinking about all of the intangibles involved.
The case was a lot more difficult than it seemed, and it appeared that Denise had already considered things from every angle.
She started to chuckle and said, “On the other hand, I’ve been trying to think of it as a payback for all of the shit I’ve had to go through as a single mother. Maybe if we had enough cases like this one, we could share the money between single black mothers all over the country. But that’s just the ghetto girl in me taking over. Nobody owes us anything; nobody but these sad fathers.”
I thought about commenting on that, but I quickly decided to leave it alone. Instead I asked, “Have you thought about the reaction from the women in your Single Mothers’ Organization?”
“Mmm hmm,” she mumbled, stretching out in my lap. “We would probably end up sharing every dime with them. They already look at me and my sons as a Cinderella story. Winning a multimillion-dollar court case is all they need. This would just give them more of a reason to hate me. And it would give my little sister a million more reasons to call me up for money.”
I shook my head and grinned while rubbing her back and shoulders. “It sounds like you’re between a rock and a hard place,” I told her.
“Tell me about it. That’s why I had to have your company tonight. I can’t even sleep over this thing,” she responded. “And the thing is, the average mother wouldn’t think twice about it. They would just take the money and deal with whatever. But I mean, it’s not as if we’re poor anymore, you know. So it’s just not that simple for me to decide.”
I decided to look at it from a totally different angle. “Okay, Denise, let’s say for a minute that you were married to the father of both of your sons. Would this decision be as hard for you to make then?”
She sighed and said, “Brock, there’s no sense in even answering that question. I mean, the reality is that I’m not a married woman with one father for both of my sons.”
“But what I’m trying to get at is to have you think about what the main issue is here. I mean, are you ashamed of who you are, and you don’t want everybody to know? Because if you are, then that’s an honest fear, and I just want you to be able to face up to that.”
Instead of answering my question, Denise readjusted herself in my lap and leaned up to kiss me. The kiss was as if it were the last of a lifetime. It was very passionate and meaningful, as if I would be going over to war in the Persian Gulf tomorrow.
I looked into her eyes and asked, “What was all of that for?”
She ran her fingers to the back of my neck and answered, “For your company.”
I could tell that she didn’t want to talk anymore. She would have plenty of nights to think about the incident with her son and what to do about it. But for that night, and for that moment, she simply wanted an understanding man. So I fell into Denise’s arms and kissed her back, holding her like a newborn baby, until her passion became too strong to deny.
She whispered, “I don’t want to use you,” as I slowly undid her nightclothes.
I said “You’re not. And I’m glad to be here for you, whenever you need me.”
“Just make sure that you protect us,” she reminded me with a grin and a peck on my lips.
“Always,” I told her.
Then we went on to make slow and quiet love on the family room floor, conscious of being subtle enough not to wake her sleeping sons.
I got back in after five in the morning and thought long and hard about being Denise’s lifetime partner. The passion we shared that evening was definitely too much for me to bear. It was like a curse, pulling me back into sickness again.
“Shit!” I mumbled to myself. “What happened to taking things slowly and thinking things through?”
I tried to laugh it off, knowing that I wouldn’t sleep again without envisioning myself at Denise’s side in a full family setting. That night we spent together was a curse indeed; a curse of how sweet it could be. True companionship.
Fathers and Sons
E’LL be back around seven tomorrow evening,” I told Beverly at the front door. It was a sunny Saturday morning, and I was taking my son with me to Barrington, Illinois, for a short stay with my parents to let him realize what he was connected to.
“It’s no rush. Take your time,” Beverly responded to me. It was her idea that Walter and I make the trip alone for father-and-son bonding, as if we were going fishing.
I smiled and said, “Actually, I wanted to get back home in time to devour more of that splendid cooking of yours. You have my mother beat by a mile. You’ve spoiled me.”
She asked, “Your mother’s going to cook?”
I laughed. “Yeah, I wish that she wouldn’t, but you know how she likes to show off sometimes.”
My wife smiled back at me and said, “I’ll see what I can do then.”
Walter was already heading toward the garage with his bags in hand for the car. His hands had healed enough not to need any new bandages. That was a good thing, because my parents would have flipped if my son still had his hands wrapped during our visit. They would have had a thousand more questions for me, on top of the thousand that I already knew they would ask.
“Bye, Walter. Have a nice time,” Beverly told him.
“I hope so,” he whined. Unfortunately, I don’t think he looked forward to seeing my parents again. We had visited only twice before, once when he was five, and again when he was nine. Both times were torture for him. My parents didn’t have the kind of house that young and curious visitors would enjoy. They had a “don’t-touch house” of expensive furniture, sculpture, paintings, and knickknacks of memorabilia on every counter- and tabletop. It was a kid’s nightmare. I didn’t like spending too much time at my parents’ house myself. I remember counting down the days before I was finally off for college.
However, since Walter was older, I didn’t think it would be as bad on him. I was hoping that he would begin to assess the extent of the wealth that he was surrounde
d by, and be inspired to feel more connected to it.
When Walter and I started out on our one-hour journey to Barrington, I let him listen to the cassette tape he had brought along with him. He seemed hesitant to play every song. He kept fast-forwarding and rewinding.
I said, “You know, if you’re only interested in a few songs, then you need to buy singles instead of the entire tape. Because you’re only going to break my stereo system with all of this back-and-forth button pressing.”
“Oh, my bad,” he told me. He ejected his tape and decided to listen to the radio instead.
“You can play your tape, Walter. I just don’t want you skipping past everything.”
He was still hesitant. “No, we can listen to the radio,” he responded. I had it on WGCI just for him. WGCI was one of the young, urban contemporary stations. Nevertheless, I could not help wondering whether my son wanted me to hear the kind of music he listened to. I was hoping it wasn’t full of profanity and degradation to women. But if it was, I knew that he wasn’t playing it around his mother. I knew Denise would not allow that. However, I didn’t want to start off on such an authoritarian foot with him, so I decided to let it slide until we made our way back to Chicago that Sunday afternoon. Then I planned to bring the subject up again.
“So, you say that things have pretty much been back to normal at school?” I asked him.
“Yeah, once I got my bandages off. At first, everybody was just staring at me.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I can imagine. How’s your writing going?”
He exercised the fingers on his right hand. “Oh, I can write now. It was hurting when I first tried on Monday. But it’s all right now.”
“Did you miss much homework?”
“No.”
“So, you’ll still be able to get straight A’s then?” I asked him with a smile. It was no harm in aiming for the moon. I already knew that my son was capable of getting straight A’s.
“So far I can,” he answered.
“Are you going to try out for any sports teams this year?” I figured that basketball would have been a natural choice for him, since Walter looked up to his older brother so much. Yet, my son was much shorter than his brother was at the same age, and Walter had never participated in team sports. I wondered how much genetics had to do with that. I wasn’t much of a sports fanatic as a kid myself. At five foot nine, I was a lot shorter than Jimmy’s father.
“I might try out for track this year,” my son told me.
At that point, I came right out and asked him, “What about basketball?” I figured he could at least play point guard if he made it close to six foot. Since Denise was tall herself, with a father who was well over six foot, there was a strong possibility of my son getting a growth spurt. My father, on the other hand, was only an inch taller than I was.
Walter hunched his shoulders. “I’m not that good at it,” he said.
My son’s simple answer caused me to frown. I couldn’t imagine such a confident kid taking such an easy way out. “Are you saying that in comparison to your brother? Because you shouldn’t judge yourself up against him. He’s been playing basketball a lot longer than you have.”
“I know, but I’m just not good at it. I mean, I tried it and all.”
I asked, “Well, what are you good at?”
“Schoolwork.”
I smiled. I liked that answer, but it didn’t appear that Walter felt as proud as I did about it. He said it like a grudge.
“Do you wish that you were good in basketball?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Yeah. I wish I was good in football, too. But my mom wouldn’t let me play that.”
With his small size, I could see where Denise would have some worries about him playing football, but not basketball.
“Have you tried out for track before?” I asked him.
“No.”
“So what makes you think you’ll like that?”
He hunched his shoulders again. “I don’t know. All you have to do is run.”
I laughed. “Son, I think it’s a lot more to it than that. You’re going to be running a whole lot of laps if you go out for the track team. They run at least three or four miles a day.”
“I can run a mile,” Walter stated. “I used to jog in the mornings with my brother. I could even keep up with him.”
I was tempted to say, “That’s because you were jogging,” but I left it alone. I think participating in sports would be good for Walter. At least it would keep him occupied from thinking about the streets. And I seriously doubted his school grades would suffer.
I said, “Yeah, well, maybe you should go out for the track team. What do you usually do with your free time?”
“Play computer games.”
I grinned at him. “Yeah, that figures,” I said. “All the time I spent outside riding my bike, your generation spends inside with joysticks in their hands.”
Walter smiled back at me. In my opinion, that computer game, joystick mentality definitely added to turning out plenty of antisocial kids. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that Walter should participate in some kind of school sport.
“Are you sure you want to go out for the track team?” I asked him again. “We can buy you the best track shoes out there.”
He looked at me and answered, “Yeah, I don’t care.”
I said, “All right then. I’ll talk to your mother about it when I take you back home tomorrow night.”
He yawned and said, “Okay.”
In the next five minutes, Walter was sound asleep with his seat leaned back. I looked over at him and thought about my son’s potential for the rest of the ride. With the right guidance, he could be anything he wanted to be, except for maybe a basketball or football player. Those two sports were overrated for black men anyway. There were so many other professions that young black men were ignoring. Maybe my son could even become a sports agent and represent his brother’s interest for a professional basketball team one day. Walter would definitely need a passion toward sports to do that.
Maybe he could even run for some type of political office. He had plenty of drive and opinions. With that profession in mind, however, he would need to clean up his social preference for being “a roughneck” and join debating teams. He could do that. Walter would make a very strong politician. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t want to bullshit the people like many politicians are forced to do. Maybe Walter could be a bank executive like his old man. He already understood the workings of capital gains, interest, and loans. Then again, maybe he could become an entrepreneur like his mother and grandfather. I didn’t like my job all that much anyway, and Walter seemed more ambitious than I was at his age, so maybe he would need to control his own destiny.
Walter’s potential was unlimited! I was excited just thinking about it. It turned an hour drive into what seemed more like twenty minutes. My son was far from being a street thug of any sort, he just needed me there to remind him of that.
I woke Walter up as we drove through the private property entrance and up to the familiar four-bedroom stone-built house of my upbringing. My parents were already sitting out on the front lawn, awaiting our arrival. They seemed eager to be meeting with my son again. The first visit was a shocker, and the second was spent just feeling the situation out. Of course, they asked to see him a lot more in between, but I didn’t feel the moral support from them at that time to continue bringing him. Maybe things had changed, and their hard-line attitudes had softened a bit. Especially after I had married Beverly and announced her recent pregnancy to them. Nevertheless, I had my own intentions anyway. After all, Walter wouldn’t be staying with my parents in Barrington, he would be staying with Beverly and me in a brand-new house of our own. I just wanted him to feel the power of my family’s wealth.
Walter woke up, stretched out, and immediately spotted the new live-in maid my parents had hired. She was a Dominican woman in her late thirties. She looked a lot younger though, and she was browner
than all of us; a deep, shiny brown with long black hair and matching black eyes in a cream-colored uniform and soft shoes.
“That’s the maid?” my son asked me, watching the attractive helper pour tea. When he was nine, my parents had a much older black woman who worked there at the house. They usually allowed the maids to return to their families on the weekends unless they were having company, which was the case with us.
I smiled, reading my son’s young mind. “She’s the new one,” I told him.
Judging from his gleeful expression, I don’t believe he was unhappy to be visiting any longer.
“Is she gonna tuck me in bed?” he asked me with a healthy laugh.
I shook my head and told him to calm down. I couldn’t help but smile at it. Walter had a normal boy’s attraction to the opposite sex, that’s for sure.
“Well, how are you?” my mother, Dolores Perry, greeted us with a hug. Her hair was turning a brighter gray by the year, yet my mother did not have one wrinkle on her smooth brown face. She was turning sixty-four in November. My father, Walter Perry Senior, at sixty-six, had already done most of the graying that he could do. I guess that came from all of his worries and anxieties. I hoped the same wouldn’t happen to me, but I figured it probably would.
My father stood up from the white lawn chairs and shook our hands with a nod. He was never the excitable type. He was the kind of successful man whom you had to prove everything to. At first, he even asked me to have a blood test on Walter, but I turned his ridiculous suggestion down. I knew that Walter was my son. My father even complained about Walter carrying on our name, but I ignored that as well. What was done was done.
“Well, we’re both healthy and well rested,” I told my parents, alluding to Walter’s nap inside the car.
My son looked at me and grinned.
“Are you sure that Beverly couldn’t have made it?” my mother asked me.
Beverly and I had just visited three weeks ago to announce the news of her pregnancy. It was obvious my mother was still apprehensive around my son. Maybe I should have visited with him more often, so that my parents could get used to seeing me with him. However, I had just recently increased my own activity with my son.