Something Old, Something New
The beaming Lily was escorted down the aisle by Davis on one side and Devon on the other. Both of them looked handsome and very serious as they left her at the kiva stage and silently stepped back.
Reverend Paula, draped in beautiful red and gold vestments, began the ceremony, and when the time came for the vows, Trent’s softly spoken words, “Share my life and I will love you until time is no more,” made tears flow not only from Lily’s eyes but from the eyes of women all over the kiva.
She responded with, “You are my sun, my nurturing rain, my life. I will love you always.”
Reverend Paula asked for the rings. Amari, Trent’s best man, passed his ring to him. The gorgeous sapphire that he gently pushed onto her finger was so beautiful, Lily’s knees wobbled. The matron of honor, Bernadine, handed Lily the groom’s ring, Lily pushed the diamond-accented gold band onto Trent’s finger, and the ceremony continued.
When it was done, Paula spread her arms wide and called, “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Mr. and Mrs. Trenton July.”
Applause shattered the air on the heels of her words, and cheering greeted the kiss the newlyweds shared. The drummers began pounding their instruments and a happy Lily locked hands with an equally happy Trent and headed down the aisle.
The reception took place at the Dog, but before the festivities began, Lily looked out over the crowd until she spied the smiling Judge Davis and beckoned her to the front of the room. Judge Davis waited until the crowd quieted, then said, “Devon Watkins, will you join me up here, please?”
Confusion on his face, Devon did as the judge asked, then stood beside her as he and everyone else wondered what this was about. As soon as she began to speak, Amari smiled. The words were very familiar to him because they were the same ones she’d spoken the day he’d been officially adopted, and now Devon was going to be official, too. It took Devon a few moments to understand what was happening, but once he did, and Judge Amy declared that from that day forward his name would be Devon July, he went crazy, and so did the guests.
Lily leaned down and gave him a big hug. “We can’t have an official family if everyone isn’t official, so is this okay with you?”
Over the pounding of the drums and the low-toned chants and high-voiced calls of the singers, he nodded happily. “Yes! Thank you, Mom and Dad! Thank you.”
After that, the party began in earnest. Toasts were proposed, the first dance taken, and when Trent and Lily sat down, Amari stood on a chair and yelled over the din, “May I have your attention, please!”
Trent and Lily shared a look. Neither of them knew what this meant.
Once everyone quieted, he announced, “Preston and I, with the help of Tamar and my OG, prepared this special presentation. Please turn your attention to the big screen.”
Suddenly, Lily’s seventeen-year-old face from the high school yearbook came on the screen, and she screamed with surprise. Next came Trent’s. The crowd went nuts again. To his delight, Amari and his coconspirators had somehow transferred the images from Tamar’s old video camera to the screen. There was Lily, blazing her way around the track, and Gary and Trent, wearing their basketball uniforms, flexing their muscles, and mugging for the camera. Lily started crying again as picture after picture slowly flashed by. Getting up, she embarrassed Amari totally by giving him a big thank-you kiss, then did the same to Preston.
The food was set out, folks lined up, and Lily was so touched and happy after all she’d seen and done that she couldn’t stop crying.
At midnight, Nathan came and whisked them away to the airport. Davis would be flying home Sunday morning, and Mal would be staying with the boys at Trent’s house until they returned. Lily and Trent didn’t find out where they were going until Bernadine’s jet was in the air.
Pilot Katie Sky said over the speakers, “Lily, Ms. Brown left you an envelope in the galley.”
Lily retrieved the envelope. With Trent beside her, she looked inside and found a photo of Tina Craig’s sprawling patio. The sticky note attached read: Lily. You and your hunk will have the place all to yourselves for a week. My staff will take care of everything. Enjoy being in love—Tina and Bernadine.
Trent pulled her onto his lap and held her as the happy tears flowed once again. “You planning on crying all week?” he asked affectionately.
“I just might. Who would’ve ever thought we’d end up together again?”
“I certainly didn’t, but I’m glad we did. Have I told you I love you today?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe you should tell me again.”
“How about I show you?”
Seven o’clock Monday morning, when Bernadine pulled into the Power Plant, she was surprised to find Preston out front. “Hey, Brain. What brings you by so early?”
“Need to talk to you about something.”
“What is it? That was a real nice photo show you and Amari put together, by the way.”
“Thanks. It was fun.” He handed her what appeared to be a printout of an e-mail message. “Can you read this, please, and tell me what you think I should do?”
Bernadine read the words, and when she was finished, she looked at him with surprise. “She says she’s your grandmother and wants to get in touch.”
“I know. What should I do?”
“She included her phone number. Do you want me to call her?”
“Would you?”
“Okay. Come by after school, and I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Thanks, Ms. Bernadine.”
“You’re welcome.”
Preston left her to walk over to the school, and Bernadine went inside. She set her purse down, opened her phone, and punched in the number from the e-mail. When the call went through, she said to the woman who answered, “Mrs. Crenshaw. My name’s Bernadine Brown. I’m calling you on behalf of Preston Mays. Do you have a moment to speak with me?”
Tamar was getting ready to go to the rec. Her brother and his clan had headed home sometime before dawn, so she pulled the curtains back to take a quick peek outside and make sure Olivia was still parked where she’d been left last night. What she saw widened her eyes and shot her temper through the roof. Olivia was in the same spot, but she’d been turned over and left upside down. She looked like a beetle on its back, and all her tires were gone. A bunch of tools lay on the ground beside her, including a jack. Steaming, Tamar ran outside to get a closer look and found a sticky note on the door that read: I know we called a truce, but I couldn’t resist. Your coyote brother.
Tamar opened her mouth and screamed, “THADDEUS!!”
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Book Club Questions
1. How did the title, Something Old, Something New, manifest itself in the story?
2. Besides Trent and Lily’s relationship, who else did the title represent?
3. Which character’s back story surprised you the most and why?
4. How best can Barrett contribute to Henry Adams?
5. Which scene(s) made you laugh? Which one(s) broke your heart?
6. If you were a resident of Henry Adams, which of the children would you most like to parent and why? Which one would you least like to raise?
7. Was Tamar’s anger at her brother justified? What about Marie’s at her mother and at Tamar?
8. Should Marie’s son have contacted her?
9. Talk about Trent’s role as father to Amari and Devon.
10. Should Devon have been made to paint the fence alone, per tradition?
11. Discuss tradition in your individual families.
12. What should Jack do about Rocky?
Author’s Note
Something Old, Something New marks our third visit to modern-day Henry Adams, Kansas. This installment is filled with humor, heartache, and a bit of mayhem in the form of the Oklahoma Julys. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writ
ing it. I especially enjoyed working in the traditional flute played by most Native cultures, which is more akin in form and fingering to the Western clarinet. The siyotanka, as the Lakota flute is known, played a prominent role in my first Henry Adams historical romance, Night Song, and I couldn’t resist resurrecting the concept for Trent and Lily.
Over the course of the series one of the main questions readers have been asking is: When will Zoey speak? That has now been answered and I’m looking forward to learning more about her multifaceted personality in the future.
As with the previous two books, Bring on the Blessings and A Second Helping, we leave Henry Adams with many still-unanswered questions. Will Leo and his company run roughshod over the rights of the farmers and lay their pipeline anyway? Is that e-mail really from Preston’s grandmother? Will Rocky ever give poor Jack the time of day? And what about Riley—will he have to act as his own lawyer at the upcoming trial in order to save Cletus’s bacon? In the words of the great Rocket J. Squirrel: Stay tuned, girls and boys.
Once again, I want to say thanks to all the foster parents and adoptive parents who’ve e-mailed me their stories, forwarded me pictures of their kids, and sent me blessings for writing a series that has touched their hearts. You’ve touched mine also with your commitment and love. Keep doing what you’re doing.
According to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 424,000 children were in state-run foster-care homes or facilities in 2009, and of that number, 57,000 were adopted. In many ways that’s great, because in 2002, there were 520,000 children in foster care and 51,000 were adopted. However, you don’t need a degree in math to figure out that if 57,000 were adopted in 2009, more than 360,000 are still waiting for a permanent home. Many of these children will age out of foster care on their eighteenth birthday and be forced to deal with a world that often lacks the support system they’ll need to succeed. And yes, there are wonderful stories of children who have the smarts, drive, and tenacity to surpass even their wildest dreams, but unfortunately these stories seem few and far between.
As I noted in Bring on the Blessings, most of the children in the foster-care system are children of color, and the hardest to place are groups of siblings, children with special needs, and teens. My son was five when we adopted him. He’d been taken out of his home at the age of three because of abuse that left him hospitalized and encased in a body cast to heal his broken ribs and limbs. Although his maternal grandmother wanted custody, she was denied by the courts and he went into the system. But in social worker speak, he’s called a survivor—a child who has come through the fire relatively whole.
When he came to live with us, he had issues. He had a very limited vocabulary for a child of five, had never gone out for dinner as far as we knew (not even to McDonald’s), and had become accustomed to sleeping on a bare mattress due to bed-wetting problems. In those first few months, he wore us out. I have two younger brothers, so I was well aware of how much wild energy boys can have, but this little guy must have been drinking jet fuel after we put him to bed at night, because he got up every morning turbocharged. It made me tired just watching him. It was like having a curious wolf cub in your home: lots of zooming around and lots of destruction, from the antennae on my then twelve-year-old daughter’s boom box to the odometer on my hubby’s exercise bike. Nothing was safe, and it wasn’t because he was destructive. It was because he wanted to touch everything in his brave new world, and sometimes knobs that look like they should turn and other things that look like they should bend don’t. My daughter wanted to bury him in the backyard every day.
But we survived, as families tend to whether the children are biological or not. Although he was age ready for school, the rest of him wasn’t; too much jet fuel for a classroom. When he did start kindergarten a year later, my husband and I tag teamed. Three days out of the week, I was in the classroom; the other two days, my husband was. Nothing like watching a labor consultant dressed in a suit playing in a sandbox with kindergarteners.
We got it done, however, and by the time our son started high school, the little wooden boy who came to us with a vocabulary that was limited to the word motorcycle and the phrase gotta use it had transformed himself into the Fresh Prince of our small, semirural town.
He was sixteen when cancer took my husband, his dad. His life was shattered, and during the eight years since, he’s performed more stupid kid tricks than a mother can shake a stick at. For a while, I was the one wanting to bury him in the backyard on a daily basis.
Do I regret adopting him? Not in the least. His grief at losing his dad had nothing to do with being adopted and everything to do with love and how lost he felt when his guiding star dimmed. Getting him through senior year and beyond turned into such an adventure that my daughter suggested I write a book about him titled You Did What?!
I’m sharing his story to say parenting is parenting, no matter where your children originate. Biological kids have been known to give their parents fits, too, so don’t let the fact that a child may have issues deter you from opening your home and heart.
In traveling over the last two years to promote this series, I’ve cried a lot. Upon hearing stories from adoptive parents, foster parents, and adopted children about how much the Blessings series has hit home, or how much the Henry Adams kids remind them of the children they are raising, or the joy the entire family experiences reading the series, crying was all I had.
The folks in Henry Adams have readers and book clubs all over America talking about adoption, fostering, and volunteering, and I hope the discussions lead to some positive action on behalf of those 360,000 left behind. However, if only one person steps up, it gives one more child a shot at a life most of us take for granted. So if you can help, do so. The rigid rules that used to apply as to who can be an adoptive parent and who can’t are finally changing as society realizes that only two questions are truly paramount: Will you love this child? Can you provide for this child? If the answers are yes, all that’s left is the shouting.
So if this series has touched you enough to consider helping out a child in need, then my job here is done. Take it from me, you will be blessed.
Until next time,
B
About the Author
BEVERLY JENKINS grew up in Detroit and majored in journalism and English literature at Michigan State University. She has been featured in many national publications, including the Wall Street Journal, People, Dallas Morning News, and Vibe.
www.BeverlyJenkins.net
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Also by Beverly Jenkins
A Second Helping
Bring on the Blessings
Deadly Sexy
Sexy/Dangerous
Black Lace
Edge of Dawn
Edge of Midnight
Midnight
Captured
Jewel
Wild Sweet Love
Winds of a Storm
Something Like Love
A Chance at Love
Before Dawn
Always and Forever
Taming Jessi Rose
Topaz
Indigo
Vivid
Through the Storm
Night Song
Credits
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover illustration © Mandy Pritty
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW. Copyright © 2011 by Beverly Jenkins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, trans
mitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © June 2011 ISBN: 9780062092144
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jenkins, Beverly, 1951–
Something old, something new : a blessings novel / Beverly Jenkins.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-199079-3
1. African Americans—Fiction. 2. Weddings—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. City and town life—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3560.E4795S43 2010
813'.54—dc22
2010037385
11 12 13 14 15 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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