Shareef took a deep breath and figured as much. He may have been a grown man, but that didn’t excuse him from being called out for his bad decisions. A grown man needed correcting just as much as a young man when he was wrong, and Shareef was in no position to argue.
He mumbled, “Yeah, I know.”
His grandfather nodded to him. He said, “But knowing it and doing something about it are too different things. See, ’cause a man can know that he has cancer, and do nothing about it until it’s time for his deathbed.”
Shareef listened and silently nodded back to him. What else could he do?
“Well, I’m not trying to watch my grandson go to his deathbed before I tell him what changes he needs to make in his life,” his grandfather told him.
Shareef heard the word “changes” and reacted to it instinctively. He began to fidget and twist up his face as if the word hurt him as much as his left side did. He didn’t like to make changes unless he was the one deciding to make them.
His grandfather knew as much. You don’t raise a boy from his infancy to middle age without knowing what kind of a man he is. Shareef was a bull, a ram, a lion, and a grizzly bear, all rolled up into one. So his grandfather scrambled to be logical before he could raise up on his hind legs, charge forward, claw, and buck his grandfather off of him.
“Now Shareef, I’ve watched you make decisions on what you wanted to do for your entire life, and it’s been mostly a blessing for me. I liked seeing a young man take charge of himself.”
Charles Pickett raised his index finger and added, “Of course, your grandmother thought differently on a number of occasions, but I always managed to fight her off so you could be a man.” He said, “You know, because sometimes a woman can get involved and mess up the process of a man learning himself. And that’s when you end up with these young men who don’t know how to take charge and be a man.”
The African cabdriver overheard the advice being dished by the grandfather in the back of his car, and he couldn’t help but smile. He agreed with him wholeheartedly. There were far too many womanish men in America for his own taste, a bunch of soft men who made too many excuses for themselves.
The grandfather added, “But there have been those times, Shareef, when I had to agree with my wife, and this happens to be one of them.”
He said, “Now I’ve watched you work hard to build yourself into the kind of proud man that other men find it very easy to admire, but at the same time, you still have this reckless shit that you do, every now and then, that you still need to learn how to grow up out of.”
He said, “Now maybe you need to learn how to play golf or something to get away from those tendencies.”
Shareef heard the word “golf” and began to smile. He just wasn’t a golf-playing man.
His grandfather read the smile on his face and asked him, “Now what does that mean? You think golf is a sissy game, don’t you? And you don’t think Tiger Woods is a real athlete because he hits golf balls instead of people.”
Shareef shook it off. “I didn’t say that. Tiger Woods is the beast. That’s why they call him Tiger. I’m just not into playing golf.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to do something, Shareef,” his grandfather told him. “Because you can’t keep doing what you been doing.” He said, “And you know they called your wife up about this, don’t you?”
Shareef looked alarmed by the information. “They what?”
Charles watched as the cabdriver approached his home in the Morningside Heights area next to Columbia University. He told him, “Hey, right here.”
The cabdriver eased on the brakes and came to a stop in the street. Charles figured he would finish the conversation with his grandson once they were out of the taxi. So they climbed out, paid the driver, and pulled Shareef’s one bag of luggage from the trunk.
“Thank you,” Charles told the driver. And as soon as he was alone outside of the house with his grandson, they picked back up on their conversation.
Shareef asked him, “So you say they called my wife?” That was the last thing in the world he wanted to hear. It caught him off guard.
“The police called her before you called us. They were looking for you everywhere,” his grandfather answered him. “So then Jennifer gets on the phone all shaken up, and lets your grandmother have it with everything. She starts talking about how you left the house, and all the little groupie girls who’ve been after you, and how she thinks about divorce, and what about the kids, and the marriage counseling, and she just broke down in tears about everything. That’s why your grandmother didn’t want to talk to you when you called. She started looking at me and saying it was my fault, and that it was up to me to fix it.”
Shareef looked into his grandfather’s face and let out a deep sigh before he looked away. What could he say about all of that? He realized he wasn’t in the world alone. No man was. He had a wife, kids, grandparents and friends whom he all loved, and he had to answer to all of them with his actions and reactions.
Whether he liked it or not, everything he did affected them. So he nodded his head to his grandfather and said nothing. He still didn’t know what to say.
His grandfather placed a soft hand on Shareef’s right shoulder and told him, “There comes a time, Shareef, when a man has to pull his own ideas and behavior into line with those he loves around him. Now that don’t mean that you stop going for your dreams and aspirations, but it does means that you have to think first about what that means to everyone else. You have to think more about how you make those things happen in a balance, so that you don’t end up pulling yourself too far away from everything that really means something to you. Because, see, I know how much cotton candy is out here, believe me, but I also know how much you love your wife.”
Shareef suddenly felt like a little boy again in his grandfather’s wise hands. He didn’t want to hear the lecture. He didn’t want to hear the hard answers. He didn’t want to hear about his marriage. Nor did he want to hear the truth about maturity, but he had to.
His grandfather told him, “Now you can have all these people out here who fake like they love you, but they only love you for as long as you’re a celebrity in the limelight. They don’t love you when it gets dark. They only love you when the lights are on. And they don’t love you when you’re old and slower moving. They only love you when you’re young, slim, and quick on your feet. You hear me?”
Shareef got the point and smiled. It wasn’t as if he had never heard it all before, he just needed to hear it again and he appreciated the timing.
He said, “So, Grandmom probably won’t speak to me right now, will she?”
Charles laughed and showed his teeth. “Oh, you already know that. You just got both of us in the doghouse. But at least you’re all right. Now let’s go on in here and take care of these bruises.”
Shareef followed his grandfather into the house, and he was glad to be back there. But as soon as they walked in, he heard his grandmother’s feet moving through the hallway upstairs and toward the bedroom, where she slammed the door shut behind her.
Bloom!
Wilma Pickett had been waiting at the top of the stairs for Shareef to arrive at her home so she could show him her fierce disapproval of his recent behavior.
Shareef took another exhausting breath and shook his head. He was going to have to apologize to his grandmother after he apologized to his wife. He already knew the deal, he just had to prepare himself for it.
“Now let’s get you out of these clothes,” his grandfather told him.
Shareef grimaced as they took off his bloodstained shirt for a second time. Then they pulled off his blue jeans and shoes. His left shoulder, ribs, hip, and thigh were all purple, black, and blue. His body was stained and sticky from dried up blood, and he was swollen in several places from the lack of ice or care of his wounds.
“Yeah, you took a bad fall there,” his grandfather told him.
Shareef asked him, “How did you know?”
Charles looked at the wounds all on his grandson’s left side. He said, “Well, that’s what it looks like. It looks like you fell off a damn cliff and landed clean on your left side.”
Shareef grinned and said, “That’s just what happened.”
His grandfather told him, “Well, I don’t want to know too much about it? Just tell me that you’re innocent.”
“I am,” Shareef told him. “I guess I just didn’t realize how serious some people are about protecting their names in the street. And I wasn’t even planning on putting their names in anything.”
His grandfather stopped and nodded to him. He said, “Shareef, I’ve lived here in Harlem for a long time now, ever since your grandmother and I moved up here from Georgia in nineteen fifty-nine. And I have never been to a place where people think about their good names as much as they do in Harlem. So if you needed any information on that, I could have told you that a long time ago.”
He said, “Now let me go in here and get you a bucket of warm water, ice, Neosporin, and bandages to deal with these wounds.” He looked at the injuries again and added, “I hope you didn’t damage anything internally, because you may need to go to the hospital anyway. But I’d rather you did it back down in Florida with your family.”
Shareef nodded as his grandfather went to prepare for the beginning of the healing. But once Shareef thought about his wounds and checking into a hospital in Florida, he thought about facing his son, and what Shareef Jr. would think about it all.
“Damn,” he mumbled to himself. “I just gotta tell Little J that things happen.”
ONCE SHAREEF WAS ALL CLEANED UP, bandaged, and iced down, he sat in the comfortable living room chair with his left leg up and only white towels wrapped around him, and he thought about everything. He had made it out of a serious jam alive, but everyone else hadn’t, and now he was in debt to his lifelong nemesis because of it.
So he thought of Jurrell Garland and the threat he had made about his wife and family in Florida. Did Jurrell mean what he said? Of course he did. And now Shareef had to deal with that. He would have to play or pray.
He shook his head again and let out another deep sigh. He thought about Jennifer and his kids back home, and whether or not he could ever return to being a committed husband to a woman who had lost her passion for him? Jacqueline Herrera wouldn’t hang around long enough for him to decide, that was for sure. She was already mapping out her departure from his life. Shareef would never become that serious about her anyway. In fact, he wondered if he could ever be seriously committed to a woman again. Based on how they changed so much, he didn’t trust any of them. A lot of women were simply too emotional for him.
I wonder what Cynthia’s up to right now, he pondered. Cynthia seemed to know men a little better than the average girly-girl, because she hung around men. But in hanging around men, maybe she would always be more trouble than he needed in his life.
Yeah, I’ll just stay cool with her and keep myself out of Dodge, he told himself.
Then he thought about his friend Polo, and wondered if he should change his will back to normal, since they were both safe and sound.
Ten percent of a couple mil’ is a lot, he told himself of his estimated wealth. Then again, if Jennifer and the kids get half, including the house, then my grandparents get twenty-five to thirty-five percent, and Preston takes care of the rest with a family estate fee, then Polo’s ten percent comes out as a nice little nest egg for a lifelong friend to do something with his family.
As Shareef continued to think things through, he heard his grandmother walk back out of her room upstairs and into the hallway.
“Shareef!” she called down the stairs to him.
Her yell woke her husband, who had put Shareef back together and had fallen asleep on the comfortable sofa beside him.
“Yes, ma’am,” Shareef answered her.
“Have you spoken to your wife yet?”
By that, she meant, Have you called your wife back to apologize and to beg her for her forgiveness?
Shareef answered, “I’ll call her right now, Grandmom. I just needed to get some ice on my wounds first.”
His grandfather immediately climbed off the sofa to go and retrieve the phone for him.
“Are you okay?” his grandmother called downstairs to ask him.
“Yeah, I’ll make it,” Shareef told her.
“Good. Then tell your wife.”
By the time Wilma Pickett slammed her door back upstairs, Charles had brought the phone over to Shareef to make his call.
“Thanks, Grandpop,” Shareef told him. Then he took a deep breath with the phone receiver in hand.
Can I help her to get back her love for me? he asked himself as he made the call. Then he shook it off, doubting it.
That’s the wrong thinking to even deal with her, he concluded. And as long as it’s my idea, she’ll fight it. That’s our problem now; everything she brings up, I don’t like, and everything I bring up, she doesn’t like. So how do we settle that?
“Hello?” Jennifer answered.
Shareef said, “It’s me. I’m all right,” and he got nothing but silence for the first couple of minutes.
“What happened to your cell phone?” she finally asked him. She had been calling it for hours.
“It’s a long story,” he told her. “But I left it at the hotel in Manhattan this morning. I didn’t want it on me today.”
“Why?”
Shareef exhaled and told her, “There was too much going on. I just thought it would be a distraction.”
“A distraction to what, of you running around in the damn streets of Harlem, Shareef? Is that what you want to do with your life now? I mean, I just can’t take much more of this. And if you want to get rid of me so damn bad, then why don’t you just get Preston to write up the divorce papers. Why are you trying to stress me like this? Why?”
Shareef could see the tears ready to roll out of her eyes without even being there to witness them. He could hear it in the shakiness of her voice. He knew Jennifer just like she knew him. And he knew enough about her to realize that every word he spoke would be countered from her perspective. So he stood paralyzed on the phone. There was no sane thing for him to do but to give in, and even that was insane.
Shareef rarely gave in to anything. But if he had given in a few days ago, a week ago, a month ago, or a year ago, fifteen people would have never been killed in Harlem. So he finally made the sane or insane decision.
He said, “You’re right. I need to get a grip on myself. And this has been a long time coming.”
Then there was more silence.
Jennifer said, “Please don’t patronize me, Shareef.”
That was how his wife of ten years responded to him giving in. It was a foreign language to her. She had no clue of knowing how to accept it.
Shareef paused and thought, Yup, that’s just what I thought. There’s no way out of this. She’s gonna fight me with everything I say.
He looked over at his grandfather and smirked. How did men and women ever figure out how to get along? It seemed impossible. Shareef and Jennifer had been married for a decade already. His grandparents had been married for more than five decades. How in the hell did they do that?
Charles nodded back to his grandson and told him calmly, “Just hang in there.”
Shareef then told his wife, “I guess I have to show and prove more than I can talk at this point. Because talking about it is not gonna do anything for you.”
Suddenly, Shareef’s grandfather began to shake his head with a face of doom.
He said calmly again, “Tell her that you love her.”
Jennifer said, “Whatever, Shareef. I can’t trust anything you say or do anymore.”
Shareef listened to his grandfather and said, “Well, I love you and the kids anyway. And I’m never gonna stop loving you. That’s why I never filed for no divorce, Jennifer. I don’t believe in it. And I don’t believe we’ve stopped loving e
ach other. I’ll never believe that.”
His grandfather looked at him and smiled. He began to nod his head and was pleased with Shareef’s words. But did he really mean them?
Jennifer said, “Yeah, well, you have a very strange way of showing it. I wonder how you would act if you hated us.” At least she sounded calmer now.
Shareef repeated his wife’s words out loud so his grandfather could hear them and help him out again.
“If I hated you? Why would you say something like that?”
“That’s how you’ve been acting, Shareef,” she told him.
“She didn’t mean to say that,” his grandfather told him. Nothing Charles said in the room was loud enough to be overheard through the phone, so it was safe for Shareef to continue.
“You don’t mean that, Jennifer,” Shareef told her. He said, “You know better than that.”
She asked him, “So, what do you plan to do? Are you moving back home?”
That was a tough question. Shareef didn’t even want to look to his grandfather for that answer.
He asked her, “Do you want me back there?” It was the safest response that came to mind.
“You’re the one talking about showing and proving, Shareef. So, what does that mean? Does that mean you can still have your cake and eat it, too?”
She was backing him up and putting him on the spot. That made Shareef feel powerless, exactly how he didn’t want to feel. Nevertheless, he was willing to rest and heal for a minute. He realized that they all needed healing, including his kids, a healing from missing daddy so much.
“Well, let that be the first step then,” he told her.
“Let what be the first step?”
Jennifer was playing her usual game of specifics. Shareef had become so vague with her at times that it became necessary for her to ask him exactly what he meant by everything.
“Me moving back in,” he answered. He said, “And I’m sorry about all of this.”
He no longer needed his grandfather’s help at that point. He had his own rhythm going on. He knew what he needed to do to make things right. It just wasn’t going to be easy.