“Aw, Mom, come on,” Little J protested immediately.
It was no sweat to Shareef. He understood how his wife felt about driving the kids around in his sportscar. Sportscars were not built for kids. So he said, “I’ll just take him in your Land Rover.”
“Can I go, too? I wanna go,” Kimberly begged her father, while tugging at his arm.
Jennifer huffed and said, “I have some errands to run.”
“So take the Avalon,” Shareef said, regarding her second vehicle.
“You take the Avalon,” she snapped.
“Say no more, just let me have the keys.”
Jennifer used the Land Rover for more upscale affairs, and the Toyota Avalon as her family get-around car. Shareef used the Mercedes SL for his play, and a Ford Explorer for his get-around. However, on that bright and sunny Florida day, he’d missed his Mercedes and wanted to be behind the wheel again. He had also moved out of the house at the beginning of the year and into a condominium on the twenty-seventh floor of a brand-new high-rise near Miami. His family had never been there. The condo was his private place, somewhere to be himself, and to entertain whomever he wanted.
Realizing he would not be riding in his father’s Batmobile to football practice, Little J pouted, “She always wants to get in our way.”
Shareef wasn’t sure if his son was referring to his sister or to his mother, but he didn’t like it either way.
“Ay, watch your mouth,” he snapped sternly to his son.
Little J dropped his eyes to the ground and held his tongue, but his emotions and intent were still legible. A spitting image of his father with lighter brown skin, it was obvious that he would be as driven, as bullish, and as determined to have things his way as his old man was. It was another dilemma that the author, father, husband, and man would be forced to deal with.
As they drove to the Jaguars’ football practice for ages ten and under, Shareef felt it important to have a talk with his son about his attitude.
“Shareef,” the father addressed the son in the passenger seat.
His son frowned and said “I’m Li’l J, Dad, you’re Shareef,” with youthful swagger.
The father took a breath and said, “Look, man, you have a very good life. You understand that? There are plenty of kids out here your age who would love to have all the opportunities that you have. Even on your team. But you’re walking around here with an attitude like somebody owes you something. Is that how you want to treat us? You don’t appreciate what we do for you?”
The son picked up on his father’s serious tone and dropped his eyes again with no answer.
“Shareef, you look at me when I’m talking to you.”
He waited for his son to make eye contact.
He said, “You don’t drop your eyes when someone is talking to you, you hear me? You sit there and you take it. That’s what a man does. We don’t look away. We don’t look into the clouds. We don’t count army ants on the ground. We take it eye to eye like men. So if you wanna be a little man, then you take it like a little man.
“Now answer my question. Do you appreciate what your mother and I do for you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, act like it then. Stop pouting all the time, stomping around the house, screaming at your sister…”
“Yeah,” Kimberly interjected from the backseat.
Little J cut his eyes at her.
“Don’t do it, you look right back at me,” Shareef told him.
His son started to pout again, “But Dad, she…”
“I don’t care what she does, I’ll handle her. You stay focused on what I’m saying to you. And don’t drop your eyes again.”
Then he focused on his daughter, strapped in the car’s backseat.
He asked her, “Did anyone say anything to you, Kimberly?”
She looked him in the eyes and answered, “No.”
“Well, you learn to stop instigating then. You hear me?”
She nodded and answered, “Yes, Daddy.” She was a perfect mix between her mother and father, and a slightly lighter brown shade than her brother.
Hearing the word “Daddy” from his daughter softened Shareef a bit. He didn’t want to come back home and be the heavy knowing that he would be leaving them again. So he immediately changed his tone while paying attention to the road.
He said, “I love both of you guys. And I love your mother, too. We’re all just gonna have to get along with each other. We got a good life.”
WHEN THEY ARRIVED at the practice field, Little J hopped out of the car to join his teammates. They ran laps, exercised, and began practicing their team plays.
As practice continued, a few of the fathers and coaches had on-and-off conversations about the game of football.
“You think Miami got a chance this year without Ricky Williams?” one of the parents asked an assistant coach.
There were four coaches and seven fathers out on the practice field with twenty-four kids. Five mothers were there at practice as well.
“Yeah, they got a chance. They got Daunte Culpepper now,” an assistant coach answered.
“You think he’s gonna make that much of an impact?”
“He should. They haven’t had a real quarterback since Marino.”
“All of the Florida teams should look good this year,” Shareef spoke up. Football was his game. Being from New York, he still rooted for the Giants and the Jets, but he didn’t mind watching the Dolphins, the Bucs, or the Jaguars in Florida. Nor did he mind watching Michael Vick and the Atlanta Falcons in his old college town.
One of the fathers looked him over and said, “You write those books, don’t you? Romance novels.”
The man had kept that knowledge to himself until Shareef had decided to speak up among them.
“That’s what I do,” he answered. “Why, you read a few of them?”
He knew better than that, he just wanted to back the father up on his heels.
“Nah, I don’t read ’em, my wife does. I didn’t think you would watch football, though,” the father committed.
“Yeah, football and writing don’t go together, hunh?” Shareef quipped.
The father said, “I don’t know, I figured you’d watch the soap operas or something. The Lifetime channel. Don’t you gotta do research for what you write?”
A couple of the other fathers chuckled and grinned.
Shareef said, “Yeah, but I don’t get it from watching television. My research comes straight from us.”
Right as he spoke, Little J caught a pass, made a couple of dandy moves, and outran his teammates down the sideline for a touchdown.
One of the coaches looked over to Shareef and stated, “Your boy’s gonna be one of our best players.”
Shareef said, “I know it.”
“J practices with my dad all the time,” Kimberly spoke of her brother and father.
The other father looked back at Shareef and asked him, “You played some football?”
“Not really, just fifteen, twenty years of my life,” Shareef joked with his answer. “Then I started writing romance books after college and somehow lost every one of my football skills.”
“No you didn’t, Daddy. You can still play football. J gets mad all the time when he can’t catch you,” Kimberly added. “And he can’t throw as far as you either.”
“Aw, he’s nine years old, he’s not supposed to outrun or outthrow me yet,” Shareef continued lightheartedly. He said, “But he’ll probably run and throw me down once he gets about sixteen. It’s already in the genes.”
The other fathers stopped their shucking and jiving after hearing that. They already knew what Little J could do. He had been taking the other kids to school. And if father was like son, then this man definitely had football skills, romance writer or not.
“So, who you like to win the Superbowl this year?” the humbled father asked Shareef.
Shareef said, “It’s all up for grabs this year. You got Denver, Seattle, Carolina,
Pittsburgh, and the Patriots as always. Then you got Cincinnati, Chicago, the Eagles, the Jags, Indianapolis, and the Bucs, Redskins, and Giants all making a comeback. Then you got San Diego, Atlanta, and Dallas still sitting in the mix, especially with Dallas signing T.O. from the Eagles. So take your pick.”
The one father nodded and was speechless for a minute. The other fathers looked around at each other and started laughing.
One of them said, “Well, shit, if you didn’t play no football, then you damn sure must be reading a whole lot of newspapers or something. You damn near sound like an announcer to me, right off the Sports Network. What’s your picks in college football?”
The fathers and coaches all shared a laugh and went back to respecting each other as football fanatics, and they rightfully recognized Shareef Crawford Sr. as one of the group.
ON THE OTHER SIDE of town from the football practice field, Jennifer Crawford attended her annual fund-raiser meeting at Broward County’s African-American Library.
“Do you think your husband would be willing to offer an hour or two of his time to conduct a fiction writing workshop?” one of the senior library coordinators asked her at their roundtable in the second-floor office. They sat around a large, oval-shaped table, five women and two men. Jennifer was second to the youngest at age thirty-two.
She took a breath and answered, “One of the things I try not to do is to ask Shareef to participate in too many of our events. I mean, let’s be honest about it; if I were not married to him, would we even be so open to ask?”
“I know, I know, but we had to ask you,” another member commented. It was only natural for them to ask about the participation of a nationally recognized, bestselling author who was married to one of their supporting members. But every year they asked, and every year Jennifer gave them her time, ideas, resources, and economic support. Shareef had even participated in several of their past events, so how much more could Jennifer offer them?
“We have a budget that is ten thousand dollars more than last year, so we should be able to invite some of the premiere authors and get a great return on our investment,” one of the two men in the room stated. He was in charge of the accounting.
“What other authors are we thinking about inviting?” the youngest woman of the group asked. Outside of Jennifer, she considered herself the most knowledgeable on new and up-and-coming authors in the African-American community.
“Well, we like Michael Eric Dyson because his work seems to cross over to a large section of our supporters. But Tavis Smiley also has a new book out this year, we just don’t know how much he would ask for,” one of the planners explained.
Jennifer had to sit and listen as price tags were thrown around in regards to other writers, knowing that they rarely offered Shareef much of anything. And although she understood that her family could afford to give and not take, the principle of at least offering a person their worth had always irritated her. No one knew how hard her husband had worked over the years to make himself into a brand name more than she had. Nevertheless, she felt it was her duty to help the fund-raising process in any way she could.
Jennifer found pride and usefulness in being able to assist those in need. The middle child of three sisters and two brothers, she had been the most responsible person in her family. That was what attracted Shareef to her, and she to Shareef, when they attended college in Atlanta at Morehouse and Spelman, respectively. They were each able to find their way around obstacles, but they kept running into problems negotiating each other as a couple. Shareef would pull as hard as he could to the right, and she would resist, only for her to pull as hard as she could to the left, and find his resistance. He would rationalize his perspective with his logic, and she would rationalize her perspective with hers. And at the end of a their long nights of battle, they would both be exhausted, with him refusing to submit to her, and her refusing to submit to him.
She thought about their struggles a lot. She didn’t speak about them often. It was not her way to complain about her many stresses, she just worked through them in silence. However, she couldn’t seem to work through her inability to trust her husband to refuse temptation like she could. And she wondered if that temptation was more attractive than she was; more uninhibited, more enticing. And those thoughts only made her more insecure and unwilling to compete. Why should she be in competition with other women anyway? She was married to the man, and he should respect her more, holding her high on her pedestal. But since he had obviously forced her to compete, with disrespectful bitches, then he would have to live with her wrath and her withholding her affection from him.
Yet, she felt helpless and ultimately at his mercy. Shareef had become a national superstar, where she was only his wife, an aspiring event coordinator who had been only halfway successful in her attempts at big events in Florida, or in her hometown of Macon, Georgia, where her father, Daniel Mason, was a county judge. So maybe Shareef could walk away and do better, or most likely worse. For what woman would work as hard as she had to maintain the peace with her husband when more than half of her friends and family were separated or divorced for lesser transgressions?
Jennifer loved Shareef, his boastful swagger and his achievements, as much as she loved her father’s. But submitting her will to her father was natural—he was Daddy. To submit to a husband she could no longer trust was degrading, and she found herself not able to do it. She had pride. She had value. She had self-respect. She loved her husband very much while despising her lack of control over their marriage, and she found herself paralyzed in her emotions. What was the right way to deal with him? Only if the man wasn’t so damned thick-headed and impatient, maybe he could find time to relax with her for a minute, listen to her words, and allow her to develop trust in him again.
Jennifer would sink into deep spells of daydreams about her husband and their marriage at any place or time without warning. All it took was mention of his name or a passing of information to remind her of him. And before she knew it, it was close to ten o’clock at night and their library meeting was adjourning. It would take her another twenty minutes to drive home to relieve him of the children. How would Shareef react to that? He reacted to everything. But if she had reacted as much to him, she may have been forced to stab him.
“I’M ON MY WAY to the house now,” Jennifer called and told her husband from inside the Land Rover. By then it was well after ten o’clock, and she had spent an extra ten minutes talking to the youngest member of the fund-raising committee about the best location for a new apartment. That’s what Jennifer was like. Loyal. And her job was never done until everyone had received her full attention.
“Aw’ight,” Shareef grumbled quickly over the phone.
She heard his voice and knew what he was thinking. He had been waiting to leave for more than an hour, and he was now pissed for having to wait that long. But life wasn’t about a clock for Jennifer. Life was to be enjoyed and treasured, regardless of the seconds, minutes, and hours. Time should not control you, you should control it.
So when she arrived home, she was still not pressed.
Shareef, however, was waiting outside the house, on the steps, for her, like an overgrown child who could not wait to catch the minutes that could never be recaptured or replaced.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he told her as he hurried over to his Mercedes.
“How did practice go?” she asked him.
“What?”
“I said how did his practice go.”
“Oh, it went normal. He had a good practice.”
Shareef had already made it to his car, and since he was so eager to leave right then and there to chase eleven o’clock before he missed it, she told him, “All right,” and let the hasty man go.
She then entered the house and walked straight up to the rooms of the children to make sure they had been tucked into bed properly. Because sometimes Shareef didn’t take the time to get them into their pajamas.
SHAREEF WAS ON THE ROA
D back to Miami at 10:34 PM, and was madder than a motherfucker.
“That’s the kind of shit I’m talking about,” he fussed to himself about his wife. He already knew what had happened. Jennifer had put in more overtime at her meeting at his expense, but he wasn’t supposed to be upset about it. Nope. He was just supposed to wait until midnight and then sympathize with whatever story she gave him.
There was a cat stuck in the tree outside the library so I called the police, an ambulance, and a fire truck to make sure they could rescue her safely before I left.
Shareef would then holler, Fuck that damn cat! Nobody else stuck around for that shit! So why did you have to? After a few more hours, once he had calmed down, after he had lost three more years of his life expectancy through the unnecessary stress she had caused, he would feel like a fool for overreacting to her good deed.
“Shit!” he cursed out loud as he hurried back to Miami. He had not been with his new mistress in a couple of weeks, and they had made plans to go out that evening.
He dialed her cell phone number through the car phone, and awaited her answer.
“Hello.”
“Jacqueline, I’m on my way,” he told her.
“You’re on your way? You were supposed to pick me up an hour ago.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
“You didn’t even answer my calls,” she complained. “I called you three times already.”
The truth was, Shareef didn’t want to talk to her until he knew for certain he was on his way. Otherwise, he would have looked like a henpecked fool to continue telling her that he was waiting to leave. Maybe Jennifer had planned to ruin his night. Maybe her arriving home later than expected was to control his ability to find happiness without her. That’s why his travels away from home and away from her had become liberating, with the only drawback being that he missed his children.
Shareef told his mistress, “I’ll make it all up to you,” only because he knew she would make it up to him later. And if she did not, she would no longer be his mistress. That was the dilemma that every new woman fell into with Shareef. While he continued in his struggle to understand his wife, he remained pressed for time, stressed out for a release, and intolerant of any new relationship that called for his patience. Because he no longer had any. Jennifer had taken it all.