Didn’t know which bit of news spun me around more—that Avis and Peter Douglass were actually engaged, or that the Bandana Woman was going to take up residence in this very house. Stu seemed in a slight state of shock—the oh-God-what-have-I-done variety—and I volunteered Amanda and myself to help with necessary preparations. But what would Becky need? Toiletries? Underwear? We probably wouldn’t know till she got here.
When I hit school Monday morning—refreshed from my stay-at-home week, I had to admit—I noticed that Avis was wearing The Ring diamond-side down to stave off questions and squeals from coworkers. But I did wiggle a moment with her behind closed doors in her office, long enough to ask, “When, Avis, when? Don’t keep us all in suspense. These things take preparation.”
“No,” she said mildly, “we want to keep this simple. Get a marriage license and . . . I don’t know,maybe have Pastor Clark marry us on a Sunday morning.”
“Sunday morning?” I tried to keep my screech to a whisper. “Are you guys out of your minds? What about flowers, and bridesmaids, and wedding cake, and dancing for joy?” I let slip a grin. “Hey.All the Yada Yadas could be your bridesmaids.”
“Jodi Baxter! Read my lips. Simple. Sunday morning. Now”—she smiled sweetly—“did you have something school-related you wanted to talk about?”
I sank back in her visitor chair. “Yeah. Parent-teacher conferences on Wednesday. I’m scared spitless.”
I WAS GLAD I talked to Avis. I told her about running into Hakim’s mother at Adele’s shop on Saturday, about my feelings of failure with Hakim, about realizing the accident still didn’t have closure. Not for me, and certainly not for Geraldine—how could I expect that? How did a mother ever get over the death of her child? Much less relate normally to the woman responsible for his death, who just happened to be her only surviving son’s third-grade teacher?
Avis didn’t try to answer all my questions, but she wrote down some scriptures for me to turn into prayers. I tried out the first one—Proverbs 28:13—as I walked home from school on Monday, past the tiny lilies of the valley pushing up along the sidewalk, praying aloud. “Dear God, I don’t want to be the kind of person who covers over my sin.You promised that if I confess and for-sake them, I will receive mercy.” Yes, I knew I’d received mercy. I wasn’t in jail, was I?
On Tuesday, I soaked up the second verse she’d given me from Acts. 3:19: “Lord Jesus, You promised that if I repent and turn to you, that You would send times of refreshing.”What a wonderful word—refreshing. Like a hot shower after camping in the mud all weekend, or ice-cold water on a muggy August day. Even as I was writing that day’s homework assignment on the board, my heart was crying, “Oh, Lord! Please send that time of refreshing!”
We had early dismissal on Wednesday to allow for report-card pickup and parent-teacher conferences. The third verse Avis had given me was Galatians 6:2. I just wasn’t sure I knew how to pray it with Geraldine Wilkins-Porter in mind. “Jesus, Your Word says to carry each other’s burdens, but . . . I really don’t know how to carry this mother’s burden without drowning in my own guilt and her sorrow.” Yet the words stayed with me: “Carry one another’s burdens.”
Praying the Scriptures really calmed my mind and my spirit as parents appeared in my classroom, and I crossed off D’Angelo’s mother . . . Ebony’s father . . . LeTisha’s proud parents . . . a couple of no-shows . . . Ramón’s uncle . . . and then there it was: Geraldine Wilkins-Porter’s signature on the sign-up sheet.
I stood up from my desk chair as the door opened, and Hakim’s mother stepped into the room. She hesitated a moment just inside the door, trim and businesslike in a gray suit with a short skirt, and a silky red blouse. Adele had done a smashing job on her hair—tight corkscrew curls all over with just a touch of rusty color in the hair, softening her rather sculptured face. “Please. Come in,” I said. She crossed the room and we both sat down, eyeing each other anxiously across my desk. I didn’t have a clue what I should say. I hadn’t writ-ten anything out, hadn’t practiced anything. Just prayed.
I pushed Hakim’s report card aside and folded my hands to keep them from shaking. Somehow I found the courage to keep my eyes on her face. “Ms. Porter, Hakim continues to show some improvement in reading and writing—but I believe that is his accomplishment, not mine. I’ve been doing some soul-searching and . . . I had no right to try to keep your son in my class. He’s a very likable boy, and I really did want him to stay, but . . .” The words kept coming, words that had been hidden thoughts, pushing themselves into the space between us. “I realize now I was trying to redeem myself in your eyes for what I did by helping your second son. Maybe redeem myself in God’s eyes too.”
Tears pushed themselves to the brink. I blinked them away, afraid that if I stopped, I’d never find the courage to continue. I couldn’t read Geraldine’s face—it was guarded, but not hostile. Not hostile. That counted for something.
“There are two things I need to say to you. I know I said ‘I’m sorry’ when we met in the courtroom. I am, deeply, so sorry for your loss. But I need to say much more than that. I . . . I was driving angry that day—angry after a dumb fight with my husband. I wasn’t breaking any laws behind the wheel, yet my spirit was wrong, so wrong that day. And the next thing I knew, your son was dead. For that, I not only need to repent before God, but before you.”
The dark eyes across the desk from me were deep and luminous. She didn’t interrupt or yell at me or turn away. She was listening.
I swallowed. My mouth was dry. “Second, I never should have expected you to leave Hakim in my class when you discovered I was his teacher. That you did says far more about you than about me. I overestimated my abilities, though. He is not progressing as he should—and as I believe he can with the right kind of help. Please forgive me for my arrogance. I know you only want the best for your son—as I should. It was wrong of me to ask you to leave him in this awkward situation. If you want to remove him from this class, I—”
Hakim’s mother held up her hand to stop me. Her eyes were dry but bright. “You have had your say. Now let me have mine.” She stood and walked over to Hakim’s desk, her finger slowly tracing the jagged scar he had dug into the wood with a paper clip. Then she turned back to me.
“I don’t know if I can forgive you for killing my son,” she said slowly. (Oh God! To hear her say it like that—“for killing my son”—I can’t bear it!) “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do that. But I have something to say to you too—something I’ve had to face, even though I haven’t wanted to. That day, the day of the accident, Jamal was running against the light, against traffic, with a jacket over his head in a downpour that kept drivers from see-ing him. His cousins admit it; the other driver—the one that hit your car—said so too. I couldn’t hear it; I wanted to put it all on your head.” She took a deep breath. “But my Jamal was also responsible for what happened that day. Not just you.”
Her words nearly sucked the breath out of me.
She traced the jagged scar again with a carefully manicured nail. “Hakim likes you, Ms. Baxter. Against all odds, against all the hate that has raged inside me, my son likes you. I couldn’t understand it. But then . . .” She looked up. “Then you come waltzing into Adele Skuggs’s beauty shop to take her elderly mother for a walk. You. Jodi Baxter. The woman I love to hate!” An ironic smile tipped one side of her mouth. “And my beautician tells me you’re in her prayer group—her prayer group, for God’s sake!—and it was your idea for the sisters to take MaDear out or come in and read to her.” Geraldine Wilkins-Porter wagged her head. “When I walked out of that beauty shop, it was a lot harder to think of you just as that pig-headed white woman who killed my son.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Pig-headed! Hakim’s mother thought of me as “that pig-headed white woman.” Well, why not? Didn’t I still think of Becky Wallace as “Bandana Woman”? Both of us had hit on a way to deny the humanity of the person who’d wronged us . . . deny her her name.
Geraldine sat down across from me again, and for some reason she started to laugh softly. “Yes, pig-headed. Not very creative, I know. I wanted to call you something worse.”
I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh too, my shoulders shaking. “You should have,” I gasped. “Yes, a lot worse!” I dabbed at my eyes with a tissue, and when I lifted my head, I realized she was looking at me. Our eyes met and the moment hung in the air.
“Oh, Geraldine. Can you forgive me?” I reached my hand across the desk.
To my surprise she touched my fingers briefly, then pulled her hand back and looked down at her lap. “Maybe . . . maybe someday,” she whispered.
I WASN’T SURE EXACTLY what happened in my class-room that afternoon, except that both Hakim’s mother and I had spoken honestly to each other—and we had touched. As I gathered up my books and papers after the last parent-teacher conference, I felt . . . light. Like refreshing spring water was bubbling up inside my soul. There it was—that word. Refreshing. God was true to His Word. He had sent a “time of refreshing.”
I wanted to dance all the way home—except Denny was there in the parking lot to pick me up when I came out of the school building at nine o’clock. “Hey, babe. You okay?” He’d known how anxious I was about this parent-teacher conference.
For an answer, I gave him a long, sensuous kiss on the mouth that left him gasping.
Hakim was still in my classroom the next day, and the next. Well, I had released him if his mother thought it best. But in the meantime, I’d just plug along with my lesson plans for finding the perimeter of rectangles, taking a field trip to the Chicago Historical Society, and using prefixes to change the meaning of words.
Friday evening, Denny had to coach a baseball game at West Rogers High, so I didn’t feel guilty skipping out with Stu to do some shopping for Becky Wallace. Stu had decided to make a welcome basket of toiletries like shampoo, body lotion, razors, facial scrub, body mist—even a toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant—and we had a blast picking out the stuff.We decided to go with a melon scent for consistency, fruity rather than flowery. Becky Wallace didn’t exactly seem a “flowery” sort of woman.
Walking up and down the aisles of Target, Stu went nuts—adding a thick bath towel and washcloth to the cart, a pair of one-size-fits-all slippers, and even a small hair dryer. “Uh, Stu,” I said, as she paused by a display case of Timex watches, “you’re spending a lot of money here. I don’t think Becky expects all this. Giving her an address to come home to is a huge gift as it is.”
Stu pursed her lips, passed up the watches, and pushed the cart into the next available checkout lane. “Yeah.Guess you’re right. Except, I don’t think she’ll have much, just coming out of prison. Maybe just the clothes she was wearing that night when she . . . anyway. And don’t forget, Jodi. You have Denny and the kids to squander gifts on. Right now, Becky Wallace is the closest thing to family I’ve got.” She shrugged. “I figure, why not?”
WE HAD NO IDEA when Becky would arrive on Saturday. Some of the Yada Yadas said they’d like to be there to greet her, but Stu decided there’d be time for that later. Becky would probably appreciate a fairly anonymous reentry into society versus the big-band approach. Stu’s house was so clean, a hospital patient could eat off the floor. But she was so hyper, about four in the afternoon I made her put her feet up in our recliner with a big mug of valerian herb tea to calm her down.
After one sip, she made a nasty face. “Ugh! Jodi, what is this stuff?”
“It’s . . . an acquired taste. I put lots of honey in it.”
She held it out. “Put in lots more.”
“Mom.” Amanda appeared in the doorway to the living room. “There’s a strange gray car double-parked outside our house with its hazards on. Two guys in suits and sunglasses. And . . . that woman.”