Chapter 35
Michael didn’t have to wait until Friday. I called him back Thursday and accepted the offer.
“Great,” he cheered. “You can start Monday.”
Great didn’t begin to describe this miracle. Seriously, how do you get fired by somebody and then get rehired by that same person, in the middle of a terrible economy, with a 10 percent raise only three months after they led you to the slaughterhouse? This marvel had G-O-D written all over it.
Michael gave me a few directives about my first day. I carefully wrote them down and then ended our call. Thank You, Lord! For safekeeping, I decided to keep the notes right next to me in my nightstand. When I opened the drawer, the ugly pictures of my banged-up face stared at me. This part of my life was over. My next call was to the Dallas County Police Department to drop the charges against Deniessa. Turns out it’s not so simple to drop cases these days. I’d have to go into the station and fill out an affidavit, but that was okay. I was riding too high on God’s mercy to question my resolve.
I picked up my mother so she could come celebrate big-time Friday night with Eric and me. I figured it was as good a time as any to get the third degree from her about the tooth and my weight. Maybe now that I had a job, I could take it.
She entered my car, took one good look at me, and remarked, “Peaches, it’s time for you to draw the line on those hips of yours.” This advice from a woman whom I’ve never known to pass up an extra helping of mashed potatoes.
Might as well beat her to the punch on the next issue. I raised my top lip with my index finger. “Look. I’ve got a chipped tooth, too.”
“Hush your mouth! You sure do. Lord, it’s a good thing you got this job sight unseen. What happened to you?”
“It’s a long story.”
She shooed my words away with her hand. “Something tells me I don’t even want to know what happened.”
Thank God!
I decided we should graduate to GameEvent, a combination arcade, bowling alley, and restaurant. Loud music and pins clashing on the wooden floors filled the atmosphere. When I looked around at the patrons, it was clear that Eric fit in more with this group than the crowd at Pizza Kingdom. My baby was growing up.
Laser tag, one of the main attractions, found Eric and me on opposite teams. Eric’s team whipped up on mine. He even had more points than me at the end of the match.
“Now I got you!” he bragged all the way back to our table.
I sat down and caught my breath. “Next time, son, next time.”
He grabbed a hand full of tokens from the plastic cup my mother was guarding and ran off to play more games, leaving her and me alone at our booth.
She smiled at me, searching my face for a reaction.
“Yes?”
“Eric sure misses you.”
“I miss him, too. And I thank you for stepping in to help with him.” I tiptoed around my desire to resume the full-time job of parenting my son. “I’m sure ready for school to end. I think I’ll have lots of flexibility with this new job, so Eric and I should be able to spend lots of time together. LaShondra gave me some reading tips—”
“When you gonna start coming back to church?” she poked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I guess whenever I’m ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“I don’t want to hear people’s mouths. ‘Where you been, little sister Miller?’ ‘Sure been missing you.’ ”
“Aw, girl, please.” She waved me off. “Folks ain’t studyin’ you. That’s a trick of the enemy.” She pushed a stray hair behind her ear and turned to watch a random bowling game.
I watched her face go from passive to pensive. She wanted to say more, I was sure, but she wouldn’t. Just like she used to do with Daddy. She’d sit there and say absolutely nothing while Daddy ranted about a cup that wasn’t washed properly or scratchy sheets. He’d go off over little stuff and she’d sit there biting her tongue.
“I hate it when you do this.” Try as I might, I couldn’t hide the resentment in my voice.
Slowly, she faced me. Her brow arched and rounded. “When I do what?”
“When you refuse to speak up for yourself.”
“I speak up for myself plenty fine, thank you very much.”
“No, you don’t. You never stood up for yourself when Daddy was alive.” I struggled to keep a lid on the rage piping within me. “And when he died, he left you clueless about how to handle things.”
My mother looked me up and down a few times. “Is that what’s been bothering you?”
“Yes. It bothers me.”
“Peaches, I’ma tell you like this. I had my part, your daddy had his part. I didn’t know how to pay bills on the computer, he didn’t know how to separate laundry. We were a team, like married folks ought to be. So he died and now I have to learn things and ask for help. I’m okay with it. Unlike you, I wasn’t tryin’ to be every woman,” she spat out. Then she added for good measure, “That’s why you’re single now.”
I knew it was coming and, of course, I had a reply ready on my lips. “And I’ll stay single if it means I can’t express my feelings.”
“You’re right about that,” she agreed sarcastically. “You will most definitely continue to be by yourself until you understand how to pick your battles with a man. Everything ain’t worth arguing over, and some things ain’t gon’ change whether you spend two days fussing at him or not. By the time me and your daddy had you, I’d figured that out already.”
“So ... you had given up on letting Daddy know how you felt about things?” I surmised.
“The other part of picking battles is knowing when and where to fight them. Just ’cause I didn’t buck up to your daddy in front of you don’t mean I didn’t have my say. Your daddy could be downright stubborn and prideful, just like somebody I know.” She winked at me. “But believe me when I tell you, I had his ear.”
My last Saturday before starting my new job, Eric and I spent the whole day together. He seemed perfectly content to follow me around the house like a puppy. While I laced my shoes, he sat on my bed harmlessly tinkering with the trinkets on my nightstand. A twang of guilt stung me as I wondered if he was trying to refamiliarize himself with our home.
“Thank You for your redemption, Holy Spirit,” I whispered under my breath.
“Momma, who gave you a black eye?” Eric held the pictures of my battered face in his hands.
I snatched the evidence from him, ripped the pictures to pieces, and tossed them into the trash. “Stay out of my stuff, son.”
He followed me to my bathroom. Eric’s little face appeared at the bottom of the mirror. “Who did it, Momma? Tell me so I can go bust ’em up.”
“You will not be bustin’ up anything except a book, okay?” I shooed him away. “Go make sure your room is clean.”
“Did you have to go to the hospital?” he persisted, worry hovering between his brows.
There was no escaping this line of questioning. Plus I supposed he deserved some kind of explanation after having encountered disturbing photos of my injuries. “I had a disagreement with someone. That person hit me—”
He slapped his right fist into his left palm. “Did you hit ’em back?”
“No, I did not hit that person back. I protected my head until someone else came and pulled the person off me.”
Eric jumped to his feet, kicking wildly. “Man, I wish I would have been there. I would have came out like Kung Fu Panda and done a super-dropkick on ’em, then I would have—”
“That’s enough, Eric. The police arrested the person. It’s over now, okay? And don’t go tellin’ your granny I had a black eye.”
With the issue settled, we headed out for a healthy breakfast of fruit smoothies. Then I logged a few miles at the track while Eric played on the playground. Coincidentally, the same little red-haired boy was there again with his mother. I remembered the last time we were all there. I was just about to embark on that stupid replay of a relationship with Raphael. In retrospect, I have to admit that I knew it wouldn’t work all along. He hadn’t changed.
Raphael wasn’t thinking about changing, and it was stupid of me to try to “wish” him right. Leopards don’t change their spots, because they can’t change their own spots. Any time a leopard wants his spots changed, he has to go back to the Creator and ask for new skin. Christ being that skin, of course.
Even though Raphael wasn’t right for me, I still held out hope that, someday, he would be right for Eric and this other child who was on the way. I resolved to pray earnestly for Raphael forever. Well, at least until my son was eighteen years old. Somebody needed to pray for that man.
After my jog, we came home and cleaned up a bit before going to LaShondra’s house to get a look at her debut cake. She displayed it proudly in a covered glass dish. Eric said it was pretty except for the pink roses, which leaned to the right a bit.
“My teacher said I relied too much on sight rather than instinct. I have to become one with the icing,” she sang, and dipped in a traditional Chinese bow.
“Girl, if you don’t get a knife and cut this thing.”
Eric ate enough for both of us. “This is good, Auntie Shon.” My poor child was a little piglet! I thought about scolding him, but the Holy Spirit checked me, told me to wait until we got home to talk with him about acting so greedy.
My lips clamped shut as he munched away. I sensed the Spirit smiling inside me. I sat there thinking, “It’s a beautiful thing when the Holy Spirit speaks and I actually listen.” He agreed, reminding me of 1 Thessalonians 5:19. “Do not quench the Spirit.”
Although the extent of LaShondra’s involvement with the cake was decorating, she gladly accepted Eric’s voracity as a compliment. “Maybe I’ll make you a cake for your birthday next year.”
Eric swallowed quickly. “When you have a son, he’s gonna really like this cake for his birthday.”
LaShondra smiled and rubbed a hand across Eric’s hand. “I receive that word, Eric, in the name of Jesus.”
A trip to the movies rounded out the rest of our day. Since this was the first weekend my mother had been without Eric, I don’t think she knew what to do with herself. She called us twice during the show to see if we planned to drop by her house later.
“Momma, I’m pooped. I think we’re gonna go on home,” I whispered so I wouldn’t disturb the other viewers.
“Well ... I was just wondering. He left so many clothes over here, he probably ain’t got enough socks to make it through the week at home.”
No doubt, the light from my phone was probably annoying the people above me. I had to satisfy her or this was going to be a long conversation. “We’ll come by on our way home.”
I should have known my mother would be waiting with a church trap. After she smothered Eric with hugs and kisses, she loaded my car with three grocery bags full of his clothes. Collecting his belongings was a sweet reminder that Eric lived with me again, where he belonged.
“Thanks again, Momma, for everything.”
She straightened up, squared off with me while Eric buckled himself into his seat. “When you coming back to church, Peaches?”
The million-dollar question. “Soon.” I put one foot inside my car.
She breathed heavily. Bit her bottom lip. “If you won’t go for yourself, at least go for Eric. There’s too much going on out there in the world. He can’t afford to be without knowledge of the Word of God, ’cause the enemy is startin’ early on these kids today. He ain’t waitin’ like he used to.”
That night, I watched the news and saw my mother’s warning illustrated. A local thirteen-year-old girl was found dead after sneaking out of the house to meet her online boyfriend. Her friends said she thought he was fourteen. He turned out to be twenty-four and a pedophile. The mother’s face twisted in anguish as she displayed pictures of her daughter taken just a few months earlier. Beautiful, sweet little girl. “He tricked our daughter,” was all the girl’s mother could say before grief seized her ability to speak.
I remembered how gullible I was at thirteen. Shoot, I was fooled by the enemy at age thirty-four. It’s like you think you have to look out for one thing, but the enemy attacks you from a whole different direction. The least I could do was gird Eric up with the Word, have him write the scriptures on his heart, and get some more saints praying for him on a regular basis.
He had prayer warriors covering him at my mother’s church because my mother was a long-standing member of New Zion. The members at our home church, however, knew Eric by name because of his involvement with Sunday school. When Quinn and I were an item, he saw to it Eric was one of the first students in class every week. He helped my son memorize verses to make sure he was ready for class. Come to think of it, maybe that’s how Eric had slipped under the reading radar. Quinn worked with him so much, it was hard to tell Eric had a problem.
My mother was right about the whole church thing. I was planning to get back to church soon, but to be honest, I rather enjoyed the growth I was experiencing in the five-thirty club. Felt like I had Jesus all to myself. A honeymoon phase of sorts. Alas, there’s the rest of the world to deal with.
I turned off the television, kissed Jesus good night, and told him I was coming to His house tomorrow. I do believe He kissed me back.