Mama Rocks the Empty Cradle Read online

  I threw my hands up. “Oh, no … you’ve got to be kidding … ain’t no way I’m going with you to an abortion clinic!”

  Yasmine lowered herself into the chair, her head so straight it looked like she had a glass of water on the top of it. “You’re my best friend, Simone. You’ve got to go with me!”

  “Because I’m your best friend, I won’t help you do this!”

  Her face stiffened. “How do you know what’s right or wrong? Who made you my judge and jury?”

  She was right. This was Yasmine’s decision, not mine. And I knew my friend had not made her decision carelessly, whether I agreed with it or not. I took a deep breath, trying to take the edge out of my voice. “I’m not your judge. But I am feeling that having an abortion ain’t the thing to do!”

  Yasmine was silent. She sat chewing the inside of her cheek. After a while, she spoke. “Why are you so protective now? You ain’t never cared about babies before … you always said you didn’t have the maternal instinct!”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess I saw a baby a few days ago that turned a switch on inside me,” I said, remembering Morgan’s angelic smile and thinking of how somebody had snatched her away and killed her mother. Where was that poor child now? “And my feelings tell me to care about the baby you’re carrying. I’ll help you with it, I promise!”

  She waved a hand dismissively at me. “Yeah, right!”

  “Listen, Yasmine,” I said. “You can’t—”

  “You’re making a decision without even thinking about it!”

  The knot in my throat tightened. “Okay,” I told Yasmine. “I’ll think about what you want to do but—and I mean this—I ain’t promising you that I’m going to go with you to an abortion clinic.”

  Yasmine didn’t take her eyes off me. “When will you get back to Atlanta?”

  “Next week,” I answered her.

  “Think about it for at least that long,” she said, then began chewing her cheek some more.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I said.

  “I’ll wait until you get back to Atlanta before I make an appointment at the clinic. You’ll change your mind by then!”

  I didn’t say anything.

  The tears shone in Yasmine’s eyes again. “Simone, I can’t do this by myself.”

  “What about Ernest? Have you told him?”

  “No. And I’m not going to. I ain’t having Ernest marry me ’cause I’m having his baby!”

  “He might want to marry you!”

  “A baby don’t make a man stay, and in the case of a black man it’ll make him leave faster!”

  “Once he knows—”

  “No!—I ain’t having Ernest beat me down … I ain’t gonna tell him, don’t want him to know!”

  “Girl, you’re crazy! Ernest has got a right to know!”

  “No, he doesn’t!”

  “Suppose he wants his baby?” I asked.

  “I’ll—” Yasmine stopped, thought, then said softly, “I’m only twenty-five. I can have other babies. Once we’re married, I’ll give Ernest all the babies he can take care of!”

  “Suppose—”

  “Simone, get real! Men ain’t got feelings for babies like women do!”

  “Who told you that?”

  “If you listened to the women whose hair I do every week, you’d know it!”

  “My father—”

  “Mr. James is different. He’s from the old school, not like these men today! I’ve heard my clients tell me how their man disappeared once they became pregnant! It’s the way things are nowadays!”

  “Maybe you need to spend less time talking to your clients and more time doing their hair!”

  She glared at me. “I’m not telling Ernest and neither are you!”

  “And if I do?”

  “I’ll never speak to you again, Simone. You and I have been girlfriends since before Ernest, before Cliff. I know you ain’t about to let something like this come between us now!”

  I ran my hand through my braids. “Yasmine,” I said, “you’re supposed to have some sense … don’t do this thing to your baby!”

  She made a funny sound in the back of her throat. “Give it a week! Think about being in my shoes. Then you’ll see things my way.”

  I shook my head. “Believe what you want,” I said, deciding already that there was no way that I was going to change my mind.

  She stood and began walking toward the front door. Then she turned. “Simone,” she said. Her voice cracked.

  “Yeah!”

  “Don’t tell anybody what I’ve told you. Not even Miss Candi.”

  “I won’t say anything,” I promised.

  She cocked her head, pulled on the neck of her T-shirt, then opened the door. “I ain’t kidding. Don’t mention it to your mama … I don’t want Miss Candi thinking bad about me!”

  “Mama isn’t judgmental,” I said. But I couldn’t help but wonder what my mother would think if I told her that I was going to have an abortion.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  The Covingtons are natives of Otis County. They own quite a bit of land, property that my great-great-grandfather obtained during Reconstruction. His oldest son was my great-grandfather, Ezekiel Covington. Great-grandpa Ezekiel’s youngest and only living child was my great-uncle Chester. He had died six months earlier at the ripe age of ninety-nine.

  Uncle Chester had quite a few children himself, since he’d buried three wives. It was his daughter, Agatha, however, who inherited Great-grandfather Ezekiel Covington’s shrewd business sense. Cousin Agatha is a tall thin woman, with banana-colored skin. She has never married and, to my knowledge, has never wanted to. When you meet her she appears shy. But this is a deception. She is so astute in the handling of the Covingtons’ land that you’d think she had a degree in business management.

  It was Cousin Agatha’s cleverness, along with a few encouraging words from Mama, that convinced Uncle Chester to give Agatha the power of attorney before he died. Cousin Agatha set up the Covington Land Company and had it incorporated, ensuring that our land would stay in the family for at least another hundred years.

  Daddy’s cousin, Fred Covington from Philadelphia, doesn’t value land ownership the way Cousin Agatha does. As a matter of fact, Uncle Fred’s philosophy is that land is good only for burying the dead. Money, he says, is for the living.

  While Cousin Agatha doesn’t agree with her first cousin, she was keen enough to know that she could use a little cash to fix up the old house she and Uncle Chester had shared for years. So she arranged to have the timber cut on the land, something that hadn’t been done for decades.

  Cousin Agatha shopped around for the best price and, when she’d finalized the deal, she wrote letters to the entire Covington clan, telling each one how much they could expect as their share of the proceeds of the timber sale.

  For the past three weeks, the loggers had been cutting. Rain had stopped them temporarily, but once the sun came out, they’d pushed their trucks and saws further into the Covingtons’ forest.

  I don’t know if Cousin Agatha suspected that the loggers would try to cheat her or not, but she absolutely refused to leave her house while the timber was being cut all around her.

  The first phone call I’d gotten after Yasmine left was from Cliff. He told me that things in L.A. were really getting bogged down. It seemed that Mrs. Campbell’s appraiser came up with a greater value on their furniture than Mr. Campbell’s. Mrs. Campbell had worked herself up into a fine state, telling Cliff she was going to get every cent of her husband’s money.

  Both Cliff’s and Yasmine’s problems had me in a sickening funk. So when Cousin Agatha called to tell me that she had cooked our dinner and that all I had to do was to come to her house and pick it up, I felt things were looking up a little.

  I peeked into Mama’s room. The Meprozine capsules had knocked her out; she would be asleep until either my father got in from work or I returned from Cousin
Agatha’s.

  Happy that I didn’t have to throw something together for the three of us to eat later, I got into my Honda and headed to Cousin Agatha’s house near Cypress Creek.

  It was a little after two-thirty when I pulled out of Smalls Lane. The rain had stopped; the sun was shining through the thickly tree-lined highway.

  I popped in Nancy Wilson. Her tape, “A Lady with a Song,” filled the car with her smooth and mellow voice. It was exactly what I needed on this trip. I felt depressed, or maybe sad … I don’t know. Whatever my mood, Nancy’s voice supported it.

  The drive to Cypress Creek is along a twisting highway surrounded by acres of maples, silver-white birches, tall green pine and oak trees, and a thick undergrowth of shrubs. Every five or six miles, there is a sprinkle of farmhouses.

  The strip is usually empty. The few cars that use it whisk through with no downtime. So when I glanced at my rearview mirror, I was surprised to see the dark blue Ford coming up fast behind me.

  I slowed to let him pass. I wasn’t in any hurry. Yasmine was on my mind. Her world is made up of cosmetics, fashion shows, and salon events. She is on the go so much, she barely keeps up with herself. My girlfriend is bright, the kind of woman who becomes more attractive the longer you know her.

  Yasmine was a full-grown woman, I thought, capable of making her own decision, and I had no choice but to live with whatever she decided. I sighed, remembering that she hadn’t asked my opinion. All she wanted was for me to go with her to the clinic.

  I wrestled with that thought … to distance myself from personal involvement … to convince myself that I had to respect my best friend’s decision. But the more I thought about it, the more intense my feeling against the abortion became.

  And something else was bothering me. For years, I’ve had to defend not being maternal, not being a woman who thought the only way to be happy was to have kids. Now I was having to defend why I wanted to save an unborn child, so much so that I was risking my friendship with my best friend over it.

  It was ironic that Yasmine’s dilemma and the kidnapped Morgan were what it had taken to spark my maternal flame. Still, my conversion was real—I felt like I had finally become a sharer in the bond with all of my sisters—you know, that woman’s thing that tells you to be a part of perpetuating the human race!

  My hands gripped the steering wheel. “Yasmine would tell me to get pregnant without being married and have a baby myself, since I’m such a staunch opposer to her abortion!” I said aloud. That thought lingered. “I’m sorry, girlfriend,” I said. “I don’t care what you say, I’m not going with you to that clinic!”

  This whole thing had me talking to myself. Simone, get a grip, I was thinking when from the corner of my eye I saw the driver of the blue Ford pick up speed. He put on his turn signal, then pulled out in front of me. As he drew even with me, he threw up his index finger like he was pulling the trigger of a gun.

  The driver was black, middle-aged. His hair was woolly, long over the ears and combed back. His lips were uneven, his top one long and thin, his bottom lip fat. His beard was a scraggly thing that was in bad need of trimming. His complexion was leathery like he had spent a lot of time out-of-doors. The Ford slowed, then shot past me along the deserted road.

  Once the Ford was out of sight, I was alone again. My unpleasant sight of the driver had made me a little uneasy, but with Nancy’s song filling my car, I was beginning to relax. I thought of how Cliff would react if I was pregnant, what it would do to our relationship. That thought, and a nudge of the tightness still in my stomach, made me shiver. I lowered the air conditioner. “Pregnancy and babies,” I whispered. “All of a sudden my world is filled with both!”

  By that time I had noticed the blue Ford again. It was ahead of me, the driver moving less than twenty miles per hour. I slowed. As I did, he put on his signal to pull off to the side of the road, as if he had a flat tire. I drove past, looking for any sign of car distress. There was none. But as I pulled past, I noticed the baby’s car seat strapped behind him.

  The whole encounter took less than a minute and I wouldn’t have thought any more about it except the Ford soon caught up with me again. This time the driver didn’t pass. He was driving so close behind me that I thought he was going to ram my tail end. I glanced at the rearview mirror. The driver was staring at me unblinkingly. Something in the look on his face told me that this man would hurt me if he ever got the chance. And what I heard next made my heart jump into my throat. There was a thump and a fizz. One of my front tires had blown. I turned down the volume on the tape and took a deep breath. One of the things I’ve learned about panic is that it causes errors in judgment. Things happen fast, and because of the instinct for survival and the desire to get away to safety, thought usually follows action. Be calm, I told myself. Think. I knew how to change a tire. Cousin Agatha’s house wasn’t too far away. My eyes went back to the mirror. Just inches behind me, the blue Ford followed. The demented eyes of its driver just seemed to be waiting for me to stop my car. Flat tire or no, I kept driving.

  The Ford stayed close behind me. I felt trapped, stupid. I kept staring back at the car inches behind me, fighting to stay calm, fighting to take deep, even breaths. Think, think.

  The roadway was deserted, the silence eerily profound except for the rhythmic thump of my flat tire. There wasn’t another car in sight. I took a deep, careful breath and with my left hand tight on the steering wheel, I opened the car pocket with my right hand. I examined the can of pepper spray I found there. Was it good? The last time I’d used it was during that affair in Bentley a year and a half earlier.

  I glanced into my mirror again. The Ford was still inches behind me. But now, in the far distance, a white car was coming up fast behind both of us. My heart leaped. I whispered, “Thank goodness!” When I eased the Honda toward the shoulder of the road, the driver of the Ford immediately followed.

  I switched off the car, checked to make sure that all of the doors were locked. A flock of crows, disturbed by our arrival, cackled and scolded, then flew off over the tall trees. I prayed.

  The man in the Ford behind me didn’t move. I was beginning to wonder why he hadn’t gotten out of his car and come toward me when I realized that he, too, had seen the approaching car … he was going to wait until it passed before he made a move.

  As the white BMW neared, I flung open the door and jumped from my Honda. I ran into the middle of the highway, waving my hands frantically and screaming as loud as I could.

  The driver of the BMW slowed his car. Two young men in their twenties and a young woman gaped out at me, confused.

  “Help me!” I screamed. “Please help me!”

  The young man who was driving stopped his car. He opened his window and said, “Calm down, lady … what’s your problem?”

  “My tire,” I said. “I’ve got a flat tire!”

  “Uh, you feel like changing a tire?” the driver asked his two passengers. The young lady in the backseat rose up, looked me in the eyes, then whispered something to the two men.

  I felt the eyes of the man in the Ford boring straight into me. I pointed. “That man has been following me! If you won’t fix my tire, at least give me a ride … Just don’t leave me!” I begged.

  The three people in the BMW looked toward the parked Ford. “Okay, lady,” the driver said, as he swung his car in front of my Honda. “If you’ve got a tire jack, we’ll change your tire!”

  The man in the Ford shook his head. Then he turned the key in his ignition and pulled back out onto the highway. When he swerved past, I saw for the first time the baby who was strapped into the infant’s seat.

  The man had Cricket’s baby in his car!

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Yasmine’s problem had stuck in my throat like a lump of scorched rice pudding; the guy who had Morgan added to that lump. Now the only thing I could taste was bile.

  I’d planned to go back to Atlanta on Saturday. I’d concentrate there o
n influencing Yasmine not to have the abortion. After thinking about Cliff’s problem with his client, Mrs. Campbell, I decided that whatever delay he’d have in getting back to Atlanta would allow me time to spend with Yasmine. Now, that cold-eyed turkey in the blue Ford had pissed me off in a way that made me want to stay in Otis long enough to help Mama not only to track down who had brutally murdered Cricket, but to find out who had kidnapped little Morgan. If, as I strongly suspected, the baby’s kidnapper was the guy in the blue Ford, I’d take pleasure in personally throwing salt into his eyes.

  By the time I’d picked up the food from Agatha and driven back home, a hodgepodge of emotions were surging through me. As soon as I walked into the house I’d intended to tell Mama that I’d spotted little Morgan, but I found her steadying herself, pressing one hand on the wall for support as she painfully made her way toward the family room. I waited until she was seated in the family room, her feet propped up on a stool. The expression on her face told me that she already knew I had something I wanted to tell her.

  “You wouldn’t believe who I saw,” I began. No sooner were the words out of my mouth, however, than my father walked into the room. He pointed to the food on the tiled kitchen counter. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Cousin Agatha sent dinner,” I said, glancing at Mama. I suspected my father was thinking that while his cousin’s cooking could never equal Mama’s, it was definitely better than anything I could throw together. Whatever he was thinking, he pulled back the foil paper that covered the bowls. “Field peas, rice, corn bread, and fried chicken,” he reported, then he shook his head. “I’ll eat later.” He turned and headed toward the front door.

  “Mama, you wouldn’t believe who I saw,” I began again before we heard the door shut behind him.

  Mama’s stare was a big question mark.

  “Morgan—I saw Morgan less than an hour ago,” I told her.

  Mama’s eyes grew wide.

  “I swear—when I was going to Cousin Agatha’s house. On Highway Three, that winding road that dead-ends near the Cypress Creek road. Morgan was inside a blue Ford that some fool was driving.”