2-in-1 Yada Yada (29 page)

Oh, brother. Not likely,
I thought.

“The doctor, what did he say?” Ruth prodded.

“She. Doctor was a she, which helped some. She said it felt like a cyst thing. But she wants to stick a needle in it to make sure, and wants me to get one o' those mammogram things.” Chanda's eyes filled, and her hands twisted the handkerchief tighter. “Oh God, I'm scared. Even if it's not . . . not . . . you know . . . I heard those mammogram machines flatten your breast like a pancake and it
hurts.
And I'm scared of needles. Even in my arm! But in my . . . in my . . .?”

“Oh, honey.” Adele rolled her eyes. “You can do it. You a normal size. Now, me? They hardly know what to do with these things.” She spread her arms and puffed out her large bosom. Thank goodness I wasn't the only one who laughed.

“The aspiration they do with the needle's not so bad.” Avis chimed in gently. “Really. One of us will go with you to hold your hand.”

“What do you mean, not so bad? How do you know, Sista Avis?” Chanda looked doubtful.

Avis was silent for a moment, as though she hadn't intended to go this far, and suddenly the group seemed to hold its collective breath. Then she said quietly, “Because I've been through the whole nine yards.”

Chanda's eyes widened. “You had breast cancer? Did you . . . did they take . . . ?”

Involuntarily ten pairs of eyes strayed to Avis's chest. She always wore loose-fitting things—tunics, big stylish tops in bold prints. Did that mean—?

“Whoa! Slow down, everybody.”Avis shook her head. “No, I did not have a mastectomy. I did have a lumpectomy, because I did have cancer—but they found it early. It hadn't spread anyplace else. But even that . . .” Avis's mouth twitched, almost smiled.

“What!” several people cried together. All of us had a morbid fascination with this conversation. Avis, of all people! She'd told us more about herself in the last sixty seconds than I'd figured out in the last ten months.

“It's nothing, just . . .” Avis's shoulders started to shake, and her smile grew bigger. Good grief, she was laughing.

“What?” a few more people begged.

“It's not funny,” Chanda sniffed.

“No, no, it's not funny. I'm sorry, Chanda. It's just that . . .”Avis shook her head, still grinning at her private joke.

“You better tell us, Avis Johnson,” Florida said, “or we all be thinkin' you crazy.”

“Already thinkin' that,” Adele muttered.

That was the truth. This wasn't like Avis at all.

“All right.” Avis tried to control herself. “Like I said, I had a lumpectomy, and they only took about one-fourth of my breast. Which I'm grateful for, believe me. But . . . to be honest, when I looked in the mirror, I still felt deformed. And I was worried . . .” She blinked rapidly, as though fighting some lurking tears. “ . . . worried my husband might think so, too. I didn't want him looking at me, afraid of what he was thinking about my body—even though he kept assuring me it made no difference to him.”

So there
is
a Mr. Avis! Or was.
I was dying of curiosity. Why hadn't she ever talked about him before?

“Of course I had to go for all these checkups, and the next time I had a mammogram, the technician put these two little black plastic dots on either side of the scar so it would show up in the x-ray picture. And when I looked down at my breast . . .” Avis's shoulders started to shake again as she tried to control her laughter. “. . . it seemed like this little old man with no teeth was looking back up at me—you know . . . the puckered scar, the two little black eyes, and this protruding dark nose . . .”

Florida laughed right out loud. “Oh, girl, I can just
see
it!” And by that time, all the rest of us were cracking up.

“What did you
do?”
Nony said, grinning as big as the rest of us.

“Well, I started laughing—laughing so hard I could hardly stop. And the technician, she looks at me like I'm crazy. So I told her—”

“You told her?” Adele sputtered. “You
was
crazy, girl.”

“Yes, she did look at me funny—especially when I asked her if she would just leave the two little black dots so I could show my husband.”

At this, we all howled.

“You didn't!” Chanda eyes popped.

Avis got out a tissue from her purse and wiped her eyes. “I did. When he got home from work, I made him sit down on the couch, and I unbuttoned my blouse—”

“You go, girl!” Adele shouted.

“—and showed him the little old man with no teeth . . .” She could hardly go on, she was laughing so hard. But finally she gasped, “And we had the best laugh we'd had in a
looong
time.”

So did Yada Yada. It took us a good five minutes to pick ourselves up and resume some semblance of order. But when we did, Ruth bluntly asked the question that was burning in my mind and probably everyone else's.

“Your husband, where is he now?”

Avis took a long shuddering breath and was quiet for a moment or two. When she spoke her voice had dropped, and she spoke almost reverently. “That's the hard part. He died two years later . . . from cancer.”

31

W
hew. Finding out that Avis had had breast cancer and that her husband had died of cancer was
huge.
Who would have known, as serene as she always seemed and so ready to “give glory to God” in every situation? Her hilarious story about visualizing “the little man with no teeth” on her “deformed breast” seemed so out of character for Avis . . . and yet, maybe not.

“Laughing together was so healing for Conrad and me!” she told us. “In fact, it helped prepare us for what lay ahead when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. They couldn't operate—the cancer was too far advanced by the time he was diagnosed. But God showed us that even in the midst of a crisis, we can look for His gifts of joy and peace.” She shook her head, half-smiling at the memory. “He wouldn't let our daughters be all sad and gloomy around him, even at the end, when he was bedridden and in a lot of pain. He'd crack jokes and tease them . . . and I'm so grateful. Their memories of their dad are happy ones right up to the end, even though they miss him terribly. I'm only sorry he never met his namesake . . .Conrad Johnson the third.” She threw up a hand. “Don't get me started on the grandbabies! I think maybe it's time to pray for Chanda.”

And pray we did, gathering around our sister who cleaned houses on the North Shore, praying with many voices for healing. As part of the prayer, both Avis and Nony read a whole litany of “healing scriptures,” claiming God's promises for health and wholeness for Chanda. I certainly believed God could heal, but I wasn't always comfortable thanking God in advance, like we
knew
for sure that's what He was going to do. In fact, I felt a little confused; Avis's husband had died, hadn't he? It was a little easier for me to pray that Chanda would experience God's peace in the middle of the uncertainty and that she could trust that God loved her and was working out His purposes in her life.

While we were still praying, the door buzzer sounded. “Ain't time yet,” I heard Adele mutter, but she padded silently in her slippers for the front door. Shrill voices from the stairway took shape as Adele opened the door.

“Don't know this place! Take me home!”

“MaDear, you
are
home. Here's Adele—see?”

“Adele who?”

We heard Adele's sharp voice. “Sassy, you wasn't s'posed to come till eight. I got company.”

“I know, I know. But . . . had to bring her home. She . . . never mind. Talk later. But I gotta go now. 'Bye, MaDear. Don't be mad, Adele. I'll call you.” And footsteps retreated down the short flight leading out the front door of the apartment building.

The apartment door closed and Adele appeared back in her front room carrying a walker folded flat in one hand and dragging MaDear by the hand with her other. “Sit here,” she commanded, lowering the elderly woman into the dining room chair she'd been sitting in earlier. “Shh, now. We're praying.”

“Oh. Praying.”Out of the corner of my eye I saw MaDear press her hands flat together in front of her sunken bosom and squeeze her eyes shut. “Yessuh, Jesus . . . thanks ya, Jesus . . . 'Alle-
lu
-jah . . . Yessuh, yessuh . . .”

Adele started to rejoin the group praying around Chanda, but Avis moved over to the little woman in the dining room chair and began to pray. The rest of the group followed her, several kneeling down in front of the chair, others taking MaDear's hands and holding them, and began to pray for Adele's mother as if she'd been there the whole time. MaDear's eyes opened and she looked from face to face, a smile beginning to soften the birdlike face.

“Adele? Adele? We having a party?” she said in her throaty voice.

“Sure we are, MaDear.” Adele's own voice sounded husky.

Yada Yada prayed for MaDear for several minutes, then we drifted back to our places with the last few “Bless the Lords.” Edesa opted for sitting on the floor with Yo-Yo so Adele could have her chair.

As the room quieted, Avis raised her eyebrows. “Anything else before we close out today?”

“What about you, Jodi?” Florida spoke up. “You always so busy keepin' everybody connected. What can we pray 'bout for you?”

Her question took me off guard. “Oh, well, I don't know . . . nothing really.” That sounded lame, and I knew it.

“Maybe Jodi doesn't need our prayers.” Adele's statement sounded more like a challenge.

“Of course I do,” I tossed back. Where did she get off saying something like that? Every time I thought Adele and I were breaking ground, it felt like she broke the shovel over my head. “I
would
appreciate prayer for my kids . . . Josh and Amanda are going to Mexico on a mission trip the end of this month—a youth group thing. But I have to admit I'm anxious. All the terrorist threats . . . the turmoil in the Middle East . . . heightened security. It's not easy letting them go out of the country right now.”
There,
I thought.

Avis nodded. “Of course. Anyone else?”

“Well, uh . . .” Yo-Yo scratched the back of her short, stand-up hair. “You all good at prayin', I know that. So maybe you can pray for me about this Jesus thing. You know, deciding to be a Jesus follower or however you said it, Florida.”

Nony literally leaped out of her chair. “Halle
lu
jah!” she shouted. Adele's living room erupted with “Glory to God!” and “Praise Jesus!”Yo-Yo wanted to be a Christian! Now
that
was worth shouting about.

Yo-Yo stuck her hands in her pockets and hunched her shoulders till she could get a word in edgewise. “You guys finished? 'Cause it ain't like there's anything to shout about yet. I done some stuff . . . stuff I ain't proud of. What's God gonna say about that?”

I NEVER DID GET TO TALK TO YO-YO that evening about the teen rave flyer, but it seemed like a downer after the way we ended Yada Yada at Adele's apartment. I mentally made a note to call her sometime before we met again in two weeks, which Nony offered to host at her house in Evanston, just north of the city. “You're all invited to visit our church that Sunday, too, if you'd like,”Nony had said. “Easy to find . . . the Worship Center on Dempster, just west of Dodge. Doesn't look like a church, though. We meet in a warehouse.”

“Well, Jodi and Avis's church meets in a storefront,” Edesa had joked. “Maybe you'll have to wait till Yada Yada comes to Iglesia del Espirito Santo to visit a
real
church.”

Avis was ecstatic on the way home. “You know, it was really Yo-Yo who encouraged us to hang in there with each other after the conference—to keep praying for Delores and José, remember? And, thanks to you, you got us all connected by e-mail. Maybe she didn't know it, but it was God's plan all along for us to hang in there for Yo-Yo, too, don't you think?”

“Absolutely.” I laughed. “Avis, I am so high, I don't even think the car tires are touching the ground.”

“Here.” She fished around in her big purse and pulled out a CD. “Stick that in your CD player.” In a few moments the car was filled with a mixture of gospel and praise and worship music.

I pulled up in front of Avis's apartment building and spied a parking space not far away. It gave me an idea. “Avis, could I come up for a few minutes? I'd like to see a picture of your husband . . . if you don't mind. After the story you told tonight, I'd like to meet him because . . . that's part of you I didn't know about.”

She hesitated just a millisecond. “Sure. Come on up.”

I parked the car—thanking God for the mini-miracle of a parking space on the street at that time of evening—and followed Avis up to her second-floor apartment. It was . . . just like Avis. Elegant art prints on the walls, shiny wood floors—shoes off at the door, please—with bright-colored area rugs, beige-and-black furniture, bookcases filled with hardcover books, and silk flowers in curved opaque vases. Colorful translucent drapes were caught back from windows that boasted Venetian blinds, turned just so to let the light in and keep prying eyes from below out.

“It's beautiful, Avis,” I breathed.

She walked over to a low bookcase, the top of which was covered with framed photographs, and picked up a five-by-seven silver frame. “This is Conrad.”

The picture was actually Avis and Conrad, standing by the railing of a ship, his arm clutching her close. They were both wearing white slacks and marine blue shirts, setting off the rich deep color of their skin. Avis was laughing, holding on to a long headscarf that was blowing in the wind. Conrad was grinning at her, obviously thinking he was the luckiest man in the world.

“That was our twentieth anniversary,” she said. “We took a cruise to the Caribbean. Our first and last.” She pointed out the rest of the photographs. “Those are the three girls—Charette, Rochelle, and Natasha. Charette and Rochelle are married. This one is Charette's twins,Tabitha and Toby, last Christmas. And this . . .” She picked up a portrait of a toddler with loose black curls all over his head, grinning happily. “. . . is Conrad Johnson the third. Rochelle's baby. She gave the baby ‘Johnson' as his middle name so he could carry his granddaddy's name.”