Mama Rocks the Empty Cradle

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 Ford slowed, then shot past me along the deserted road.…

When I 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.…

Dedication

To
William, Sr.
, my husband of thirty-four years;
Edwin
, my oldest son;
Shekinah
, my daughter (and best friend);
Vincent
, my son-in-law; their sons,
Joshua
, my first grandchild, and
Cedric
, the newest addition to our family;
William, Jr.
, my youngest son;
Stacey
, his wife;
Delcena
, my niece;
Richard
, her husband; and
Morgan
, their daughter.

I
’d failed.

Frustration hung over my head like a halo. The task hadn’t been hard. My boss had given me a routine assignment, one that normally took me less than a week to do. “Run a paper trail, find this witness; our client swears he exists,” he’d said. Then he gave me a name, a description, and an approximate age.

When I didn’t come up with the person, my boss, one of Atlanta’s best defense lawyers, plea-bargained for his client. Then he boarded a plane from Hartsfield to take a European vacation.

I sat, staring at a diploma that I’d taken so much pride in earning, and thinking about the day I’d interviewed for the position of paralegal in Sidney Jacoby’s research department. I’d already had five
such interviews in less prestigious law offices without a hint of a job offer.

Except for my urge to flick dandruff from his shoulders, I swiftly sized Sidney Jacoby up to be pretty cool. Sidney looked down at my résumé, then back up to meet my eyes. “Simone Covington,” he said, as if he liked the sound of my name.

I nodded.

“Graduated from Emory, I see.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you going on to law school?”

“No,” I admitted. “I like the legal research.”

Sidney laughed. “I like the research myself,” he admitted. “Did a lot of that when I was in law school.”

“You were a paralegal?” I asked, surprised.

“Yes,” he said, shaking his head, his dark brown eyes twinkling in a way that made me sure he could be warm with compassion at one moment and cold at the next. He leaned back in his seat, and crossed his fingers in front of him. “Nobody can tamper with the truth,” he continued. “If you dig deep enough, peel off all the layers of appearances, cut away through the lies, and strip through the absurdities, you’ll find the truth, Miss Covington.”

I smiled.

“The adrenaline you feel from the experience is priceless,” he said.

My eyes widened. I believed the man, believed he shared my passion for getting to the heart of things.

“When I was a boy,” he continued, “I almost
drove my mother crazy. Later, after I’d finished law school, my father died. I offered to move back home, thinking I could help her. She wouldn’t have it. She even gave me five thousand dollars and told me, ‘I cannot take another day of your questioning everything and everybody that comes to my house.’ ”

We laughed.

“My teachers loved me,” I said. “They could always count on me to research the things that they couldn’t find time to research themselves.”

Sidney said, “I could never do anything that other kids called fun, but I knew the details of just about anything. And the things I didn’t know, I wouldn’t stop until I learned them.”

“I suppose we have a gift,” I heard myself say.

“Yes,” he agreed, as if I had said something profound. His eyes twinkled. “And don’t you ever take that gift for granted, Simone Covington.”

The next day, Sidney Jacoby telephoned me and made me a generous offer. Needless to say, I like the man. To be honest, from that day forward, I felt good about working for him. He genuinely believed in what I do, and he supported the way I do it.

I’ve worked for Sidney for five years now, five years in which he had never taken a vacation. Oh, he’d planned to get away, all right—every detail of a six-week tour of Europe from the time the plane leaves Hartsfield until it lands in London, he had planned. But he had never done it.

When I admitted that I’d come up empty-handed in my search for our witness, Sidney didn’t say
much. But I was sure he was disappointed. I suppose that’s why I was thinking about the day he had interviewed me, remembering our mutual belief in digging until we got what we sought.

Still studying my diploma, I reached for a box of Godiva chocolates and my phone and called my mama. “Sidney’s gone on vacation,” I told her.

“Good, then you can take some time off, too—come home,” she replied.

“Just because Sidney is out of town doesn’t mean that there isn’t any work for me to do.”

“It’s midsummer. Sidney needed a vacation and you do, too.”

“When I told Sidney that I couldn’t come up with his witness,” I told Mama, “he stared like he saw something in me that he’d missed all these years—”

“Simone,” Mama interrupted. “You’re doing it again. Overreacting. It’s normal for people to take vacations in the summer and Sidney is normal. Besides, if that witness existed, you
would
have found him. Sidney and I both know that!”

I swallowed. “Maybe that’s why he didn’t push me to keep looking,” I said, my spirit lightening.

Mama’s voice was softer. “Forget the case. Take a week’s vacation and come home—I need you.”

“You want help to solve another murder?” I asked, and laughed.

Mama laughed too, a light, musical sound. “Not this time,” she told me. “I’m scheduled for surgery first thing Monday morning.”

I sat up straight. “What kind of surgery?” I demanded. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing serious,” Mama replied. “I’m just having bunions removed from both my feet. I’d planned for James to go with me to the hospital—”

“Hospital?”

“It’s outpatient surgery, Simone,” Mama said. “Anyway, you’d be a big help to me. With Sidney out of the country for six weeks, you can spare a week of your vacation, can’t you?”

“Cliff—” I started to say.

“You and Cliff will have at least two weeks left to do something together. But, tell you what I’ll do,” Mama said, and I knew I was about to be bribed. “You come home on Friday, you and I will shop and cook on Saturday, then Cliff can drive here and have Sunday dinner with you, me, and your father.”

My boyfriend, Cliff, is a divorce lawyer who is working hard to become a partner in his firm. The thought of how much Cliff and I both loved Mama’s cooking whirled through my mind. “Cliff has been pretty busy with another one of his detachment clients,” I said.