No Weapon Formed (Boaz Brown) (3 page)

Stelson came dashing into the
living room. “What’s wrong?”

Seth answered for us, “Mommy’s
tying my shoes, but I wanted to tie them.”

I finished the second shoe
and gave Seth directions to go get his backpack from his bedroom. He obeyed,
albeit with tear-filled eyes.

Stelson parked his hands at
his waist and whispered, “Why wouldn’t you let him tie his shoes?”

Zoe’s continued cries divided
my attention. I answered Stelson as I pulled her from the swing. “Because it’s
taking him too long and we’re in a hurry.”

“It’s important for him to be
able to do things for himself,” my husband lectured. “What’s going to happen to
him when you’re not around, Shondra? You want him to be the type of kid who can’t
do anything without Momma?”

“He’s
four
!”

Stelson slapped his hand into
his palm. “He’s a boy who will one day be a man. I don’t expect you to
understand this, but you have got to let him try to do things on his own. Maybe
you could get him up a little earlier.”

I motioned for Stelson to
hand me the baby’s diaper bag from the kitchen. “Um, no. If I wake him up
earlier, that means
I
have to get up earlier. Not gonna happen.”

“Then I’ll take him to
school,” Stelson suggested.

“When? On the one or two variable
days a week when you don’t have to be across town by six o’clock? I don’t think
so. It’s not worth confusing the routine. We gotta go.”

I left Stelson standing in
bewilderment, thinking to myself:
He just doesn
’
t get it.

I dropped the kids off at
daycare without incident, staggered back to the car and sped out of the parking
lot with every intent to clip off as much lost time as possible. My Honda was
getting to be as old as Methuselah, but she could get up and go when necessary.

I called my best friend,
Peaches, on my way in to work. She lived in Philadelphia, which put her an hour
ahead of me, so I knew her morning was well underway.

“Hey, girl.”

“Hey. You’re just now heading
in to work?” she questioned.

“Don’t start. I’ve had a
crazy morning already. Stelson snoring, baby crying, and I stubbed the mess out
of my toe. My foot is so jacked,” I vented.

“And you’re headed to the
doctor’s office, right?” she asked in her mothering tone. I suppose as the mom
of four children, she had mastered the art of indirectly telling people what
they ought to do.

“No. I’m going to work. If it
gets worse, I’ll go to a twenty-four-hour clinic when I get off so they can
confirm that it’s broken—after Stelson gets home from work.”

“Girl, you crazy,” she
dismissed my perfectly sane plan. “A broken bone is good for at least two days
off work in my book. And you know I was the H-R queen.”

I could only agree as she
recalled the person she used to be. The best friend I used to know. In the five
years since she’d married Quinn, Peaches had turned into the most domesticated,
all-natural guru in my phone contact list. She had jumped into wifehood and
stay-at-home-mommy-world with both feet after vowing “I do”. Took some
convincing to get her down the aisle, mind you, but once she married Quinn, she
never looked back. Just packed her stuff, scooped up her nine-year-old son and
kissed Texas good-bye. Then she popped out two more stair-step kids—a
girl and a boy—and put the brakes on her career in order to take care of
house and home.

“Just ask the doctor to give
orders to keep your foot elevated and iced for the next forty-eight hours.
Maybe you can catch up on the sleep you lose to snoring. Did you try the
lavender snoring remedy I emailed you?”

“No! You know I don’t fool
with all that natural stuff you send me. I’d be running all over town looking
for frog sweat and ant spit, listening to you.”

Peaches coughed and faded for
a moment. “I almost choked on my smoothie. Shondra, you stupid.”

Frog sweat and ant spit.
I had to laugh at my own joke. “Girl, I’m
tired. That’s what I am. Deliriously tired.”

“So what happened with the
housekeeper?”

“I haven’t found one yet.”

“You know my mother is
chomping at the bit to get her hands on Zoe. Since my kids and I are out of
town and no one in my family has had any babies lately, she’s always asking
about yours,” Peaches reminded me.

“Your mom is a grandma. They’re
supposed to step in every now and then, not every day,” I said.

“Have it your way. But are
you even looking for help yet?” she nosied.

Oh, the hazards of having a
best friend who knows you too well. “You know, I can’t open my house to just
anybody. Don’t you have to give the housekeeper a key? A pass code to the alarm
system? I’m not comfortable with the idea.”

“Well, I’ll be praying for
you to find the help you need.
If
it’s God’s will,” she chastised.

“Have you been talking to
Stelson?”

“Not exactly,” she avoided my
question. “But you know…he and Quinn are Facebook friends. Every once in a
while, they might IM one another.”

“Uh huh.”
A conspiracy.
“Look, Peaches, you know I can’t stay home with my kids. They would drive me
crazy. I’d be depressed. I’d get fat. It would actually be counterproductive, I
promise. But why am I explaining all this to you. You
know
me.”

“Yes,” she sided with me, “I
know you. And I know you’re always tired, which makes you extra cranky,
irritable, and very hard to deal with, I might add.”

“Look who’s talking! You were
the president of the bad attitude caucus for
several
consecutive terms,”
I reviewed the record for her. “And you were the card-carrying member of the
independent woman club. Almost cost you a relationship with Quinn because you
didn’t want to lose your identity!”

“True that, but I resigned
from both clubs when I learned to rest in Christ,” she said. “His yoke is easy,
His burdens are light.”

I, too, had memorized Matthew
11:30 in Sunday school. Back then, the problem was: I thought a yoke had
something to do with eggs, and I thought a burden was a wooden log, for some
reason. Yet, I had to admit to myself that even with a developed vocabulary and
forty-one years to my credit, the verse didn’t mean much more to me now as an
adult. My life wasn’t a tragedy, but it was nowhere near easy and light.

I turned in to the school’s
parking lot. With only a few minutes before the first bell, the closest slots
were already taken. My spot, however, was reserved clear as a bell:
Assistant
Principal Only.

However, somebody in a late
model red Kia Optima couldn’t read. “I know this person did
not
park in
my spot,” I shared my thoughts aloud.

“Don’t get mad. They were
probably in a hurry,” Peaches attempted to calm me. “And you
are
late,
sweetie pie.”

“What time I get here is
irrelevant. And there’s not another empty parking place for, like, fifty yards!
I can’t wobble all the way across this lot!”

“Go in peace, Shondra.”

She got on my nerves
sometimes, riding around on her Jesus-bike. “Enough with the kum-ba-ya,
Peaches. Talk to you later.”

“Bye, girl.”

I circled the lot a couple
more times. Nothing. Except for one spot marked with bright blue and white.
Handicapped Only.
I am disabled at the moment
. I eased into the spot,
making a mental note to look out my window in half an hour to see if the
non-reading culprit had backed out of my reserved space. If so, I’d ask one of
my colleagues to move my car to its rightful position. If not, I’d ask our campus
officer to write the offender a warning ticket.

I worked hard for this
position! How somebody just gonna park in my spot?
I felt my heart rate increase with every
step from my car to the main entrance. Since every other step sent a painful
jolt up my foot, I grew even angrier.
I wonder if they’d park in the nurse’s
spot! The counselor’s spot! No! They would NOT!

Granted, the handicapped spot
had actually put me closer than my normal position, so I should have been happy
to take a few less steps. But was I? No. I was mad.
Why is everyone against
me? Why did Stelson get so upset about the shoe thing? When will Peaches get
over her natural self and stop trying to make everyone live to be 150?

I, for one, didn’t want to be
150 so I could sit around and watch everybody I cared about die. No way. I’d
had enough of death since my mother passed away three years earlier. I was
still struggling through holidays and birthdays without her. Couldn’t imagine
going through a century and a half worth of the pain of losing my friends and
family.

As I struggled with my purse
and the laptop bag which I had taken home on Friday but didn’t even get the
chance to open over the weekend, out of the blue comes a crew of kids with a
microphone, a camera, and a bright light.

“Mrs. Brown! We saw you park
in the handicap spot. What do you have to say for yourself?” He thrust the
microphone in my face.

I recognized the
investigative reporter right away. Michael Higgins. Though a senior, he was
barely five feet tall and had tried to add the illusion of an inch to his
height with a spiked Mohawk. He was one of those bright kids whose clever ideas
sometimes landed him in trouble. In fact, he was on my radar for the senior
prank.

For effect, I limped a little
deeper as I answered, “Well, Michael, as you can see, my parking spot was taken.”
I motioned toward my car. “Also, I’m wearing a sock instead of a shoe, which
means I’m hurt. Walking is very painful—”

“But rules are rules, Mrs.
Brown. You don’t have a handicap parking sticker, so it’s illegal for you to
park there. You wouldn’t encourage
us
to break or bend the rules due to
someone else’s negligence, would you?” he pressed as the camera crew got a
little too close to my foot.

“Can you step back, please?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl
holding the lighting respectfully answered as she yanked her head, signaling
for the camera boy to follow my orders—as though her words carried more
weight than mine.

I stopped and looked at the
camera squarely. Gave my hair a confident flip. “I agree, Michael. It’s wrong
for me to break the rules, even under these circumstances. Anyone who breaks
rules needs to be prepared to pay the consequences. If I get a ticket, I’ll pay
it. At this moment, every step I’ve saved in pain is worth whatever it might
cost me financially.”

Then I motioned for the
videographer to aim low. “Can you zoom in on my foot? Clearly, it’s swollen.
Anyone who has ever stubbed a toe in the middle of the night can empathize with
me.”

“Cut!” Michael announced. The
camera drooped. All eyes focused on him. “That’s a wrap.”

“Wait a minute! You can’t
tell
half
the story, Michael,” I antagonized him a bit.

He sighed. “We’re chucking
this story. It’s too goody two-shoes.”

I joked, “What did you think
I was going to do? Deny what I’d done? Make up some kind of a double standard?”

“Ummm…yeah!” he smirked. “The
news is supposed to be sensational. Scandalous. Salacious. But you…you’re like
being honest about it. Taking responsibility. You’d come off looking like the
victim. We’d never win the journalism competition with
this
story.”

The collective moans let me
know I was off the hook.

“Don’t worry. We’ll find
something else,” he instructed the team as they walked back to the arts wing. “We’ve
got ‘til February.”

“Hey! Any of you private
investigators see who parked in my spot?” I asked before they got too far.

“Oh. It’s mine,” camera girl
admitted.

“So this was a set-up from
the beginning, huh? And who are you, anyway, young lady?” I knew most of the juniors
and seniors, but I couldn’t say the same for the underclassmen.

“Janerica Woods.” She batted
her fake eyelashes at me timidly.

I liked to see kids with a
healthy fear of adults, so I decided to go easy on her. Besides, I had to give
them some credit for spending some of the last days of summer break up at the school.
They were already working on the yearbook layout and planning for competition.
“You guys need to make sure you have your next story approved by Mr. Conway.
You baited me into a trap by parking in my spot. It’s called entrapment. Not a
good idea,” I warned them.

The girl shot a dangerous
glare at Michael, as if to say she’d told him so.

“Move your car, Janerica,” I
ordered.

“Okay, Mrs. Brown.”

They scrambled on their way
and I hobbled on up to the main entrance of our massive three-story red brick
building. I waved the magnetic strip on the back of my ID in front of the
school’s security sensor. The door clicked and I entered, giving the front desk
staff a quick greeting as I headed down the hall toward my office.

Millicent, my secretary, was
the first to notice my limp. “You okay, Mrs. Brown?”

“Yes. Stubbed my toe,” I
replied with a yawn.

She trailed me into my
office. Since Millicent was twenty years older, I always had a hard time seeing
her as my professional subordinate. I couldn’t have asked her to stop following
me. Good Southern manners die hard.

“Let me take a look at it,”
she said.

Her long brown hair riddled
with streaks of gray and the off-centered glasses reminded me so much of Momma.
“Okay,” I gave in. “But don’t freak out.”

I dropped my bags at my desk
and ambled over to the small, circular meeting table. I sat in one of the
cushioned chairs and plopped my injured foot up on another one while Millicent
watched with worry written across her lined face.

When I bent over and removed
the sock, her expression morphed from worried to repulsed. “Mrs. Brown! You
have
got
to get to a doctor.”

“It’s only a broken toe,” I
mumbled, attempting to wriggle my other toes so she’d be satisfied.
Unfortunately, the attempt ended with my face contorted in pain.

“Toes are close to vessels.
Broken bones can damage veins within your toe. What if it needs a steel rod? I
saw on the news one time where this lady lost her leg from the knee down
because she didn’t get help after stepping on a sea shell.” Millicent painted
the worst-case, most far-fetched scenario, same as Momma would have done.

I can’t count the number of
times Momma and I were simply sitting in the back room watching the news and I
ended up getting a thirty-minute lecture about something that happened to some
child way in North Carolina. “See, Shondra, this is why I don’t let you run
wild! If that girl would have been at home, she never would have…” fill in the
blank with every calamity imaginable. Let Momma tell it, everyone would be
alive today if they’d just stayed at the house.