Once Upon a Project (10 page)

The first funeral Elyse had ever attended had been that of Melvin Maxwell. She'd been in her first year of college at the time, and it remained the saddest function she'd ever been to. Melvin was Pat's youngest brother, just sixteen years old, a brilliant student surely destined for great things. His death resulted from one of those in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time circumstances. While walking home from school he'd been caught in gunfire from two warring gangs, and his life and promising future came to an abrupt end from a .38-caliber slug to the head.

“I guess Pat doesn't have anything else to do with her time. But you can't say that. She's not married, but you are.”

Elyse smiled at him sweetly. “Yes, I'm married. I know it. But
you're
the one who seems to be forgetting your responsibilities.”

Chapter 14

 

P
at's fingers stroked her throat as her other hand held the phone receiver. She'd been on the phone all afternoon, taking calls from attendees of yesterday's luncheon expressing thanks to her for organizing it. She knew everyone meant well and she was happy that they'd enjoyed themselves, but she was beginning to chafe at hearing the same words over and over from different people. Even listening to her own mother telling her what a good job she'd done didn't relieve her weariness. She just hoped that when the newspaper article was published next week she wouldn't get yet another rash of congratulatory phone calls.

She forced herself to concentrate on her mother's words. “Daddy and I are very proud of you, Pat. You know that, don't you?”

“Yes, Mama. Thank you.” She sensed her mother wanted to say something else, and she merely waited.

“Pat . . . I saw Ricky and his wife at the restaurant yesterday.”

Her shoulders slumped. Whatever her mother wanted to say about Ricky, chances were that she didn't want to hear it. Last night, the smiles and good wishes finally over with, she'd come home and cried her heart out. “Yes?”

“He looks like he's done pretty well for himself. I ran into his mother in the washroom.”

In an instant Pat's upper body went from loose to tense. Nothing good could come of her mother's encounter with Miriam Suárez, who had been deeply offended by the Maxwells's opposition to a match between Pat and Ricky. An early resident of Dreiser like the Maxwells, she and Pat's mother used to sit together on playground benches while their children napped in their strollers, and later when they were old enough to play. Many a time Pat recalled going to the Suárez apartment to borrow a cup of rice, or Mrs. Suárez coming by to borrow an egg or two.

The comfortable situation of being friendly neighbors ended when a furious Miriam came to the Maxwell apartment after Ricky's talk with Moses. There'd been shouting all around. Fortunately, the Suárez family moved out of the projects shortly afterward. Rumor had it that Miriam had tracked down her ex-husband for back child support, and since her boys were now grown, she put the money down on a house.

“What did Miriam say?” Pat asked her mother now, her curiosity winning out.

“She told me that her son owns two restaurants, including a very popular place downtown. She asked if I'd ever been there. She said he has a high-rise condo overlooking the lake plus a summer cottage in Michigan.”

“In other words, she drove home her point that her son was plenty good enough for your daughter,” Pat said tightly.

“And she said one more thing before she left. She said that he's happily married to a Latina girl.” Cleotha paused. “Then she asked about you.”

“I see. She reminded you that you and Daddy didn't want me to marry a man who was both poor and Latino.”

“It was a dig at your daddy and me, Pat. Miriam never had anything against you, even if she might have preferred for Ricky to marry someone Spanish. She wanted to drive home her point that Ricky is doing so well because of what Daddy said about him being a burrito boy.”

“He said Ricky was just a busboy, Mama. Daddy never called him a burrito boy to his face.” Even her father shied away from making ethnic slurs, at least in the person's presence. He'd endured enough of being called a nigger down in Arkansas. “And she knows I never got married. She just wanted you to admit that I'm an old maid.”

“Now, Pat—”

“It's all right, Mama. I'll talk to you later, okay?”

The conversation with her mother left Pat feeling a little sad. She tried to summon enough energy to get up and do something constructive, like vacuum. But she couldn't get the memory of yesterday's luncheon out of her head.

It seemed like she'd gone through the day in a daze. Somehow she managed to greet Ricky at the door, to be introduced to his wife, and to make her speech without looking at him. She'd even stopped at his table when she went around the room with the cordless microphone, asking attendees to tell their former neighbors a little about their current lives. Ricky and his wife shared a table with Teresa Navarro. Teresa had joined her family in Dreiser the year the Twenty-Two Club girls turned eleven. At the time she barely spoke a word of English and was placed in the fourth grade, two years behind where she should have been. Blessed with a quick mind and superior intelligence, she mastered her new language and ended up eight years later as school valedictorian. Teresa had a crush on Ricky and didn't like it when he only had eyes for Pat. But Teresa hadn't done badly. She held a PhD and worked as a medical physicist for one of the leading medical centers. She'd married a white guy, and it amused Pat to see how uncomfortable her husband looked at the Soul Queen. He had a Gold Coast “I'm the majority” look about him and had probably never been around so many people of color at one time in his life.

The phone rang again, and she reached for it languidly. “Hello.”

“Hi there!”

Pat instantly recognized Grace's voice. “You sound awfully chipper this afternoon.”

“Why wouldn't I? I have a date next week.”

“A date? With the Wade kid?”

“Yes, Eric. And he's not exactly a kid, Pat. He's forty-five years old.”

“Yes, I suppose not. I still remember him from when we were kids. But he doesn't seem to be your type, Grace.”

“You know, Pat, maybe if you weren't so discriminating you wouldn't be sitting home alone most Saturday nights.”

Pat wasn't deterred. “And maybe if
you
were a little more discriminating you'd have that third husband you want so badly.”

“Touché.” Grace took no offense, as Pat expected. Grace made no secret about wanting to give matrimony one last try and that she was actively looking for candidates.

“Honestly, Grace. What could you possibly have in common with Eric Wade other than the fact that you both lived in Dreiser? I don't know what he does for a living, but I'd bet he's nowhere near you on the success scale.”

“He's a supervisor at a moving and storage company.”

“And how did he react when you told him what you did?”

“Well, I didn't exactly tell him I'm director of global public relations. I don't want to scare the man, Pat. I just told him the name of the company I work for and that I'm in the public relations department.”

“So he thinks you answer phones. Grace, that's so dishonest.”

“Will you get off your high horse, Pat? We can't all be Dudley Do-Right.”

Pat sighed. How could Grace stand to embark on yet another short-lived affair? From what she'd seen of Eric Wade, the man could barely construct a grammatically correct sentence. Yet, a successful woman like Grace was ready to start dating him. Just because he was buff. Hell, the man moved furniture for a living; he
ought
to be in shape.

Pat hardly considered herself to be a Dudley Do-Right, but she knew that she and Grace looked at life differently. Grace's entire life revolved around trying to catch a man. For Pat, there were so many other things, like community service. She practically had to drag Grace kicking and screaming to that Career Day seminar at their old high school. Grace hadn't wanted to go because there would be no marital prospects there. She knew it would always be that way, unless Grace did manage to find another husband.

“Well, have a good time. Just try not to expect too much out of it.”

Grace's answer came without hesitation. “I'm expecting great sex.”

After they hung up, Pat pondered Grace's outlook. Maybe she wasn't so wrong, after all, in dating these men who were less successful than she. At least she got to have sex once in a while.

Pat remembered hearing about Judge Glenn Arterbridge's divorce through the office grapevine. She'd hoped he would ask her out, even if she felt a little skeptical about that happening. In her experience the biggest men usually pursued the smallest women, and this had been no exception. The moment he stopped by the table at the bar and grill near the courthouse where she and Grace were dining, Pat knew who he was after.

That might not be the only reason. Grace was a new face to him, while she argued cases in his court three or four times a year. Perhaps he felt it improper to ask her out, although according to the grapevine, nearly as many lawyers were dating judges as lawyers dating other lawyers.

Pat sighed. Maybe she should start being a little more open when it came to the men she dated. The reunion was over. It was time to move on.

Chapter 15

 

“E
lyse, I'll have to go to the tailor this weekend. My pants are getting loose.” Franklin pinched roughly three-quarters of an inch from his waistband.

“There's someone at the dry cleaner's who's pretty good; she's done some work for me. We'll plan to drive over there Saturday morning.” She smiled at him. “You don't have to have your pants taken in, you know. You can always start eating more.”

“I really haven't been trying to lose, but I haven't had much of an appetite lately.”

“Maybe we can go out to eat tonight and stuff you with a four-course meal,” she suggested.

“I thought you might want to do that. That is, unless you've made plans with your newly rediscovered friends.”

“Oh, please. Franklin, it was one dinner and one lunch.”

“And one night spent at a bar.”

“Yes, that, too. A perfectly respectable bar. Not the swankiest place in the world, but every place can't be The Four Seasons. But it's all over. If they have another reunion in another fifty years, I'll probably want to go to that, too.”

“Elyse, we'll all be dead in fifty years.”

“Exactly my point. The reunion is over, Franklin. Granted, my friends and I did make an agreement to meet for dinner every six months, starting in October. But I'll be surprised if it actually happens. We'll probably fall back into the same old habits, exchanging Christmas cards and hardly ever seeing each other.” She slipped her arm through his. “So, now that you don't have an excuse, does that dinner invitation still hold?”

“Sure. It's nearly seven. We can leave now, if you're ready to eat. I'm not particularly hungry, but I probably will be in a half hour or so.”

Her eyebrows jutted up. Not hungry? As far as she could tell—and Franklin wasn't one to wash out his dishes—he hadn't eaten anything since the English muffin she'd fixed him at ten that morning, over eight hours ago. An alarm went off in her head. Could something actually be wrong? She'd noticed a decrease in Franklin's food intake, but she also knew he attended many catered lunch meetings at work that left him full even by dinnertime. She just presumed he was attending meetings where food was served more often lately.

But this was a
weekend
.

She looked at him carefully. He certainly didn't appear unwell. He'd always kept fairly fit. For years he'd joked that he didn't want to get all out of shape and risk losing her to a younger man, a playful comment she noticed he hadn't made lately, since they'd had words about his lack of energy. He did have a little bit of a potbelly, but not enough to get in his way. The weight loss actually looked good on him.

Elyse had struggled with weight her whole life. As a child she'd been what was then referred to as “pleasingly plump.” In her first year of college she'd packed on thirty pounds, losing it painstakingly shortly before she met Franklin at a homecoming weekend during her junior year.

Even now, with her children grown, her weight fluctuated. She kept her closet organized by clothing size—the clothing she wore regularly and the clothing for times when she picked up a few pounds.

Franklin's weight, on the other hand, had always been pretty stable. Her eyes searched for anything that suggested a change in his health. He looked pretty much as he always did, other than having lost a few pounds.

“I'm going to change. Be back in a minute.”

He looked relieved and happy. She realized he'd probably worried about her intentions, thought she was about to start hanging out with her girlfriends on Saturday nights. Like she'd really want to do that. As Pat had pointed out, it was far better to snuggle at home with your husband than to be out looking for one. Her friends all had her contact information, and she'd exchanged e-mail addresses with Kevin so they, too, could keep in touch, but she had no plans to see anyone. She already had all she needed to feel happy and complete.

“Wait,” she said suddenly. She moved close to him and raised her chin. “I haven't had my kiss today.”

She closed her eyes dreamily as their lips met for a second or two. When she opened her eyes her smile faded as she noticed something strange.

The whites of his eyes had a yellowish tint, like he had some kind of vitamin deficiency. She hadn't noticed it until now. The first twinges that something might really be wrong wiggled through her chest.

“Franklin,” she said suddenly, an underlying urgency in her tone. “I want you to promise me that you'll make an appointment with the doctor.”