Single Mom (15 page)

I had a lot of respect for Denise. There was no question about it. However, if I ever expected to take things further with her than just being a sneak-around friend, then she had to have some respect for me as well.

FTER
taking lunch, I walked into my small office, near downtown Chicago on Halsted Street, and prepared my desk for a two-thirty appointment. Elmira, my Latina secretary, gave me the message that Walter Jr. had called while I was out.

“He didn’t leave a message?” I asked her. That was unusual for Walter, but I figured whatever it was, it had to be dealing with our son. If he was calling during work hours, then it was urgent. Or at least from
his
point of view. I was just hoping that he wouldn’t be bothering me concerning a custody battle unless he was seriously ready to go to court. In all honesty, I didn’t believe he had an
inch
of a case! Nevertheless, that didn’t mean that I wasn’t at least nervous about it.

“He just said that he’d call you later on tonight at home,” Elmira told me.

I told myself not to worry about it. I had a job to do.

“Any other messages?” I asked my secretary. She would have told me on her own if there were; I wanted to move on to a new subject as quickly as I could by forcing the issue.

“No, it was just that one call,” Elmira answered, with her beautiful, dimple-faced smile. She was a really attractive young woman, who received plenty of invitations to dates, from every kind of man under the sun. But Elmira was smart enough to know what true love was, and she wasn’t going to sell herself short by being overwhelmed with the offers.

I felt guilty when I first thought about hiring her because I realized there were many sisters in Chicago in need of a good job. However, after I thought about how black men and women had been ignored by whites, hiring
their
own people, I decided that my Latina sister, a minority herself, was just as needful for a fair opportunity. Besides, she was the best applicant for the position. Then she was able to get me plenty of clients from Chicago’s Latino community, which I did not expect at the time I hired her, but I damn sure accepted after the fact. So it all worked out for the best.

At precisely 2:36, Sylvia Livingston, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of three, and a lifetime resident of Chicago’s South Side, walked into my office. It had just stopped raining earlier, and the sun was back out in full force, creating a muggy heat. Sylvia had walked right through the middle of it, wearing a burnt orange suit, an off-white blouse, and a matching wide-brimmed church hat. Fresh sweat was pouring down her face as she furiously wiped herself with a handkerchief.

“Oh, I’m so sorry I’m late, Sister Stewart, but those buses never seem to act right when you’re in a hurry. Those bus drivers get ta’ socializin’ and singin’, and all the while, you got some place ta’ get to,” she said as she took a seat in front of my desk.

Sylvia was one of my most progressive clients. I had called her down to my office to discuss different programs to shell money away for her youngest son to go to college in ten years. She was one of the few welfare recipients that I could convince to start some kind of savings. She understood the type of determination it would take to turn her finances around. She found herself a steady job, got off welfare in less than three months, and had been working hard, steadily, and more important, saving her money ever since. I was so proud of her commitment and progress that I made an oath to myself to sing her praises as much as I could to other clients who needed an extra push to believe that they could make it.

After she had explained her tardiness and sweat to me, I smiled and offered Sylvia some bottled water out of my mini refrigerator.

“Oh, thank you
so much
, Sister Stewart, I
really
appreciate this,” she responded. She took the bottled water and gulped it down without using the plastic cup that I had given her. “Whew, that’s some
good
water! Praise the Lord! He is so
great!
Only
he
can make water this good, sister. What’s the name of it?” she asked, inspecting the label. “Clear Lakes, like in cleanliness.”

Sylvia was definitely a character. She had been through more men
than I care to think of, but she did love her children. I couldn’t hold her jones for love against her. I guess “The Good Lord” was her new boyfriend.

“So, how much did you say you had saved away for David again?” I asked her. If I hadn’t cut her off, we could have spent a half hour talking about nothing.

“Oh,” she said, digging through the papers in her purse. She pulled out an account statement and read, “Four hundred sixty-two dollars and twelve cents.”

“And you still have that in the money market?”

“Just like you told me.”

“Okay now, to get even more interest out of his savings, I’ve been looking at some aggressive growth accounts that are yielding as high as thirteen to sixteen percent.”

“Mmm,” Sylvia grunted. “The money market is only four point five percent.”

“That’s right. So you see how much of a difference it would make in the long run,” I told her.

“Three and four
times
the difference,” she said, with wide eyes.

I smiled and nodded my head, right before the phone buzzed.

“Hello,” I answered.

Elmira said, “It’s Walter, calling you back. He said it would only take a second.”

“And that’s about all I have,” I told her.

Walter came on the line and said, “I just wanted to ask when would be the best time to call you tonight. I know how busy you are, and I really need to talk to you.”

About what?
I wanted to ask. But I held my tongue.

“Tonight may be a bad night altogether,” I told him. “I have a lot of runs to make. How about I just call you tomorrow night?”

“What time?”

Sylvia was all up in my face. I had to get off that phone, and in a hurry, especially with “Sister Livingston” in my office. She could read conversations like a detective. In particular if they were with men. She could smell a man in the air like a chef could smell food.

“I’ll let you know around this time tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Walter responded.

I looked at the big grin on Sylvia’s face and realized I had gone past my second.

She said, “These men believe they can just barge into your life anytime they good and well please. Don’t they, Sister Stewart?”

I shook my head, smiled, and set out to ignore it. “Ah, getting back to business, Sylvia.”

“
Oh
, I’m sorry, Sister Stewart. I didn’t mean to get into your personal associations.
Please
forgive me! I had no right to do that. No right at all!” Her apology only prolonged the issue.

I tried to ignore it again by passing her the information I had gathered.

“Do you forgive me, sister?” she persisted.

I looked up and said, “Of course, I forgive you. We’re only human. Only a few of us can live without talking about men, and believe it or not, the men are even worse than we are sometimes.”

“Yeah, but they talk about us so
nasty
, Sister Stewart. Do you listen to some of these rap songs they have about us today? These young rappers are talkin’ ’bout doin’ it this way, and doin’ it that way, two at a time and all kinds of nasty, godforsaken stuff. They even got the young women gettin’ just as nasty now. Foxy Momma and carryin’ on.”

“Foxy Brown,” I corrected her. I only knew because my sons were fans of hers. I had mistakenly fallen right into Sylvia’s favorite subject: nastiness.

“That’s her! And do you see some of these videos that they’re in?” she asked me.

Of course I had. I had been the one to turn them off whenever I caught either of my sons watching them instead of doing more constructive things, like flipping through the World Book encyclopedias I invested in, or learning how to better use the computer I had bought. In fact, because of computers and the use of the Internet, I had heard it said a few times that encyclopedias were on their deathbed.

“Ah, Sylvia, we are really getting off on a tangent here, and I want to get us back on track. Okay?” I said with a lighthearted chuckle.

She looked stunned for a second, as if I had snatched away her Thanksgiving Day chitlins and called her a sinner. “Ah, you’re right, sister. You’re
absolutely
right! I need to get this filth from my mind.”

I couldn’t help but smile at Sylvia. She just couldn’t help herself. Before we could get back to business though, I got another phone call.

“Is this one
really
important?” I asked Elmira. My patience was beginning to wear thin.

“Ah, it’s your son, Jimmy,” Elmira bashfully responded. It wasn’t her fault that I wasn’t getting much done.

“Okay,” I told her with a pause. I prepared myself for anything. Sometimes I just wished that my sons would call every once in a while and say, “Mom, I love you.” But that was only wishful thinking.

Jimmy was
telling me
, not
asking me
, that he was going to the movies.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Your brother will be getting home from camp before you get back,” I calmly responded to him. “Why don’t you wait and take him with you?”

“Mom, I got friends going? I get tired of taking him with me.”

“So, what are you gonna do, leave him at home?”

“Yeah, he can watch TV or play the video games until
you
get home?”

Wrong answer!
“Ah, I don’t think so. Okay? Now if you don’t want to take him with you, then you wait until I get home. As a matter of fact, you wait until I get home to discuss this anyway, because I don’t want to hear his mouth about you not wanting to take him.”

Jimmy said, “Aw’ight.” He hung up a little too quickly. I didn’t have time to respond to his attitude. I would deal with it when I got home.

When I hung up the phone again, Sylvia lightly touched my hand.

She said, “Before I met you and Sister Jenkins at SMO, I didn’t have a
clue
how to handle my boys. But you two have taught me so much, and have given so much of your time to so many others, that I really do believe you all were sent from the Lord. May God bless you, sister. And may he give you the strength to keep doin’ what you’re doin’.”

I smiled and said, “Thank you very much, Sylvia. Sometimes, you just don’t know how much I need a healthy pat on my back for my efforts.”

She said, “I
know
you do. We
all
need a pat on the back. And sometimes we all are called on by the Lord to be his angels.”

I nodded. “Well, you’ve surely been
my
angel, Sylvia,” I told her.

“And you’ve been mine right back, Sister Stewart.”

I said, “Okay, now let’s get back to what we were doing.”

Sylvia straightened up in her chair and responded, “Aggressive growth accounts for my son to get to college.”

I smiled, shook my head, and got back to my work. Sylvia may have been a character, but she was nobody’s fool; at least not anymore. And I was good and proud of her.

Every time I even thought about giving up on helping people, I found new strength to keep going. Maybe Sylvia was right, and my gift from Cod was being helped along by words of encouragement and faith from
plenty of human angels spread out all around me. I
needed
every single one of them, too!

I got home, had a talk with my two sons about family togetherness, cooked dinner, and ended up having yet another conversation with my younger sister. I talked to her about her responsibilities as a mother and how bad habits with men can make her life a lot harder than what it needed to be.

“Nikita, Mom said that you were out all last night and left her to watch Cheron.” I really didn’t want to be the disciplinarian in my sister’s life, but
somebody
had to do it.

She sighed and said, “You know what? I don’t even know why she told you that. She knew I was going out. She
said
I could leave Cheron with her!”

“Yeah, well, she didn’t know that you were gonna be out
all night
. She probably thought that you were just going to a movie or something. And knowing you, I can imagine you didn’t give her any specifics,” I argued.

Nikita and my two-year-old niece, Cheron, had just moved back in with my mother a couple of months ago to a two-flat house on the West Side that
I
was helping to pay the mortgage on. I hated to tell Nikita to shape up or ship out, but we both knew that I could if I had to. She had been trying to save up to find a new place of her own, and that was the only reason my mother and I decided to let her stay, rent-free. I had given my sister plenty of money before, but she would blow it on I don’t know what, so I wanted to see how responsible she could be when saving her own money. To hell if
I
was gonna help her get an apartment and then have
my
money go down the drain over
her
stupidity!

Nikita had a serious problem of being suckered out of her pocket change by these corner-hanging men she likes so much. She reminded me of a younger version of Sylvia Livingston, but at least Sylvia had come to her senses and realized that her children were her priority. I don’t know what it was going to take for my sister to get that message, but she needed to get it fast, because she was nowhere near being a teenager who didn’t know any better.