The Last Street Novel (12 page)

He asked, “Does Michael Springfield expect me to meet up with him in jail?”

Cynthia perked up. She answered, “Oh, yeah, he definitely wants to see you.”

“Can you set that up for next week? I want to see how much of a story he has.”

“You’re coming back to Harlem next week?”

“Unless it can’t happen?”

“Oh, no, it can happen, I just want to make sure.”

“Well, yeah, that’s what I’m planning.”

“All right, I’ll set it up then. What day next week?”

“I’m thinking Tuesday or Wednesday. I wanna get back in the city like, Sunday night, and get settled first. I want to take a few days to see what everything looks like now. I hear there’re a lot of changes going on.”

“Yeah, you’ll see. They have new construction all over Harlem now.”

“Construction of what?”

“Condos.”

Shareef smiled, thinking about his own condo back home.

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, and they’re expensive, too. I even asked about a few of them.”

Shareef nodded. He figured he would get to all of that once he arrived back home. He said, “So, see what you can set up and get back to me by the end of the week. You need my number again?”

“Is this it on my phone?”

“Yeah, this is my office number. So keep it business.”

She chuckled. “I got you player. I won’t mess up your game. It’s strictly business then.”

He said, “I’m just talking about with the phone calls, not when I get up there.” And he grinned. He surely wanted to explore Cynthia’s vibrancy again. He only got a chance to do her once before she dropped her book proposal in his lap and broke camp on him.

“Mmm, hmm, you want your cake and eat it, too,” she commented.

“Don’t we all? So call me up later this week and let me know.”

“Okay, I’ll call you.”

Shareef hung up the phone, smiling with stimulating tingles from the conversation and expectations with Cynthia. Then he remembered to join his fine, playful mistress in the Jacuzzi. He stripped his boxers off and moved butt naked toward the bathroom. But the office phone rang and stopped him.

He froze and thought of letting the answering service take a message. But he checked the number to see who it was first.

“Jennifer,” he answered. He took a breath and decided to see what she wanted. Their conversations were rarely long anymore. They had only general information calls, mostly regarding the children.

“Yeah,” he answered drily.

“I just wanted to remind you that we have that meeting with the marriage counselor set for next Tuesday at ten in the morning,” she told him.

Shareef recalled it and responded, “Shit.”

“You didn’t plan anything else did you? I asked you to put that on your calendar before you went on tour.”

“Yeah, I do have it on my calendar, I just haven’t looked at it since I’ve been back.”

“Do you have some other plans for next Tuesday morning?”

“I was going to fly back up to New York to start doing research for a new book.”

“When? You just got back from the tour. You know Shareef wants you to take him to football practice.”

Jennifer got frantic whenever Shareef changed the plans on her, which was often. It wasn’t as if he did it on purpose, but he did make new commitments without much regard for previous ones.

Shareef responded, “He has a whole three-month season. This is only one of the first practices.”

“Well, how long do you plan on being up in New York?”

“I planned to be there for a week.”

“So you won’t make our meeting with the marriage counselor, either? When are you leaving?”

“I planned to leave on Sunday, but I can wait until Tuesday afternoon.”

He was actually interested in seeing a marriage counselor. After struggling without help for the past three years of their marriage, a professional point of view on their beefs would offer a breath of fresh air. Or at least he hoped. Hearing what his wife had to say about her loss of passion in their relationship was enough for him to want to stay and go through with it.

“Your son is going to be disappointed,” she told him.

Shareef thought,
Tell me something I don’t know.

“I’ll spend extra time with him this weekend then,” he responded.

“And what about Kimberly?”

“She can stay with you. You know how Shareef gets when she starts whining.”

“So what? He has to get over it. She wants to be with you, too.”

“But you said my
son
was going to be disappointed, not my daughter.”

“You know what? You do what you’re gonna do.”

When Jennifer hung up the phone with him, Shareef responded, “I am.”

He placed the cordless office phone back on the charger and marched his naked behind to the bathroom. When he stepped inside, Jacqueline had turned off the lights, lit up the candles, and filled up the Jacuzzi with warm water, bubbled just like he had asked her to.

When he quietly closed the door behind him and crept over to the tip of the tub, she smiled with bubbles on her shoulders, in her hair, and on her nose.

“I was just about to come out there and get you.”

“Why, I’m a stalker. Remember?”

Jacqueline started acting with a squeamish look and put her hands out in front of her. “Oh, God! Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Shareef stopped and frowned at her. Then he chopped his right hand into his left palm.

“Cut. That was terrible. Take two.”

She grinned and splashed water at him.

“Whatever. I’m not an actress anyway.”

Shareef climbed into the Jacuzzi with her and countered, “Yes you are. You’ve been acting up all night and all morning.”

She grinned and kissed his lips, getting bubbles on his nose.

She said, “But that wasn’t acting.”

He grinned back in a lip lock and said, “Oh.”

A
T
8:43
AM
, Tuesday, August 1, Shareef labored over what he would wear to his first marriage counselor appointment with his wife.

“Do I go casual or professional?” he asked himself out loud. He had pulled out gray sweatpants and an orange
I LOVE THE BAHAMAS
T-shirt, versus a white button-down shirt, beige sports jacket, and blue denim jeans.

He looked at both outfits laid out on his bed and pondered.

“Nah, I’m a professional, and I need to be respected that way. This counselor needs to see me the way most people see me when they first meet me.” And he began to put on his button-down shirt, sports jacket, pants, fine shoes, and cologne. He drove his Mercedes, too.

Halfway to the meeting at a downtown office in Fort Lauderdale, Shareef found himself stuck in a traffic jam on I-95 North at 9:35.

“Shit,” he cursed. “Is it an accident or what?”

He had twenty-five minutes to make it to this first meeting on time, so he got off the highway at the next exit and used his navigation system to find another route, only to run into more traffic and stoplights on the streets.

“Shit,” he cursed himself again. “This is just my damn luck.”

By the time he arrived at the building in downtown Fort Lauderdale and made it up to the third floor office, it was 10:18.

Shareef strolled inside the door and said, “Traffic jam. I-Ninety-five.” There was nothing he could do about it, so he decided to keep his cool and roll with the punches.

Jennifer Crawford sat on a black leather sofa with her legs crossed, wearing sheer stockings, a tan tweed business suit, peach blouse, light brown leather shoes, and a matching brown leather handbag. Her golden brown hair was pulled into a perfect bun, and her lipstick and light makeup were perfect. She never needed much makeup anyway. Her skin was naturally tan and radiant. Shareef used to call her “The Golden Girl” in their better days. But that seemed like another lifetime now.

Obviously, Jennifer wanted to be taken seriously that morning as well. Shareef was still impressed by her. He took a seat on the opposite black leather sofa to his right and sat with his legs wide open for comfort. Then he stared into the face of a black woman in wire-framed glasses and a dark blue suit, who sat behind a desk in front of him. She looked in her forties.

Oh, shit, a black woman,
he told himself. For whatever reason, Shareef was expecting to see a white man that morning.

“Hello, Mr. Crawford, my name is Dr. Jacqueline Nelling, and your wife, Jennifer, and I have just been sitting here chatting, about nothing in particular, just getting to know each other while we awaited your arrival.”

The fact that her first name was the same as his mistress didn’t rattle Shareef at all. He planned to stay cool and in control of his emotions.

“Okay, how are you doing? My wife hasn’t beaten me down too badly already, has she?” he joked.

“No, she actually spoke very highly of you,” Dr. Nelling told him. “She tells me that you’re one of the leading authors in contemporary African-American fiction.”

Shareef looked at his wife, and she smiled at him. She still did have a smile.

He nodded and said, “Okay. That’s good.”

Jennifer told him, “I always speak highly of you. I can’t say that he does the same for me though,” she informed Dr. Nelling. Jennifer continued to smile, a good, natural, confident smile. She was determined not to be a sour victim, or at least to appear not to be.

Shareef said, “Actually, she’s a very intelligent, caring, supportive, and loyal woman. And as you can see, she’s also good-looking, sexy, and professional.”

Dr. Nelling looked at both of the Crawfords dishing out compliments and responded, “Wow. So, what’s the problem?”

The room went quiet for a spell.

Shareef asked, “Is that how we start, just…start talking about the problems?”

It seemed a little too informal to him.

Dr. Nelling asked him, “Why not? You two seem quite open with how you feel about each other, or did you just make those comments up for me.”

Shareef looked at his wife and said, “Nah, that’s how I feel about her.”

“That’s not what you tell your little flunkies,” Jennifer expressed through her smile.

All of a sudden, Shareef didn’t like that smile anymore. It was mocking.

Dr. Nelling looked at Shareef and asked him, “What do you tell other people about your wife?”

Shareef came clean with the woman. That’s what they were there to do.

He said, “I tell them that she don’t give me none. Or I used to. Now I don’t even talk about it. But it’s the truth. She won’t let me touch her. But I don’t call her no bad woman or nothing.”

“Yeah, and then his little whores would call my job and our house at all times of night, telling me, ‘You’re gonna lose your husband if you don’t watch your back. You don’t deserve him. I’m a much better woman. I know how to hold my man down.’ And all kinds of other
bullshit
like that, but he’s gonna say that he’s
not
saying negative things about me.”

Jennifer was no longer smiling. She was venting, and venting good.

Shareef responded, “I mean, I can’t say what these women are gonna say or do. I told her that already. That’s straight-up woman stuff, cat fighting. I don’t even know who they are.”

“That’s bullshit,” Jennifer said with her mocking smile again. “He thinks he knows these women so well, but obviously he doesn’t know them at all. And he obviously doesn’t know what they’re capable of. And this is why you don’t
cheat,”
she said into her husband’s face. “Because it all comes back home, Shareef.

“And if he wants to know why I don’t let him touch me, all he has to do is ask himself, ‘Where have all of these tramps and whores been?’” she stated. “Where do you find them? You think a woman can’t be a nasty whore just because she reads one of your
books
?”

Shareef had to contain himself before he blew his cool not five minutes into their session. His wife was laying into his ass
quick
.

Instead of getting excited, hot, and bothered by it, Shareef smiled.

He said, “She would have you believe that I just ran out here and started collecting women for no reason. That’s not how it went down.”

Jennifer stopped him and said, “Collecting women? I guess they’re his little
trophies
now.” She looked at Dr. Nelling when she said it.

Shareef kept his cool, but he was no longer smiling.

He said, “If I may finish. I’ll tell you how it went down. We had two kids after marriage, and then all of a sudden, I had to beg for everything. She just cut off the damn well.”

Jennifer cut him off again. “He doesn’t understand that your body changes after children. I had to breast-feed. I was sore a lot of times. I had longer periods. Longer cramps. And then I had to go back to work. And sure, after getting the kids ready, feeding and clothing them, working all day, cooking when I get home. Yeah, excuse me for being a little tired. Is that a crime?