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Authors: E. N. Joy

BOOK: The Perfect Christian
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Chapter Twenty-nine
“There you are!” Unique came up behind Terrance. “I saw you still roaming around. Didn't our pastor ask you to leave?”
“The sanctuary—but not the church,” Terrance answered. “Besides, I'm not finished with what I came here for.”
“Oh, you're finished because
I
say you're finished,” Unique spat, kicking off her shoes. “Now I've tried to stay saved—Lord knows I have—but there is only so much a girl from the hood can take.”
Terrance looked at Unique with his nose turned up. He sniffed the air. “I thought I smelled a rat . . . a hood rat. My senses were correct.”
“Oh no, he didn't!” Unique started taking her earrings off next.
“Oh, Lord. Not again,” Deborah said under her breath, and then rushed over to get Unique under control. “Come on, Unique. There are not going to be any more fights today.”
“Let me go,” Unique demanded, “'cause I'll fight a man. I promise you I'll fight a man.”
“Stop it right now!” Deborah ordered as she dragged Unique out of the room. Once they were no longer visible, Deborah could still be heard saying, “Acting like a bunch of heathens in the house of Lord. I'ma pray for every last one of you. Honestly I am.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Terrance,” Bethany said as she walked in between Mother Doreen and the gentleman. “I apologize for Sister Unique's actions. That's no way for a saint to act and certainly not in God's own house. Perhaps I can say more diplomatically what my sister in Christ there was trying to say.” Bethany held a smile. “I don't think my sister wants to see you, speak to you, or have anything to do with you.” She looked back at Mother Doreen. “Isn't that right, Reen?”
“Reen—oh, what an endearing term between two sisters,” Terrance said before Mother Doreen could reply to Bethany's question. “You got any other siblings?” he asked Bethany.
“Uh, yes, well, no; I mean, I had other siblings, but they've gone home to the calling of the Lord,” Bethany answered.
“Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you.” There was a brief moment of silence, and then Bethany was about to speak again, but Terrance spoke instead.
“I guess you could say I'm an only child. I could have had a sibling—a brother—but he never had a chance in the world.” He looked over Bethany's shoulder at Mother Doreen. “Nope, never had a chance in the world thanks to your sister here.”
“Okay, look . . .” Bethany put her hands up. “Pastor might have asked you to leave the sanctuary, but now I'm asking you to leave the church.” She walked over to the door and held it open, signaling for Terrance that he should leave.
“No,” Terrance said. What surprised both Bethany and Terrance was that Mother Doreen had said the same thing in unison.
“Wha—what?” Bethany asked with uncertainty. “Come again, Sis.”
“I said, no—let him stay. I'll talk to him.”
“Doreen, I really don't think that's a good—”
“He needs to finish up what he came here for,” Mother Doreen said, walking toward Terrance. “I know what it's like to be on assignment and don't finish up the job. It haunts you and always sits in the back of your mind until you go back and do something about it. Well, let's not give Mr. Casinoff any reason to have to come back for any unfinished business. Let him say all he's got to say right here and right now.” Mother Doreen looked at Terrance. “All right, Mr. Casinoff?”
A little caught off guard by Mother Doreen's support of his not leaving, Terrance replied, “Yes, fine.”
Bethany looked from Terrance to Mother Doreen, then said, “Okay, Reen, if you insist.” She went to close the door with her still inside of the room.
“Uh, Bethany, Sis, if you don't mind, I'm sure Mr. Casinoff here wants to talk to me alone.”
“It's Terrance. You can call me Terrance,” he offered. There was something about Mother Doreen showing him formal respect that tugged at his conscious.
“Fine,” Mother Doreen agreed. “I'm sure Terrance wants to talk to me alone.”
Bethany walked over to Mother Doreen hastily. “There is no way I'm leaving you in here with this man alone. No telling what a man who will come and interrupt the wedding of complete strangers is capable of—”
“Beth, please.” Mother Doreen put her hands up. “I'm covered in the blood. I feel protected. I just think there are a few things Mr. Casi . . . Terrance needs to get off his chest, and then he'll be well on his way.” Mother Doreen looked over at him. “Isn't that right, Terrance?”
He swallowed without saying anything. Mother Doreen's kindness seemed to be eating him alive.
Once again, Bethany looked at Terrance, and then back at Mother Doreen. “All right, if you say so,” she agreed with much reservation as she walked toward the door. “But if you need me, just shout, because I'm going to be right outside this door . . .” she glared at Terrance as she walked past him to exit, “. . . praying.” On that last note, Bethany left the room, closing the door behind her, leaving Mother Doreen at the hands of the enemy.
Chapter Thirty
Initially, after Bethany had closed the door behind her, there was silence. Mother Doreen soon broke that silence.
“Well, Terrance,” she threw her hands up, and then let them fall to her side. “Let's do this. Finish up what you started; I mean, whatever there is left to finish. Heck, you've already interrupted the wedding. You succeeded in stopping the wedding from taking place. Being that that was your goal in coming here in the first place, what else could there possibly be left for you to do? What else is there, Terrance? You came here to have a brotha's back, as you called it—to keep Pastor Frey from making a mistake by marrying an ex-felon. Well, you succeeded at that. So what else is there? Please, let's do this so we can both go on with our lives. No, mine might not be the life I thought I was going to live once I walked out of this place today, but I'm not going to fret on that. Sometimes life doesn't turn out the way we want it to. But you know what? We simply gotta make due. So come on, Terrance. Let's do this.”
It was as if Mother Doreen was putting up her dukes and challenging Terrance to a fight just like Unique had done moments ago. Only instead of like it was for Unique, with Mother Doreen, the brawl wasn't going to be physical. No, Mother Doreen knew better than to try to fight the enemy with flesh. Her pastor had taught her a long time ago that the flesh can't win battles, not really. It's the spirit that is victorious over all enemies. So Mother Doreen put on the full armor of God and was in position to fight.
Terrance didn't appear to be intimidated one bit though. The same way Unique professed that she would fight a man, Terrance would definitely fight an old woman . . . with words, of course.
“I thought I'd be satisfied, but just seeing the wedding being called off wasn't enough,” Terrance said. “The same way only serving one year in jail hadn't been enough of a punishment for you for what you did to my mother.”
“So is that why you're still here? To punish me some more? Well, you've succeeded. For years I lived with the weight of having not told anyone about my past. Do you know that it wasn't until a year ago that I actually finally shared it with someone?”
“Well lucky you. I had to hear about what you did every day of my life since I could remember.” Anger filled Terrance's tone. “I was reminded of my mother's loss every day my grandma would take me to visit my mother. Probably the same way your former husband was reminded of his loss every time he came to visit you in that jailhouse.” Terrance stepped closer. “Speaking, of which, you were in the joint for about a year. Didn't you wonder what that husband of yours was up to all that time? I mean, it had to be lonely for ol' Willie boy out there.”
Mother Doreen's eyebrows sunk in at the way Terrance spoke of Willie with such familiarity.
“Oh, yeah, the same way I did my research on you and everybody else I felt the need to know some things about, I did my research on Willie too.” He snickered. “That Willie was some player, that's for sure. At least that's what I heard. I mean, I heard so many things about Willie that I would have never guessed he was a married man.” He shook his head. “I guess that's what they mean by the good old days, because I'm sure today you can't find a black woman on earth who would turn a blind eye to all of Willie's doings. But then again, womenfolk ain't built like they were back then. Because you have to admit, it takes a certain kind of woman to allow her husband to sleep with other women, drink, hang out in the streets, gamble all their money away, and then lie about it all.” He laughed.
Mother Doreen stood there not finding one thing funny. “I agree, Mr. Casinoff . . .” she'd gone back to being informal. “I was a different kind of woman back then, but I'm a new creature in the Lord. I'm not that woman anymore. She's dead.”
Terrance looked Mother Doreen up and down. “Then I guess I'm like that little white boy in that movie,
Sixth Sense
.” He leaned in and whispered, “I see dead people,” then pulled back and burst out laughing. “'Cause from what I can see, Doreen Tucker is alive and well; living her life like it's golden.” He frowned. “Well, she was about to anyway.”
Now Mother Doreen was the one who snickered. “You can stand here all day and insult me any kind of way you want to. You can bring up my past all you'd like, but I ain't going back to live in it. But if it makes you feel any better, I'll stand here and take it. If you want to stand here and say to me what your momma never got a chance to, I'll allow that. Because I can only imagine the pain your mother must have felt and probably still feels to this day.”
“Oh, my momma isn't in pain anymore. Her pain is long gone. See, Lauren Casinoff is dead now. For real. Not the old her, not the new her, just her, period. She's gone.” Terrance looked as though it was taking every bit of strength he had to hold the hurt inside resulting from thoughts about the loss of his mother.
“I'm sorry . . . I'm sorry to hear that.” Mother Doreen slowly extended her hands. “I can see that you're hurting. And if you don't mind, I'd like to pray for you.” Her hands lingered in the air while Terrance stared down at them, almost contemplating on whether to allow Mother Doreen her request. “Please, son, let go and let God. Don't let the past haunt you. Allow forgiveness to enter your heart. I'm telling you, keeping all this bottled up inside will drive you crazy.”
Terrance's eyes darted from Mother Doreen's hands to her eyes. “What do you know about something driving a person crazy? Trust and believe, you don't know crazy.” Terrance, still shooting daggered eyes at Mother Doreen, began closing up the space between them. “But here in a minute you are going to know just what crazy is.” Terrance reached into his pocket before saying, “Because I'm about to show you exactly what crazy looks like.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Mother Doreen stared down at what Terrance had pulled out of his pocket. She stood there breathless with no words to say. She looked into the eyes of the woman in the picture Terrance held in his trembling hand. She'd remembered the first and only time she ever really truly looked into those eyes. It wasn't when she was on top of her beating her and her unborn child. It hadn't been when she'd been in the choir stands singing praises to the Lord. It was that day in the courtroom when Mother Doreen had been sentenced after pleading guilty—per the advice of her attorney. Plea deal. Just as Mother Doreen's thoughts had traveled back to the past earlier when she was in the sanctuary, that's exactly what her thoughts did again.
Soon, the eyes on the Kodak paper turned into real live eyes that Mother Doreen stared into as she was escorted out of the courtroom after having been sentenced to prison. “I'm sorry,” Doreen managed to let come from between her lips as the guards escorted her out of the courtroom.
“Too late to be sorry now,” the guard snorted.
Later, as Doreen was driven to the prison, she thought the entire time of whether she'd done the right thing by taking the plea. One year tops if she plead guilty to felonious assault.
“You could spend that much time in jail waiting for a trial date,” her attorney had told her while they discussed her options prior to her agreeing to take the plea.
“But, but it was an accident,” Doreen had told him. “It just happened. I didn't wake up that morning planning to do that. Even when it was happening, I had no idea that she was pregnant.”
“Well, that's not what the court is going to say. What the court is going to say is that you were jealous. You were jealous that another woman was pregnant by your husband. Not only that, but you were angry because you yourself had miscarried your husband's child. Now here's this other woman giving him what you couldn't.”
“But that's a lie!” Doreen blurted out.
“Oh, really now?” The attorney began flipping through the file he had before him. “So the information I have here is incorrect? You didn't miscarry in the first trimester of your pregnancy? Ms. Casinoff wasn't pregnant by your husband, and your husband knew the child was very much his? As a matter of fact, hadn't they even planned the pregnancy? Your husband, while telling you his job relocated him, had actually put in a transfer request to his boss to relocate him to West Virginia, right?” While the attorney made all his statements in question form, Doreen shook her head. “He wanted to be closer to Ms. Casinoff. Raise their child together and eventually leave you to be with his mistress and child, isn't that true?”
“No! No!” Doreen stood up and yelled. “That's not true.”
“What? What part isn't true?” he scanned his files. “Please tell me, because your husband has been interviewed, Mrs. Tucker. Most of this information came straight from the horse's mouth.” He slammed the folder shut and looked Doreen squarely in the eyes and began to speak in a whisper. “Come on, girl, you and I both know you did this.”
“Not on purpose,” Doreen interrupted.
“Yeah, but you did it. I mean, you're lucky they are not trying to charge you for murder for that baby. There's really no precedence for that right now, but I'm sure that judge would love to set one and make a name for himself using you. Me, personally, I'm sure prosecution would much rather take the easy route with a plea. So if I were you, I'd take the plea before everybody decides to try to make a name for themselves while dragging your name through the mud.”
Doreen sat and thought about it.
“You're a preacher's kid, right?” the attorney asked her.
“Yes, sir. My father has a ministry back in Kentucky. He—they—him and my mother—they don't know anything about this.”
“Well, if this thing goes to trial, they are certainly going to find out about this. Do you really want everybody's named dragged in the mud along with yours? I mean, what would become of your daddy's church if his members found out that his daughter had beat a poor woman half to death and killed her—”
“Okay, okay!” Doreen cut him off. She didn't want to hear one more time how'd she'd killed a baby—how she was a baby killer. She might have been in jail for what she'd done to the grown woman, but mentally, everybody was charging her for killing a baby. It might as well have been on the books.
“Okay, what?” the attorney wanted to be specific.
“Okay, I'll take the plea. I'll take it,” Doreen broke down.
The attorney exhaled. Doreen buried her head down on the table and cried.
“Now, now,” her attorney tried to comfort her by patting her arm. “You're doing the right thing.” His thoughts mirrored Doreen's when he said, “Because look at it this way. Even though you'd be in that courtroom being charged for a crime against an adult, all that the jurors are going to have planted in their heads is that dead little baby who didn't have a chance in the world of surviving after the beating it took.”
Doreen cringed. The way he'd just described it sounded so vile, so vicious, so evil. He made it sound like she'd taken this poor little innocent baby and pummeled it to death with her fists. If that's the way they would portray her act in the courtroom, then there was no doubt the jurors and judge would lock her up and throw away the key. Doreen had made up her mind; she was going to take that plea. And she had.
Now, after taking the plea and being sentenced, she was in a van on her way to begin serving out her sentence. Her heart ached. She'd have to go a year without being next to Willie. She'd have to go a year making her family feel she'd abandoned them to be up under Willie. It was a lie, but she'd rather hurt them a little with a lie than hurt them a lot with the truth. She'd write letters to her family to keep in touch with them, letting them know she was okay. She'd tell them she was going on a sabbatical for a few of the months she would be locked away. She'd figure out a way to get a call through here and there without them knowing it was from a jail. She had to do something to keep them at bay so that they wouldn't try to come looking for her. Lord knows she didn't want them to find her there.
By the time Doreen made it to the prison, she had convinced herself 100 percent that accepting that plea and making that courtroom think her actions had been carried out according to some devious plan was the right thing to do. It beat her going through a long drawn out trial and having lies and theories made up about her that, nine times out of ten, people would believe. No, she couldn't do that to herself, and she couldn't do that to her family.
She decided she would serve her time like a woman, accepting the punishment God had for her. Because although what she ultimately did that day at that motel might not have been intentional, she did it nonetheless. She committed a crime against man and God. There was a price to pay, but after only a week of coming to terms with her decision, Doreen would find out just how costly that price tag was.

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