A Special Relationship Read online

  Carrie, at first, thought he was joking. She even laughed about it and told him he looked constipated. But Dale, she quickly discovered, could not have been more serious.

  “A sample of what?” she asked when his foul mood wasn’t abated.

  “You know what,” he said, his voice shaking in agitation. “I’ve got to know what it’s like to be with you. My daddy told me the truth. He said I’m a Mosley for Pete’s sake. We ain’t got to be buying no pigs in no pokes. What if we ain’t compatible? What if you’re frigid or something? I’ll be stuck with somebody I’m not even compatible with. I’ve got to have it, Carrie, that’s all there is to it.” When Carrie didn’t respond, but just sat there staring at him, he became angry. “If I don’t get a sample,” he said bluntly, “if you don’t treat me like the man I am and give me a taste of what I can expect, then the wedding’s off!”

  Carrie didn’t even think about it. There were certain things she was willing to do for Dale. She’d cook for him or clean for him or even wash his dirty clothes for him. She was, after all, soon to be his wife. But there were other things she wasn’t going to do for anybody. “The wedding’s off then,” she said without hesitating either, “because I don’t give out samples.”

  Dale looked at Carrie as if he suddenly hated her, as if he’d finally saw a side of her his daddy had been warning him about, and then he began to shake his head. “Fine,” he said. “Don’t give it up. My daddy said you wouldn’t. He said all you ghetto girls like to play hard to get. So keep on playing with your bad self. But don’t you think for a minute that you can come running back to me.” He said this and looked at her again, to be sure she understood him clearly, and then he was gone. In his mustang and speeding off, the dust of the road kicking up behind him. Gone.

  It took nearly half the morning for Carrie to realize what had just transpired. It all happened so fast. But it only took her a moment to realize that it was probably for the best. She never loved Dale, she’d even told him so herself, but she cared deeply for him. And the idea that he would so easily dump her like this, a man who had professed to love her so much that he didn’t care that the feeling wasn’t mutual, was shocking on every level. She knew he was spoiled, she knew he was the only son of the wealthiest property owner in town, a young man ready, willing, and able to take over the family business as soon as his time came. But for him to leave her because he couldn’t have his way with her was more than she’d ever thought possible. It was devastating, in fact. But she also knew that it was better to have him leaving her now, before the marriage, than after she’d taken those solemn vows.

  Honey Banks, however, wasn’t as resolute. She took it far harder than her daughter. She sat out on that porch and fumed. Dale Mosley was one of the most successful men in town, she reminded her “crazy” daughter. His family owned more rent houses than they could count, including the one they themselves lived in. How in the world could she have turned down a man like that?

  “I’m saved, Mama,” Carrie said as she closed her eyes and attempted to forget all of this drama swirling around her, the Georgia sun bright and beaming against her light brown skin. “That’s why I turned him down. What would I look like sleeping with a man that’s not my husband?”

  “You’ll look like a woman with some sense,” Honey insisted. “And it don’t matter what you’ll look like anyhow. He’s gonna be your husband, he’s no stranger to you. You might as well say y’all married already.”

  “Not in the eyes of God we aren’t.”

  “Here we go,” Honey said and shook her head in angry resignation. What in the world was she going to do with that darn daughter of hers? Carrie was always her favorite, everybody knew it, and Honey saw this engagement to Dale as Carrie’s last big chance to be somebody. She once had so much hope for that child, beginning in her school days when she was so smart that she aced every test they put in front of her, to the night when she graduated with honors and was supposed to go on to college and make a success of herself.

  But Honey suffered a massive stroke two days after Carrie’s graduation and Carrie, being who she was, decided without hesitation to put a hold on her college plans and stay at her mother’s side. Honey would have forbid it if she would have known, but she didn’t know because her condition deteriorated rapidly and, within hours of her stroke, she’d lapsed into a coma. By the time she came to, nearly three weeks later, she was unable to so much as feed herself. She needed Carrie then. And Carrie was right there with her, even taking a job as a waitress in a local diner to help pay the bills.

  Honey didn’t like it but what could she do? Carrie’s father was a rolling stone alcoholic and was never around, and when he was around he was useless. Her oldest daughter, Popena, had disgraced the family by running off with some married man who any fool could see didn’t mean right by her. But Popena seemed to hate her and she could never tell that child a thing. Honey had nobody else but Carrie. And as the months came and went, her dependence on Carrie grew and grew until she forgot about her daughter’s future for worrying about her own.

  It was the reality of her condition that did her in. She hated being partially paralyzed on the right side of her body. She hated walking with a limp and having to practically drag her foot along. She hated having to rely on a small disability check just to survive. She was forty-one years old the year she had her stroke, still a young woman she felt, but her entire world changed that day to where she now, at forty-seven, couldn’t do hardly any of the things she used to do with ease.

  Some of the locals believed that she took her bitterness out on Carrie, that she didn’t give her daughter half a chance to breath, let alone get on with her life, but Honey didn’t see it that way. She had to have help, that was a hard, cold fact, and Carrie was the one who had to help her. Besides, she reasoned, Carrie was young and beautiful and smart as they come, she’d have no trouble whatsoever finding her a successful man to take care of her.

  When Dale Mosley took a liking to Carrie, Honey was on cloud nine. “You done it now, Baby Girl!” she said gleefully one night after she had enough liquor in her to dismiss all of the few inhibitions she had left. And then Carrie had the nerve to turn the boy down? She had the best she could ever hope to have wrapped right around her finger, and she turned him down? Honey shook her head again and looked at that daughter of hers. It was no secret why Dale wanted Carrie. It wasn’t just because Carrie was beautiful, but because her eyes were light green like her daddy’s, creating an astonishing glow to her small, brown face that often had strangers staring in admiration. Her thick, black hair had more bounce than a basketball and she wore it trimmed into a low-cut bob-style that was flipped under and pushed behind her small ears. Even in her simple, dress style, usually jeans and t-shirts, she had an air of gracefulness about her, from the way she walked in tip-toe, bouncy strides, to her thin, swan-like neck.

  And she had an innocence about her that men just loved, a sweet, compassionate side to her that Honey was counting on to serve both of them well one day. Any man in Attapulgus would give dearly to be with a woman like Carrie, and many tried. But she was so stubborn, and so into that religion of hers, that Honey was convinced she scared them away. Men didn’t mind having a good Christian woman, one who feared God just as much as they feared Him. But they didn’t want some sanctified nutcase. And that daughter of hers, if she was anything, was sanctified, and nutty, to the core. “You’re just like your sister,” she said to Carrie in a purposely harsh tone.

  Carrie, however, laughed. “Mama, please,” she replied. “You know good n’ well me and Popena are nothing alike.”

  “You just like her I tell you! Both of y’all crazy as chanks. Both of y’all ain’t got the sense you was born with. She was running around with a married man, creating all kinds of hell around here, so much hell that she had to be run out of town like the tramp she is. And now you. Defying me too. But you so saved. You too good to do what females have to do every day to wrangle them a man. God will forg
ive you, child. He understands what’s going on. But nooo. Not Carrie. She’s got to be all sanctified. She’s got to be all filled with the Holy Ghost. No man can touch her. Not even a successful man like Dale Mosley! The man, as if you done forgot, that promised to give me this house free and clear after y’all got married.”

  Carrie almost laughed again. That was the point. A house for mama. Carrie could sell her soul to the devil, but at least her mama would get a house out of the bargain. She stood up quickly on her trim, five-five frame. The reality of it was too painful to even think about. “I’ve got to get to the diner,” she said.

  “I thought you said you ain’t on the schedule to work today.”

  “I’m not. I’ve gotta pick up my check.”

  “Yo’ check,” Honey said and began turning around in her seat. “That don’t be enough money to even pay the rent. And yo’ crazy butt could be married to the man that owns the house! You can’t be this foolish, Carrie. I didn’t raise you to be this crazy. You got to think about your future, child. You’ll be a sagging-breast old woman still working at that diner down yonder if you don’t stop expecting so much from these men!”

  “I gotta go, mama.”

  “Why don’t you just give Dale a call? Just talk to him. That’s all you got to do. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

  “But I won’t, mama. I’m saved and I’m not about to compromise my salvation for nobody, don’t you understand that? You act like I’m enjoying this. You act like I don’t care for Dale. Well I do. I thought he was gonna be my husband. I thought . . . .” Carrie hesitated. That same pain she felt when Dale broke off their engagement was beginning to reemerge. “I thought he loved me enough to wait,” she said.

  “He’s a man, crazy woman!” Honey said. “A man! And men don’t wait. Yo’ daddy a good for nothing, he’s the example. All you got to do is remember his runnin’ around and you’ll know exactly how men are.”

  “Every man ain’t like that.”

  “Uh-hun,” Honey said and folded her big, burly arms. “Name one.”

  Carrie stood on the porch and stared at the children playing in the wooded field across the street. There was one out there. She just knew it. A good, strong, Christian man God was going to bless her with in a mighty way. And unlike Dale Mosley, her dream man wouldn’t let the need for some fleshly pleasure, for a sample, to break them up. It was just a matter of time. It was just a matter of putting all her trust in God’s plan for her life, regardless of what her mother or anybody else had to say about it.

  She left and went to the diner.

  By the time she got back home, however, things had changed for the worse. Carrie’s heart dropped as she walked onto the dirt road of row houses and saw what was going on at hers. Her mother, along with her mother’s latest boyfriend of the week, had undoubtedly drank themselves into a drunken stupor and was now putting on a show for the neighbors. A show, Carrie was dismayed to realize, that included her mother leaning against her cane and tossing all of Carrie’s clothes out onto the porch, screaming obscenities as she did. Her mother’s boyfriend was seated out on that porch, his bottle of liquor still in his hands, laughing at the display. Laughing as if this horror show was actually entertainment.

  Carrie slowed as she approached the wooden-framed house that looked almost dilapidated, and then, when her mother nearly tripped over in her drunkenness and rage, she hurried up the steps. She tried to calm her, she tried to get her to understand that it was her life and she couldn’t live it on anybody else’s terms.

  But Honey didn’t want to hear it. She pushed Carrie aside, even slapped her, and called her every harsh name she could recite. Carrie endured her mother’s wrath, as she’d always endured it, convinced that her mother was just disappointed with her own life and didn’t mean half the hateful things she was saying.

  But then, as if Carrie didn’t have enough to deal with, another ultimatum was dropped on her. Honey staggered and then pointed at her daughter. “Either you marry Dale Mosley,” she said in no uncertain terms, “or you get out my house. You so good, maybe you too good to be livin’ with a big-time sinner like me. You a grown woman, anyhow. You twenty-four years old. I ain’t taking care of your sanctified butt another second!”

  Less than an hour later, when the afternoon sun was at its brilliance and the sense in trying to find a reason for staying was no longer worth the time it took to think one up, Carrie Banks got away. Without saying another word to her mother, who was still staggering around the house lamenting her terrible life and sorry-behind daughters, and without calling Dale Mosley and telling him anything about her plans, she placed her discarded clothes into the only suitcase she owned, cashed her check at the local Pigly Wigly, and caught the first Greyhound bus out of Georgia.

  She was headed for Florida, the sunshine state. Her big sister Popena had written countless times about the new life she had made for herself in Jacksonville and how Florida, of all places, was fast becoming the promised land, the place of refuge where even a marked woman like Popena could find her way. That was why Carrie made up her mind and left without looking back. She was going to find her way too.

  THREE

  In downtown Jacksonville, on a rainy, dreary day, Marva Cox walked into the extremely large office on the top floor of the Dyson Corporate headquarters building and sighed in great frustration. Robert Kincaid, her boss, a man she’d known and worked with for nearly ten years, was standing there in shirt sleeves staring out of his huge, wall-sized window as if he didn’t have a board meeting in less than thirty minutes and needed to get prepared.

  She was worried about him. He’d been this way a lot lately, where he’d just stare out into the wide blue yonder as if such penetrating, hard looks could make what happened to him two years ago finally stop haunting him. And she wanted so much to help him, to reassure him, but she knew she couldn’t. He was not the kind of man who opened up to anyone, especially not to his fifty-four-year-old black secretary who wanted, as he once told her, to smother him with mothering, and especially not on a day like today. On any other day over the past two years, Robert Kincaid was not a soft man. He was not an easily affectionate individual on his best day. But today was different. It was the second anniversary of his wife’s shocking news, the day his life changed forever, and he could not have been more hard to reach.

  He wasn’t always so aloof and stand offish. Marva could remember a time when her boss was the kindest human being she’d ever known, a man who would move heaven and earth for her and anybody else he cared about. But his experience with that Gloria Kincaid had changed him. Now he would just as soon be left alone. Now he didn’t give out any affection and didn’t want any in return. But that still didn’t stop Marva Cox from trying.

  “Have you had your dinner yet, Robert?” she asked him as she moved further into his office and sat a folder on his desk. He ignored her, which she’d come to expect too. “I can run over to Polly’s and pick something up for you.”

  “No thanks,” he said without turning around.

  “It’s no trouble at all.”

  “Marva,” he said in an even but firm voice, a voice she knew was his early warning to knock it off.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “Forgive me for caring.”

  “Did you get that projections report?” he asked her.

  She shook her head. The man was all work all the time. “Yes, I went downstairs and got it myself. I just put it on your desk.”

  Robert moved away from the window with such a reluctance that it appeared as if he was being forced to do so. Marva watched her boss as he walked slowly to his desk, his tall, elegant frame still imposing and self-assured despite the air of somberness that nowadays surrounded him. Although he stood behind his desk and began looking through the pages in the folder rather than at Marva, he could apparently feel her stares. “Why are you still here?” he asked without looking up.

  “Because you are.”

  “I told you about that.”

/>   “I know.”

  “You need to get a life.”

  “I have a life.”

  “Yeah, you and me both.”

  “Oh, stop complaining,” Marva said. “You wouldn’t last a day without me and you know it.”

  Robert’s entire demeanor changed into a kind of stricken stupor. He hated being attached to anyone. But Marva, with her motherly affection for him, with her loyalty and devotion, was the closest he would probably ever get to a soul mate. “A day,” he said, his eyes still focused on the papers before him rather than his pushy secretary. “I wouldn’t last an hour.”

  Marva wanted to smile at those rare kind words, but Robert glanced up at her, as if he was daring her to smile, so she didn’t. “Ross said they could change the bottom line projections if the board wants the numbers more high-end,” she decided to say. “But he’ll stick with them, he said, if you can.”

  Robert hesitated, seemingly reading one page in particular. “I can,” he said.

  Marva stared at Robert, and then she exhaled. “Robert?” she said and she refused to say another word until he looked at her. He did.

  “Yes, Marva?”

  “Why don’t you take a vacation?”

  “A vacation? In the middle of an acquisition? Come on.”

  “Just for a few days. It’ll do you good.”