Mama Rocks the Empty Cradle (5 page)

“She didn’t want to die,” Mama said, her voice low, thoughtful. I remembered what she’d told me
about how terrified Cricket had been of dying when she was in labor with Morgan.

“What evidence did you find in the bedroom?” Mama asked Abe.

“A few glasses, one with lipstick.”

“Anything that might belong to a baby?” Mama asked.

Abe shook his head. “Nothing. Not even a pacifier.”

“Then it’s possible that Morgan wasn’t in the apartment with Cricket after all.”

A wrinkle creased Abe’s forehead. “I’m thinking that the baby was with Cricket, that whoever killed her decided to take the child with him.”

“Who would do a thing like that?” I asked.

“The person on the top of my list is Timber Smith, Cricket’s boyfriend. I’ve got an APB out on him. Once I track him, talk to him, I’ll have a better fix on the whole thing. Still, I guess I’d better put a call in to the State Law Enforcement people. I’m going to need help on this one.”

Mama looked down at her watch, then stood up slowly. “Let me suggest that after Rick finishes putting up the posters of Morgan’s picture all over the county, get him to talk to Timber’s kinfolks. Perhaps they will tell him something about Timber’s whereabouts that they wouldn’t tell Rose.”

“I’ll do that,” Abe agreed.

“Right now,” Mama continued, “I’m going home and rest these aching feet. Tomorrow morning Simone will take me to a few places I need to visit, and to talk to a few good people who don’t mind telling
me things I need to know about Cricket and Timber.”

When I got Mama back to the house, I gave her two Meprozine capsules and made her as comfortable as I could. Then I fixed lunch—chicken soup, grilled cheese, a diet cola, and a small bowl of ice cream. No sooner had she eaten, Mama fell asleep.

I sat in the family room, pushing the television remote control restlessly until the telephone rang. I wasn’t too surprised to hear Yasmine’s voice. She knew that I’d be with Mama for the week, and I’d expected her to call to see how Mama was doing.

“Thank goodness you’re finally home!” Yasmine’s voice was breathy, nervous. “I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”

“Why?” I asked. “What’s happening in Atlanta?”

“I’m in Martin,” Yasmine said. “I’ll be at your mother’s house in half an hour,”

Before I could ask another question, she hung up.

When I peeked through the peephole and looked into Yasmine’s eyes thirty-five minutes later, I was shocked. There was a harried look on her face. She wore no makeup, her hair was pulled into an untidy knot at the nape of her neck and tied carelessly with a scarf—this was not the way my girlfriend usually looked. I opened the door. Yasmine rushed past me and into the center of the family room. There, she
stood looking in every corner like she couldn’t make up her mind which direction she wanted to head. She wore light faded jeans, a plain white T-shirt, and a pair of black sling-back sandals.

“Girl, what is wrong with you?” I asked. “You look like you lost the fight.”

“What?” she asked distractedly.

“Forget it,” I said. I cleared my throat.

Yasmine looked at her watch. “I’m hungry,” she said.

I rolled my eyes. “Want a sandwich?”

Yasmine made a shrug so small it was barely noticeable. “Yeah, a sandwich would be good.”

A few minutes later Yasmine was holding a grilled cheese sandwich she wasn’t eating and pushing around a mug of Ethiopian coffee that I’d brought to Mama from Caribou Coffeehouse in Buckhead. She stared down blankly at her food.

“Something on your mind? Something we need to talk about?” I asked. “You’re not sick, are you?”

Yasmine looked at me, then broke eye contact. But not before I saw the tears in her eyes. “Where’s Miss Candi?” she asked, again not answering my questions, Her behavior was starting to scare me.

“In bed, asleep.”

“Simone,” Yasmine whispered, “I’m pregnant!”

I stood up, walked to the counter, and poured myself a cup of the coffee. I felt disappointed. I knew Yasmine was a strong believer in the traditional family. She’d always argued that the husband should come first, then a house, and lastly children.

I took my cup and sat across from her at the table. “Girl, common sense could have prevented something like that from happening!”

“I took a home pregnancy test,” Yasmine whispered. “It’s positive.”

“Take another one!”

“I’ve taken three. Simone, they were all positive.”

I shook my head. What could I say?

She reached into her pocket for a tissue, wiped her wet eyes. “
Simone, I’m going to have an abortion!”

Her words came down on me like a ton of bricks. The thought of Yasmine having an abortion stirred an emotion, what I can only describe as a sensitivity to the delicacy of life—and suddenly I liked that feeling, I wanted to protect it, nurture it. I couldn’t think of anything to say, words wouldn’t come. When I did speak, I heard my voice as if it came from a distance. “Girl, don’t even think about doing something like that. You could handle a baby—”

Yasmine stood up. She began pacing. Then she stopped in front of me and stared, a cold, dead-eyed look. “Girl, don’t you know that a baby is like a chain around your leg? It keeps you in lock-down!”

“What?”

She made an ugly face. “There’s no way I can have a baby now. And, Simone, I need you to go with me to the clinic.”

I threw my hands up. “Oh, no … you’ve got to be kidding … ain’t no way I’m going with you to an abortion clinic!”

Yasmine lowered herself into the chair, her head
so straight it looked like she had a glass of water on the top of it. “You’re my best friend, Simone. You’ve got to go with me!”

“Because I’m your best friend, I won’t help you do this!”

Her face stiffened. “How do you know what’s right or wrong? Who made you my judge and jury?”

She was right. This was Yasmine’s decision, not mine. And I knew my friend had not made her decision carelessly, whether I agreed with it or not. I took a deep breath, trying to take the edge out of my voice. “I’m not your judge. But I am feeling that having an abortion ain’t the thing to do!”

Yasmine was silent. She sat chewing the inside of her cheek. After a while, she spoke. “Why are you so protective now? You ain’t never cared about babies before … you always said you didn’t have the maternal instinct!”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess I saw a baby a few days ago that turned a switch on inside me,” I said, remembering Morgan’s angelic smile and thinking of how somebody had snatched her away and killed her mother. Where was that poor child now? “And my feelings tell me to care about the baby you’re carrying. I’ll help you with it, I promise!”

She waved a hand dismissively at me. “Yeah, right!”

“Listen, Yasmine,” I said. “You can’t—”

“You’re making a decision without even thinking about it!”

The knot in my throat tightened. “Okay,” I told Yasmine. “I’ll think about what you want to do but—and I mean this—I ain’t promising you that I’m going to go with you to an abortion clinic.”

Yasmine didn’t take her eyes off me. “When will you get back to Atlanta?”

“Next week,” I answered her.

“Think about it for at least that long,” she said, then began chewing her cheek some more.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” I said.

“I’ll wait until you get back to Atlanta before I make an appointment at the clinic. You’ll change your mind by then!”

I didn’t say anything.

The tears shone in Yasmine’s eyes again. “Simone, I can’t do this by myself.”

“What about Ernest? Have you told him?”

“No. And I’m not going to. I ain’t having Ernest marry me ’cause I’m having his baby!”

“He might
want
to marry you!”

“A baby don’t make a man stay, and in the case of a black man it’ll make him leave faster!”

“Once he knows—”

“No!—I ain’t having Ernest beat me down … I ain’t gonna tell him, don’t want him to know!”

“Girl, you’re crazy! Ernest has got a right to know!”

“No, he doesn’t!”

“Suppose he wants his baby?” I asked.

“I’ll—” Yasmine stopped, thought, then said softly, “I’m only twenty-five. I can have other babies. Once
we’re married, I’ll give Ernest all the babies he can take care of!”

“Suppose—”

“Simone, get real! Men ain’t got feelings for babies like women do!”

“Who told you that?”

“If you listened to the women whose hair I do every week, you’d
know
it!”

“My father—”

“Mr. James is different. He’s from the old school, not like these men today! I’ve heard my clients tell me how their man disappeared once they became pregnant! It’s the way things
are
nowadays!”

“Maybe you need to spend less time talking to your clients and more time doing their hair!”

She glared at me. “I’m not telling Ernest and neither are you!”

“And if I do?”

“I’ll never speak to you again, Simone. You and I have been girlfriends since before Ernest, before Cliff. I know you ain’t about to let something like this come between us now!”

I ran my hand through my braids. “Yasmine,” I said, “you’re supposed to have some sense … don’t do this thing to your baby!”

She made a funny sound in the back of her throat. “Give it a week! Think about being in my shoes. Then you’ll see things my way.”

I shook my head. “Believe what you want,” I said, deciding already that there was no way that I was going to change my mind.

She stood and began walking toward the front door. Then she turned. “Simone,” she said. Her voice cracked.

“Yeah!”

“Don’t tell anybody what I’ve told you. Not even Miss Candi.”

“I won’t say anything,” I promised.

She cocked her head, pulled on the neck of her T-shirt, then opened the door. “I ain’t kidding. Don’t mention it to your mama … I don’t want Miss Candi thinking bad about me!”

“Mama isn’t judgmental,” I said. But I couldn’t help but wonder what my mother would think if I told her that I was going to have an abortion.

T
he Covingtons are natives of Otis County. They own quite a bit of land, property that my great-great-grandfather obtained during Reconstruction. His oldest son was my great-grandfather, Ezekiel Covington. Great-grandpa Ezekiel’s youngest and only living child was my great-uncle Chester. He had died six months earlier at the ripe age of ninety-nine.

Uncle Chester had quite a few children himself, since he’d buried three wives. It was his daughter, Agatha, however, who inherited Great-grandfather Ezekiel Covington’s shrewd business sense. Cousin Agatha is a tall thin woman, with banana-colored skin. She has never married and, to my knowledge, has never wanted to. When you meet her she appears shy. But this is a deception. She is so astute in
the handling of the Covingtons’ land that you’d think she had a degree in business management.

It was Cousin Agatha’s cleverness, along with a few encouraging words from Mama, that convinced Uncle Chester to give Agatha the power of attorney before he died. Cousin Agatha set up the Covington Land Company and had it incorporated, ensuring that our land would stay in the family for at least another hundred years.

Daddy’s cousin, Fred Covington from Philadelphia, doesn’t value land ownership the way Cousin Agatha does. As a matter of fact, Uncle Fred’s philosophy is that land is good only for burying the dead. Money, he says, is for the living.

While Cousin Agatha doesn’t agree with her first cousin, she was keen enough to know that she could use a little cash to fix up the old house she and Uncle Chester had shared for years. So she arranged to have the timber cut on the land, something that hadn’t been done for decades.

Cousin Agatha shopped around for the best price and, when she’d finalized the deal, she wrote letters to the entire Covington clan, telling each one how much they could expect as their share of the proceeds of the timber sale.

For the past three weeks, the loggers had been cutting. Rain had stopped them temporarily, but once the sun came out, they’d pushed their trucks and saws further into the Covingtons’ forest.

I don’t know if Cousin Agatha suspected that the
loggers would try to cheat her or not, but she absolutely refused to leave her house while the timber was being cut all around her.

The first phone call I’d gotten after Yasmine left was from Cliff. He told me that things in L.A. were really getting bogged down. It seemed that Mrs. Campbell’s appraiser came up with a greater value on their furniture than Mr. Campbell’s. Mrs. Campbell had worked herself up into a fine state, telling Cliff she was going to get every cent of her husband’s money.

Both Cliff’s and Yasmine’s problems had me in a sickening funk. So when Cousin Agatha called to tell me that she had cooked our dinner and that all I had to do was to come to her house and pick it up, I felt things were looking up a little.

I peeked into Mama’s room. The Meprozine capsules had knocked her out; she would be asleep until either my father got in from work or I returned from Cousin Agatha’s.

Happy that I didn’t have to throw something together for the three of us to eat later, I got into my Honda and headed to Cousin Agatha’s house near Cypress Creek.