Man Enough For Me (33 page)

T
he day of Easy’s funeral was bright and sunny. Though it was the beginning of December and bitingly cold, the weather had been unusually dry. Since the dusting of flurries they’d had a couple days before, not a drop of snow had fallen, and so the ground, though cold, was clear of ice.

As Jules stood near the burial plot, she was vaguely aware of the minister’s words. Since the day she had seen Easy’s body at the hospital, something had changed. A thick fog had wrapped itself around her mind, separating her from everything and everyone. Jules felt as if she was moving slower than everyone else around her. Life went on, but for Jules it seemed to be happening at some distance ahead of her.

Her eyes moved slowly across the thick crowd that had gathered at the graveside. Usually people didn’t bother to go to the interment, especially on a day as cold as today. But for Easy, a lot of people seemed to have made an exception.

There were so many faces. Some Jules knew well, others were only slightly familiar, but most she had never seen before. In fact, during the days following Easy’s death, Jules had met more of his friends than she had in the several years in which she had known him.

Beside her she could hear Maxine sobbing quietly. She had
not stopped crying since the day at the hospital. It seemed that every time the tears would dry up a bit, a fresh bout would start. From the worry lines that had taken up permanent residence on Truuth’s face, Jules could tell that he was concerned about Maxine. He shouldn’t have been. He knew Maxine. Excess emotion was her thing. But Jules figured that his worrying about her was just his way of distracting himself from the fact that Easy was gone. Jules knew Truuth was used to people leaving him. But just because you were used to something, it didn’t make it any easier to deal with every time it happened.

Beside Truuth, ‘Dre was standing with Tanya. From the outside he looked pretty composed, but underneath his Christian Dior sunglasses, Jules knew that his eyes were red. Earlier that morning at the church, Tanya had revealed that ‘Dre had broken down the night before, after his visit to Easy’s grandmother. From her own interaction with him Jules knew he had shut down, just like when his father died. Word was, he hadn’t been to the office since Easy died, and apart from Tanya, he pretty much wasn’t talking to anyone unless it was absolutely necessary.

And then there was Tanya. Jules looked over at her fair friend, who was holding ‘Dre’s hand tightly. Taking care of everyone else, like she always did, seemed to be helping Tanya deal with Easy’s passing. Unlike Jules she had cried a couple times, but not as excessively as Maxine. And while the rest of them were content to keep their feelings to themselves, she’d been the only one freely talking about how sad she was that Easy was gone. She had even gone as far as to see a grief therapist, and had made appointments for all Triad employees to do the same. Jules wasn’t sure how many people would actually show up, but it was the thought that counted.

A sudden creaking in front of her drew Jules’s attention to the one place she had been trying to avoid. The grave.

She watched as the coffin was slowly lowered down into the ground on the horizontal straps positioned across the open burial plot.

” ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. They will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.’”

The minister’s words drifted through the haze of Jules’s mind. The coffin was halfway down, and Jules could barely see the top anymore. A part of her mind refused to believe that Easy was in that coffin, and that they were putting him in the ground.

Jules took a step toward the grave so she could keep her eyes on the casket. It was the last time she would see her friend. She wasn’t ready to let go yet.

“‘Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.’”

By the time the coffin had come to rest, Jules was standing at the very edge. As the workmen pulled the lowering bands out of the grave and began to remove the burial apparatus, particles of dirt slipped down from the sides of the plot onto the casket.

The sound of the gravel hitting the coffin seemed to lift the fog from Jules’s mind and send her careening back into reality. They were burying Easy. They were burying her friend. He wasn’t coming back.

“‘We commit this body to the ground; earth to earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’”

All of a sudden Jules felt weak. With each flower that fell onto the coffin, it became harder and harder for her to breathe. She wasn’t ready for him to be gone. She hadn’t told him how much she loved him. She hadn’t told him how proud she was of what he had become. He hadn’t had a chance to live yet. Not fully and completely anyway. No, it was too soon. She hadn’t said good-bye.

But as the men slid the heavy slab of concrete resolutely over the top of the grave, she knew it was too late.

That was enough.

Jules felt her body go limp, and a gut-wrenching scream
curled its way up from the core of her being, echoing across the solemn cemetery. She would have sunk onto the cold, hard ground had it not been for two strong arms that grabbed her and pulled her close.

Jules buried her face in Germaine’s chest and let her cries get swallowed up in his strong frame. She hadn’t seen him enter the cemetery and certainly had not seen him come up behind her. But he had seen her, and he had known that it would be too much for her.

She collapsed against him, letting his strength support her. She was too tired to be in control.

The sobs that wracked her body made her feel weaker still, and she closed her eyes and tried to block it all out. She couldn’t watch them seal off the tomb, or cover it with dirt. She couldn’t even watch the people leave, which they soon did. Because their leaving meant that it was over. This was the last moment in time that would be about Easy. She would have to let him go. She couldn’t do that. She wasn’t ready.

A cloud of grief seemed to have seeped in, replacing the fog that had been there before. It was so heavy that Jules could feel its weight rest on her, making her bones ache, making it hard to breathe.

“It’s okay. It’s okay….” Germaine’s voice drifted softly in through the jumble of her mind, his soothing words echoing over and over, in a rhythmic pattern. Slowly but surely, it seemed to sedate Jules’s tumultuous emotions, and transform her wracking sobs into gentle whimpers. Eventually she stopped crying, and began to breathe again. After what seemed like forever she opened her eyes.

Germaine loosened his grip, but kept a supporting hand on Jules as she stood back a bit and looked around. The cemetery had emptied, leaving only the two of them standing by Easy’s grave. Jules finally managed to look at the spot that was to be her friend’s final resting place.

The workmen had done a good job of covering the plot
neatly, and someone had placed a wreath of yellow and white carnations and tulips on top. The headstone would not come until later in the week, so for now this would have to do.

Jules sighed. It was a pity Easy couldn’t see the big fuss everyone had made for him. He wouldn’t have believed it.

Kneeling down, she placed the single white rose she had on top of his grave. On her last birthday Easy had sent her eleven white roses. When she had asked him why eleven, he’d said because eleven was one rose short of a dozen, just like Jules was one screw short of crazy.

She smiled. She would miss those things about him. The way he insulted her in love, the way he was overprotective, the way he was always asking her questions about God out of the blue. But more than that—she would just miss him.

After a few more moments, she took a deep breath and stood up, brushing away the tears that threatened to fall again. She turned around to find Germaine handing her a handkerchief. Jules snorted.

“You have a handkerchief?”

He shrugged as she took it. “It came with the suit.”

His hands were stuck in his pockets casually, but he was watching Jules carefully. As distraught as she was, she didn’t miss the look of concern in his eyes.

“Oh, geez, I must look a mess,” she mumbled, wiping her eyes and sliding her sunglasses off her head. But Germaine reached out and took them from her before she had a chance to put them on.

“It’s okay,” he said gently.

Jules stared at him for a moment, before taking back her glasses and putting them on anyway. It was bad enough that he seemed to be able to guess her every move. She didn’t need his intense eyes peering into her soul as well.

“Everyone left?” she asked, as they walked toward the parking lot.

“Yeah. They went back to ‘Dre’s house,” Germaine said.

“There goes my ride,” Jules mumbled. Since her car had been in the shop again, she’d gotten a ride with Maxine that morning.

“I told Max I’d take care of it.”

“Oh.”

An awkward silence fell between them as they covered the rest of the distance to the parking lot. When they got to the car, Germaine opened the door, but Jules didn’t get in. Instead, she hugged her small black purse to her and stared at the ground. She could feel Germaine standing silently behind her.

“You don’t want to go to ‘Dre’s, do you,” he said.

She shook her head.

“You want me to take you home?”

She nodded.

“Okay.”

She slid into the front seat and buckled the seat belt, as he closed the door.

Jules didn’t know whether it was the finality of Easy’s funeral, or the general confusion of her life, but something about the familiar feeling of Germaine’s front passenger seat put her at ease. She snuggled deeper into the velvet cushioning and stared out the window as the city whizzed by. It felt like the world whizzing past her life.

She felt her cell phone vibrating, but ignored it. It was probably Tanya, or Maxine, or even her mother. But her throat was raw from crying, and a dull ache was resting behind her eyes. She wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone.

Eventually, her phone stopped buzzing. But only moments later, she heard Germaine’s go off.

“Hello? … Yeah, she’s with me…. No, she’s not feeling too well…. Okay … Yeah, I’ll make sure she gets home okay…. Bye, Tanya.”

As Germaine clicked the phone shut, she closed her eyes and allowed the momentum of the car to lull her mind into a dull calm.

Jules didn’t remember waking to give Germaine the keys to her apartment. Neither did she recall him leading her inside, or taking off her shoes as he helped her into bed. The only thing she remembered was the feel of her soft pillow as she drifted off into a dark and restless sleep.

J
ules slept through most of the weekend.

Even though Easy’s funeral had been on a Thursday afternoon, she didn’t crawl out of bed until the following Friday evening. And even then, it was only to drink a bit of tea before crawling back under the sheets. Same thing on Saturday evening. It was not until Sunday morning that she finally got up. And even then she still felt exhausted.

As she started the kettle to make some more Peppermint Persuasion, she noticed the blinking red light on her answering machine. Sighing deeply, she pushed the Play button.

There were twelve messages, half of which were from Tanya. The others were from her mom, Davis, Maxine, and even ‘Dre.

She deleted them all before taking her mug of tea and a half-eaten packet of saltine crackers onto her balcony.

It was bright, and bitingly cold, and Jules wrapped the blanket she had taken with her tighter around her shoulders.

She could see the wind rustling the large pine tree outside the building. Even in the winter it was green and full of foliage. It would be Christmas in a couple of weeks, and her neighbors in the building across the street had already put out Christmas lights and decorations. Children bundled in winter jackets and scarves ran ahead of their parents on the sidewalk below, seemingly
immune to the cold winds. Jules wished that she could be like them, happy and carefree. But all she could think about was that this would be the first Christmas in five years she would spend without Easy.

Every year they had gone with Maxine, ‘Dre, Tanya, and Truuth down to the waterfront to catch the fireworks. This year he would not be there. Jules didn’t bother to wipe the tears that ran down her cheeks.

Jules wasn’t sure how long she sat out there. It wasn’t until she heard the locks on her front door open behind her that she stirred.

Feeling less alarmed than she should have been, Jules shuffled from the balcony into the living room, her blanket still wrapped tightly around her.

“Wow. You look a mess.”

Jules rolled her eyes when she saw it was only Germaine, and pulled the sliding balcony doors shut, effectively cutting off the cold air from the rest of the apartment.

“I wasn’t expecting company,” Jules mumbled scratchily, as she plopped down on her couch, pulling her feet up under her.

“I can see that,” Germaine said, wrinkling his nose. “You stink too.”

Jules glared at him, decked out in his crisp red and white bomber jacket, dark blue jeans, and sparkling clean Timberlands. He looked like a Tide commercial.

“I’m sorry, did I invite you over while I was sleeping?”

“No,” Germaine said, ignoring her caustic tone as he dropped into the recliner in the corner. “But word on the street is that you’ve been holed up in this place for the last couple days feeling sorry for yourself.”

He pulled off his gloves and stuck them in his pocket as Jules watched.

“Think of me as the rescue party.”

“Thanks for your concern,” Jules said. “But I’m fine. You can go now.”

“Not until you’ve had a shower, and something to eat. In that order,” Germaine said. “Then we’ll both go.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Jules said. “And I don’t need a shower.”

Germaine raised an eyebrow doubtfully, and Jules looked away. Okay, maybe she did need a shower. But she certainly didn’t need him telling her what to do.