No Turning Back (The Traveler) (7 page)

“What about dealing with your will, Gary? Are you ready to start off on any of that today?” the attorney asked him. In addition to his mother’s important estate documents, Burnett was ready for conversations on preparing Gary’s will in case anything unexpected were to happen to him. It was the attorney’s job to prepare for the worst.

Gary scanned the stack of paperwork on his kitchen table and waved it off. He had enough on his plate already regarding his mother’s stuff.

“Can’t you handle some of that? God, man, that’s a lot of shit to think about,” Gary complained.

“Yes, I can, but I’ll still need you to read and sign it. Or we could execute a power of attorney form, if you like,” Burnett suggested. “But I need you to at least be abreast of the particulars involved that are needed. I mean, a will is all quite detailed.”

When Taylor overheard the words “power of attorney” and “will” being tossed around in their conversations at the kitchen table, he began to pay more attention.

Gary glared at the attorney and groaned, “Man, just slow down with all of that, Christopher. I’m still trying to deal with my mother’s funeral right now. Can’t we wait until next week to for all of that?”

“Yeah, give him some time on that. What’s the hurry?” Taylor interrupted, stood and approached them at the table to support his friend while Melissa watched and listened from the sofa.

Burnett promptly gathered the load of paperwork and returned it to an oversized folder that sat in the empty chair beside them.

“All right then, it can wait. I just need for you to become familiar with the terms while we execute your mother’s will, but we can’t wait long. You have a substantial inheritance and we need to get your affairs in order for your own protection. It will all become clear when we review the estate documents. And this is all important, so please take it seriously.’’

He placed the oversized folder on the table, marked as
Stevens Estate
.

“I’ll make sure he looks over everything,” Taylor said.

The attorney nodded and stood from his chair, towering over Taylor in his dark suit. “Okay, well, I have a few other meetings to make on your mother’s behalf, including a meeting with Mayor Jerry Abramson today. He’s honored to speak at your mother’s funeral.”

“Yeah, how’d you manage to do that?” Gary asked him.

Christopher gathered his briefcase and smiled. “Well, Gary, so many people genuinely liked your mother that it honestly wasn’t hard to do.” He took a breath and exhaled. “She is such a tragic loss to all of us. I am really going to miss that woman, as will the community.”

As soon as the attorney walked out, Taylor sneered, “I don’t think I like that guy.”

“Yeah, he seems very
fake
,” Melissa added, finally walking over to join them.

Gary grumbled. “It doesn’t matter. As long as he gets it all done, who cares?” He had been that way all week—acerbic.

Right on cue, Taylor sat at the table and asked him, “Have you bothered to call that psychologist Dr. Teikata referred you to?”

Gary had shown them the referral note from the doctor to help explain the perplexity of his unusual response and moodiness. He eyed Taylor at the table and said, “I should have never showed you that.”

“Have you called and talked to any of your relatives?” Melissa asked him. “Where are your family members?”

She found it weird that only she and Taylor were around him after his loss.

Taylor looked at Gary and knew better. Gary and his mother had never been close to their extended family. It had been a long and unspoken feud that had occurred decades ago.

Gary answered gruffly, “They’ll be here for the funeral. Other than that, I really don’t want to be bothered with them. Some of them have called me, but I don’t know them that well.”

Melissa frowned and said only, “That’s too bad. Family is important.”

Gary shrugged. “Yeah, but my mom seemed really pressed to keep me away from them. So I don’t know what was going on there. I never had relationships with them.”

“What about at your family reunions or anything? Didn’t you look forward to being around your cousins or whatever?” Melissa continued.

Gary and Taylor sat there silently. They both knew what Melissa didn’t; Gary and Gabrielle had been the only family they knew … and Taylor. So Gary reached across the table and grabbed his best friend of more than a dozen years by the shoulder.

“Here’s my family right here: my cousin—brother from another mother.”

Taylor grinned and said, “Yeah.”

Melissa shook it off and smirked.
Guys!
she thought.

Gary returned to his disconnected stupor. Over the past three days, he had spent a lot of time thinking to himself, zoning in and out of their conversations with him. But he was fully aware that his friends had been watching over him, and he appreciated it.

He looked up and joked, “Are you guys planning to leave me alone for a while? I feel like I’m in protective custody.”

Melissa told him, “You are. We’re just trying to make sure that you’re all right.”

Gary stared at her from across the table. “Thanks. So I guess I should feel privileged to have two bodyguards constantly surrounding me now.”

Taylor and Melissa eyed each other and chuckled.

During the burial and final blessings of Gabrielle Antoinette Stevens at Louisville’s Memorial Cemetery on Saturday morning, Gary stood between Melissa, Taylor, Taylor’s family, and several of his mother’s extended family members, who had traveled up from Tennessee. He
was dressed in a fine black suit and a burgundy patterned tie. A number of stirring speeches had been made on his mother’s behalf and many tears had been shed from her close friends and estranged relatives. Even Dr. Teikata was there. Even with the torrent of emotion, Gary remained detached. There were no tears or deep sense of sorrow, only a blank emptiness. It was as if he needed more evidence to prove that it was all real.

The Louisville mayor gave his departing words from the opposite side of Gabrielle’s chrome coffin with gold trim. Wearing a quality black suit of his own with a politician’s blue and red necktie, the mayor was surrounded by his wife, several city and state officials, and the local police officers, some of whom had worked on his mother’s case.

“Gabrielle Stevens was a fine, hardworking woman, who gave her all in service to the Louisville community and to the state of Kentucky. She was a tireless agitator for social good, a working mother, a diligent lobbyist, and a loyal friend to everyone who knew her …”

As the mayor continued, attorney Christopher Burnett shifted in his stance, feeling uneasy. He had received an unexpected visit at his law office toward the end of the week that had unnerved him. He looked around, wondering where his unforeseen visitor was standing amongst the crowd. He had assumed the woman would attend the burial; he figured he had just not located her yet.

The distracted attorney peered over his right shoulder and quickly swiveled his head forward. In the crowd behind him, he had spotted who he was looking for: a striking African-American woman. She had visited him at his office that week and had scared the professional life out of him. And she had plenty of legal information to validate her cause.

Standing tall and stately, two rows back, she blended into the crowd in her black suit and heels. She was the same athletically built woman who had bought a Mary J. Blige CD from Gary’s record store a week ago. Taylor and Gary hadn’t notice her or nearly anyone else in the crowd. But Burnett couldn’t stop himself from thinking about her.

Who the hell is she?
he pondered.

She seemed overly physical at his office, and she crowded his buffer space with a message that “protective eyes” would be watching over him to make sure he handled Gary’s estate properly. She had told with such poise and authority that he was forced to take her warning seriously. Then she had left him standing there with no name, phone number or anything.

“… and although Gabrielle will surely be missed by us
all
, may the spirit of her work continue to guide us and set an example of community service for years to come,” the mayor concluded in his speech.

Gabrielle’s coffin was lowered into the ground amidst a barrage of colorful roses that were thrown onto her descending coffin, but her son was still unmoved by it.

Standing beside him, Gary’s aging Tennessean grandmother took a deep breath and wiped her tears with a small tissue. She was nearly seventy with thick gray hair and the hard, lined face of a stern woman. She observed her tall and sturdy grandson and nodded to him. Although he appeared rugged and independent, she still regarded him as a young man in need of family love and guidance.

“Well, I guess now we can finally get you back down to Jackson and have you get acquainted with all of your relatives,” she commented as they returned to the black limousines and Lincoln Town Cars that had brought them to the burial site. “We all couldn’t make the trip up here this weekend, you know,” his grandmother added.

She was obviously a strong matriarch of the family. No one spoke before she did. She seemed to make all of the rules too.

Gary’s grandfather Stevens walked beside her, a tall and rugged man himself of a few words. His stiff gait made him look uncomfortable in his black suit and dress shoes. He looked more like a blue-jeans- and short-sleeved-shirt-wearing man who preferred a pair of comfortable and worn boots. He might have even worn a cowboy hat over his full head of striking gray hair. He served as a prelude to what Gary could look like in fifty years.

Gary’s Tennessean aunts, uncles and cousins all followed behind them. But he was too unfamiliar with them to know who they all were. He figured he had a lot of catching up to do.

In the middle of the departing crowd, Burnett continued to scan for the mysterious woman, but she had disappeared.

Back inside the limousine of immediate family members that included Gary, Melissa and Taylor, Gary was addressed by his most familiar aunt. Mary Anna was the oldest of six Stevens children and was the next in line to power, where Gabrielle had been a defiant third. Gary assumed his oldest aunt would become the next matriarch of the family after his grandmother passed. Mary was already more boisterous than her easygoing husband.

She said, “So, Gary, when are you planning to come on down to Tennessee to see us?” Before he could answer her, she sized up Melissa. “And who is this here—your girlfriend? Well, she’s pretty enough.”

Melissa smiled and said, “Thank you.”

“Now y’all gon’ do the right thing and get married
before
ya have kids, am I right?”

Melissa looked at Gary in shock. She had no idea the question was coming or how to respond to it.

Taylor held back his laugh. Melissa was far from ready to handle Gary’s straight-shooting family. Their Tennessean candor was a family strength that Gary and his mother had benefitted from with their own independence and willfulness. One couldn’t afford to be bashful in the Stevens family, or at least not with the women. The men all seemed to be more doers than talkers, a direct contrast to Gary, who loved to talk.

“We’re not quite there yet,” he told his vicarious aunt.

His grandmother eyed him sternly. “Well, don’t you make that mistake when you get on down on that road, you hear? Now we don’t need this to happen to another generation. It’s already bad enough that you’ve been away from us for this long.”

Melissa looked into Gary’s green eyes and could feel the oxygen being sucked out of the limo. No wonder he had been so uninterested in his family. If she had learned anything about Gary, she understood that he wouldn’t allow anyone to dictate his plans. From what she could
establish from his family’s conversations, his mother had obviously broken from their ranks, and they were dead set on pulling Gary back into the fold.

Gary read Melissa’s look of concern and grinned at her. He figured he could handle himself just fine. He looked over at his grandfather, his uncle-in-law, one of his younger male cousins, and even his friend Taylor, and he presumed that he would
never
be the silent man who obediently went along with someone else’s agenda, including his family’s.

Gary thought,
I still don’t know who my father is, but I don’t believe it’s in my genes to be like these mules over here. And my mother didn’t raise me to be like them. So I’ll be glad to disappoint them all.

He spoke up and said, “I’m not thinking about getting married at all, to be honest with you.” He added in jest, “I’m thinking maybe I’ll just have Stevens babies all around the world. I can make sure to spread our Tennessee seed from here to Australia.”

Taylor was ready to explode with anxiety in his seat.
Jesus Christ! He’s still crazy!

Melissa cracked a smile. She didn’t necessarily like Gary’s joke to sire numerous offspring around the world, but she did respect his determination to uphold his independence. It was his way of remaining true to himself at his family’s expense. Expecting him to accept anything less would be a violation of his constitution. So Melissa felt proud of him, even though his indomitable liberty would be in opposition to her own intentions for family.

To Gary’s surprise, the Stevens men regarded his off-the-cuff remarks as amusing. The three of them grinned, guardedly, inside of the limo, from his grandfather down to his younger cousin. It was a fervent man’s unfathomable dream to sow his seed across the globe, even for them. So to hear their bodacious relative claim it-even in jest-was an unspoken victory for them all.

However, Gary’s grandmother was quick and fierce to shoot down his absurdity.

“I can’t believe you even said anything like that for everyone to hear,” she told him. “Is that how my daughter raised you to speak out around women? You keep that whoremonger talk
to yourself or you save it for the men’s locker room. But I not gonna
stand
to hear that kind of talk around my daughters and granddaughters. Do you hear me, Gary?”

Gary grinned. “Yes, Ma’am.” He didn’t see the point in a further confrontation with her. He had already said his piece, and he decided that he would go nowhere near his roots in Tennessee. As far as he was concerned, he was Kentucky born and bred and he vowed to keep it that way.