Once Upon a Project (7 page)

Chapter 10

G
race took advantage of the red traffic light to run a brush through her hair. She really liked the rich sable-brown color; it beat having graying near-black tresses any day. Her hairdresser had been right when she suggested that a lighter color would be softer against her face. She might be about to turn fifty, but that didn't mean she had to look matronly. People told her she looked better than a lot of forty-year-olds out there. She worked hard at it, too, spending thirty minutes in the gym at least three times a week, watching her diet carefully, and walking several miles on the weekends.

She sighed as she put the brush back inside her leather shoulder bag. She felt like she'd already wasted the afternoon by attending the luncheon, and the awkwardness of coming face-to-face with Ricky for the first time since their affair had ended and meeting his gorgeous wife truly made her regret going.

Still, it wasn't like she had anything else to do, and Pat needed people like her to make her message to the media: that children who grew up in the projects weren't necessarily destined to live their lives in abject poverty and squalor.

She knew Pat had a point. Half the high school–age kids living in Dreiser today probably had no idea that Theodore Dreiser had been a popular novelist and Chicago native in the early twentieth century. She knew from that Career Day seminar Pat had dragged her to years ago at their alma mater that many of them had no ambitions in life, other than to live in a nice “crib” and drive a nice “ride.” A few did tell her they wanted to run their own businesses, but not one of them had any idea what kind of business they hoped to operate. Grace knew that merely wanting to call the shots from a corner office with a view and make a lot of money was nothing more than a pipe dream, and that ten years from now those kids would have the same dream, no better defined than it was now.

Her thoughts returned to Ricky. His forced-looking smile and stiff hug told her he felt just as uncomfortable as she did. But at least he hadn't been surprised to see her. Surely Pat knew he was coming, since she handled the RSVP list. But she'd said nothing to Grace. Why? Grace wondered. Could it be that Pat was still hung up on Ricky after all this time? My God, everything between them had ended more than half a lifetime ago.

Grace had always thought that if something serious developed between her and Ricky, like she so desperately wanted, Pat would first be upset but would come around eventually. Now she wasn't so sure.

Of course, considering the outcome, it was a moot point. Grace had been stunned when Ricky told her why he was ending their affair—just when she thought everything was progressing beautifully. She'd never heard anything so idiotic. Did he actually feel like he was cheating on Pat after being apart more than twenty years? And what about her? Pat was her best friend, yet she was willing to put that friendship in jeopardy to pursue one of the most eligible soon-to-be bachelors in Chicago. She couldn't help it that Pat had given Ricky up to please her parents.

As Grace got closer to the South Side, she wondered if going to Junior's Bar would be worthwhile. She doubted she'd see any new faces there tonight. And nobody had better mess with her Mercedes.

Two people she knew she
wouldn't
see were her ex-husbands. Danny Knight, her second husband, was happily settled in San Juan, Puerto Rico, managing the office of a worldwide accounting firm.

Nor would she be seeing Jimmy Lucas, her first husband and father of Shavonne. He'd been revered in high school for his skill at basketball, overshadowed only by his friend Douglas Valentine, whose height of six feet six made him a natural.

Grace and Jimmy had begun going together in tenth grade. She fended off his pleas for sex for over a year. Grace was afraid, of both sex itself and of getting pregnant. But by the time she got to high school it seemed like more and more girls from the neighborhood were having babies. Tanya McArdle got pregnant in tenth grade, and the word on the street was that she'd been messing with a thirty-five-year-old man.

When Jimmy started cozying up to Stacey Noe, Grace knew she'd have to take action. Rumor had it that Stacey had fucked the entire football team in the bleachers. Grace resolved to keep her man. Shortly after that she and Jimmy did it in his bed after school, when his mama was still at work. Except for one brief moment of pain, Grace loved sex, and they started having it whenever they could, with Jimmy cautioning his younger brothers not to blab to their mother. Not that Mrs. Lucas would have cared too much. To Grace, Jimmy's mother always looked bored and disinterested, puffing on an ever-present cigarette and complaining about one thing or another.

Most of the time they used condoms, but every once in a while Jimmy would forget and they couldn't turn off their sex drives. One day he didn't pull out in time, and that was how she'd conceived.

Telling her parents had been the most difficult thing she'd ever been faced with, before or since. They had such high hopes for her. She was going to be the first in her family to go to college. She wouldn't have to work at menial jobs, like stacking boxes on a forklift in a warehouse or cleaning up behind folks at a downtown hotel. Even with her being co-captain of the cheerleading squad—Susan Bennett was captain—and all the practice it entailed, she managed to keep her grades up.

Her parents were horrified at the news, as Grace had expected them to be. Lou and Helen Corrigan arranged to meet with Janie Lucas, who even back then could best be described as washed-out.

Janie, who had four children by three different men, lit a cigarette and stated in a tired tone, “I always told my son not to sleep with anybody he wouldn't marry.”

For Jimmy that was the kiss of death. His mother had practically come out and said that if Lou Corrigan insisted her son do right by his daughter, she would have no objections. Her next words made her intention clear as just-washed windows: “I can't complain about having one less mouth to feed.”

Parental consent was obtained, and Grace and Jimmy were married at City Hall. They had a honeymoon of one night at an inexpensive hotel on the outskirts of downtown. But Janie Lucas had spoken too soon. On Sunday afternoon Grace and Jimmy each returned to their own parents' apartments and resumed their lives as high school students. Grace managed to conceal her pregnancy through May, but word spread all over the school when, by her fifth month, in June, she could no longer conceal her growing belly as she changed for gym. Her parents spoke to the principal, showed Grace and Jimmy's marriage certificate, and asked that she be allowed to stay on a few more weeks and graduate with her class.

Grace and Jimmy each continued to live at home through July, when a cheap one-bedroom apartment was located nearby and furnished from thrift shops and stores that sold cheap balsa-wood furniture.

Teenage pregnancy among high school students in the inner cities had not yet risen to epidemic proportions back in 1975, but at the time Grace became pregnant, out-of-wedlock births were something that happened mostly to older girls, girls who'd already finished high school and who held jobs, no matter how menial, or who attended college. Occasionally some twelve-year-old shocked everyone by sprouting a big belly, but Grace, coming from a poor but moral family, caused a major scandal when she “got in trouble,” as the neighbors called it.

She hated the pitying looks in the eyes of her neighbors. They'd all heard her mother brag about how she would have her pick of colleges and how she would go on to great things. Grace knew they'd all written off any future she might have, saying privately that she'd become just another welfare mother.

Fortunately, Grace never stopped believing in the bright future her parents assured her was still within her reach. She regarded her pregnancy as a temporary setback, but she always knew she would go to college one day. She wasn't about to give up her scholarship money, and she'd already met the requirement of a high school diploma. She found a reliable babysitter to leave Shavonne with, and that January she started taking classes during the day, and worked two nights a week and all day Saturday and Sunday at the customer service desk at a local supermarket. Jimmy had gotten a job in receiving at Marshall Field's. Most days they saw each other only long enough to say hello and good-bye as he came home and she went out to work.

The sex that turned them into teenage parents wasn't even as fun anymore. And Grace swallowed a birth control pill every day without fail. God forbid she have another baby. This way she was protected from another pregnancy—which would be particularly troublesome, given her affair with a fellow student in her accounting class. She already had her hands full with Shavonne without having paternity issues for a new baby.

She and Jimmy quickly learned that sex is no basis to spend a lifetime together and spent five years barreling toward the inevitable breakup. After their divorce a still-young Jimmy joined the army. He served twenty years, had another marriage along the way, and eventually got divorced a second time. Every now and again he visited Chicago.

After his mother's health began to fail, he started showing up more frequently. On one of those visits he called Grace. With her second divorce behind her and with no other plans for the evening, Grace invited him over for dinner, and they ended up in bed together for a single night of passion with no strings.

When Jimmy's mother died three years ago, Grace was going through one of her frequent dry spells in her love life and knew she wouldn't turn down any overtures Jimmy might make. But she was in for a rude surprise. Now retired from the service and with a good state-government position in Austin, Texas, Jimmy was accompanied by a woman in her midthirties with a pregnancy-swollen abdomen, whom he introduced as his new wife. Even Shavonne hadn't known that her father, who'd had no children with his second wife, had married a third time, much less was starting a second family. Grace couldn't fault him for his dismal matrimonial record, which equaled her own, but she thought it ridiculous that Jimmy would have a child younger than his grandson.

Now almost at Junior's she found a parking space a block and a half away. Before leaving the car she clicked her Lo-Jack into place across the steering wheel. She walked down the street her sharp eyes taking in the crowd waiting to get in, which seemed to be mostly old-timers over forty. At least there were no kids in here. The last thing she wanted was to be hanging with people her daughter's age.

 

 

Grace spotted Pat making rounds. Good. That meant Pat would be able to tell her if anyone worth knowing was here. Lord knew that Pat knew half the population of the South Side, and as for the other half, well, they all knew Pat.

The crowd at the oval-shaped bar in the middle of Junior's was already two deep. Grace didn't see Susan or Elyse anywhere, which meant they probably had a table on the other side. Surely they were here by now. She moved in that direction, stopping to greet people she recognized. When she passed Stacey Noe she nodded politely. She'd never liked Stacey, mostly because of the slutty reputation she'd had in high school. If Stacey hadn't cozied up to Jimmy back then, Grace wouldn't have been so anxious to sleep with him to keep him from getting it from her.

Stacey didn't look bad, Grace thought. Still thin as a rail. She'd been blessed with a pretty face, although now it had a slightly hard edge, which even the lightening of her hair couldn't disguise. Grace knew the hardness stemmed from years of sexual indiscretions. Rumor had it that she would fuck anything—even a cucumber. She'd heard Stacey was a caseworker for Cook County. It didn't surprise Grace to see her there alone. No self-respecting man who knew her reputation would marry her. Grace found Stacey's presence at Junior's disheartening. She didn't want to be around a bunch of lowlifes.

Grace was still trying to get past the crowd at the bar when she felt a tap on her shoulder. “Well, hello there.”

“Hello,” she said cautiously, praying that when she turned she wouldn't see some man with a mouthful of gold teeth leering at her.

She turned, and she held her breath. Something about the good-looking, fair-skinned, mustached man struck her as familiar. Hell. Maybe she'd seen him in a movie. He was fine enough to be a star, especially now that Denzel had started to look a lot less gorgeous and more like just another man in his fifties. “Do I know you?”

He smiled, revealing even, white teeth. Her interest only increased. She couldn't get excited about a man who'd clearly gone too long without seeing a dentist.

“Eric Wade. From Building Twelve.”

Grace searched her memory bank. That name sounded so familiar. Dreiser had twenty buildings, each with three stories, with five apartments to a floor. That made for a heck of a lot of people to recall.

Then it came to her. A larger-than-usual family—and many families in the projects had six or seven children—who moved in when she was in junior high. She believed they had at least ten kids. Nice-looking kids they were, too, all of them. Grace, Elyse, and Pat all had a crush on the oldest boy, Arthur, who was sixteen and didn't give any of them the time of day. Susan was the only one who didn't participate. She said Arthur Wade was full of himself.

All the Wade kids had gotten their good looks from their parents, but unfortunately both the mother and the father abused alcohol to the point where Mrs. Wade had become blowsy and Mr. Wade thin and wasted. The oldest child was a girl, who got married right out of high school and had never been seen again. Grace remembered her mother saying the poor thing had probably run for her life. One of Grace's younger brothers played with one of the Wade boys, and one day after he went to the family's apartment he came home and declared it a pigpen, with roaches running everywhere like they were listed on the lease as occupants.