Sweet Bye-Bye (12 page)

“Amen!” went the congregation.

“Let’s talk a little more today about forgiveness. Is that okay?”

And before I realized it, I was yelling out with the congregation, “Yes, Pastor!” Whew, this message was right on time.

Then I heard Brother Jacobs give his trademark “All right now, Preacha!” from across the room. I looked around to see where he was. I couldn’t see him but it made me smile.

Pastor Fields told us that God forgives, and that there is no need to dwell in guilt. She said that we have all fallen short of God’s glory, and when we do, we just have to call on Him for forgiveness and pick ourselves back up again. My faith was being fed in a major way.

It felt good to be at church. The message made a lot of sense. The vibe was good, and I felt God’s presence in the place. So when Pastor Fields asked for people to come forth and kneel at the altar to pray, I unashamedly stood up and walked down the aisle.

19

Business as Usual

T
hat evening, I realized it was high time for me to get back to work. So I phoned Canun and left him a message on his voice mail.

“Hello, Canun. It’s Chantell Meyers. Look I umm . . . As you know, I’ve been under the weather. Ahem.” I cleared my throat. “I have not been feeling well. But, I am ready to come back to work, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Umm, well, that’s it for now. Okay, bye.”

I hung up the phone and patted the back of my damp neck, because quite honestly, I didn’t know if I had a job or not.

Canun called me back early Monday morning and said that he would see me in the office around 8 a.m. That was promising. It was always hard for him to keep secrets, but he’d managed not to give me any telltale signs on where he stood on the matter of my absence. He simply said that he’d see me when I got in the office.

It was 7:50 a.m. when I walked into the office confidently and sat down at my desk. The other reps were staring at me with their eyes bugged out. I wanted to look at them and say “Boo!” to see if they’d scatter.

My coworker Cameron strolled over with a new pixie haircut and a pair of designer jeans. “Chantell, I am glad you’re back.”

“Thanks, Cam,” I said and worked on my list of clients that I needed to contact.

It was obvious that my little absence was the talk of our division, because the other reps kept going over to one another’s desks and whispering, smirking, and looking my way. Or they’d glance at me from over the cubicle. I sat there with pen to paper, making notes. I could smell my subtle perfume dancing on my wrist. My lips glistened with MAC lip gloss. I brushed my flyaway soft hair from my face. I was aloof, unaffected, and uncaring. A couple of times I met their stares, and smiled and said, “Did you need to say something to me? No? Oh, well, by the way you were looking at me, I thought you needed to tell me something.”

I knew what they were whispering. They were asking one another who did I think I was. They were saying that the company was giving me special privileges, or that I was sleeping with Canun, or that affirmative action had saved my job or something stupid like that. I’d been there four years and I knew the type of things that were said when office drama reared its ugly head.

I had work to do. It looked like someone had been covering my account list, but there were a lot of little maintenance-type things that needed to be done on my accounts. I had to ignore the stares and the gossip. Michael Pearson, the rep who worked exclusively with car dealerships, had the desk across from me. He got an instant e-mail from the guy next to me and said aloud, “Yep, I feel the same way.” They instant e-mailed back and forth a couple more times, and their computers dinged each time they received a message. They were going to get told off if I heard anything even remotely resembling my name or my situation come from them.

I had been at work going on two hours, and I hadn’t heard from Canun yet. And I was beginning to wonder if he was just going to let it go when an instant message from him popped up on my computer monitor: CHANTELL, CAN I SEE YOU IN MY OFFICE FOR A MOMENT?

SURE, I typed back and hit send.

I grabbed a pen, a notepad, and my purse in case he was giving me my walking papers. I looked up at the awards and plaques on my cubicle walls and told myself not to worry, that I could get another job relatively quickly. My heart beat like a drum, and I almost believed that my nosy coworkers could hear it as I walked past their desks.

His door was almost closed so I tapped it lightly.

“Chantell. Hi, have a seat.”

I sat down. Give it to me straight, Canun.

He shuffled papers around on his desk. “So, are you feeling better? You seemed awfully upset from your phone call last week.”

“I’m feeling better. Thank you.”

“That’s good to hear. But frankly, I would have expected a little better communication on your part, Chantell. You’re a professional. We can’t have you MIA.”

Yeah, well, I would have expected a little less backstabbing on your part too Canun, I thought. But I said, “I understand, and I apologize for the way that I handled myself. I was just suffering from a little burnout, but I am better now. At the time, I felt it was necessary to temporarily remove myself from the work environment in order for me to reenergize and be better able to do my job, for the team!” I smiled. “See, I needed to rejuvenate in order for me to come back at optimal performance. Now I am back, and I am rejuvenated, and I am ready to exceed all of my revenue goals.” I stuck my shoulders back, and I put my chest out a little so that my body language showed him that I was an asset not just to the company but also to him. I knew how to speak Canun Ramsey speak. Canun wanted to make VP, and the revenue that I brought in made him look good. Darn good.

And that was it, that was pretty much all that I needed to say.

“Oh, absolutely! Chantell, we all need a break sometimes, certainly, we can all understand that. This could have been grounds for termination, however. We’ll let this serve as a verbal warning.” Then he whispered, “In the future, however, let’s keep the lines of communication open, okay? I had to cover for you, you know. I told the big guys that you told me you were out ill.”

“Oh, thanks, Canun,” I said with a smile.

“Ahh, don’t worry about it. I got your back.”

I smiled and laughed. Yeah, I’ll bet he did.

I was going to start back to my desk when I remembered the cruise. I turned around and went back to Canun’s door.

“Oh, Canun,” I said.

“Yes?”

“You remember my vacation a week from Friday. Don’t you?”

“Huh? Oh, yes. Just make sure your desk is taken care of before you go. I don’t want anything left unattended to.”

“Sure thing, Canun, and thank you.”

I stopped by HR, just to make sure that they knew that I would be out the next week, before I finished cleaning up my accounts.

20

Hello Again

T
ia and I sat in a booth at TGIF’s in Jack London Square on Monday evening. We were laughing, chatting, eating appetizers while waiting for our dinner to arrive.

“So how was your mother-in-law’s visit?” I asked.

“It was fine.”

“Really?”

“Well, no, actually she got on my nerves pretty badly, talking to Ron like he was a five-year-old. But I got through it,” said Tia.

I laughed.

“‘Ronnie, you want Momma to make you dinner? Ronnie, when is the last time you had a real sweet potato pie, baby?’” mimicked Tia. “Then she’d look at me and say things like, ‘You know, Tiwina, when Ronnie was a teenager, his girlfriends were always on the thick side. He sho’ changed up with you. Didn’t he?’” Tia paused.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I didn’t say anything. I just smiled with my lips tight the whole weekend. Like this.” She plastered a hard fake grin across her face.

I laughed.

“And Ron, he looked like a deer caught in the headlights the whole weekend. I was so mad at him,” she said.

I cracked up. They were a mess. The waitress brought our food and we ate and got caught up on each other’s lives some more.

My back was to a group of four or five at the booth behind me. I hadn’t been paying much attention, but I heard someone say, “True. Very true. When you have little black girls and society tells them that they aren’t beautiful, that their hair is not long enough, that their features are too much, lots of time they don’t fly like they could. Their wings stay at their sides. They stagnate. But ohhh, when you make sure that they are aware of how beautiful and unique they really are, then, my friends, you have something different. Then you have little Venuses and little Serenas running around.”

“True.”

“Well said, Doctor,” said another man’s voice.

Tia looked at me from across our table and whispered, “Eavesdropper.”

I smiled at her and shrugged. “I’ll be back. I’m going to the little girls’ room—I have to go pee-pee.”

“Uhh, that’s TMI, Too Much Information, and you know it! Just go. Please.” Tia shooed me away.

I giggled and got up from the booth.

I started toward the bathroom at the back of the building. I looked good with my light pink slacks and matching soft pink wraparound shirt. It crisscrossed in the front and tied in the back. Apparently someone else agreed, because I could feel him staring at me. I didn’t bother to see who it was, though, because it didn’t matter. My heart was set; I was going to marry Eric, and that was all there was to that.

I came out of the bathroom, and a tall figure walked over to me. I sort of looked away, staring straight ahead, looking at nothing between his head and his shoulder. I was going to say to him, “Look, sweetheart, I’m sure you’re fly and all that good stuff, but I’m already taken. Okay?” Then he had the audacity to touch my arm. Excuse you! I thought. I looked over at him and was going to speak, but I saw that there was something familiar about this face. I think it was the eyebrows—no, it was the lips. I couldn’t place it. He was maybe six feet, with a thin yet muscular frame. He had smooth chocolate skin, like Tyson Beckford. He had a perfectly trimmed goatee and thick, perfect eyebrows. Where the heck did I know him from? Then he leaned over to me, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “Hello, Frog Face.”

My heart started beating like crazy, and the wall had to hold me up. Breathe, Chantell, breathe. “Keith Rashaad Talbit?”

“Yeah,” he said with a big grin.

“Oh my God, Keith Rashaad! I can’t believe—what are you doing here?”

He laughed. “I’m glad to see you too.”

I blushed and fumbled over my words. “No, I mean, I didn’t know you were— I mean, you’re here and you didn’t call. Not that you
had
to call me or anything. I just haven’t seen you in a long time.”

Back then, years ago, after I’d kissed little Keith in the balcony on Sunday, he’d started shamelessly following me around. It wasn’t like I had a ton of best girlfriends. Before you knew it, we were playing Batman and Wonder Woman on the steps outside of the church while our grandmothers attended committee meetings.

I guess I had a right to say all of this to him now. I mean, he was my childhood best friend.

My grandmother used to say that bad luck came in threes, and here I was staring at the third great loss of my life. I hadn’t seen him in sixteen years.

We stood in the back of the restaurant near the bathrooms. There were pictures all over the walls. We blocked the hallway. I looked at his face. He had changed so much! As a little kid, Keith had been sickly. Eczema, broken arm, ear infections, you name it. Then as he reached middle school, he had acne galore. But he was so bighearted, and smart. And he had these eyebrows that were magnificent.

“Can I hug you?” he asked.

“Aw, man, can you?” I stepped closer to him.

Then he took his arms and wrapped them around me. It was a big strong hug, and my feet rose up off the ground. I put my arms around his neck, and felt him sway with me just a bit. When he let go, he looked at me, and with his index finger he touched the little mole above my eyebrow.

“Chantell, look at you. You’ve gone from ponytails and Band-Aids to beauty queen.”

“Stop.” I blushed.

“I’m serious, you look incredible.”

“Well, thank you, Keith Rashaad. You look amazing yourself,” I said.

I thought about when we were children and wondered about his asthma. I remembered a time when we were about twelve. We were racing in the street and Keith had an asthma attack. Keith was my acekoomboom, my buddy, my roaddawg, and I thought that he was going to die. So I ran. I sprinted, as fast as I could, four blocks to his home. I got his inhaler and brought it back to him.

A man was trying to get past us in the hallway. “Excuse me,” he said.

“Oh, no, excuse us,” said Keith. He put his hand to the arch of my back and walked with me a few steps, till we were out of the hallway. I still couldn’t get over how he’d changed. It was like the story of the duck that turned into the swan. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help it: I looked at his arms for hive marks from all those food allergies. I saw nothing.

Keith must have seen me looking, because he laughed. “It’s all gone,” he said in his smooth, deep voice.

“What?”

“The asthma, the hives, I outgrew it all. And I wear the Keri lotion every day.”

He chuckled at his own joke. Because of the hives and lack of lotion, Keith often had looked chalky as a kid.

I stood there, looking at him in awe. This was amazing. He was hypnotic. Then I realized how ridiculous I probably looked staring at him, and I was embarrassed.

“Who are you with here? I mean, I’m here with my friend Tia. Are you alone?”

He smiled. “I’m actually here with the group behind where you were sitting. We’re with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.”

“Did you move back to the Bay Area?”

“Oh, well, no. I’m here on a three-month project. But while I’m here, I am going to spend some time mentoring kids.” He motioned over to his table with his eyes. “We were talking, and I saw you when you got up. I knew that it was you right off, when I saw the mole and those sad eyes.”