Sweet Bye-Bye (24 page)

“Hey, look at us!” I said out loud.

Keith knew exactly what I was talking about. “Yes, Superwoman. I have had that picture a long time. I don’t have very many pictures from our childhood, but I always keep that one nearby,” he yelled out from the other room.

I was flattered.

Keith came out in a striped button-down shirt over a T-shirt. He smelled good, which relaxed me. Keith relaxed me.

“Okay, I’m ready.”

We left the house, crossed the street to where I was parked, and got in my black Wrangler.

“Okay, where are we going?” he asked.

“It’s a surprise. I’m not telling,” I said, “but you can try to guess if you want.”

I started the car.

He smiled. “Okay, I’ll play. But if I guess correctly, what will you give me?”

“What?” I asked, pulling out of his parking lot.

“Yeah. If I am going to be the one guessing, then you have to let me make up the rules. And the rules are, if I guess correctly, you have to give me something.”

“Okay, but what do you want?” I eyed him suspiciously.

He smiled, sucked his teeth, his eyebrows moved a little, then he said, “How about dinner?”

“Okay, that’s easy. You’re on.”

“To dinner?”

“Huh?”

“Are we going to dinner?”

“Oh. No.” I laughed, because I actually was going to take him to dinner, but since he guessed it so easily, I was going to have to find someplace else to take him first.

“Is it to the park?” he asked as I stopped at a stop sign.

“Uhh, nope.” Where was I going to take him? That wasn’t a bad idea.

“To a mall?”

“Nope.”

“Is it to your parents’ house?”

“Nope.” I entered the ramp to get on the freeway.

I kept driving, and Keith’s answers kept getting sillier and sillier. “Is it to get the VCR cleaned? Is it to mow the grass? I washed your car, but I’m not mowing the grass in my good shirt!”

“No!” I laughed.

“To Paris? To get LASIK eye surgery?”

“LASIK what? No!” I laughed.

“Okay, I’m sorry. I get really silly around you, Chantell. Still.”

He took me back to the fifth grade too.

I kept driving all that way until we got to Darryl’s Mini Storage. The parking lot was filled up, and there were no nearby parking spots on the street. So I drove around the corner to a residential neighborhood.

“So. Where are we?” he asked, crinkling those eyebrows.

“You’ll see,” I said.

We stepped off the curb. I smiled when I thought about what he had said in the parking lot. He’d said that he’d always loved me. He proudly displayed my picture on his corkboard. We walked and he held my hand firmly. I was going to show him my hidden treasure. I wanted him to see it. And like a child, without thought, I stopped and spun around so that I stood smack dab in front of him. I put my arms around his neck and pushed up on my tippy toes and kissed his lips. A real kiss. A good kiss. He looked shocked, as I pressed my lips into his and kissed from one side of his mouth to the other. When I pulled my head back to look at him, a huge grin spread over his face. Then Keith leaned down and helped me to reach him. He gently rubbed his lips on my lips, while pecking me. Our lips parted and we gently touched each other’s tongues. We stood there in the street with our lips locked until someone laid on the horn with full force.

We came up for air, and there were three cars lined up waiting to get by. Keith Rashaad locked his fingers in mine and we ran over to the sidewalk. A man in a black Jetta, whose bumper was just two feet in front of us, smiled and gave us a thumbs-up. Keith raised one eyebrow and waved apologetically.

A lady in the third car, a little green Tercel, rolled down her window and yelled as she drove by, “What’s wrong with you two? Can’t you do that behind closed doors!” She sped off.

“She was serious,” Keith said as he looked at me. I looked at him and we burst into laughter.

“I guess so, huh?” We laughed some more.

“So, Chantell, tell me. Where are you taking me?”

“Top secret. You’ll see.”

We walked past some houses and up to Darryl’s Mini Storage. I used the keypad in the cement wall to open the gate. We walked to storage space number 77.

“Why are we here? What’s in here?”

“My lost world, my history, my past.”

He looked at me, confused. I took out my key and unlocked the orange door. Keith helped me to push the rolling door upward.

When Keith saw the sheets draped over the big squares, he asked, “What’s all this?” I held out my hand, inviting him to step in and look around. He unveiled painting after painting and examined them. I’d come here one day to count just how many there were. Zarina had painted thirty-nine of them.

“Chantell, these are incredible.”

“Thank you. My mother did them all. She was really talented, wasn’t she?”

Keith walked over to another sheet and unveiled another three pictures. “Yes, she was! Growing up, Chantell, you never mentioned her. You never spoke of her.”

I still felt a hurt. “I know, that’s pretty sick, huh?”

“No, I didn’t mean that. It’s not sick. It was just hard for you and your family.”

Keith knew me so well. I almost told him that it was because people only want to be around you when you’re doing well, but I showed him another painting instead.

“I love you, Chantell, and I care about you. I bet we’d be a great support system for each other.”

This was the second time he’d mentioned the word love. Did he know what he was saying? Apparently he didn’t, because he was talking like he was going to be here for a while, and we both knew that wasn’t true.

“Hey,” I said, “look at the books.”

He walked over to the shelf and looked. “Wow, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin. Your mother had some heavy hitters in her repertoire.”

I smiled. “Yeah, she did.”

I had so many emotions running through me. Confusion, happiness, sadness, fear. I grabbed a book and sat down on the floor. Keith sat next to me. He leaned over to me and kissed me on the cheek.

“Thank you for sharing all of this with me,” he said.

I kissed him back. “Thank you for coming here with me.” I was glad that he was the first person whom I had shared this room with.

He sat down on the cement floor next to me. “Read me something.”

“Alright. I’ll read you some poems written by my mom.” It felt good to say that.

He uncrossed his legs and I sat between them, resting my back against his chest. It was nice, and dinner could wait a few more minutes.

The poems were handwritten in black ink:

As long as I feel loved, I’ll stick around.

My voice made the words resonate like an echo in the small room.

I crave your attention, your uplifting praise.

A phone call now and then, your touch on my face.

As long as our souls dance every now and then,

Then what we share won’t come to an end.

Safe with you, I feel at ease,

So I long to inhale you like a gentle breeze.

As long as I feel loved,

I’ll stick around.

We absorbed that.

“Hummm,” went Keith Talbit.

We sat there reading poems for over an hour, before I felt my tummy grumble. I looked up at him as I read a last line.

. . . It feeds me. It fuels me. Passion. ’Tis my reason for living.

I lifted my head from Keith’s chest and looked up at him. His eyes were closed and he had the sweetest smile on his face. When I stopped reading, he opened his eyes.

“Keith, we had better get ready to go,” I said. “I owe you dinner.”

He looked at me with squinted eyes. “Okay. But first, I have to ask you something. What made you bring me here, Chantell? I mean, I’m glad that you did and all. But I was wondering why you choose to share this with me?”

He was asking a lot of personal questions. “For a lot of reasons,” I said. “Mostly because it’s a private part of me that I am embracing, and exploring. Because you are a big part of my past. And I wanted to share it with you.”

I looked at him and wondered aloud, “That was okay with you, wasn’t it?”

“It is more than okay with me.”

We left Darryl’s Mini Storage with our fingers interlocked.

With me driving, we rode to dinner. The freeway was crowded. Keith’s phone rang. He picked it up and looked at it. Then without so much as a hello, he just put it back on his waist. Had it been the hospital, or one of his buddies, I was certain he would have answered it. I knew it was silly, but I thought about my past relationship with Eric. I remembered the way he left me and went with the Australian-accented woman from the boat. I know I shouldn’t have, but I thought about how Eric had called me “Sabrina” in his sleep. Then I wondered who had been on Keith Rashaad’s phone.

“You can get that you know,” I said.

“I know. But there’s no one else on earth that I want to talk to more than you right now.”

I didn’t know how to feel, so I was quiet.

“So, Chantell, tell me, what do you want for your life?”

“I’on’ know.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking of stuff.”

“Tell me.”

“No, it’s nothing. Just work-related . . . Umm, okay, I’ll play, what do I want out of life . . . Maybe moving to a bigger house. I don’t know, maybe to start my own business. I just want a nice life.”

He nodded. He was going to have to answer the same question.

“What about you? What do you want?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I want to be a good husband, good doctor, and good father. I want good conversation, and good sex.”

“Whoa! You went there,” I said.

“Hey.” He chuckled. “I’m just being honest.”

I laughed, yet I realized that I wasn’t being honest with him. I wanted to be a good wife and mommy. I kept driving quietly. I wanted a family too.

Keith put his hand on mine and said, “I hope to get closer and closer to you, if that is okay.”

I looked down at my knees, then up at all the traffic on the road. San Francisco was always so busy. What if I got too attached to him? What if we got married, then he got sick? What if he ran off with someone else?

“Hello? Keith Rashaad to Chantell.”

“Sorry.” I nodded my head and said, “I’d like that.”

“Are you sure, Chantell? I’m not trying to pressure you, I just—”

“No, I’m sure. I’d like that.”

And I think we became something of a couple.

44

Attitudinal

I
pulled up to the office park in Los Gatos where Skyway Modems was located, in my extra shiny, freshly waxed black vehicle. I took the sidewalk past the freshly mowed green grass. The maintenance people were working to get it all cleaned up and into bags. My shoes clicked as I walked. The day had a bit of an overcast, so I removed my sunglasses. I was putting them in my purse when I looked up to meet Mina Everett’s gaze. She was on her way out of the building, and as she eyed me, her walk turned into sort of a Cindy Crawford strut, and she made a face as though something stunk. I fought hard and resisted the urge to move like I was on the catwalk.

When I got up to the office door, I was proud of myself because I’d ignored her invitation for our energies to battle. I was facing my issues one at a time. Then I thought about the present that I’d sent her, and for the first time I realized that it wasn’t cool.

The receptionist said Mr. Strautimeyer was ready to see me, so I walked into his office. He stood up from behind his desk to shake my hand, and we got right down to business. I pulled out a proof sheet.

“This is the ad, the way that it is set to run.” He reviewed it and signed off. “Great,” I said. “We are going to run the ad for two days, Friday and Sunday. Right?”

“That’s correct, and I get 20 percent off on next Monday’s run. Right?”

“Yep. That’s the plan,” I said.

“Great.”

“Awesome. I’ll see you next week.”

He waved and went back to his papers on his desk. I wondered why Mr. Strautimeyer never said good-bye.

When I got back out to my Jeep, I noticed that it looked a little lopsided. I walked around the vehicle and found that, sure enough, the back rear tire was as flat as the pavement it sat on. I supposed that Mina had her suspicions about where the pooh-pooh gift came from.

I sighed and called Triple A.

45

C’est la Vie

I
sat on the grass in the park, with Keith’s head in my lap, and took in the simpler things in life. There were two squirrels running back and forth up a tree just six feet in front of us. We sat there squeezing each other’s hands and rubbing each other’s hair and shoulders while we relaxed and watched them work. They weren’t afraid of us. They had seen far too many people to be afraid.

Since our first date Keith had said several times with a certainty that he’d always loved me. I’d tried not to fall for him. And even though we both decided that we were going to continue taking the celibacy route, somehow I still found that I was in over my head. How deep was I in over my head? That was the question that I wondered about. Now the three months had come and gone, and I was scared to death of being left.

A little squirrel kept looking in the grass, fiddling through the twigs on the ground. Then it would run up the tree’s trunk with a couple of little sticks before reappearing and starting its search all over again.

“Selective little thing, huh?” he said.

“That it is,” I said, massaging Keith’s palms and fingers. He looked so relaxed. “Are things going according to plan down at the hospital?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, and his eyes lit up. “In fact, we’re ahead of schedule. Pretty soon hospitals across the country should start using the new Netzer laser skin-grafting equipment. Maybe in as early as six months.”

“Really? Wow, you guys should really be proud of yourselves. I know I’m proud of you, Keith Talbit.”

He took my finger from his temple and put it to his lips and kissed it. “Yeah, I think it’s really going to help a lot of people.” This man really loved his job.