The Last Street Novel (40 page)

“Yeah, you took a bad fall there,” his grandfather told him.

Shareef asked him, “How did you know?”

Charles looked at the wounds all on his grandson’s left side. He said, “Well, that’s what it looks like. It looks like you fell off a damn cliff and landed clean on your left side.”

Shareef grinned and said, “That’s just what happened.”

His grandfather told him, “Well, I don’t want to know too much about it? Just tell me that you’re innocent.”

“I am,” Shareef told him. “I guess I just didn’t realize how serious some people are about protecting their names in the street. And I wasn’t even planning on putting their names in anything.”

His grandfather stopped and nodded to him. He said, “Shareef, I’ve lived here in Harlem for a long time now, ever since your grandmother and I moved up here from Georgia in nineteen fifty-nine. And I have never been to a place where people think about their good names as much as they do in Harlem. So if you needed any information on that, I could have told you that a long time ago.”

He said, “Now let me go in here and get you a bucket of warm water, ice, Neosporin, and bandages to deal with these wounds.” He looked at the injuries again and added, “I hope you didn’t damage anything internally, because you may need to go to the hospital anyway. But I’d rather you did it back down in Florida with your family.”

Shareef nodded as his grandfather went to prepare for the beginning of the healing. But once Shareef thought about his wounds and checking into a hospital in Florida, he thought about facing his son, and what Shareef Jr. would think about it all.

“Damn,” he mumbled to himself. “I just gotta tell Little J that things happen.”

O
NCE
S
HAREEF WAS ALL CLEANED UP
, bandaged, and iced down, he sat in the comfortable living room chair with his left leg up and only white towels wrapped around him, and he thought about everything. He had made it out of a serious jam alive, but everyone else hadn’t, and now he was in debt to his lifelong nemesis because of it.

So he thought of Jurrell Garland and the threat he had made about his wife and family in Florida. Did Jurrell mean what he said? Of course he did. And now Shareef had to deal with that. He would have to play or pray.

He shook his head again and let out another deep sigh. He thought about Jennifer and his kids back home, and whether or not he could ever return to being a committed husband to a woman who had lost her passion for him? Jacqueline Herrera wouldn’t hang around long enough for him to decide, that was for sure. She was already mapping out her departure from his life. Shareef would never become that serious about her anyway. In fact, he wondered if he could ever be seriously committed to a woman again. Based on how they changed so much, he didn’t trust any of them. A lot of women were simply too emotional for him.

I wonder what Cynthia’s up to right now,
he pondered. Cynthia seemed to know men a little better than the average girly-girl, because she hung around men. But in hanging around men, maybe she would always be more trouble than he needed in his life.

Yeah, I’ll just stay cool with her and keep myself out of Dodge,
he told himself.

Then he thought about his friend Polo, and wondered if he should change his will back to normal, since they were both safe and sound.

Ten percent of a couple mil’ is a lot,
he told himself of his estimated wealth.
Then again, if Jennifer and the kids get half, including the house, then my grandparents get twenty-five to thirty-five percent, and Preston takes care of the rest with a family estate fee, then Polo’s ten percent comes out as a nice little nest egg for a lifelong friend to do something with his family.

As Shareef continued to think things through, he heard his grandmother walk back out of her room upstairs and into the hallway.

“Shareef!” she called down the stairs to him.

Her yell woke her husband, who had put Shareef back together and had fallen asleep on the comfortable sofa beside him.

“Yes, ma’am,” Shareef answered her.

“Have you spoken to your wife yet?”

By that, she meant,
Have you called your wife back to apologize and to beg her for her forgiveness?

Shareef answered, “I’ll call her right now, Grandmom. I just needed to get some ice on my wounds first.”

His grandfather immediately climbed off the sofa to go and retrieve the phone for him.

“Are you okay?” his grandmother called downstairs to ask him.

“Yeah, I’ll make it,” Shareef told her.

“Good. Then tell your wife.”

By the time Wilma Pickett slammed her door back upstairs, Charles had brought the phone over to Shareef to make his call.

“Thanks, Grandpop,” Shareef told him. Then he took a deep breath with the phone receiver in hand.

Can I help her to get back her love for me?
he asked himself as he made the call. Then he shook it off, doubting it.

That’s the wrong thinking to even deal with her,
he concluded.
And as long as it’s my idea, she’ll fight it. That’s our problem now; everything she brings up, I don’t like, and everything I bring up, she doesn’t like. So how do we settle that?

“Hello?” Jennifer answered.

Shareef said, “It’s me. I’m all right,” and he got nothing but silence for the first couple of minutes.

“What happened to your cell phone?” she finally asked him. She had been calling it for hours.

“It’s a long story,” he told her. “But I left it at the hotel in Manhattan this morning. I didn’t want it on me today.”

“Why?”

Shareef exhaled and told her, “There was too much going on. I just thought it would be a distraction.”

“A distraction to what, of you running around in the damn streets of Harlem, Shareef? Is that what you want to do with your life now? I mean, I just can’t take much more of this. And if you want to get rid of me so damn bad, then why don’t you just get Preston to write up the divorce papers. Why are you trying to stress me like this?
Why?”

Shareef could see the tears ready to roll out of her eyes without even being there to witness them. He could hear it in the shakiness of her voice. He knew Jennifer just like she knew him. And he knew enough about her to realize that every word he spoke would be countered from her perspective. So he stood paralyzed on the phone. There was no sane thing for him to do but to give in, and even that was insane.

Shareef rarely gave in to anything. But if he had given in a few days ago, a week ago, a month ago, or a year ago,
fifteen
people would have never been killed in Harlem. So he finally made the
sane
or
insane
decision.

He said, “You’re right. I need to get a grip on myself. And this has been a long time coming.”

Then there was more silence.

Jennifer said, “Please don’t patronize me, Shareef.”

That was how his wife of ten years responded to him giving in. It was a foreign language to her. She had no clue of knowing how to accept it.

Shareef paused and thought,
Yup, that’s just what I thought. There’s no way out of this. She’s gonna fight me with everything I say.

He looked over at his grandfather and smirked. How did men and women ever figure out how to get along? It seemed impossible. Shareef and Jennifer had been married for a decade already. His grandparents had been married for more than five decades. How in the hell did they do that?

Charles nodded back to his grandson and told him calmly, “Just hang in there.”

Shareef then told his wife, “I guess I have to show and prove more than I can talk at this point. Because talking about it is not gonna do anything for you.”

Suddenly, Shareef’s grandfather began to shake his head with a face of doom.

He said calmly again, “Tell her that you love her.”

Jennifer said, “Whatever, Shareef. I can’t trust anything you say or do anymore.”

Shareef listened to his grandfather and said, “Well, I love you and the kids anyway. And I’m never gonna stop loving you. That’s why I never filed for no divorce, Jennifer. I don’t believe in it. And I don’t believe we’ve stopped loving each other. I’ll never believe that.”

His grandfather looked at him and smiled. He began to nod his head and was pleased with Shareef’s words. But did he really mean them?

Jennifer said, “Yeah, well, you have a very strange way of showing it. I wonder how you would act if you hated us.” At least she sounded calmer now.

Shareef repeated his wife’s words out loud so his grandfather could hear them and help him out again.

“If I hated you? Why would you say something like that?”

“That’s how you’ve been acting, Shareef,” she told him.

“She didn’t mean to say that,” his grandfather told him. Nothing Charles said in the room was loud enough to be overheard through the phone, so it was safe for Shareef to continue.

“You don’t mean that, Jennifer,” Shareef told her. He said, “You know better than that.”

She asked him, “So, what do you plan to do? Are you moving back home?”

That was a tough question. Shareef didn’t even want to look to his grandfather for that answer.

He asked her, “Do you want me back there?” It was the safest response that came to mind.

“You’re the one talking about showing and proving, Shareef. So, what does that mean? Does that mean you can still have your cake and eat it, too?”

She was backing him up and putting him on the spot. That made Shareef feel powerless, exactly how he didn’t want to feel. Nevertheless, he was willing to rest and heal for a minute. He realized that they all needed healing, including his kids, a healing from missing daddy so much.

“Well, let that be the first step then,” he told her.

“Let what be the first step?”

Jennifer was playing her usual game of specifics. Shareef had become so vague with her at times that it became necessary for her to ask him exactly what he meant by everything.

“Me moving back in,” he answered. He said, “And I’m sorry about all of this.”

He no longer needed his grandfather’s help at that point. He had his own rhythm going on. He knew what he needed to do to make things right. It just wasn’t going to be easy.

Jennifer gave him another stretch of silence. Shareef understood what that meant. She wanted to doubt him again. But even though she may have been thinking it, Jennifer refrained from saying it. She was open to give it a chance herself. She still adored the man. She couldn’t deny it.

So instead of her saying something to disturb the progress of their new agreement, she simply asked him, “When are you getting back?”

Shareef looked to his anxious grandfather and nodded with a grin. The situation with his wife and family looked positive. It was all on their shoulders now, and they would try and work things out.

He answered, “My original flight is still scheduled for tomorrow morning. But I have to see how my body feels in the morning. I’m figuring that tomorrow I’ll be more sore than I am today. So if that happens, I may have to hang around up here and get iced down until Tuesday.

“Are the kids still up?” he asked her. By then, it was after ten o’clock at night.

“Shareef is, but if you’re not coming back until Tuesday, then I’d rather you speak to him tomorrow sometime. At least that’ll be closer. And I know he’s been wanting you to see him at practice and everything.”

Shareef nodded and smiled. “Yeah, I know. Li’l J wants to show me all his new moves.”

W
HEN HE ENDED THE PHONE CALL
with his wife, his grandfather asked him, “So, what do you think?”

Shareef paused. He told him, “It’s a struggle, man. It really is. I just wish I could take it back to the beginning. Things were a hell of a lot easier then.”

His grandfather chuckled and said, “Well, instead of going back to the beginning, how about starting a new beginning.” He said, “So, what you have to do, is court your wife again like you did when you first fell for her. In fact, try this. Don’t even think of her as your wife anymore. Think of her as just Jennifer. And then you do everything you can to try and make her your wife again. How about that?”

His grandfather had twinkles in his eyes as if he had just come up with a genius plan.

Shareef chuckled at it himself. He said, “I’ll try that. That sounds better than trying to pick up where we left off, because where we left off was nowhere. So I think it’s best for me to look at it as starting over.”

“Exactly,” his grandfather agreed with him.

It took only a few more minutes for his grandmother to walk out of her room again.

“Shareef?”

“Yes, Grandma?”

“Have you spoken to your wife?”

“Yeah, I just got off the phone with her.”