By the time she steps into the bathroom, Randall is already soaking in the tub. Two gla.s.ses of wine, his nearly empty, sit on the marble-tiled ledge. He slurps his wine and, eyes closed, rests his head against the tiled wall behind him. "Ahhhh. I needed this. Thanks, hon."

Lena kneels beside the tub so that her face looks directly at his and drags her hand through the scented water, forcing steam and the odor of musk to drift in the air between them. "I can't help but wonder, Randall, how keeping you on track makes your secretary and your a.s.sistant more worthy of your thoughtfulness than your wife."

"It's no big deal, Lena. You don't like cheap stuff anyway. I'll take you to San Francisco next week. You can pick up something then."

"That's not the point, Randall."

"The point is I'm home, not with them, and I'm tired."

Her boots come off slowly, as do her cashmere sweater and tight jeans. She tosses them next to the four pairs left on the floor from earlier this evening before she settled on the French ones, to show off her hips. Randall did not notice her hips or the jeans at the airport, just as at this minute, eyes closed in a trance of concentration, he doesn't notice her nakedness.

The water sloshes against the sides of the long tub when Lena stirs it with her foot. When she steps in, Randall opens his eyes and leans forward. He cups her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and ma.s.sages them in that way that always makes her moan. Lena pulls away before she does, before she starts something even her momentary meditation has left her still too upset to finish.

"I'm already feeling the jet lag." Randall scoops hot water over his chest and head and repeats this motion two more times. Wrinkled eyebrows keep the rivulets from his eyes. "I'm ready to sleep in my own bed." He swallows the rest of his wine with one quick swig, steps out of the tub, and dries himself roughly before going off to bed.

The rasp of Randall's snores matches the sawing sounds of the final minutes of a movie on TV. Sleep is the only time that anyone would label Randall peaceful. If she is awake, when he lies motionless in the middle of the night like this, Lena often pokes his shoulder, his neck, his thigh in antic.i.p.ation of the slightest movement: proof he is still alive and well. Half-open eyes tell Lena he is somewhere between dream and arousal.

Randall tugs her close, tickles her with his tongue in a new place, and she gasps from the sensation. They blend together in their familiar way. She surrenders to his touch, the bristle of his mustache, a hint of musk oil. There is no urgency to his movement, yet he comes swiftly, leaving Lena wanting more.

Chapter 6.

Lulu and John Henry's dream house looks the same as the day they bought it in 1965. The house is painted a pale color somewhere between beige and rust; a lamp that switches on at 4:30 p.m. and off at 7:30 a.m. every spring, summer, winter, and fall. Year round Christmas lights, more fragments than bulbs, loop under the eaves and around the three-sided bay window that dominates the front of the house.

Whenever Bobbie and Lena complained of how embarra.s.sed they were by the lights and the hideous, old-fashioned paint, John Henry told them he didn't have a problem with change as long as it stayed away from him. The biggest change he'd made in his life, he told his daughters every time, was coming to California, and, since he wasn't a risk taker, he saw no need to push his luck.

"Lulu? You in the backyard?" Lena ducks around the low branches of the California oak where she and Bobbie always wanted John Henry to build a tree house. The limbs of s...o...b..ll hydrangeas straggle over the path; low pink azaleas, in ironic harmony with the painted red cement, ramble below. Two garbage cans filled with dead leaves sit in the middle of the path. This Wednesday, like every Wednesday of the eighteen months since John Henry pa.s.sed, Lena feels like she has become her father. She lugs the trash to the curb where neighbors' cans jaggedly line the street up one side and down the other like whole notes in a measure of music.

Once done, she heads for the backyard. The yard that used to be John Henry's pride and joy is unkempt in a way that shocks this daughter of parents once so fastidious: overgrown hedges, scraggly lawn, brown spots on camellia leaves, wiry rose bushes; an apple tree branch hangs doggedly parallel to its trunk.

Lulu's posture is effortlessly straight-backed. She holds a tarnished bra.s.s nozzle attached to a green-striped garden hose in her left hand and listens intently to someone's conversation on the other end of the cell phone squeezed between her right ear and shoulder. The bluish rinse that Lulu tints her thin, curly afro with glistens in the sun. Not one hair on her head is out of place, no wrinkles in her blouse, not a drop of water on her pants. Lena can't help but smile at how beautiful her mother still is, how the color of her clothes warms her skin.

Phone still in place, Lulu holds two conversations at the same time. "Tell me your husband husband didn't see you looking like that? At least you could've put on lipstick." Lulu never goes without her trademark lipstick. Today, her fuchsia lips match the budding azaleas, her cardigan, and her loose ankle-length pants. "He back yet?" didn't see you looking like that? At least you could've put on lipstick." Lulu never goes without her trademark lipstick. Today, her fuchsia lips match the budding azaleas, her cardigan, and her loose ankle-length pants. "He back yet?"

Lulu is a pet.i.te woman; her frame frail and shrinking with each pa.s.sing year. Lena bends, touching her lips to Lulu's cheek, and sniffs. Floral perfume is Lulu's trademark, too; its fragrance comfortable and rea.s.suring; her forgetfulness is not. Three times over the last month, Lena has had to remind Lulu of details she should know-Randall is out of town, Kendrick is home and not away at college, Camille is about to graduate from high school, Bobbie lives in New York.

"Randall came home yesterday. Remember?"

"That son-in-law of mine is always off somewhere-China, Paris, New York-making big-time deals." Lulu shouts into the phone in the way octogenarians often do, forgetting the sophistication of cell phone technology. The hose falls to the ground and snakes beneath her folding chair. "He's the executive vice president at TIDA, you know. The only black that high up. I'm surprised Lena didn't go with him and stay in one of those nine-hundred-dollar-a-night hotels he loves."

Lulu is Randall's biggest fan, and, on some level, Lena is both proud and bored with Lulu's exaggerations. Lulu winks, covers the handset, and mouths words that Lena cannot decipher because, despite this habit her mother has had for all of Lena's life-in church, behind John Henry's back, in rooms full of noisy relatives-Lena is not good at lip-reading. Lulu tells whomever is on the other end of the line she has to go and clamps the phone shut.

"You need a gardener, Lulu. What if I can't come over every Wednesday?"

"I'm not helpless." Lulu's knuckles are knotted with arthritis. She flexes her fingers and lays her hands on Lena's. "How's my baby girl doin' on this glorious day?"

Lulu presses her hands to Lena's temples. No need, Lena believes, to bother Lulu. John Henry and Lulu's marriage was different, maybe exceptional. They grew up in a Mississippi town with only a postal route number and no name. The day John Henry came home from World War II, he asked for Lulu's hand in marriage. The two of them worked hard, raised their girls, and spoiled them as rotten as they could on their government salaries.

John Henry took care of everything. He doted on his wife. He drove Lulu to work, to church, the grocery store, and shopping and brought his check home every Friday. In return, Lulu took care of him, served his dinner every evening at six sharp-a saucer of finely chopped onions beside his plate no matter what she cooked. She ironed his clothes and let him play poker with his buddies once a month.

"Did you ever feel like you were... losing yourself?" Once Lena believed her attachment to a powerful mate completed her. Power shifted their relationship, hers and Randall's, bifurcated their growth, like a tree, into independent directions ignoring the trunk that made it one; forgetting to meet at a glorious crown, joined and whole. Now she knows she cannot tell when her husband of twenty-three years lost his respect for her. But that loss has weakened her.

"Honey, that losing yourself thing is strictly for your generation. I knew where I was all of the time." Lulu chuckles. Picking up the nozzle, she takes a bottle of aspirin from her pocket. The cap is one of those now old-fashioned, no-childproof tops.

"I need to make some changes. And Randall is a little... impatient."

"I hope you're not thinking about that photography business again." The day Lena completed her acceptance paperwork for UCLA, John Henry, checkbook in hand, and Lulu stood beside her prepared to pay her tuition on one condition: no photography. They weren't about to waste their hard-earned money on frivolity: college was about getting a good job, a nine-to-five-with-an-hour-for-lunch job, a government job, a GS 12 or 15 job with a pension, vacation, and benefits.

"I always always took care of my family first." Lulu jiggles pills straight from the bottle into her mouth, then sips from the nozzle. "Women have to put up with a man's moodiness until it runs its course." took care of my family first." Lulu jiggles pills straight from the bottle into her mouth, then sips from the nozzle. "Women have to put up with a man's moodiness until it runs its course."

"Maybe Bobbie should get her b.u.t.t out here and benefit from some of this advice." Her big sister always says Lena tells their mother too much.

"It doesn't apply... and, Bobbie thinks her books are more important than... anything else. Maybe if she listened, she could have a husband, too." Lulu holds on to the chair to stand fully upright. "You forget how lucky you are. You're living the life I dreamed for you..."

"What can I help you with today? I won't be able to stay as long as usual, I've got to get ready for Sat.u.r.day. Randall wants friends over for dinner."

"That's nice, baby girl. That should make Randall happy." Holding her right elbow with her left hand, Lulu opens then shuts the sliding gla.s.s door to the spa.r.s.ely furnished family room behind them. After John Henry dropped dead of a heart attack on the eve of their fifty-ninth wedding anniversary, Lulu went into a frenzy. She threw away John Henry's yellowed, fake-leather recliner, years of past issues of Life Life and and National Geographic, National Geographic, unopened liquor bottles, except for the now forty-year-old bottle of twenty-year-old blended scotch whiskey Bobbie gave them years ago as an anniversary present, the old TV, the broken hi-fi and the treadmill John Henry used every other day until it broke. unopened liquor bottles, except for the now forty-year-old bottle of twenty-year-old blended scotch whiskey Bobbie gave them years ago as an anniversary present, the old TV, the broken hi-fi and the treadmill John Henry used every other day until it broke.

After Lulu forces the metal latches-top, bottom, and two above the handle-closed to the accompaniment of small grunts, Lena heads for John Henry's tool room, the one room Lulu left untouched, and grabs a can of WD-40. At the sliding door, she sprays each of the four latches and the metal runner tracks. She works the latches and the door back and forth until they roll without effort.

Lulu pushes at Lena's arm. "You get on home. Get ready for your party. Fix yourself up. You have a good life, Lena-I know I'm repeating, but it's the truth."

"What if that isn't enough?"

"Then make make it enough. Make it enough to last until death do you part. I hope you're not thinking about doing something foolish. There's no way you could live like you do without Randall." it enough. Make it enough to last until death do you part. I hope you're not thinking about doing something foolish. There's no way you could live like you do without Randall."

"You... you sound like a page from a black-mama manual: if you got a man, then you got to be happy." Mother and daughter stand opposite one another, two sets of hands perched on their own hips just like they did when Lena was a teenager, eager to get from under her mother's old-timey ways.

The locks glide open when Lulu opens the gla.s.s door, and Lena knows she is being ordered to leave, as Lulu's superst.i.tions demand, the same way she came in.

"I'll get somebody-at least to cut the lawn and trim the roses, there are so many." Lulu sighs with resignation, as if this decision is her punishment for growing old without a man, and heads toward a full white rose bush. She nips three blossoms with her shears. "This is an Austin tea rose. Your father gave it to me for our fortieth anniversary. It stands for happy love." She dribbles water from the hose onto a paper towel then wraps it around the th.o.r.n.y stems and hands the bouquet to Lena. When Lulu starts to water the lawn again, it occurs to Lena that Lulu has been watering the same spot since she arrived. She is either methodical or more forgetful than Lena cares to ponder.

"How are you feeling, Lulu?"

"Don't worry about me; I'm fine. Your father would take care of the yard, if he were here. Your father was the man." Her words are practiced like the rosary she recites every Friday morning. "Your Uncle Joe was busy all of the time. He was a big shot, like Randall. Worked day and night on his real estate business so his family could have a big house-not as big as yours-and a new Cadillac every year. Inez liked to decorate, but she had to ask your uncle for the money." Lulu's face is serious, her eyelids close.

"What does this have to do with me?"

"Well, when Inez wanted new wallpaper in her bathroom, she peeled pieces from around the bathtub, the sink, places she knew Joe would notice, and she flushed them, and a few women's items, down the toilet. When the toilet backed up, Joe told Inez to call the plumber and while she was at it, she might as well get somebody to replace the wallpaper as well." The wind sprays dirt onto Lulu's face. She wipes her eyes with a lacy handkerchief peeking from her pant pocket and aims the water at the wilted juniper bushes beyond.

"I can't believe Uncle Joe was that stupid."

Lulu ignores the metered patter of Lena's foot intended to get Lulu to make her point. She pauses, her smile the best indication of how much she is enjoying her story and her daughter's undivided attention.

"Men need to see see things to understand them. They don't like to things to understand them. They don't like to hear hear about women's problems. If a woman understands the man, the man will understand the woman." about women's problems. If a woman understands the man, the man will understand the woman."

"I think you're never on my side."

"I know you don't like what I'm saying, Lena. You probably think it's old-fashioned, but that little piece of advice kept my man by my side for one day short of fifty-nine years. Figure out how to handle your husband while you think think on that." on that."

Chapter 7.

Shoppers stare at Lena's tear-smudged eyes; a toddler points a chubby finger; his mother shushes and whisks the child away.

"Why did you talk to Lulu about you and Randall?" Bobbie asks. The sister Tina loved, Lena recalls, was not around when life turned bad. Growing up, Lena went to Bobbie when she wanted to know about life, bribing her first with hot cocoa and extra marshmallows before Bobbie would talk to her little sister. Lulu's advice was most thorough when it came to etiquette and politics. She told her daughters how to vote (Democrat) and why (hundreds of Negroes beaten with hoses, arrested, suffered, some killed so that every Negro in America could), but not how to handle a man; just that they needed one. Lena knows that Bobbie, miles away in New York, is more than willing to tell her what to do.

The courtesy clerk crams the last grocery bag into the trunk. Lena tips him five dollars and paces, phone crunched between shoulder and ear in the same way Lulu held hers. The converted warehouse in front of the parking lot is shaped more like an apartment building than a grocery store.

"At least I include her in what's going on in my life." And you never do, Lena wants to say, but then Bobbie would hang up like she always threatens to do whenever the conversation comes close to the intimate details of her life. "I'm all dis...o...b..bulated. Why Randall wants a party so soon after coming home-"

"Because he knows he can." Bobbie taps a pencil against the receiver, and Lena wonders why both Bobbie and her mother like to make noises when they talk on the phone. "How's Lulu?"

"She seems a bit dis...o...b..bulated, too. I think I might go with her to her next doctor's appointment. But if you must know, I was getting... perspective."

"You wanted 'perspective' from the woman who ate, slept, and dreamt John Henry Harrison?" Bobbie laughs.

"What do you know?"

"I don't have to be heteros.e.xual, or married, to know that you let your husband get to you. You're too hard on yourself."

"It's what I do." Lena sighs like her eight-year-old self under fire from her big sister. "And why don't you call Lulu more often? You haven't been home in a year."

"Lulu doesn't know how to have a regular conversation without implying that religion and a good man can cure all she believes is wrong with me. I love her, and I forgive you for being rude, but don't change the subject. This is about you, not me. You love being married. You love Randall. I simply tolerate him because he's the father of my niece and nephew." Randall and Bobbie argue whenever they are together. The last time Bobbie was home, it was over music: easy-listening jazz versus bebop. "He would not be where he is without you. And that's a fact." Lena imagines her sister wagging her finger on the other end of the phone.

"What difference does it make?" Lena groans at the sight of Dr. Miller's stocky frame between cars one aisle over. She ducks and rattles her purse. "G.o.d, where are my keys? Kendrick's therapist is headed this way. Dammit, I don't want him to see me."

"Tell him to go f.u.c.k himself. Hand him the phone-I'll say it if you won't."

At the end of his first session, Kendrick stepped into the waiting room and told Lena that Dr. Miller wanted to see her. Lena a.s.sumed he wanted a payment and stepped into the tiny office, checkbook in hand. Once inside, she was surprised by the kitschy coziness of the middle-aged doctor's office. Flowered cushions on a slouchy sofa. Masks smeared with white ash, African spears, and fertility G.o.ddesses with swollen bellies and distended b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Their shared heritage seemed all the more reason to like him.

"My grasp of family dynamics will const.i.tute a critical area of Kendrick's therapy." Dr. Miller settled into his recliner, his stubby legs struggled to reach the ottoman. "Kendrick has given me permission to discuss our conversation with you. While I will not breach doctor-patient confidentiality, I do sense that there are other issues, as they relate to you, specifically, that cause Kendrick to question your... value."

"As opposed to his father's? And measured by what? His income as opposed to my... non-income?" Lena focused on the cable-st.i.tched afghan folded over Dr. Miller's armrest. The st.i.tches were uneven and lumpy: a gift from a feeble-handed grandmother for her adored grandchild. "What does that have to do with why he took drugs?"

"There may be clinical depression. I'm not certain, of course, we've only spoken once. It's like a puzzle, and I have to fit all of the pieces together to a.s.sess the reasons Kendrick chose to use drugs so heavily. What you you have to consider is the impression you've created and how it will affect his relationships with women and his view of women in general. Especially if the woman appears to be weak." Nothing moved on Dr. Miller's body, not his eyelids nor a finger chilled from the air conditioner's breeze. have to consider is the impression you've created and how it will affect his relationships with women and his view of women in general. Especially if the woman appears to be weak." Nothing moved on Dr. Miller's body, not his eyelids nor a finger chilled from the air conditioner's breeze.

Lena pushed off the sofa like a baby and stumbled to the door. She glowered at the therapist and did not bother to ask how he could make such a snaky a.s.sumption after only fifty-five minutes with her son.

Now, Dr. Miller stands in the middle of the parking lot, four plastic grocery bags in one hand, and pats his jacket and pants pockets with absent-minded vigor. Lena pretends to search underneath the car while Bobbie yells, "Give it to him! Give the phone to him!"

Lena shakes her head no and stays lowered until she hears a car engine start. The doctor, his head swiveled in the opposite direction to monitor the parking lot traffic, drives away when she peeks over the hood. In the car, Lena pulls I, Tina I, Tina out of her purse and riffles the edges with her thumb to let Tina provide inspiration, this time for how to keep away from people she doesn't like. "Don't laugh. I'm reading Tina Turner's autobiography. I like her guts." out of her purse and riffles the edges with her thumb to let Tina provide inspiration, this time for how to keep away from people she doesn't like. "Don't laugh. I'm reading Tina Turner's autobiography. I like her guts."

"She has more than guts-surprise, I read the book. I own bookstores, remember? And she left without fear and without money."

"I haven't been on my own since I was thirty-one. I could never make as much money as Randall does. Maybe Lulu is right." Like John Henry, Lena is not much of a risk taker.

"Sell yourself short if you want to, but all you have to do is want it bad enough." Bobbie puffs on a cigarette and yells to a distant voice in the background that she can't help right now, that she's unavailable for a while so would they please close her door. Papers rustle, and Lena imagines stacks and to-do lists atop her sister's antique desk. "Once she left, Tina only looked forward and took every opportunity that came her way. She even cleaned houses, for a minute, until she got a break."

"Stop smoking. I can hear you puffing all the way from here." Lena swerves out of the parking lot and steers through the streets. "I want my life to be the way it was. And I don't know how to get it back."

"You wouldn't be so into Tina if that was your intention. And slow down, I can hear you gunning the engine all the way from here all the way from here."

"It's not so easy to give up your dreams."

"You don't have to give up anything, and you don't have to meet any of Randall's stupid ultimatums. This is not not a corporate takeover. Tell a corporate takeover. Tell him him to go f.u.c.k himself. If you don't want to have a G.o.ddammed party, don't." to go f.u.c.k himself. If you don't want to have a G.o.ddammed party, don't."

"It's too late. I've already called everybody and shopped at three different stores."

Lena senses Bobbie shaking her head on the other side of the line. Unh. Unh. Unh. Exit, stick to the twisty road, left at the stoplight, one right, another couple of lefts, and she is almost home. From a half block away, Lena watches exhaust sputter from Kendrick's nearly new, lemon-colored Mustang. A brown delivery truck blocks his car. She extends her hand out of the open window and waves to Kendrick and the deliveryman.

"Stop waiting for Randall's permission. Let's see, when you were seventeen you waited for Leonard Templeton to ask you to the Senior Ball. As I recall, you never went. You waited for Randall to tell you when you could go back to work. And you still don't work."

The second time she asked, they sat on the couch in Randall's home office working on a speech he was about to give at the annual board of directors' meeting. He read it through, noting changes, words, phrases, commas, and periods that gave him time to breathe or the audience to ponder. Lena suggested memorizing the first paragraph to make immediate contact with the audience and gain acceptance and interest right away.

"I went to the bank today," she said.

Whether he heard her or not, she couldn't tell. He recited the first paragraph, experimented with his delivery-serious, with humor, smiling, not smiling, hands, no hands. "When I gave my father his first cell phone last year, he was astonished at the power of such a small device. 'Dad,' I said, 'you ain't seen nothing yet.' As I stand before you, on the cusp of a new century, ready to introduce the future of telecommunications, I speak those same words to you as I did to my father: ladies and gentlemen, you ain't seen nothing yet!"

As soon as he finished, her thumbs lifted in approval, Lena started again. "I talked to the manager about my photography business. It's been two years, and I'm ready." She smiled at the end of her sentence, hoping her declaration was light enough to encourage Randall's agreement.

"You're happy aren't you? The kids are happy. I'm happy." He took her hand and didn't wait for her reply. "I know I promised, and I mean to keep that promise." Randall stood and paced the length of his office, delivering his words in the same way he had practiced his speech: her expertise, her willingness to polish his speeches, not to mention her first-rate entertaining had become critical to his success.

"Bottom line, the next couple of years are key. I know we can make this work." He knelt in front of her, his eyes willing her to agree. "C'mon, Lena, it hasn't been that bad, has it? You help me, and I'll help you. I'm not breaking my promise, just asking for an extension."

Hadn't she known it would come to this moment all along? Lena swore she could handle all of that, take a few cla.s.ses, develop a signature style, and check out galleries. How many extensions would it take to get to her dream? She reminded Randall that she had mult.i.tasked her way through kids and work and entertaining and managing the household for years. It would work, she reasoned, until she heard him say his goal was to be CEO. The sensation, like vertigo, went from head past stomach to knees easier than she thought it would. Like falling into a cushy ball of fluff. Surrender. Without fight, without words, just the certainty that the loyalty Randall valued would cost her her soul.

"Okay! I get it. There's a delivery truck in my driveway. I won't wait wait for him." The gloved driver jumps out of the van, opens its double doors, and shoves three boxes onto a handcart. Lena points to the front porch and a white envelope taped to the wrought iron railing. The driver tips his baseball cap and heads in that direction. for him." The gloved driver jumps out of the van, opens its double doors, and shoves three boxes onto a handcart. Lena points to the front porch and a white envelope taped to the wrought iron railing. The driver tips his baseball cap and heads in that direction.

"See? The universe has just sent you a message. Make things happen. And why don't you call Cheryl. Your old buddy always could knock sense into you."

"I haven't talked to Cheryl since Daddy's funeral. Too much time has pa.s.sed to cry on her shoulder. Especially about Randall."

"Promise me you'll call her. If you don't, I will."