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  Guilt ate at him. “Sit down for a minute. I need to talk with you about something.”

  “Woo, this must be serious. I’ve never seen you look so somber.”

  They sat across from one another as Keith told her, “I want to tell you the truth about my relationship with Janet.”

  “Confession time, huh?” Her lip curved into a nasty snarl. “So all this time you’ve been trying to make me feel guilty about what I’ve done to you – and you’ve been carrying on with that woman?”

  He put his hands up. “Will you allow me to speak?”

  She waved her hand. “Go on, you’ve got the floor. Confess your sins.”

  He hesitated, then blurted, “Before I married you, I was interested in Janet. I thought that if she and I got to know each other, our relationship would develop beyond friendship.”

  “Mmh, and I bet you wish you had gone on and married her now, don’t you?”

  He held up his hand again. “But when I married you, I knew that no other woman would be able to take your place. To put it in simple terms, Mrs. Williams, I fell in love with you, girl.”

  She smiled, nudged his shoulder and said, “You say that to all the girls.”

  “So are we, okay? Do you trust me?”

  “Yeah, I trust you. But that Janet is another story. I knew the day she came over here that she had it bad for you. She actually yelled at me and started crying; told me that I was no good for you.”

  Keith saw the look of sadness on Cynda’s face and wanted make her feel better. “Look, Cynda, I’m sorry about that. Janet was just looking out for me.”

  Cynda waved him off. “Don’t worry about it. I’m just going to get on the bus and make some unannounced visits to your office.”

  They laughed, then she turned back to her new assignment. “And don’t think this big old couch is staying in here.”

  He held up his hands. “Hold on now. I do have to make one stipulation. You have to come up with a budget and stick to it. And to be truthful, I don’t think our budget can handle a new couch right now.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you own that construction company?”

  “Well, yeah. But like I told you, the business is doing okay. That’s it. One wrong move and we could lose this house.”

  “Okay, Mister Low-money-bags, what can our budget afford?”

  He smiled and told her, “Slipcovers.”

  She cringed. But no one would accuse her of sending Keith to the poor house. “All right then. I’ll look at some of the things I want and come up with a budget and present it to you. How’s that?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I was watching HGTV last night. They did a living room remodel that was off the hook; but I can do better.”

  He smiled.

  They talked some more about her ideas for the house, watched a movie and then turned in for the night. They drifted into a world where nothing else mattered but the way they felt in each other’s arms. Exhausted from the comfort they found in one another, they lay together in silence. Cynda was against Keith’s chest while he put his arms around the small bulge of her belly.

  “Can I ask you something?” Cynda said, cutting through the silence.

  He rubbed her stomach. “What is it?”

  “This God of yours, He loves you, right?”

  Unequivocally, Keith answered, “Yes, He does.”

  She put her hand on his as he rubbed her belly. “Then why do you think He would make you marry a whore?”

  Keith turned Cynda around and looked her in the eye when he said, “I’m not perfect, Cynda. I’ve sold drugs, I even murdered a man before God saved me. Why do you think His love is big enough to cover my sins but not yours?”

  Putting her hand on his cheek, she leaned up and kissed his chin, then his mouth. “I just don’t understand your God, Keith. You’ve been good for so many years and He punishes you by having you marry someone like me.”

  “I’m not so special, baby. God had a prophet in the Bible marry a prostitute.”

  “No way!”

  “Yeah, He did. The act of marriage between the two was a symbol of God’s great love for us. It showed how God continues to love us even though we stray away from Him.”

  She played with the hairs on his chest. “I bet this prostitute was so grateful that she was saved from a life of sin that she did everything this prophet told her to. She bowed and scrapped at his feet, right?”

  Keith frowned. “No, baby, she didn’t. She ran away from him. He had to go find her and bring her home again.”

  “So he could beat the day lights out of her I bet.”

  “The prophet loved his wife, he didn’t want to harm her.”

  “Well, did she stay with him after he brought her back home?”

  “No, she kept running back to her old life. She had children with other lovers and Hosea took them in.”

  Cynda turned to the wall. “I don’t understand this God of yours, Keith. And I don’t like this story.”

  ***

  At four o’clock in the morning, Keith woke and reached for Cynda, but she wasn’t in bed with him. Frantic, he jumped up. He was kicking himself for telling her the story of the prophet and the prostitute when he opened the door to the baby’s room and found her seated in the rocking chair.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked as he took a seat on the floor next to the chair.

  “No,” Cynda replied.

  “Is the mattress still too hard?”

  “It wasn’t the mattress, Keith. I was having another nightmare. I just needed to get out of the bed.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  She put her feet in the rocker and let it glide back and forth. “It’s the same dream I always have. My mother’s pimp is raping me, and I’m trying to tell him that I’m too little to take my mama’s place, but he won’t listen. The whiskey on his breath makes me want to vomit, but I’m too scared to do anything but lay there and let him take my innocence.

  “I probably could have dealt with him taking my innocence. It’s just sex, right? But why did he have to take my mother away from me?”

  Cynda’s lip quivered as she looked at Keith. “You want to know something funny? I’m upset about him taking my mother away from me, and I hated that woman.”

  “Maybe hate is too strong of a word. Huh?”

  She shook her head. “No, I hate her, Keith. From the day I looked into her coffin and knew that she had allowed that monster to take something else from me, I’ve hated her.”

  Cynda said the words with such venom that Keith didn’t know what, if anything, he could say in her mother’s defense, so he changed the subject. “Where is this man now?”

  “Dead,” she told him without emotion. “Somebody stabbed him in the heart in prison.”

  “The dead can’t hurt you, baby. It’s time to move past that pain.”

  “They don’t seem dead to me, Keith.” She pointed at her heart. “In here they are still alive. Still got my heart so clenched with hate that I can’t find room to love.”

  He understood where Cynda was coming from. His mother hadn’t caused his heart to fill up with hate, but his inability to forgive himself for what happened to her had paralyzed him. Made him want to keep Cynda a prisoner in their home so she would be safe. “Can I tell you something?” he asked Cynda.

  She leaned her head against the rocker. “Yeah, what?”

  “My mother became a whore.”

  Cynda’s lifted her head off the rocker and stared at Keith. “What did you say?”

  He picked some lent off his pajama pants. “You heard me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I didn’t want to talk about her.”

  “And now you do?”

  He put his hand on her leg. “She wasn’t always a whore. She was a junkie first. Then I told her I wouldn’t help her to get high anymore – told her I didn’t want to see her until she got clean. So she started tu
rning tricks to get what she needed. She died a week after I told her I wouldn’t help her anymore.” He shook his head as tears swam around the base of his eye lids. “She was murdered by a John. And I have blamed myself for her death for twenty years now.”

  Cynda lifted Keith’s head and wiped the tears from his eyes. “That’s pointless, baby. You had nothing to do with her death. You can’t blame yourself for what someone else did to your mother.”

  He nodded. “I’m starting to see it that way. But don’t you think it’s equally as pointless to blame your mother for what someone did to her. I mean, come on Cynda, do you really think she wanted to be murdered?”

  When she didn’t respond, he stood up, reached out his hands and pulled her out of the rocker. “Come on, let’s go back to bed.”

  She leaned against the wall in the baby’s room and looked around. As she turned out the light in the baby’s room she said, “We had some lousy parents didn’t we?”

  Nodding, Keith told her. “We don’t have to be like them, Cynda.”

  “Do you really think it’s possible for me to be a good mother?”

  “All things are possible, babe. Believe in yourself.”

  The next day, Keith bought Cynda a used Honda Accord. She ran out the house cheesing from ear to ear. “You got this for me?”

  “So, you won’t have to catch the bus to make those surprise visits to my office.”

  She squealed.

  “Now it’s not new, but I paid cash for it,” Keith told her.

  She took the keys from him. “I’ll be back. I’m going to the grocery store.”

  Keith sat in the house nervously waiting for her to return, chiding himself for being the dumbest man on earth. Now she didn’t have to steal his truck if she wanted to leave him. He’d provided her a getaway mobile. But he wouldn’t have his wife feeling trapped. She needed to know that she was free with him.

  Cynda arrived, back home an hour after she left. “Traffic is awful around here. I don’t know how you put up with it day after day,” she said, entering the house with grocery bags in hand.

  Keith grabbed the bags out of her hands and put the milk and cheese in the refrigerator. “You get used to it.”

  As he was putting a bag of rice in the cabinet, Cynda touched his arm and turned him around to face her. “Thank you.”

  In the following weeks they grew closer. They began to understand each other a little better. They desired each other and wanted to be together. She even visited him at work, brought him lunch, and glared at Janet. When she wasn’t glaring at his receptionist, Keith began to wonder if he was seeing sparks of love in his wife’s eyes.

  One night they were discussing the baby and making plans for future vacations when Cynda said, “I want to see Iona. Can you take me to her, please?”

  28

  The revival, the event that Isaac had been planning for the last five months, was upon them. Nina sat the children down in her home office and encouraged them to be on their best behavior during the revival that evening.

  Donavan pointed at his little sister. “I don’t know about Iona, but I know how to act.”

  Iona got in Donavan’s face with a sista-sista neck roll. “And I don’t know about Donavan, but I know how to act better than he does.” She stuck out her tongue and he pushed her.

  “Donavan, stop it right now. This is the type of stuff I’m talking about. Can the two of you sit by each other without it coming to blows?” Nina said.

  “No,” they answered in unison.

  Nina lifted her face to heaven, then looked back at her wayward children. “That’s just fine. You’re not going to be allowed to sit together during this revival. You’ll sit on opposite sides of me.”

  “Can we go now?” Donavan asked.

  “Yeah, go on, I’ve got a lot of work to do before we leave the house,” Nina said.

  Iona and Donavan ran out of Nina’s office, but then Nina remembered something and called Donavan back to the room.

  “Yes, ma’am?” he asked when he walked back in.

  “Sit down for a minute, Donavan, I want to speak with you about something.”

  Sitting down he raised his hands in the air. “I didn’t do it. Swear I didn’t.”

  “No one’s accusing you of anything, but now you’ve got me wondering.”

  He grinned at her. “What did you want to see me about?”

  “I’ve been a little worried about you. You just haven’t been acting yourself around me lately. Are you upset because Iona is here?” She’d been on a girl’s day a few more times with Iona since the first day they spent together. Donavan only tagged along once.

  “No way. I prayed that another kid would come live with us – you need her.”

  Nina closed her eyes. Why hadn’t she seen this coming? It was back to this – Donavan blaming himself for her inability to have more children. Calmly, she told him, “I’m glad Iona is here too, but you do know that I would have been okay if I’d only had you to pal around with, right?”

  “Yeah, Mom. I just think it’s great that you don’t have to wonder what the house would be like with more than one kid in it.”

  “Is that why you keep hitting on Iona, because you’re so glad she’s here?”

  He hung his curly head low and then answered. “I don’t know. She bugs me sometimes.”

  “Why? What’s going on, Donavan?”

  Fire shot through his eyes as he said, “I don’t like the way she talks to you. Okay?”

  She hugged her son. “I don’t like the way she acts sometimes either, baby. But you know what?”

  He pulled away, wiping his eyes as they began to water. “What?”

  “My mother gave me away when I was a small child, and I never knew who my father was.”

  “I know, you told me.”

  “Well, let’s just say, I’m familiar with a bit of the pain Iona is dealing with. And if God had not given me two loving foster parents, who knows where I’d be today?” She scruffed up his hair. “So, can you help me love Iona through this?”

  “I’ll try. But I can’t promise not to get mad if she keeps flapping that smart mouth.”

  “Just try to control yourself. Okay?” He nodded. “And you do know that your father and I don’t love you any less since Iona came. Right?”

  Donavan shrugged.

  The doorbell rang and Iona ran to it screaming, “I’ll get it!”

  Nina got up. “How many times have I told that girl about opening the door for strangers?”

  As Nina and Donavan walked toward the front door they saw a woman bend down and Iona run into her arms. Then Keith stepped in and Nina knew exactly who Iona was hugging. Cynda Stephens, her nemesis. A woman who hated her and wanted nothing more than to pull her and Isaac apart… and had almost succeeded.

  “Hey baby, your mama’s been missing you,” Cynda said to Iona.

  “I missed you too. Are you going to stay here with us?” Iona asked her mother.

  Keith stepped to Nina. They embraced as he told her, “I called Isaac; told him we were coming to town for the revival.”

  “I’m glad you could come. Where will you be staying this weekend?” Nina asked.

  “We’ve got a room at the double-tree,” Keith answered.

  Cynda stood up and Nina’s gaze fell to her stomach. She wanted to scream and ask the Lord if this was some cruel joke. How could He allow a woman who couldn’t even take care of the child she had to conceive another? Please remember me, Lord.

  Cynda patted her belly. “The baby’s due in August.”

  Iona put her hands on her mother’s stomach. “No way.”

  Smiling, Cynda said, “It’s true, honey. You’re getting ready to have a brother or sister.”

  “Will the baby be Donavan’s brother or sister too?” Iona asked.

  The room grew silent. Then Nina said, “I really wish you had called me instead of Isaac, Keith. We were getting ready for the revival and we’ve really got a lot to do befo
re heading out, so--”

  “Here’s the thing, Nina,” Keith said. “We were kind of hoping that you would let us take Iona for a couple of hours and then we would bring her to the tent revival with us.”

  Isaac would be ticked. “I don’t know, Keith,” Nina said.

  Iona glared at Nina. “You can’t stop me from seeing my mother.”

  What was she going to say? ‘No, Iona, you can’t spend time with your real mother?’ Nina wasn’t the vindictive type. Never had been. She stepped back, relented. “Go ahead, Iona. Enjoy yourself.”

  Keith said, “Nina, if you already had something planned, we can wait until tomorrow.”

  Hands on hips, Cynda asked, “Why we gotta wait?”

  Keith opened his mouth to respond to Cynda.

  Nina held up a hand. “That’s all right. Go ahead and take Iona. Just bring her to the revival.”

  ***

  Nina and Donavan arrived at the revival meeting an hour before service was to begin. They walked the expanse of the tent and prayed over each seat. Since God was going to show up and show off in this place tonight, Nina didn’t want Him to miss one person in need of healing or deliverance.

  “Pour out Your anointing. Give these people the power to live this thing the way You desire for us to live it. Open their eyes, Lord. May they begin to see it how You see it. No more living by our own rules, in Jesus’ unmatchless name I pray,” Nina prayed.

  Isaac was behind the pulpit on his knees calling out to God. When he finished, he, Nina, and Donavan linked arms and prayed once again. They sat down and waited for the volunteers and his street congregation to arrive.

  “Why’d you let Iona leave with Cynda?” Isaac finally asked.

  Nina waved at a few of the volunteers as they arrived and began setting the food up on the long tables provided for social hour before Isaac would preach that night. “I can’t very well stop Iona’s mother from seeing her own child, now can I?” Nina reasoned.

  “The courts stopped her. Why do we have to allow her to contaminate our daughter when no judge in his right mind would give her that right ever again?”

  Donavan stood. “I’m going to help them bring in the rest of the sandwiches.”