His Third Wife by Grace Octavia

Author:Grace Octavia [Octavia, Grace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, African American, Contemporary Women, Romance
ISBN: 9780758288813
Google: xpniAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0758288816
Barnesnoble: 0758288816
Goodreads: 16116026
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

“A Mother’s Love”

One man was dead. One man was dying. Inside. Inside of his house. On the couch. In the den. Lights off. Television on. For days. For nights. Two weeks passed. A mother was growing worried.

Mrs. Taylor was that mother, and one dewy late summer morning, she returned to her son’s doorstep to terminate the matter of her worry after a morning walk she begrudgingly took with her doctor’s orders.

Her daughter-in-law had come to her room the night Dax Thomas had been murdered. Val was hysterical, pointing down the hallway to her bedroom, crying that Jamison was going crazy. With her bedroom door open, Mrs. Taylor could hear cracking and breaking, trashing and thrashing about in the room down the hall. She hopped out of her bed like any mother would if she heard such a thing coming from her child’s room at 3 in the morning. No robe on. No slippers. Her sagging breasts dented the fabric of her nightgown just above her navel. Her wig was off. Two gray plaits flanked her shoulders. In her son’s bedroom, she found Jamison in the middle of a tirade. He was throwing anything he could get in his hands. Crying. Sobbing. Hollering about a boy being dead. “Just a boy. Just a boy.”

A clock barely missed Mrs. Taylor’s head at the door. She hardly moved. With the fortitude of a sergeant sent thrice into combat, she stood at attention and held her hand up to keep Val out of the room.

“Stay out here,” she’d ordered the woman before stepping into the room and closing Val out. Mrs. Taylor moved into a corner and let Jamison wreck his world until he was exhausted. Soon, her little boy was sitting on the floor at the foot of his bed crying into his knees. Funny how he looked so small to her. How every man could always look like a little helpless, grinning baby boy to his mother. She was the only person who could never be surprised by his tears. She’d seen them first. Nursed most of them herself. Mrs. Taylor sat on the bed and moved Jamison’s head to rest it against her knee. “Tell Mama,” she urged with a stern voice black mothers reserved for business they knew their sons would bring in from the street. “You tell your mama everything.” And Jamison told. Everything. About the phone call he’d made. About how his fraternity brothers had killed that reporter, put the body in that house, and planted their own evidence. About how he was responsible. Back straight up, eyes dry as egg shells, Mrs. Taylor held her son’s head tight to her knee and let his tears run down her leg. He said how he’d never wanted this. How he wanted it all to stop. To go back. To stop everything.

“Shhhh,” she began to quiet him as he got louder. “Shhh.” She rocked and rocked. “Shhhh.” Soon Jamison was quiet and a mother was giving orders. The first thing she told him was to never repeat what he’d said to her to anyone else in the world ever again.

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