Sweet Bye-Bye by Denise Michelle Harris

Author:Denise Michelle Harris [HARRIS, DENISE MICHELLE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780446534574
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2007-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

29

Change Goin’ Come

I admit, I didn’t know how to feel. I’d started to wonder if God had really spoken to me at church about this appointment, as I gave the cab driver the address.

We drove to a neighborhood of beautiful San Francisco homes. They were huge old houses that sold for a million dollars or more. The driver stopped at the address, and I scoped the place out. I walked up the set of steps shared by the renovated Victorian that had been split in half. The porch was huge and each door had its own mailbox. The house was a light brown, trimmed in black. The door seals around each entranceway and the edgings around the windows were black. Neatly shaped and trimmed green shrubbery made a perfect rectangle outside the window on one side. On the other side there was a rose garden.

I was about to knock on the door of the side that matched the address I’d written on the card, but a sign on the door said: “Please open the door and come up the stairs.” As I entered, the first thing I noticed was a black wrought-iron flower stand in the corner and a huge set of narrow and steep stairs that led upward. As I walked up the stairs I could hear music playing. Music with no words. Violins played with the sound of waves crashing though them; incense burned, and I continued up the stairs and found a sparsely decorated waiting room. A couple of pictures hung on the walls. One was a black chalk drawing, the other an abstract painting of many colors. There were a couple of bulletin boards that held flyers, and a poster was pinned to one of them. There was a little waiting area with four chairs.

Someone else was sitting in the waiting area. He looked nineteen or twenty. He had a square face and wore round glasses. His hair was a bright red and his fair skin bore tiny freckles. He was holding an instrument, perhaps a trombone. He didn’t look like he had any issues. I figured he was a teenage rebel, whose parents had forced him to come here by threatening to throw him out of the house if he didn’t get his act together. I wondered if he had a drug problem and abused crank or ecstasy.

I was plenty nervous about being here. I shook my head as I thought about the last time I’d “spoken” to someone and she’d asked me if I was suicidal. What the heck was I doing here? This wasn’t for black folks. We didn’t talk to shrinks, we worked out our own problems. We’d had enough labels and stereotypes about us. I wanted to leave. But I sat there with the teen, determined to see where all of this led.

I didn’t see a place to sign in, so I grabbed an issue of Good Housekeeping magazine out of the rack and pretended to read, but really I watched water float through a little fountain in the corner.

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