Young Wives. Olivia Goldsmith

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СКАЧАТЬ know Michelle,” Jada continued anyway. “You know these children. And you know how much Frank loves them, so just stop it, Clinton. Have some compassion. Would you want to have to bring your children home to this house after uniformed vandals tore it apart? Michelle is over there crying her heart out and cleaning up, and after dinner I’m going over to help her.”

      “You are not going over there,” Clinton said, and came around the table and took her hand. He held it hard.

      She snapped it out of his grip and held it up in front of her face. “Talk to the palm, Clinton. Because the ears aren’t hearing.” She turned away. “Didn’t you ever hear of due process? Let’s try to be Christians about this, Clinton. Don’t be so holier than thou. You only go to church to meet your lover.”

      “Come on, Jada. Frank Russo is the kind of white man who—”

      “This has nothing to do with race, Clinton,” Jada snapped. “I don’t know what Frank Russo did or didn’t do. But I know he’s not sleeping around, tearing his family apart. I know he’s not using his church as a singles bar.” All at once her rage rose within her and she felt it pushing words out of her mouth. “You’ve had plenty of time to make your damned decision and I’m tired of waiting for you to make it. I have waited and I hoped that you would make a decision—any decision. But you haven’t. So I have to. If you go down to Tonya’s again, don’t come back Clinton. I mean it. The deadline has long expired.”

      “Don’t you threaten me,” Clinton warned her. “You can’t take my children away. You didn’t even want the baby.”

      Jada snapped her head back as if she’d been slapped. “Don’t go there,” she said. “I’m not making you give up anything. You’re choosing to leave it, to leave us.”

      Clinton moved very close to her, and for a moment his size and the anger she could feel in him frightened her. She didn’t—wouldn’t—let herself take a step backward, away from him, but she was scared, though she hoped it didn’t show. “Don’t you dare go over there tonight,” Clinton said to her.

      “Don’t you dare give me orders,” Jada spat right back at him. “Why don’t you give the children their dinner instead? Something useful, instead of stupid threats.” She leaned toward him, just to show him he didn’t scare her. “I listen to God and my conscience before I listen to you. Michelle’s my friend. She would do it for me.” And with that Jada spun around, away from him and out the kitchen door into the relief of the cool darkness.

12

       Wherein Angela stops playing hooky and instead gets hooked

      Angela was dressed, for the first time in almost a week, in real clothes. She was wearing what she thought of as “a cheap legal suit”—one of those rayon-and-wool blend, navy blue jacket and skirt jobs that was a knock-off of what all the women at her ex-law firm used to wear. This one, though, was a real cheap one. And big. She’d gone up to double digits. You didn’t want your size or your IQ to be there.

      Yesterday she had forced herself up and out of the house, and had dragged herself over to Hit or Miss. Now she looked down at herself, sitting behind the wheel of her father’s Dodge Dart, the one he referred to as “the spare.” This outfit certainly couldn’t be called a hit, so it must be a miss. She was a miss now, too. Or on her way to becoming one. An unmarried miss.

      She needed the suit, because today she was showing up at the White Plains Women’s Legal Crisis Center. Her mother, definitely for Angela’s own good, had insisted that Angie show up today. She didn’t feel like it, but she didn’t feel like doing anything. She was even tired of lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. She hadn’t seen anything good on television, not even on A&E, in the last four or five days. There also wasn’t anything good to eat left at her father’s—she was down to no-fat Snackwell cookies and she’d just as soon eat cardboard, or nothing. She was still miserably unhappy but, she had to admit, she was also bored.

      “You have to do something,” her mother had insisted. “Just visit us.” So Angie agreed. It might as well be the Women’s Center, though now, squeezed into the cheesy size ten (she’d been an easy six when she’d boarded the Boston shuttle), and driving this car in this disembodied place she’d never lived in, she longed for the black sofa again.

      Angie pulled up to the building off the Post Road, where the WLCC was located. She pulled into the lot. Parking here, she noticed, was a lot different than at her suburban Boston firm, where every car that wasn’t a Lexus was a Volvo. Or a Jaguar or a Mercedes or a BMW, when you talked about the partners. Here the cars looked like automobiles from another culture altogether—people who had to make payments on used cars they couldn’t quite afford. The Dart fit right in. Angie got out of the car and walked past the dented Chevys, the late-model Buicks, the rusted Ford Escorts.

      When she got to the lobby, there was no sign, so she had to ask for legal services offices, then walked the stairs to the second floor instead of taking the elevator. What the hell. It would be the first exercise of her new life. She was breathless by the time she got to the top, even though it was only one flight. She, who used to do the Stairmaster for forty-five minutes! Well, she reminded herself, she had just spent several days horizontal.

      Now to face Natalie. Angie waited for her breathing to even out. She’d need it to face Natalie. After her divorce, her mother had become all fired up about a whole bunch of things. Angie guessed it was a good thing. Her mom had gone to law school, gotten her degree, and since then had only practiced law for women who were in need. Angie had been inspired, and she was sure one of the reasons she’d gone on to law school was because of her mother. On the other hand, it wasn’t always convenient to have a mother whose priorities were so political.

      Hesitantly, suddenly feeling shy, Angie walked into the WLCC office. A black receptionist looked up, but behind her Laura Hampton was looking over some papers.

      Laura saw her and smiled. “Oh. Hi, Angela. Good to see you.” Laura walked around the side of the reception counter and kissed her cheek.

      Angie liked Laura, the woman who had handled her mom’s divorce and then who had … well, handled her mother. The two women had lived together for almost five years, but had split last Christmas. Angie had never asked why.

      Now Laura took Angie’s left hand in both of hers and held it. “I heard from your mother about Reid,” she said, her voice low. “I’m so sorry.”

      Angie nodded, then took a quick glance around the waiting room they were standing in. There were two heavy middle-aged women sitting at either end of a battered sofa like a pair of bookends, and a painfully thin Indian woman in a sari sitting at attention in one of the straight-backed chairs on the other side of the room, jingling her bracelets nervously along her arm. Angie’s heart sank. It was as bad as she had pictured it, maybe worse. All three looked drowned in their own misery, but Angie figured at least she didn’t have to share her own. She merely nodded at Laura, who took the hint.

      “Where’s my mother?” Angie asked, and felt panic rising.

      “Your mother had to show up at court, but just for a little while. She’ll be back in the next hour.” Angie tried to smile, but only managed to nod.

      She hung up her coat and followed Laura down a short hallway to a tiny room with only one window high up in the wall. The rest of the room was jammed with metal file cabinets, a battered СКАЧАТЬ