up just a bit in order for him to make out the name of the apartments he needed to venture to.
Easing along the almost flooded streets of north Dallas, his heart suddenly ached as he thought about the situation at hand. He prayed for acceptance and wished he had made up in his mind a day earlier, a year earlier, for that matter. All he ever wanted to do was live right and be right, wanting to have a family and be the husband and father God had wanted him to be: the same type of man his father had been to him and his mother. But it never happened, and with Michelle, it never would.
“Found it,” Keithe announced to himself as he inched his way into the upscale apartment complex. Excited about the possibility of resting without argument, Keithe drove further into the crowded complex.
With pressure added to the gas pedal from his size-fourteen Cole Haan shoe, Keithe looked down toward his gadget-filled console in search for the defrost mechanism. One push turned the contraption on. Just before Keithe placed his eyes back on the narrow pathway, he searched once again for the button to lower the force of the breeze. Studying the space a little longer than he should have, Keithe raised his eyes to see the windshield clearing, but not before his vehicle made contact with something other than the road.
“Oh my God!” was all Keithe had enough time to shout before hitting the brakes. The hard braking forced his face into the windshield, but even with the short daze and blood trickling down his face, Keithe was concerned with the object he’d hit.
With the rain clobbering his sporty ride, he struggled to remove his sixfoot frame from the car to check the seriousness of the accident. It was dark and rainy, and the image of a human, maybe even an animal, was what came to mind first. As Keithe made his way to the front bumper, he found nothing. The dark of night and the rain meshed; Keithe, without thought, got on his hands and knees to see what had gotten stuck under his vehicle.
It only took a tenth of a second for Keithe to find his breath that had lodged itself in his chest. Saturated with rain, but no longer feeling any effects, he pulled himself up as fast as he could.
“Oh my God,” his voice rang out, the second time in less than ten minutes. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” he cried out as he made his way back into his car and reversed. “somebody help me!” Before he could gain energy to start his search for help, the pressure built up from a seizure in waiting caused him to black out while his body jumped against the steering wheel.
CHAPTER 1
Stoney
“Stoney, g’on out yonder and get me a switch from that tree. I’m fed up wit’cha, girl.” Grandma Susie was ready to make a promise of her threats. “G’on now.”
Walking as slowly as her bony legs would tote her through the screen door, Stoney hesitated as she teetered under the threshold. “But I didn’t even do nothing,” the seven-year-old mumbled under her breath. “I just don’t want no medicine, that’s all.”
“Wha’cha say, gal?” Grandma Susie positioned her big hands on either side of the rocking chair’s arm-rests, hoping to show Stoney that there was no playing. “Don’t make me come out there and get it myself.”
Once her bare feet landed on the porch, Stoney looked back at her grandmother and snatched her head back around as fast as she could. Knowing her grandmother couldn’t see her facial expression, Stoney stuck out her tongue and wrapped it in the corner of her mouth, which was her only comeback.
This would be the third whooping she’d gotten in one week, all because she didn’t want to take medication that Grandma Susie said she didn’t have a choice but to take. Grandma Susie said, “If I gotta take some medicine, so do you.” Every time Stoney drank the bottled purple stuff, she didn’t like the way it made her eyes look at things. She’d heard Grandma Susie tell her old lady friends that giving Stoney medicine was the best way to get her to sleep, hushed up, or to sit down somewhere. As far as Stoney was concerned, she didn’t want to do any of the above.
Finally moving forward in Grandma Susie’s mission for her to get self-destruction ammo, Stoney stood in front of the only thing besides medicine that she hated: the switch tree.
With the house she lived in with Grandma Susie behind her, Stoney looked to her left and watched her friends scatter off on the hidden trail. To her right was the alley that would take her toward town. Peeping over her shoulder, Stoney took off toward the alley, hoping her plan to run away led her right into the arms of her mother: someone she had never laid eyes on.
“So are you down? hello? earth to Stoney.” Vicky snapped repeatedly in her coworker’s face.
“Uh, huh? Oh, girl.” Stoney sat up straight at her desk. Lost in the recap of her youth, Stoney broke loose from thoughts of one of her runaway attempts.
“No can do, Vicky the Vixen,” Stoney joked around with her coworker and friend who had been pressuring her all afternoon to have cocktails after work. Remembering that she held a tablet of medication in her left hand, Stoney reached for her bottled water to wash down the pale capsule. “When are you going to give up? If I don’t boogie, you know I don’t guzzle.” Stoney stared at her friend before her frequent eye flutter took over. When Vicky’s own eyes began to water while looking at Stoney’s repeated eye jerking, Stoney paid no mind, and continued her reasoning on why happy hour was out. “Drinking is for the birds. Plus, hanging around you already has me acting thrown off. What you trying to do, get me locked up?”
“Uh-uh. Chunked is more like it. I feel ya, though.” Vicky shared a laugh with her younger counterpart. “You’re doing the right thing.” easing seriousness into the conversation, a short and vibrant Victoria really did admire Stoney for being young and making God the head of her life. Totally.
Knowing Stoney had been raised by her grandmother, Vicky could argue with some of the old-fogy ideas that her young friend had about individuals and the world itself, but she respected the twenty-one-year-old for at least giving her life to God and sticking with it. She just wished Stoney would take her advice and lose the coffee-colored stockings and sandals.
“Girl, keep doing what you doing,” Vicky halfway chanted. “By the time I was your age, I had twenty-one painted on my forehead and all I wanted was for the bartender to keep mixing and pouring. No small talk please.” She hunched her broad shoulders and turned her face, giving an academy award example of her story. When she saw Stoney give her a questioning start, Vicky announced, “Oh, that was months before I knew I was pregnant. By the time I was twenty-five, I had sobered up and was pregnant with my third child.” Vicky let out a weakened sigh, thinking that in her thirty years she had experienced a lifetime.
Getting up from her desk, Stoney shook her head about Vicky’s comment. “You are a mess,” Stoney said in her nasally tone. “Anyway. I have choir rehearsal and I’m teaching a new song tonight,” she shared as she filed away patient charts for the doctor she worked for.
“Brother Mike is letting us borrow space in his home since new bleachers are being put in the choir’s stand. You know he got that bad house everybody been talking about. I sho’ can’t miss tonight. You sure you don’t want to come?” Stoney sang to her girlfriend. “I keep telling you he got the sweets for you.”
“Hmm. That’s nice,” Vicky responded, and then silenced herself. Vicky had had a major crush on Brother Mike since she started going to Bethel sanctuary five years earlier. Recently she had made her move, jumped the gun, and acted on her feelings before knowing all she needed to know about Brother Mike. There was no way she would let on to Stoney, who was still considered fairly new to the church, that she had
