Read A Special Relationship Online
Authors: Yvonne Thomas
Robert didn’t have to respond.
His actions spoke for him.
He’d been tossing files into his briefcase to take home to review when Bill first came into his office, now he just stood there astonished.
“What’s her name?” he asked Bill.
“Shelby.
Shelby Kirkland.
Prettiest woman you’d ever want to meet.
Her dad used to be the head of the NAACP.
And she said yes.”
“You’re so proud of her why haven’t I met her?”
“Because I didn’t want you to think of her as another one of my females.
I mean this lady’s classy, okay?
Her
family are
iconic in the black community.
I had to get this right.”
Robert nodded.
He knew what Bill meant. Some women just stood apart from the rest and when you found her, you felt compelled to be cautious.
Robert was the same way when he first met Gloria.
He could only hope his friend’s lady didn’t turn out like Gloria.
He continued packing up files.
“When’s the big day?” he asked.
“Still being worked out.
But soon.”
Robert looked at his friend, the only man he had ever loved, and his heart went out to him.
“Who is this Shelby anyway?” he asked almost angrily just as his cell phone began ringing.
“What does she do for a living?”
“She’s the woman of my dreams, man, that’s who she is.”
Robert pulled his cell phone from inside his suit coat.
“That’s no answer and you know it.”
Robert then flipped open his cell phone.
“This is Kincaid.”
It was New York.
A contingent of mid-level executives had flown up there to finalize plans to take over a small but conceptually lucrative dot com, but there had been a snag in the negotiations.
Robert listened carefully, although he hardly felt the matter warranted his attention, and before he even bothered to tell them what to do, the land line phone on his desk began ringing.
Although it was Robert’s private line, he chose to ignore it.
Bill, however, didn’t.
“Chilli’s pizza,” Bill said after he picked up the phone.
Robert looked at him crossly.
“Wait, don’t hang up.
I was just kidding.
This isn’t a pizza joint.
Yes, it’s Robert Kincaid’s office.
How may I help you?”
“Did you already offer the three percent?” Robert said into his cell phone as Bill was on his desk phone asking for the name of the person who was requesting to speak with Robert.
“Carrie?” Bill said into the land line and Robert immediately looked at him.
“Carrie who?”
“I’ll call you back,” Robert said into his cell phone and shut it off.
Then he reached for the phone in Bill’s hand.
“Who’s Carrie?” Bill asked as he handed the phone to Robert.
Robert, however, ignored him.
“Hello?” he said into the phone.
Then he heard that voice.
“Robert?” she said.
“Yes.”
There was a pause.
Then sniffling.
“Carrie, what’s wrong?”
“Can you come and get me?”
“Of course I can come and get you. Where are you?”
“She told me we would just be visiting her friends.
But that was a lie.
All those men, and they thought I was gonna dance too.”
Robert’s heart dropped.
Men?
Dancing?
“Carrie, where are you?” he asked again, but this time slowly, not only to help keep her calm, but to keep himself from falling apart too.
SEVENTEEN
She was leaned against a dark, deserted corner building when Robert’s SUV drove up.
When she saw him she stood erect, revealing the torn blouse she was holding together with her hands.
He got out of his truck and hurried to her, his heart pounding with anxiety and worry, his very soul unable to contain his dismay.
He looked at
her,
he took his hand and lifted her chin to him, and what he saw disturbed him even more.
Not only was she shaking like a leaf but she had that blank, almost catatonic look that people who’d seen unspeakable horrors often displayed.
He pulled her gently into his arm, and began looking around at the land that time forgot they stood upon.
He removed his suit coat, placed it around her, and then walked her to the truck.
They drove in silence nearly the entire way back to Dresel Street.
It wasn’t until Robert turned onto 8
th
Street and was within blocks of Carrie’s home did he finally ask her what had happened.
“Popena—”
“Your sister?”
“Yes.
She had agreed to put on a dance show for these guys when I thought we were just going to visit friends of hers.
That’s what she had told me.
But it was like a fraternity party or something, I don’t know.
They were drinking and loud and it was just awful.”
Robert glanced at her, and then at her torn blouse beneath his coat.
“What happened to your blouse?” he asked her.
“Party.
Drinking.
Rowdy guys.
You do the math.”
Robert exhaled and stared at the road ahead of them.
There was
a testiness
to Carrie tonight, and he fully understood why.
This same woman who thought she’d come to town and take the place by storm was being swept around every which way she turned.
And Robert felt awful.
That last night he’d seen her, when he all but dragged her out of Simms, had tormented him since.
He knew he should have checked on her.
He knew he should have made sure that she could make it after that.
But he didn’t do a darn thing.
He didn’t want to get involved.
He had a heart to protect after all and as for Carrie’s heart, well, that wasn’t his problem.
Now he felt as if it very much was his problem.
This kid was being eaten alive in this maggot-infected world just as he’d predicted all along and he was too selfish, too drowned in his own despair, to even do what little he could have done to help her.
But what could he do?
He offered his assistance to her, and he offered it more than once.
He even offered her a job at Dyson but she refused.
She had to take care of her business herself, she said.
And he was perfectly content,
at
the
time, to let her will stand.
But looking at her now, as she still couldn’t stop her little body from shaking, as her eyes still had that glazed over look of terror deep within them, her will was about to take a backseat to his.
He’d make her pack a bag and come with him.
No matter what.
He didn’t know exactly where he was going to take her, but he knew he wasn’t going to let her spend another night anywhere near her sister’s influence.
He didn’t want the responsibility.
Lord knows the last thing he wanted was to have yet another problem on his plate to deal with.
But he didn’t see where he had a choice.
God worked in mysterious ways, he knew that to be a fact, and it seemed predestined for him to have to do this.
It seemed preordained that he should work his will, his oftentimes iron-clad will, on a good, Christian, but feisty as all get-out lady like Carrie Banks.
Problem was, and it was a major problem, how in the world was he going to get Carrie Banks to bend to that will?
Remarkably, and yet another indication of God’s mysterious ways well at work, he got his answer almost as soon as he turned off of Phoenix Avenue and onto Carrie’s street.
Police cars, an ambulance, and even a fire truck were in the front of her building, and people were standing around either dazed or excited as the entire area was cordoned off.
“What in the
world.
. .,” Robert said as his Escalade slowed near the outer reaches of the police tape, his eyes unable to believe the scene before him.
Carrie, however, wasn’t interested in speculating.
This was her home.
She wasn’t going to wait around for somebody to tell her anything.
Without so much as glancing Robert’s way, she opened the door of his SUV and hurried out.
Robert, terrified that Carrie was walking into a situation he wasn’t certain was all that secure, slammed his stick into park, grabbed his keys, and hurried out behind her.
She was already talking with a bystander, one of those young men Robert thought he recognized as hanging out on the stoop, by the time Robert came up beside her.
“I don’t know,” he was saying to Carrie.
“All I know was that a dude drove by shootin’, that’s all I know.
I took off runnin’.
They got a body in that rescue wagon though.”
“Why aren’t they leaving?
Why aren’t they rushing him to the hospital?”
“Ain’t no him, it’s
a her
.
And it’s probably because she done croaked already.”
“Died?”
“Yeah, what you think?
You should have heard
them
shots.
That drive-by shootin’ brother was looking for blood and he didn’t care whose.”
Carrie shook her head in great dismay.
Robert wanted to throw his arms of protection around her and shield her from experiencing the horrors of man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man.
It was fast becoming a night filled with so much drama that he was praying she’d be immune to it.
But he knew she wasn’t.
“Lord
have
mercy, Lord have mercy,” she said aloud.
“I pray her soul was saved.”
“Amen,” Robert said, surprising Carrie.
“It was,” the young man replied.
“Miss Millie always talking about God and junk.
She was saved all right.”
It took Carrie a full second only to register what the young man had just said.
She whipped her body around to him so fast that he literally took a step back.
“Miss Millie?
Millie Rawlings?”
“Yeah.
That old church lady.”
“Are you telling me, are you saying to me that the lady they shot tonight was
Millie Rawlings
?”
The young man looked at Robert.
Even he could see how adversely the news was affecting Carrie.
“Yeah,” he said.
“That’s what I’m telling you.
Miss Millie dead.”
Tears welled up in Carrie’s eyes and she turned around to Robert.
He didn’t have to ask who this Millie Rawlings was, because her eyes told him that she was somebody very special to Carrie.
And it was all she needed.
Another blow.
Another letdown.
Another sterling example of how cruel this world could be.