Single Mom (27 page)

“I can run a mile,” Walter stated. “I used to jog in the mornings with my brother. I could even keep up with him.”

I was tempted to say, “That’s because you were jogging,” but I left it alone. I think participating in sports would be good for Walter. At least it would keep him occupied from thinking about the streets. And I seriously doubted his school grades would suffer.

I said, “Yeah, well, maybe you
should
go out for the track team. What do you usually do with your free time?”

“Play computer games.”

I grinned at him. “Yeah, that figures,” I said. “All the time I spent
outside
riding my bike, your generation spends
inside
with joysticks in their hands.”

Walter smiled back at me. In my opinion, that computer game, joystick mentality definitely added to turning out plenty of antisocial kids. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that Walter should participate in some kind of school sport.

“Are you sure you want to go out for the track team?” I asked him again. “We can buy you the best track shoes out there.”

He looked at me and answered, “Yeah, I don’t care.”

I said, “All right then. I’ll talk to your mother about it when I take you back home tomorrow night.”

He yawned and said, “Okay.”

In the next five minutes, Walter was sound asleep with his seat leaned back. I looked over at him and thought about my son’s potential for the rest of the ride. With the right guidance, he could be anything he wanted to be, except for maybe a basketball or football player. Those two sports were overrated for black men anyway. There were so many other professions that young black men were ignoring. Maybe my son could even become a sports agent and represent his brother’s interest for a professional basketball team one day. Walter would definitely need a passion toward sports to do that.

Maybe he could even run for some type of political office. He had plenty of drive and opinions. With that profession in mind, however, he would need to clean up his social preference for being “a roughneck” and join debating teams. He could do that. Walter would make a very strong politician. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t want to bullshit the people like many politicians are forced to do. Maybe Walter could be a bank executive like his old man. He already understood the workings of
capital gains, interest, and loans. Then again, maybe he could become an entrepreneur like his mother and grandfather. I didn’t like my job all that much anyway, and Walter seemed more ambitious than I was at his age, so maybe he would need to control his own destiny.

Walter’s potential was unlimited! I was excited just thinking about it. It turned an hour drive into what seemed more like twenty minutes. My son was far from being a street thug of any sort, he just needed me there to remind him of that.

I woke Walter up as we drove through the private property entrance and up to the familiar four-bedroom stone-built house of my upbringing. My parents were already sitting out on the front lawn, awaiting our arrival. They seemed eager to be meeting with my son again. The first visit was a shocker, and the second was spent just feeling the situation out. Of course, they asked to see him a lot more in between, but I didn’t feel the moral support from them at that time to continue bringing him. Maybe things had changed, and their hard-line attitudes had softened a bit. Especially after I had married Beverly and announced her recent pregnancy to them. Nevertheless, I had my own intentions anyway. After all, Walter wouldn’t be staying with my parents in Barrington, he would be staying with Beverly and me in a brand-new house of our own. I just wanted him to feel the power of my family’s wealth.

Walter woke up, stretched out, and immediately spotted the new live-in maid my parents had hired. She was a Dominican woman in her late thirties. She looked a lot younger though, and she was browner than all of us; a deep, shiny brown with long black hair and matching black eyes in a cream-colored uniform and soft shoes.

“That’s the maid?” my son asked me, watching the attractive helper pour tea. When he was nine, my parents had a much older black woman who worked there at the house. They usually allowed the maids to return to their families on the weekends unless they were having company, which was the case with us.

I smiled, reading my son’s young mind. “She’s the new one,” I told him.

Judging from his gleeful expression, I don’t believe he was unhappy to be visiting any longer.

“Is she gonna tuck me in bed?” he asked me with a healthy laugh.

I shook my head and told him to calm down. I couldn’t help but
smile at it. Walter had a normal boy’s attraction to the opposite sex, that’s for sure.

“Well, how are you?” my mother, Dolores Perry, greeted us with a hug. Her hair was turning a brighter gray by the year, yet my mother did not have one wrinkle on her smooth brown face. She was turning sixty-four in November. My father, Walter Perry Senior, at sixty-six, had already done most of the graying that he could do. I guess that came from all of his worries and anxieties. I hoped the same wouldn’t happen to me, but I figured it probably would.

My father stood up from the white lawn chairs and shook our hands with a nod. He was never the excitable type. He was the kind of successful man whom you had to prove everything to. At first, he even asked me to have a blood test on Walter, but I turned his ridiculous suggestion down. I
knew
that Walter was my son. My father even complained about Walter carrying on our name, but I ignored that as well. What was done was done.

“Well, we’re both healthy and well rested,” I told my parents, alluding to Walter’s nap inside the car.

My son looked at me and grinned.

“Are you sure that Beverly couldn’t have made it?” my mother asked me.

Beverly and I had just visited three weeks ago to announce the news of her pregnancy. It was obvious my mother was still apprehensive around my son. Maybe I should have visited with him more often, so that my parents could get used to seeing me with him. However, I had just recently increased my own activity with my son.

“Not on this trip, Mom. She needs her rest,” I answered.

My mother nodded. “Okay, I understand,” she said. “She’s going to need all of the rest and energy that she can get. It took me eleven hours to deliver you.” She took a quick look at my son, and I proceeded to read her mind. She wanted to ask how long it took for Denise to deliver him, but she held her tongue instead.

“Five hours,” I filled in for her. Denise made sure that I knew, yet I declined to participate in Walter’s birth because of all the emotions that would have been involved.

“Well, the guest room is all ready for you,” she told my son, blowing off my answer. I was sure she had heard me. “Lucy, could you get my grandson’s things and take them to his room, please,” she addressed the maid.

The word “grandson” lingered in my head for a second. I was shocked and caught off guard by it. Usually, my parents called Walter “the boy.” Maybe they really were coming to grips with my son. It was definitely not an overnight process.

When Lucy, short for Lucienda, gently took my son’s bags, he began to smile.

My father caught his stare and grunted, “Young man, that’s exactly what got your
father
in trouble. You mind your manners.” It had a lot of bite to it, yet my father tried to camouflage the deep flesh wound with a sheepish grin.

My mother turned and looked at him with horror. She got sour and snapped, “They’re no different from
you
. Neither one of them.”

I thought of retrieving Walter’s things and getting the hell out of there already! I didn’t bring him there for that. My father’s comment was highly disrespectful to all parties involved; my son, his mother, myself,
and
Lucienda, whether Walter understood the slander or not.

I said, “Thanks a lot. Thanks for starting us off on such a good foot. I really appreciate that,” and walked away from him. How could I have regularly brought my son around such lethal venom? My father had just reminded me, in light speed, why my son had only been to Barrington twice.

I decided to lead him into the house while my parents got to arguing with each other out on the front lawn.

Once we made it inside, Walter looked up and asked me, “Was my mom a maid?”

Evidently, he
did
understand the slander. “No, she was not,” I told him.

“So why did he say that to me then?” Walter had tears in his eyes. I knew I couldn’t stay there after that.

I shook my head and responded, “Let’s go get your things. We’ll have a talk about it tonight. Just me and you.”

“We’re leaving?” he asked me. He seemed surprised by my suddenness. He was attempting to hold back his tears, but they were rolling down his face already, while he tried to wipe them away. I could feel my son’s shock and anger in my gut, and I decided there was no other decision to be made about it.

“You don’t want to stay here, do you?” I asked him, just to make sure. My mind was already made, even if he said yes. We were leaving. Pronto!

“No,” he told me with a sniff. That settled it. We marched up to the guest room and picked up his bags.

My mother stopped us on our way back down the stairs. “What are you doing?” she asked me. My father was standing at her side. He had apology written all over his face, but it was too late for that.

“Your father has something to say to you; to both of you,” my mother informed us.

“Yeah, well, he can save it for another time. If there
is
another time,” I told her. I didn’t even want to look at the man. He had ruined everything.

“Well, you’re not driving back to Chicago right now, are you? Junior, you just got off the road. You should at least give your legs a rest.”

“I will,” I said, as my son and I made our way to the front door. “At the Titan Hotel.”

“Well, maybe we could all have dinner over there,” she suggested. She was trying her best to keep things from falling completely apart.

I wasn’t so optimistic. “Or, maybe not,” I responded to her. We were quickly back out the door.

My parents argued some more while we reloaded the car.

“Junior, we’ll be over there for dinner this evening. You hear me?” my mother yelled toward my son and I.

I climbed inside and started the ignition. When I looked up again, my mother was at my driver’s side window. “I love you, honey.” Then she looked inside at my son and added, “I love you both.”

I said, “Yeah, I just wish that
he
would learn how to,” and drove off. I didn’t mean to be so short and disrespectful to my mother, but if I stayed there a second longer, I might have said and done some vicious things to my father, things my son did not need to hear or see.

The Titan Hotel in northern Illinois was one of the most elaborate and expensive hotels around. The average room there costs no less than two hundred seventy-five dollars a night, and it was only eighteen miles from my parents’ house, off Northwest Highway. I tried to use every excuse I could to stay there, and had managed to do so on four separate occasions, including a stay after the prom with an ancient-history girlfriend.

When we pulled up to the heavy, gold-trimmed doors, Walter asked, “Is this where we’re staying?” I imagined he would have sounded a lot more excited about it had he been in better spirits.

“May I take your bags, sir?”

I popped the trunk and the bellboy hauled our bags inside for us. Then I gave the car keys to the valet parking attendant.

“Enjoy your stay at the Titan,” he told us.

“Oh, we plan to,” I responded.

I had already made reservations from the car phone for a room on the twenty-third floor with my platinum Visa card. The twenty-third floor was one level down from the penthouse, where there was a dance floor, a restaurant and bar, and a large outdoor swimming pool. There was an indoor swimming pool and a sauna on the fourth floor. The Titan Hotel was a visitor’s dream!

By the time Walter had taken a good look at our bedroom, he was already in better spirits. The color television set was thirty-five inches with surround sound, cable, and pay-per-view movies.

“Man, this place is
tight!
” he told me. He took a seat on the La-Z-Boy chair and leaned it back as far as he could.

“‘Tight’ means good, right?” I asked him with a grin.

“Yeah,” he answered, clicking on the television.

“Are you hungry?” I asked him. “How about we start off with some seafood. You like shrimp, don’t you?”

He nodded like a madman. “Yeah, I like shrimp. And crab cakes.”

“Coming right up,” I told him. I got on the phone to order room service. I planned on going all out for my son, no matter how much it cost me.

We watched college football on cable while we ate our seafood. We planned on buying trunks and going swimming once our meals settled. The Titan Hotel had a gift shop that sold swim trunks and beach towels. Then we could shower, re-dress, and shoot some pool and play video games on the penthouse level.

After we had done all that we could do in one day, I sat with my son inside of the penthouse restaurant, while he enjoyed an ice cream float of vanilla and Sprite.

“What do you think?” I asked him. “Did you enjoy yourself today?” By then it was after ten at night. I wasn’t planning on giving Walter a curfew that evening. If he could hang, I was willing to let him stay up until the sun rose.

He said, “Yeah, I could stay here
every
weekend!”

I chuckled and asked him, “Would you like to?”

“How much does it cost?” he asked me.

“Let’s put it this way,” I answered, “if we planned to stay here every weekend, then we’re talking Tiger Woods money. Can you handle that?”

He nodded and said, “Yeah, I can handle it. Just give me ten years.”

I smiled. “Oh yeah? And would you bring
your
son out here?” I asked him.

He licked his lips of ice cream and responded, “Yup. I would bring my
whole
family.”

“My father brought me here when I was young, too,” I said. My father had taken my mother and me to stay at the Titan twice. I’d been in love with the place ever since. Every few years or so they added something new to keep up with the times, like the computer room on the twelfth floor.