Single Mom (8 page)

I hopped out of my Maxima, fresh from the car wash, and knocked on her door. It was the first time I had ever worn a suit on a first date in my life. Denise opened her door, wearing a midnight blue, curve-hugging, knee-length dress.

I smiled and said, “Hello, gorgeous,” before handing her the two red roses I had bought for the occasion. I was trying to make the best impression I could. I told her one rose represented her and the other represented me, two hearts and souls coming together.

“Aww, isn’t that the sweetest thing,” she gushed at me, with a peck on the cheek. As I walked her to the car with the roses in hand, she added, “Mmm, you smell good, too. What kind of cologne are you wearing?”

I answered her like a king. “Armani.” Then I opened the passenger-side door for her and helped her to slide her sexy brown legs in. When I first went to lunch with Denise, I asked her if she worked out, because her body was in such great shape. She said, “Yes, every day from six-thirty
A.M.
until eleven-thirty
P.M.
” I broke out laughing. The woman was so darn busy that her body remained skin tight naturally.

“So, where are we going?” she asked me.

“You ever heard of The Retreat, on the far South Side?” I asked her.

Denise’s face lit up. “That’s the place where they turned a mansion into a restaurant, isn’t it?”

I smiled. I figured she had heard of it. I said, “Yeah, that’s the one.” I was proud of my good choice of a first date.

“Have you ever been there before?” she asked me.

“I sure haven’t, but I always
wanted
to go there. Now I get the chance to do it with you.”

“Dennis, you really didn’t have to do all this.” She seemed embarrassed by my hospitality.

“But I wanted to,” I insisted. “Now get ready to enjoy yourself, because I put a lot of thought into this.” I damn sure wasn’t going to take her to some low-budget place to eat. I wanted the best, and I figured that The Retreat would represent success in black business.

We got there and enjoyed the place and sucked in all of its elegance, but Denise seemed to be missing something. I could just feel it. She became too silent not to have things on her mind. The wisdom that age and experience gives you was beginning to kick in for me. You get a certain calmness that makes you feel you can tell what’s going on in a woman’s mind.

I asked her, “So, what are you striving for now?” I wanted her to tell me that she needed something, or someone. Someone like me.

“I’m just trying to maintain what I have, basically. I mean, we’re only human. All we can really do is strive to be better people.”

“What if we never quite reach our goals, whatever they may be?” I asked for the hell of it. I just wanted to keep her talking to find out who she was and how she felt about things.

“Well, in that case, I would ask, ‘How hard did you try?’ And if you gave it your all and still didn’t succeed, I’d tell you to come up with another game plan.”

I smiled at her. I thought she was going to say that your all is the best you can do.

Denise chuckled and proceeded to read my mind. “I get tired of people telling me they’ve done all that they can do. The truth is, many of us haven’t done
half
of what we can do. Everybody needs to push a little harder to accomplish their goals. That’s a major problem in society today; too many people are half-steppin’.

“Like you, for instance,” she said to me. “Dennis, you could have taken me any place, worn whatever you wanted to wear, and spent a lot less energy on me, but you chose to do more, and I really do appreciate it. However, that still doesn’t mean that you’re gonna get under my dress anytime soon,” she told me with a grin.

I laughed out loud. She was as honest as I was. “And that
is
the truth,” I admitted. What else could I say?

She reached out and held my hand. “You know, it’s amazing how when people don’t get what they want the first time around, a lot of them just get sour and never put their hearts back into it. Because the bottom line is that we’re not gonna get everything we want
when
we want it. The world just doesn’t work that way. At least not for most of us. Only a few of us are lucky that way,” she said.

I nodded to her. “Yeah, and those are usually the type of people who are never satisfied with anything.”

“Because they never had to struggle,” she responded. “They take things for granted. Struggle makes us all a lot stronger, and those who are afraid of struggle are the ones who are just plain immature. They’re like little children, needing somebody to lead them through every step of the way. Then they want to get tired all of a sudden. ‘Oh, I’m so tired.’”

I found that Denise could go on for a while, talking about the shortcomings of society, motivation, positive thinking, and the general lack of
progression. She was just a dynamic woman. By the time our food came, I hardly had an appetite. I just wanted to listen to her. I kept wondering why she wasn’t married, or
at least
taken.

“So how did you wind up getting into the finance business?” I asked her. Before that night, I had only asked her about the business, and not how she got into it.

“It was just something that I found I could do well,” she answered, eating a tender salmon dish. I ordered steak, cooked well.

“Most of us never fully utilize our talents,” I told her. “I took piano lessons for about eight years, and just decided to give it up after high school. It just didn’t seem like a manly thing to do, you know. But sometimes I find myself daydreaming about continuing on with it, like Thelonious Monk or Herbie Hancock or somebody.”

“Oh,” Denise perked. “I
thought
your hands felt kind of soft for a
truck driver
. So, you’re a Mr. Piano, incognito.”

“Now, wait a minute, I didn’t say I was a pro,” I told her.

“You don’t have to be. Can you
play
the doggone thing?”

“Oh yeah, I can play. I just didn’t wanna get to lying on myself, having you think that I can
jam
on the thing. Because I’m not that good.”

“You’re better than me. I never played the piano a day in my life,” she told me. “We never owned one.”

“Well, in that case, I’m sure I can show you a thing or two, just to get you started with a little something.”

She gave me this long, mischievous grin that made me think of us together, naked. It was one of the many small hints I observed that told me Denise was definitely interested in me.

“I would like that,” she said.

I was certain that she would, but like she said before, we don’t always get what we want the first time around. I would have to go over what I knew before I even
thought
about showing her anything! I knew I would have been rusty.

I didn’t expect a kiss on the lips that night, but to my surprise, Denise gave me a wet one at her doorstep anyway.

“That’s for your effort,” she told me with a smile.

“All I ask is that we can do it again,” I responded.

She held my hand again and said, “Don’t worry. We will. I promise. It just might not be when you want, or when
I
want. It may be sometime in between.”

“Well, that’s what they say, ‘Real relationships are about compromise,’” I told her. “Okay then. I can agree to those terms.”

I went home alone that night and remembered it being the most pleasing closure of a first date that I ever had. It was maturity. I thought of Denise as a worthwhile mission, and I had my heart all the way into it. I had committed myself to going that extra mile for something,
someone
, I should say, who was definitely worth it.

Back on the road, my ten legal hours of driving were up. Larry and I had stopped at a truck station in Kentucky, ate some fattening fast food, and were ready to get back on our way to Orlando, Florida. It was close to nine o’clock at night, and time for Larry to do his part at the wheel.

“You ready, man?” I asked him.

He stretched and answered, “Yeah, I’m ready.”

I traded places with him and we got back on our way. Larry would get in these moods where he wouldn’t talk while driving, and that was fine with me, because sometimes I got tired of his yapping. He never made much sense half of the time anyway. He wasn’t too much trouble either. That’s why I didn’t mind him being a part of my run team. A guy could easily drive you crazy on a three-day run, and the older I got, the less I wanted to chance driving with guys whom I may have had problems with.

After Larry was at the wheel for a while, I got tired and went inside the sleeper to crash myself. When I woke back up, abruptly, to the sound of a police siren, it was after three in the morning, eastern standard time, and Larry had gotten us pulled over for speeding.

“Shit, Larry! How fast were you driving?”

“Ninety. What are you worried about? It’s
my
ticket, right?”

I said, “You got that right. What state are we in anyway?”

“Georgia.”

I nodded and waited to get back on the road.

The Georgia state trooper asked Larry how long he had been driving, our destination, and asked him for his medical card. Then he asked Larry if he was by himself, and I was forced to show my face and IDs.

“Shit, man!” I snapped at Larry afterward. “If this was
your
damn ticket, then why did
I
have to get up?”

“Man, fuck that honky. He wouldn’t have done all that shit to no white drivers. All he had to do was check the logbook.”

I shook my head and went back inside the sleeper. “Just get back on the damn road. Okay?”

Larry looked me in the eye and said, “You watch how you talk to me, motherfucker. I’ll
crash
this damn thing.”

“Yeah, well, you better make sure that I die if you do, because if I live, I’m gonna cut off your arms, and then your legs, and then your dick, and watch you bleed to death on the side of the road.”

Larry broke out laughing and said, “You’re a sick motherfucker, man.”

I told him, “That’s right. Don’t ever fuck with an old man, young blood. It’s dangerous.”

“You ain’t
that
damn old.”

“Yeah, but I am old enough. Now just shut up and keep driving.”

Larry was quiet for a few minutes, then he said, “Man, I gotta get to the next rest station
fast
. I gotta take me a
log
of a shit.”

I smiled. Good thing the next rest station was only two miles away. Sometimes, you get caught in between exits and have to drive ten, twenty miles before you reach the next rest room. I thought about Larry having to take a shit in the dark woods and a deer running out to kick him in the ass, and I broke out laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Your momma’s buck teeth,” I told him.

I caught him off guard. All Larry could do was laugh with me. You get silly sometimes after being on sixty-hour-
plus
runs with a guy. Every kind of emotion you can imagine will likely pass through you. That’s why it was so important to team up with someone you could get along with.

When we pulled over to the rest station so Larry could use the toilet, I got out and stretched. Then I found myself with an urge to call Denise and ask her if she had received the roses I sent to her earlier. I knew she had. It was simply an excuse to talk to her.

Denise answered her phone on the first ring, just like I knew she would. She was a light sleeper, and she was always concerned about her image with her sons. Late-night phone calls weren’t something she condoned. Nevertheless, she had begun to bend the rules, just a little bit, for me. I guess she understood just how much it meant to me. You get lonely on the road a lot.

“Yes, Dennis, I got the roses,” she said, before I could ask.

All I could do was smile. She knew me better than I thought she did. Sisters are more perceptive than most guys give them credit for anyway.

“Did you have a rocky trip or a smooth one?” she asked me, loud and clear. She sounded as if she was
expecting
my late-night call. Maybe she did expect it. We had been going strong for a full year, and I had driven thousands of miles away from her and always managed to call her with expressions of love.

“It was the smoothest ride that I could hope for. The only thing that
would have made it better would have been Denise Stewart in the passenger seat instead of this rock-headed Larry.”

“Hmm, maybe next time,” she told me.

“And how did
your
day go?” I asked her.

“It was very trying as usual. The roses made it a little better though.”

“Well, you know there’s plenty more where those came from.”

“I would hope so. I would hope that there was a whole package of sweet, chocolate muscles where they came from, too.”

I broke up laughing. I loved it when Denise talked that talk. “It’s more chocolate where those roses came from than you could ever hope for,” I responded.

She chuckled. “I hope this doesn’t turn into one of those nasty all-nighters. I have to get up early and take care of my usual business. Call me back with part two tomorrow. TGIF.”

“No problem, baby. No problem at all. It’ll be the same time and same place, after the crickets start creepin’. I wouldn’t want Larry to hear our conversation anyway. He’s too young to hear it.”

Denise laughed again and said, “Okay. I’ll look forward to the call.”

As soon as I hung up the phone, Larry climbed back into the driver’s seat and smiled at me.

“You just finished talking to that
corporate
sister, didn’t you?”

“First of all, the woman’s name is Denise. Denise Stewart. And secondly, it’s none of your damn business who I was talking to.”

Larry grinned. Then he tried to look serious. He said, “Old man, you better climb back inside of that sleeper and get yourself some rest. ’Cause if you keep talking that shit like you talkin’ you gon’
need
every minute of it.”

I said, “You ain’t
that
tough, young blood,” and climbed back into the sleeper.

“Yeah, but I see you did what I
told
you to do,” he responded to me.