CHAPTER NINE
JJ sat on that bench in that sterile hospital corridor waiting for word from the nursing staff. It had been two hours of waiting. He could not believe he was still there. And neither could his campaign manager, who rushed in and made his way toward the bench.
JJ, who was fighting sleep, looked over when he heard footsteps. Surprised to see him, he sat upright and wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here is the question?” Artie threw it back at him.
“I told you when you phoned where I was.”
“But you didn’t tell me why. That black chick from the restaurant? Seriously, JJ. Are you kidding me? May I remind you that you are in the middle of a campaign to retain your judgeship. The least whiff of scandal will destroy your chances.”
JJ frowned. “What scandal? She fell and I came to the hospital to make sure she was okay.”
“But what if she claims you pushed her? What if she wants to sue you for harassment? We can’t have any scandals right now.”
JJ looked at Artie as if he was a nuisance. “That’s not going to happen,” he said.
“That’s what they all say until it happens. You’re rich. Money is an equalizer. Remember that.”
JJ looked away from Artie. It was just too ridiculous for him to even entertain.
But Artie was staring at him. “What’s the deal?”
“The deal? What deal?”
“What’s she to you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? She’s nothing to me.”
“So nothing brought you all the way to this hospital? Nothing has that kind of power over you, hun?”
JJ gave him a hard look. He was worried about the young lady. That was all. “What is it that you want, Artie? I’m too tired for this.”
“I want to protect you from yourself.”
JJ frowned. He had gone too far. “Protect me? Get the fuck out of here! Who do you think you’re talking to? I don’t need your protection. Don’t you even come at me that way. Now get out of here. I mean it, Artie. Get out!” JJ pointed to the exit, showing the kind of histrionics he never showed.
Artie knew he had crossed a line. He also knew protection was a sore subject for JJ after he blamed himself for not protecting Sylvia and Logan.
“I’m sorry, alright? I didn’t mean to get out of my lane. I just want to make sure you get reelected. That’s all I’m trying to do.”
JJ understood that, but he was not in the mood. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said.
Artie exhaled. There was no talking any sense into JJ when his mind was made up. So Artie stopped trying and left.
JJ leaned his head back again. And looked at his watch again. And thought about how full his docket was tomorrow and it was already coming up on midnight. And he understood how strange it would look to Artie or any of his social circle. It was strange to him too. But he knew he wasn’t leaving until he saw for himself that she was okay.
Then the nurse finally came up to him. “Sorry it took so long, sir.”
He didn’t stand up, but he stared at the nurse. All he wanted was to hear that she was okay.
“I understand you’re waiting to hear word on LaTisha Payton.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“We’ve got her stabilized, sir. She’s going to be just fine.”
“What was the issue?”
“Dehydration mixed with a little malnutrition. Good thing you called for help when you did. Is she your daughter, sir?”
“My daughter?” JJ was surprised by that statement. She wasn’t that young. Or was she? He realized in that moment what little he knew about her. “No, she’s not my daughter.”
The nurse looked embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to imply . . . I apologize, sir.”
“May I see her?”
“You may. She’s in room 319.”
“Thank you,” JJ said and made his way to that room. His daughter, he thought as he walked. Where did she get off? He assumed LaTisha was at least pushing thirty. Then he realized people did have children at fifteen. It wasn’t as impossible as he was making it out to be.
But when he opened her room door and saw her lying on that bed with an I-V drip in her arm, he forgot all about that nurse’s unfortunate assumption and his heart ached for LaTisha. Because she didn’t deserve to be in some hospital all hooked up to machines like that. As if life hadn’t already thrown her every conceivable curveball it could.
But when she looked up and saw him standing there, she actually smiled that kind, bright smile that just warmed his heart. And made him smile too. “Hey there.”
“They said I fainted.”
“Yes, that’s what happened.”
“How did you find out? I thought you had left.”
A part of him wished he had left. Why was he getting all involved in this? All involved in her? He walked up to the side of her bed, his hands in his pants pockets moving around change. “How do you feel?”
“Like I couldn’t lift a leaf. I’ll feel better when they give me something to eat.”
JJ frowned. “They haven’t fed you yet? They said you were malnourished.”
“They said they had to take care of my dehydration first. Then they would try to find something for me to munch on. The kitchen’s closed, according to that nurse.”
The way they treated poor people never ceased to amaze JJ! Had that been somebody in his social circle, they would have sent out for food for the patient without giving it a second thought. Not scrounge around looking for crumbs for her to munch on. Like she was some fucking rabbit. He immediately pulled out his cellphone. “What would you like?”
“To eat?” Tish didn’t have to think long. “I know this is going to sound like a for real stereotype, but I don’t care. I would love some chicken,” she said.
JJ smiled. Then laughed. “Where from?”
“Popeyes if they’re open.”
“White or dark?”
“White.”
JJ phoned Uber Eats and ordered a “bucket” of chicken from Popeyes with mashed potatoes and coleslaw, gave the address, told them to phone when they were there and he’d come downstairs and get it, and then he ended the call.
Tish smiled. “KFC is the bucket people.”
“Oh right!” JJ smiled again. “My bad.”
Tish looked at him. Did he used to be hip in his younger days? “You don’t eat chicken, do you?”
“I do, yes.” JJ sat in the chair near the bed. He was exhausted.
But Tish knew he probably didn’t eat the greasy fried variety like she liked, but some fancy baked chicken hooked up by some fancy chef somewhere. “I was surprised when they said you were waiting to hear how I was doing. They said your name was James Brant. I had to think to myself who that was. Then I realized it was you. Judge Brant.”
JJ crossed his legs. It was not a conversation he wanted to have. He was still trying to work out why he was there himself.
Tish stared at him. “Why don’t you go home after the chicken comes? You look like you might fall on your face.”
It was an out and he was taking it. He didn’t owe her anything. He’d done all he needed to do. “I may just do that very thing,” he said.
“When I used to work for Miss Norris, she used to eat fried chicken for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
“Chicken at breakfast?”
“With waffles, yes, sir,” said Tish. “I didn’t even like chicken all that much when I first came to work for her. But by the time what happened happened, I was eating it right along with her.”
JJ smiled and turned sideways in his chair, to face her more, his legs still crossed. “Sounds as if you two were close.”
“We were. She ran a daycare and she hired me just to drive the van. But she liked me and started letting me help her teach the kids too.” Then a sad look appeared in Tish’s eyes. “She was like a mother to me.”
JJ remembered that it was a van that was involved in the getaway at that service station. “No further contact I take it.”
“None. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.”
JJ saw that sadness reappear in her eyes.
“None of my friends do either. My so-called friends, that is. They stopped taking my calls a week after I was arrested. It was like they believed I could do all that stupid shit those cops were saying I did. I couldn’t understand it.”
JJ stared at her. “You couldn’t understand what?”
“How they could discard me so easily. I loved all my friends. Had they gotten arrested, I would have been there to see them every time there was visitation. I would have accepted their phone calls every time they called, and put money on their books too. But they didn’t do any of that for me.” Then she scrunched up her expressive face. “Nobody did.”
“Not even your parents?”
A singular tear escaped her eye that she quickly wiped away. “I never told anybody this, but I actually called them after I was rotting in jail for a whole month. Just to ask them to bail me out. I knew they didn’t have a lot of money or anything like that, but I thought they might try to pull something together for me. I was so scared in that jail. People were being stabbed and raped and it was worse than anything I’d ever seen.”
JJ’s jaw tightened. “Did anybody harm you?”
Tish shook her head. “No because I stood up for myself. I wish they would have tried that shit on me. But the truth of the matter was that I was scared out of my mind, too, because I knew if I had to fight one of those bitches I would get an additional charge. And I was already looking at Life without parole or even Death as it was.” She shook her head. “That was an eight-month-long nightmare. I’ve been out of there for two months, but it sometimes feels like a part of me is still in there.”
In a way it was, JJ thought.
Tish gave him a hard look. “I just want to thank you again for reducing those charges for me, Judge Brant. I don’t think I would have been able to survive in that prison for much longer. And had they given me the death penalty?” She shook her head, her eyes filled with unshed tears. Then she looked at him again. “Thank you.”
JJ could see how heartfelt it was just by looking in her large eyes. Her eyes told her story better than her mouth could. “You’re welcome.”
But his heart still ached for her. And he needed to know more about her. About her background. “What did your parents say?” he asked her.
“My parents?”
“When you asked them to bail you out?”
“Oh.”
He could tell it was still an open wound for her. “They said no. My father reminded me what he told me and my baby brother when we were younger.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That if we ever got in trouble with the law, we were never to call them. They taught us right and if we couldn’t manage it, that was on us. He reminded me of that and told me not to call them again. And he hung up.”
JJ could feel her pain. It was that loud. “Did you phone again?”
She nodded. She couldn’t believe she could talk so freely to a man like him, but she could. “When I knew my daddy would be at work, I called my mama. But she said she didn’t want to hear it, that it was too late for tears, that they told me Shake wasn’t worth sweeping out the door but I wouldn’t listen. She told me to keep them out of it. They disowned me when I left with Shake. And she hung up on me too. Then I felt bad for even bothering her. She didn’t deserve that.”
“She didn’t deserve it?” JJ’s anger flashed. “What do you mean she didn’t deserve it? You were the one facing felony murder charges. You were the one who could have been sitting on Death Row right now, and she didn’t deserve a phone call from her own daughter? Shame on her is what I say!”
Tish was now staring at JJ. Nobody had ever defended her like that. Not ever. But he didn’t understand. “My parents are hardworking, salt-of-the-earth kind of people. Right is right and wrong is wrong and if you make your bed you have to lay in it. I knew who they were from jump. They told me who they were my whole life. They weren’t changing for me or for my baby brother. It’s just how we were raised, and how they were raised.”
JJ wasn’t taking back what he said, but he got her point. He moved on. “Was Shake the young man that was killed in that service station robbery?”
Tish nodded. “He was my boyfriend. We both lived in Alabama and knew each other all our lives. But we only started dating in high school when we were seventeen. It was rocky from the start. We never seemed to be able to get along for too long. Then we’d miss each other and get back together. It was a bad scene, man. Just toxic and dramatic and so exhausting that I didn’t know if I was going or coming half the time.”
“Let me guess,” said JJ. “But you loved him? It was all about love, right?”
He was impressed when she didn’t immediately say yes.
“It was all about lust and need and insecurities all masquerading as love,” she said, which impressed him further.
“But it was never pure love,” she continued. “He just never made me feel right or even happy. He was all I knew until I thought every boy was just like him so I might as well stay with him. At least I knew him. That was the kind of wrong thinking I was doing.” She shook her head. “We stayed together, off and on, for ten long, tumultuous years.”
JJ stared at her. He loved her keen self-awareness. Then he remembered how that nurse thought she could be his daughter. He did the math: seventeen years old when they met. Stayed together for eleven years, presumably until he died. “You’re twenty-eight?” he asked her.
“Twenty-nine. I had a birthday in prison.”
JJ stared at her. “That had to be an awful birthday.”
She nodded. “It was. It was really bad.”
“And I’m sure you were missing your boyfriend.”
Tish nodded her head. “I hate to admit it, but I was. He was my comfort zone. Then all of a sudden everything about my life was out of that zone, and I didn’t know how to process it or deal with it. Shake was my go-to person whenever life got too big for me. Then I was in prison, my friends were gone, my parents weren’t having it, and I didn’t even have Shake.” She was staring as if she was staring into yesterday. Then she shook her head as if she was shaking it off, and looked at JJ. “So what’s your story?” she asked him.
JJ wasn’t accustomed to people asking him deeply personal questions at all, even though he asked such questions for a living. “What do you mean?”
“Are you married? Have kids?”
“No.”
“To which one?”
“Both.”
Tish found it odd that a man his age wouldn’t be married or have kids. Then she wondered if he was younger than she thought. She had figured him to be in his mid-forties. Maybe she was wrong. “How old are you?” she asked him.
JJ was getting uncomfortable and decided to joke it off. “I’m not twenty-seven, that’s for damn sure.”
It worked. Tish laughed, even though she wasn’t twenty-seven either. But she got his point. But then that sense of drain overtook her body again, as if just laughing required too much energy, and their conversation petered off.
And then exhaustion caught up with JJ too. Sitting in that chair, his legs crossed, he fell asleep.
It was Tish’s turn to stare at him. Because she didn’t know what to make of him. He could ask her all kinds of personal questions. But as soon as she asked him anything remotely personal, he clammed up. It was nice of him to get her that room for two weeks. That was a great thing he did for her. But he heard her stomach growling like it was going crazy, which he had to know meant she was hungry as hungry could get, but yet he didn’t lift a finger to even offer her a dollar to get a bag of chips. But when she fainted he decided to come all this way to the hospital and to stay for hours just to hear that she was okay? Even though when she was at the restaurant trying to get his help, he forgot about her. It didn’t make sense to her. Why was he bothering with the big things but not with the simple things? She continued to stare at him as he slept. He was such a contradiction of a man. Like two people in one. What was up with him?
But it was his ringing phone that broke through the silence and interrupted her train of thought. It also woke him up.
It was Uber Eats. They were downstairs. “I shall return,” JJ said in that playful/serious way of his, and he left the room. Five minutes later, he was walking back in, not with a bucket of chicken, but with a box of chicken and fixings.
“The nurses didn’t say anything to you?” she asked him happily.
“They gave me the side eye,” JJ said with a smile, “but that was as far as they went. Hell, they didn’t have anything to give to you. They’d better not come at me.”
“I know that’s right,” Tish said as she pressed the button to raise her bed to a sitting position.
JJ took over, pressing his finger on top of hers when it seemed like she didn’t have the energy to press hard enough. She thought it was their first time touching. And she felt that touch to the roots of her hair. But JJ knew it wasn’t their first touch. He had held her in his arms when she fainted at that motel. He was too worried about her wellbeing to pay attention to how she felt in his arms, but afterwards he remembered that feel. She felt perfect in his arms. And he felt protective of her when she was there. And touching her finger on that button only reaffirmed that for him. She was not his responsibility in any way, shape, or form. But why did it feel like she was?
Tish used the hand sanitizer to wash her hands. And then she couldn’t open that chicken box fast enough. But just as she grabbed a small wing and was about to put it to her mouth, the energy left her and she couldn’t do it. She was out of gas again, just like it felt at that motel. It was going to take many more hours of that drip before she was back to normal.
JJ, who had sat back down, realized her situation and hurried up to her bed. He sat on the edge of the bed and began feeding her mashed potatoes and coleslaw first, and then he broke off pieces of chicken, with a fork she thought with a grin, and fed that to her too.
When Tish wasn’t devouring the food, which could not have tasted better, she was staring at JJ as he fed her. She had forgotten what kindness looked like. And what it felt like to be regarded by someone. And he did regard her rather highly, she thought. Why else would he stick around so long, and feed her too?
It was a question even JJ couldn’t answer. He kept getting himself deeper involved with her and he didn’t know why.
“You can have some too, you know,” Tish said to him.
“I’ve already had dinner. But it certainly looks tempting.”
“Then eat some!”
But JJ was shaking his head. “If I eat this time of night I’ll have heartburn for days.”
Tish smiled. Then she laughed.
He looked at her pretty dark-skinned face. “What’s so funny?”
“With an answer like that, you’re right. You most certainly are not twenty-seven.”
When JJ heard her explanation, he laughed too. She had a warmth about her, he felt, and an intelligence that belied her circumstances. That was why, he learned long ago, to never judge a book by its cover.
She ate so much, in the small bites he fed to her, that she fell asleep eating. Which made him laugh again. He’d never smiled nor laughed so much in a long, long time.
He closed up her box of chicken and put it aside. But he kept her in that upright position for thirty more minutes, so that her food could digest, and then he pressed her bed back into the prone position and stood there staring at her for a few minutes longer. Best he got out now. She was in good hands. And she had food to eat. He also took a wad of cash, found her backpack. He noticed that she had a couple more outfits in it, along with toiletries like toothpaste and a toothbrush. Five or six pairs of clean panties. Her life, he figured, confined to a backpack. He placed the money inside her jeans pocket to tie her over when she was discharged. She’d be okay. He did his bit. He could bow out gracefully now.
He left. He had a full day tomorrow. She could make it on her own from here.
But somehow he knew it wasn’t going to be as simple as he had wanted it to be. It was easy to pick her up. But once he made that move, it was much harder to put her down. To wash his hands of her like she was a chore he had finished.
His point was proven when he finally made it home and made it to bed. He laid there, thinking about her and her alone, and couldn’t fall asleep. Mainly because he couldn’t stop thinking about her. And how she was faring at that hospital. If she was sleeping well. If she’d had a relapse and was not getting enough fluids in.
He threw his covers off and sat on the edge of his bed. Then he did it. He phoned the hospital.
“I’m checking on a patient,” he said on his cellphone. “Her name? LaTisha Payton. Yes, ma’am. Who am I?” He would have preferred to remain anonymous, but that wasn’t possible. “I’m Judge Brant,” he said.
“Oh. She’s resting comfortably, sir.”
JJ was relieved to hear it. “Okay, thank you,” he said, and ended the call.
And then, and only then, was he able to fall asleep.