CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ricki’s parents, Mamie and Hershel Richardson, were seated at the dining room table on the far-left end of the great room.
What Vince saw was a very well-dressed black businessman in glasses, and a most attractive black woman in a nice dress with an apron around her thin waist. He could easily see where Ricki got her good looks from: both of her parents were stunning.
But that might be all that recommended them as far as Ricki was concerned because as soon as she saw them she abruptly stopped where she stood. It was so sudden that Vince looked at her, to make sure she was okay. But he knew she wasn’t. He could feel her anguish.
And her father, who sat at the head of the table, didn’t stop eating even as they stood there. But he eventually looked up, and then motioned for them to come on through to the dining room.
“Hey Daddy. Hey Mommy.”
“Hey baby,” her mother said with some affection and with a slight smile on her face. But Vince noticed that when her father glanced at her mother, her mother’s smile quickly dissolved.
And that was why Ricki blamed her mother too. She could have left that man in their infancy. She could have been stronger than she was. Things would have been so different for her and all of her siblings, she believed, had her mother stepped up.
But at least her mother spoke to her. Her father gave her that critical look he always gave her. Then he looked at Vince. But Vince was already sizing him up too. “Who is this?” he asked Ricki.
But Vince, to Ricki’s shock, walked around the table and extended his hand to Hershel Richardson. “My name is Vincent Fontaine, sir,” said Vince. He was careful to add sir in deference to his age and position in Ricki’s life, even though he wasn’t that much younger than Hershel himself.
But Hershel looked at that hand, and although every bone in his body didn’t want to shake it Vince could tell, he eventually reached out and shook his hand. “It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Richardson.”
Then Vince walked over to Mamie’s seat and extended his hand. “And you too, Mrs. Richardson, ma’am.”
Mamie seemed surprised by Vince’s show of respect for her. She was usually grossly overlooked. She even looked over at Hershel before she shook his hand.
“Have a seat,” Hershel said to Ricki and Vince.
Vince walked over and pulled out the chair for Ricki, she sat down, and then he sat down beside her. The tension in that beautiful home was thick and surly. He wasn’t leaving her side.
He could also tell Ricki was trying to be cordial with these people and to put on a brave face. “How have you been, Daddy? What about you, Mommy?”
She sounded like a kid to Vince. He could even hear a tremble in her voice.
“Who is this man?” her father asked her.
“My name is Vincent Fontaine,” Vince said again.
“You told me your name. But who are you? What do you do for a living?”
“I own a public relations firm in Washington, D.C.”
“Public relations?” Then it dawned on Hershel. “I knew I knew that name. Fontaine-Bachman? Is that your firm?”
Ricki was surprised that her father had heard of him. But Vince wasn’t. Every businessman worth their salt would have heard of it. He was worldwide. “Yes, that’s my firm.”
“You rehabilitate Fortune 500 CEOs or just their companies?”
“Both,” said Vince.
Hershel shook his head. “They commit all kinds of crimes and unpardonable offenses, but you rehabilitate them as if nothing never happened.”
Vince studied Hershel. He wasn’t lying. “That’s correct,” he admitted.
“I own a business of my own. A small factory. But I still read the Wall Street Journal. Fontaine-Bachman is worth billions. You’re a billionaire.”
Everybody, including Mamie and Davey, looked at Vince as if he had grown horns on his head.
But Ricki was especially floored. A billionaire?
She knew he was rich, but she never dreamed in a million years he was that kind of rich!
She hadn’t had the chance to even Google the man.
It was a startling revelation. It was surreal to her.
But she didn’t so much as look Vince’s way. Her father already suggested they didn’t know each other very well, so she played it off as if it was no news to her. She wasn’t giving her old man an inch.
But she didn’t have to. He gave himself that inch. “My daughter is neither Fortune 500 anything, and she’s a CEO in her mind only,” Herschel said. “What is a man like you, a billionaire no less, doing with a nobody like Rasheda? And how old are you anyway?”
Vince stared at Hershel. Him he didn’t like. That much he knew. “She’s hardly a nobody,” he said.
“You get my drift. What are you doing with her?”
It wasn’t lost on Vince, either, that he and Ricki were an odd couple in many ways. If couple was the word. It was too soon to go there, and they both knew it. “She’s a remarkable woman,” Vince said.
Hershel chuckled. “I’m sure she is. On her back. How old are you?”
Vince was about to fire back at Hershel for his little nasty remark about Ricki, but Ricki hit her knee against his knee. The last thing she needed was some testosterone battle.
Vince heeded her knee hit and held his tongue. “I’m forty,” he said.
“She’s not even thirty yet,” Hershel proclaimed. “Sounds like some cradle-robbing to me. But you still haven’t answered my question. What is a man like you doing with a girl like Rasheda?”
Vince wanted to lash out again, but he held on again. For Ricki. “It’s a long story,” he said.
“Oh I’ll bet it is,” Hershel responded as he looked accusatorily at his daughter.
Which angered Vince. And he couldn’t hold back any longer. “Whether you believe it or not, you have a wonderful daughter,” he fired back. “I’m honored to have gotten to know her.”
Davey and Mamie looked at Vince. And although Ricki felt warm inside to hear him, or anybody, say something so nice about her, she knew her father.
He would view any kindness toward her as an affront to him.
That was how he treated her and her siblings when they were kids.
They didn’t deserve compliments in his eyes.
He wanted them to be tough and hard like him, and that excluded anything positive.
“You praise her now because you apparently haven’t known her very long,” Hershel shot back. “But stick around. Your tune will change.”
Vince looked at Ricki’s mother. Why didn’t she speak up for her daughter?
And although she was pretending to eat and be distracted by the food, he could see where she was simply moving the food around on her plate.
She wasn’t eating at all. But whenever Mamie would look up, Vince also could see care and concern in her mother’s eyes, even if she was attempting to hide it.
Ricki saw it too. Her mother was her father’s prisoner in many ways. But her mother could have gotten out of that prison many times, and didn’t. She couldn’t get over that part either.
But Hershel moved on. He looked at Ricki. “Davey said you have something to tell us.”
“I do.”
Mamie looked up. “What is it about?” she asked her daughter.
“It’s about Erica, Mommy. I wanted to be the first to tell you and Daddy.”
“The first?” asked her father. “You think we don’t know what she did? She murdered that doctor. Everybody knows that.”
“Not that. What I’m talking about just happened.”
Hershel and Mamie were confused. “What just happened?” Mamie asked.
Ricki had to balance herself. Vince stopped worrying about her parents and placed his arm around Ricki’s waist. It was the help she needed to continue. “She’s dead, Mommy,” Ricki said as tears stained her eyes. “Erica’s dead.”
At first the silence in the house was deafening. Even Davey, who was standing behind his father, sat down in a chair against the wall. “Dead?” he said. Then he looked at his sister.
“What do you mean she’s dead?” her mother asked. “She’s in jail.”
“They said she . . . They said she . . .” Ricki covered her mouth. She couldn’t even say the words.
So Vince said them for her. “The police are saying Erica hung herself this morning.”
Hershel sat straight back in his chair. “What?”
Mamie let out a cry so guttural that Ricki jumped up from her chair and went and comforted her mother.
Hershel looked at Vince. “She’s dead? My child is dead?”
Vince was surprised by Hershel’s concern, but it was definitely there. “Yes sir,” he said.
Hershel backed up from the table, stood up, and went to the big bay window where he stared out with his back to everybody else.
Davey got up, hit the wall with his fist, and began pacing the floor. Ricki and her mother were holding each other and crying together. Then Davey went over, got down on his knees, and held both of them. And just like that they were a family again. They were a unit again.
Even Hershel eventually went over to the family, stood his wife up, and pulled her into his arms. He broke down too.
Vince felt as if he was an interloper in their life. He went outside, and sat on the porch.