Roses Are Red

my house.
    All around Sampson and me, men and women were
sobbing.
The minister and his wife were busy telling everybody that the outpouring of emotion was for the best — just to let it all out, the anger, the fear, the poison inside. Which just about everybody in the church was doing. Everybody but Sampson and me seemed to be crying their eyes out.
    “Nana Mama owes us big time for this little number,” Sampson leaned in and said in a whisper.
    I smiled at what he’d said, his lack of understanding of this woman he’d known since he was ten years old. “Not in her mind. Not to her way of thinking. We still owe Nana for all the times she saved our little butts when we were growing up.”
    “Well, she does have a point there, sugar. But this wipes out a lot of old debts.”
    “You’re preaching to the choir,” I told him.
    “No, the choir’s busy
wailing,
” he said, and chuckled. “This is definitely a three-hankie evening.”
    John and I were squeezed in tight between two women who were weeping and shouting prayers and amens and heartfelt petitions. The occasion was something called “Sister, I’m Sorry,” a special church service that was gaining popularity in D.C. Men came to churches and other venues to pay tribute to the women for all the physical and emotional abuse they had taken, and for the abuse they might have given women in their lifetimes.
    “It’s so good of you to come,” the woman next to me suddenly proclaimed in a voice loud enough for me to hear over the shouting and screaming around us. She hugged my shoulder. “You’re a good man, Alex. One of the few.”
    “Yeah, that’s my problem,” I muttered under my breath. But then, loud enough for her to hear, I said, “Sister, I’m sorry. You’re a good woman, too. You’re a sweetheart.”
    The woman grabbed me harder. She was a sweetheart, actually. Her name was Terri Rashad. She was in her early thirties, attractive, proud, and usually joyful. I had seen her around the neighborhood.
    “Sister, I’m sorry,” I heard Sampson say to the woman standing beside him in the church pew.
    “Well, you damn well ought to be sorry,” I heard Lace McCray say. “But thank you. You’re not as bad as I thought you were.”
    Sampson eventually nudged me and whispered in his deep voice, “It’s kind of emotional when you get into it. Maybe Nana was right to have us come.”
    “She knows that. Nana is always right,” I said. “She’s like an octogenarian Oprah.”
    “How’re you doing, sugar?” John finally asked as the singing and screeching and sobbing crescendoed.
    I thought about it for a few seconds. “Oh, I miss Christine. But we’re happy to have the Boy with us. Nana says it will
add
years to her life. He lights up our whole house, morning to night. He thinks we’re all his
staff
.”
    Christine had left for Seattle at the end of June. At least she’d finally told me where she was going. I’d gone over to Mitchellville to say good-bye to her. Her new SUV was packed up. Everything was ready. Christine gave me a hug and then she started to cry, to heave against my body. “Maybe someday,” she whispered.
Maybe someday.
    But now she was out in the state of Washington, and I was here in the Baptist church in my neighborhood. I figured Nana Mama was trying to get me a date. It was a funny idea, actually, and I finally started to laugh.
    “You sorry for the sisters, Alex?” Sampson asked. He was getting gabby. I looked at Sampson, then around the church.
    “Sure I am. Lots of good people here, trying to do the best they can. They just want to be loved a little bit now and then.”
    “Nothing wrong with that,” Sampson said, and clasped me hard around the shoulder.
    “No. Nothing at all. Just trying to do the best we can.”

Chapter 124
    A COUPLE OF NIGHTS LATER, I was home playing the piano on the sunporch at around eleven-thirty. The rest of the house was silent, nice and peaceful, the way I like it sometimes. I had just gone up, checked on the Boy, and found him sleeping like a precious little angel in his crib. I was playing Gershwin, one of my favorites, “Rhapsody in Blue.”
    I was thinking about my family, about our old house on Fifth Street and how much I loved it here in spite of everything that was wrong with the neighborhood. I was starting to get my head on straight again. Maybe all that screeching and crying in the Baptist church had helped. Or maybe it was the Gershwin.
    The phone rang, and I