Stepping Down Page 8

  She did, however, have an interest in discussing her job hunt. She was shooting for something that paid in the high 50s or low 60s so they could live comfortably in the dream house while Amani was in college. “We’re going to need lots of furniture, you know?” she chirped.

  The thought of Sharla going back to work wasn’t quite happiness for Mark. If she got into some high-powered position, he’d surely be relegated to even more fast food and even less sex. He remembered what it was like before Amani came along, how they had both been dedicated high-achievers at work. Neither of them knew how to do anything half-way.

  The last thing Mark needed at this point in his life was to feel like a single man. Alas, Sharla was her own woman. Expressing his dissention would only lead to days, if not weeks of the silent treatment. Way too much drama. It was easier to keep his mind off of home and stay focused on work.

  Praying with citizens of Oak Manor Nursing Home was one of Mark’s more pleasurable obligations. Once a month, Mark made his rounds at the center along with New Vision’s outreach team. Greeting people who hadn’t had visitors in weeks always made his chest stick out like a mini-hero while somehow humbling him at the same time.

  “Oh, bless you, young man,” the elderly women would say, planting kisses on his cheek. The men always had war stories to share, most of them exaggerated with pride, faulty memories, or both.

  Sitting in their circle by their large-screen television, Mark reveled in the sense of being in an assembly with elders. Sometimes, they grilled him on his savings and retirement plan. “You got enough money saved up so you won’t have to spend your last days in a dump because of Medicare?”

  “Yes sir,” Mark could answer truthfully.

  Other times they got into heated debates about the government. There was usually a little cursing and a crude joke or two, but they respected him enough to say “excuse my French” and “you might want to cover your ears, preacher” before they gave their worst lines.

  Tonight was no different. Thankfully, there was no news of anyone passing. And when it was all said and done, Mark prayed for his quasi circle of elders one by one.

  At a quarter past seven, he left the nursing home, still trying to decide if he wanted to go back to the church and pick up his parallel Bible or go home and do the research via the digital versions.

  There was something about the paper version—actually touching and writing in the physical books—that drew Mark back to the church to get the book. He made a promise to himself that he would get in there and out of there, be back in time to surprise Sharla with a pre-midnight arrival.

  He decided to send her a text: On way home. What you got for me?

  No matter how she replied, Mark knew she’d have to be happy. He hoped Amani had mentioned the show of support at track practice. Coupled with the fact that he’d shown up to the counseling session—late, but still—he should be well into the positive on brownie points. Anything to let Sharla know that he was at least trying to be the man, the father she wanted him to be.

  Quickly now, Mark got in and out of his office. He was actually proud that he hadn’t let himself get distracted by the million and one things still in his never-shrinking “To do” pile.

  He approached his SUV from the driver’s side, opened the door, shut it as he buckled in. He laid the coveted book on the floorboard of the passenger’s side and, suddenly, the passenger’s door swung open.

  “What the—”

  “I’m sorry. I need to talk to you.”

  It was her again. The curvaceous woman who had tricked her way into his office weeks ago and later, tried to make plans with him after visitors’ meet-and-greet. Though she wasn’t dressed in tight, provocative clothes, he somehow managed to recognize her face. Even if he hadn’t, he certainly would have remembered her perfume.

  “Lady, are you crazy? Get out of my car!”

  “Just give me a minute,” she pleaded. “I’m not trying to do anything crazy, okay? And I’m sorry I tried to hit on you before. That was wrong. I just didn’t know any other way to get to you.”

  Mark opened his car door, stepped out. “So are you going to get out now or when the police get here?”

  She was still sitting there in the seat from where he’d only seen one woman’s face staring back at him—Sharla’s. The audacity of this woman to hop in his car! She must have been following him.

  Mark took a quick look around and noticed that the nearest car was at least fifteen spaces away. This crazy lady must have been hiding on the other side of his car. His father would not have been proud that he’d let this woman catch him slipping.

  “Don’t call the police. I need to talk to you,” she begged desperately.

  Mark was amazed at her acting skills, but they wouldn’t be working today. “I told you to make an appointment with my secretary. He can get you in touch with the counseling team.”

  “I don’t need to talk to the counseling team. You have what I need.”

  “What I have belongs to my wife,” he clarified.

  “Not exactly,” she argued.

  “Yes, it does.” Mark stopped himself. Why am I arguing with this lady? He extracted his cell phone from his pocket and began to dial 9-1-1.

  “Fine!” She screamed, finally opening the passenger’s door. She looked at him from a standing position outside of his car, talking over the two front seats. “You have something that belongs to me.”

  Mark stopped shy of pressing the send button. With some distance between him and the woman, he felt like he might be able to work this out without sending her to jail tonight. “Look, you obviously need help. I don’t have anything that’s yours, lady.”

  “My name is Bria, and you do have something that belongs to me. Will you listen to me? Please? For a minute?”

  Maybe if he listened, he might get this woman out of his hair once and for all. So long as they were separated by two humongous car seats and a console, he could tolerate her for sixty seconds. “Go.”

  She took a deep breath, as though she’d just finished running a sprint. “Okay. First of all, I am a member here. I joined for the wrong reasons, but anyway, I’m glad I did. I met”—she choked—“I met Jesus this past Sunday. Thank you for introducing us.”

  Mark froze. How long had it been since someone actually spoke such words to him? Months? More than a year? “You’re welcome. My pleasure.”

  “Secondly, you do have something that, well, used to belong to me.” She flicked her long hair back. “And it was wrongfully taken away.”

  “What?”

  “Amani.”

  “Amani?” Mark had just begun to connect the dots when the unmistakable whiz of a bullet arrested his attention.

  In an instant, Bria looked behind herself, then flew back into Mark’s car.

  A set of headlights sped toward them in the parking lot.

  “Get in! He’s coming!”

  Mark jumped back in, too, cranked up the ignition. Threw the car in reverse. Forward.

  Bria shrieked in terror, “Go!”

  Chapter 14

  Sharla could have kicked herself. She should have known better than to get all excited about Mark coming home early. Though Mark normally kept his word, there had been a few times when something unexpected came up and he’d been detoured.

  The fact that he’d sent a text saying he was on his way home only made matters worse. He would have been better off saying nothing than to take forever to make the ten-minute drive.

  Sharla hid the red velvet cake on the side of the refrigerator. Mark would still see it, but not immediately. The last thing she wanted him to do was walk his late behind into the kitchen and see that cake waiting for him like “Hi! We’re glad to have you anytime you come home!”

  She threw on her most despicable house robe and her favorite house shoes—the ones with the bunnies missing their eyes—and snuggled up in the bed watching a recorded episode of Bridezilla. She felt like a Wifezilla right now, but that was only bec
ause Mark made her go there sometimes.

  Overhead, she heard Amani and his friend Jadan yell regarding whatever video game they must have been playing.

  Mark wouldn’t have been too excited to know Amani was playing video games with friends so late on a school night. But if Mark wanted to run things his way, he needed to be there.

  How’s that?

  By the time Jadan’s mom blew her horn to pick up her child, Sharla’s anger had been punctured by worry. She tried to remember the names of their sick church members listed in the bulletin. Had one of them taken a turn for the worse? Had someone approached him with an urgent need the moment after she got the text from him?

  An hour later, Sharla gave up trying to call Mark and started calling her husband’s comrades. “Hi, Reverend Jackson, this is Sharla Carter. How are you?”

  “Lady Carter, so good to talk to you.”

  “Same here,” she lied. “Listen, Mark said he was on his way home a while ago. Do you know if he got sidetracked with some kind of emergency business?”

  “No, not that I know of. I think they went to the nursing home tonight, but visiting hours are over at seven, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “I see,” Sharla mumbled as she tried to think of a likely scenario that would make the short trip home from the nursing home morph into an expanded wilderness experience. “Did he have to stop anywhere else afterward?”

  “You might better call his new assistant, Jonathan. He keeps Pastor’s calendar. Let me give you his number.”

  “I tried him already. But I’ll call him again. Thank you.”

  “Sure thing. Tell him to call me when you find him.”

  “Yes, Rev. Jackson. I will.”

  Instead of calling Jonathan, Sharla got dressed and hopped into her car. Her stomach twisted in knots. Now, she felt like she could almost kick Mark for being so inconsiderate.

  “There better be some kind of problem, buddy,” she said under her breath.

  As she neared the main intersection by the church, traffic slowed to a crawl. “Man,” Sharla fussed impatiently. She struck the steering wheel twice with her palm. There was nothing she hated more than sitting in traffic; it always felt like moments of her life were slipping away into nothingness.

  She wondered what kind of construction, malfunctioning light or other ungodly foolishness must be happening up ahead. Though the street was a busy one, the speed limit was only 45 MPH. Even if there was an accident, Sharla presumed it couldn’t have been serious enough to tie up traffic like this.

  In the next five minutes, she moved roughly ten feet. If Mark was on the other side of this mess coming home from Oak Manor, this would certainly play a huge part in his explanation of what had taken him so long. Didn’t explain why he wasn’t answering his phone, but she knew from her days working at a telecommunications company that anything could happen with technology.

  Sharla tipped her right blinker into action. Forget this. She was going back home. At this rate, Mark might actually beat her back to the house, if he’d found an alternate route already.

  After a few honks and a maneuver to forcefully secure a lane change, Sharla bluffed her way into the right lane and into a shopping center’s parking lot, hoping to find a back alley shortcut to a parallel street. If nothing else, she could visit the shoe stores until the congestion cleared because no one in the vicinity was going anywhere soon.

  She took a quick glance down the road. Squinting, she barely recognized the mass of metal being hauled onto a tow truck as a car. It looked more like one of those transformer characters, half-car, half-robot.

  A shiver ran through her as she realized the accident had been a bad one indeed. Someone must have been going way over 45 to do that much damage to the passenger’s side. “Bless whoever was in that car, Lord,” she prayed.

  The final few feet of the car were raised high enough for her to make out the back end of an SUV. White. No fancy rims.

  “Oh my—” she gasped as the vehicle’s familiarity hit her. This was a Cadillac. An old Cadillac.

  Sharla crept through the lot so she could get a better look. “God! No!” She banked a hard left and parked. She grabbed her purse and keys, running much faster than traffic would have allowed her to travel. With each hurried step, the vision of Mark’s Escalade grew clearer and clearer. The peculiar tint, the Ichthys symbol on the back window.

  Her only comfort was the fact that Mark wouldn’t have been sitting on the passenger’s side.

  Sharla ran faster now, her heart’s pace racing as she squeezed between cars that were stuck on a feeder street. She heard her linen pants rip on someone’s license plate, but she was immune to the damage to her clothes and her knee.

  With eyes set on the mangled mass of metal only, she stumbled as she stepped down from the curb into the street. Two other damaged cars littered the street, but neither looked as bad as Mark’s.

  “Ma’am, I need you to step back.” An officer blocked the view of her husband’s car.

  “That’s my husband. I mean, that’s his car.” She pointed over the officer’s shoulder.

  For all intents and purposes, the man was invisible to Sharla. She couldn’t take her gaze off Mark’s SUV. As the tow truck drove away, she could see that the windshield had been nearly destroyed.

  “Where’s my husband?”

  “Ma’am, they took ‘em to the hospital.”

  Sharla managed to focus herself. “Which hospital?”

  “Well, the man they took to Southwest Memorial Hermann, I believe. The woman was care-flighted.”

  “Woman?”

  “Yes. Female passenger.”

  Mark must have been transporting people from the outreach ministry. “W…was there anyone else in the car?”

  “No. Just those two. Ma’am, we’re trying to clear the premises now, I’m going to have to ask you to step back on the curb. I’m about to move this cone so we can open up this lane.”

  Sharla fumbled through her purse and found her phone while speed-walking back to her car. She scrolled through the call log. “Rev. Jackson, Mark’s been in a car accident.”

  “Where is he? Is he okay?” Rev. Jackson fired.

  “He’s at Memorial Hermann Southwest, I think.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Sharla pressed the red “END” button. Calling Rev. Jackson was as good as sending out an Amber alert. Every leader at the church would know in a matter of minutes.

  Sharla amazed herself with her calmness. Somehow, hearing that someone other than Mark had been taken away by helicopter gave her a sliver of comfort.

  However, the consolation was short-lived. She reached her car and jumped inside, her hands shaking with a heart-wrenching thought: Maybe they hadn’t put Mark on a care flight because he was too far gone. Was someone pronouncing her husband dead at that very moment?

  Horrifying scenarios raced through her mind. Sharla struggled to gather her thoughts and steady her voice long enough to call her son. Hopefully, she could get to him before social media did. “Amani?”

  “Yes.”

  “Honey, your dad’s been in a car accident. I’m headed to the hospital now.”

  “Wait! Come get me!” he croaked.

  “I can’t. There’s too much traffic.” Even with one opened lane, Sharla was still crawling through the aftermath. In retrospect, she thought she should have asked the officer for an escort. “Call Reverend Jackson and ask him if you can ride with him to the hospital. The number is on the refrigerator.”

  “Mom, is he going to be okay?” Amani asked, concern lacing his words.

  Sharla’s voice wavered. “I wish I could answer you, but I don’t know. I promise, I’ll call you as soon as I know something. Bye.”

  She dismissed Amani before she could throw him into even more turmoil.

  Already, she had omitted the slight detail about the female passenger when talking to Rev. Jackson and Amani. There had to be a reasonable explanation.

  Even if th
ere wasn’t…well, Sharla would have to get to the bottom of that later.

  Chapter 15

  The throbbing in his head wasn’t overwhelming, but the pain in his right arm had to come from the devil himself chewing into Mark’s nerves. He wanted to yell, but the holler came out more like a moan.

  “Baby?”

  He recognized Sharla’s voice. Moaned again, nearly gagging at the nasty fire within his mouth and throat. Now he understood how the rich man must have felt when he requested a measly drop of water from Lazarus’s fingertip.

  “Dad?”

  Amani? Mark wondered who else was there, wherever they were. He wanted to open his eyes, but the simple task would take far too much energy and incoming light might make his head pound even more.

  His lips burned, too. He faintly rolled them inward and rubbed his tongue across them. The cracked, dry veil of dead skin registered in his brain as a bad sign.

  He heard shoes shuffle toward him on a tile floor. They stopped. Then, the bed jarred slightly, sending a tidal wave of pain through his right arm. Agony propelled the word, “Stop,” from his mouth.

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “Bless God!”

  “Amen! He’s talking again!”

  Rev. Jackson? Rev. Kit?

  Why were these men in their bedroom with his wife and son?

  “Amani, go get a doctor. Tell ‘em your Daddy is awake again.”

  A doctor?

  Unfamiliar women’s voices mixed in with his wife’s. They were telling Sharla that they had her back, they were praying for her. Something about the First Ladies.

  A flood of church members who came to visit. They were too loud. Even with lowered tones, the slightest emphasis on a word reverberated in his head.

  Perhaps because they thought he couldn’t hear, there were soft questions about a woman. An accident. A gunshot. None of it made sense to him behind the thick curtain of blackness in his head.