20
The Power Of Love
P
rincess wandered amid a profusion of flowers, listening yet again to Rafael’s instruction to leave a message at the end of the tone. She’d done that already, several times, and her ex-fiancé’s silence was so loud that it was deafening. Pushing the button to end the call, she sat on a bench that offered an unobstructed view of the glistening lake water rippling several yards behind the floral landscape. In another place and time, Princess would have appreciated the tranquil atmosphere, warm summer breeze, and clear blue sky. Right now, however, all she kept seeing was Rafael’s face, and how crushed he looked when she stopped on the sidewalk and admitted that marrying him did not feel right.
If only I could talk to him,
she thought, reaching for the phone, hitting redial and feeling anguish at hearing his voice mail again. She even thought about calling his parents again, but quickly rejected that idea. The first call had been bad enough, with Mrs. Stevens not only refusing to come to the phone but loudly telling Mr. Stevens that she didn’t want to talk to that “selfish, coldhearted
female dog.
” Except the word she used to describe this canine began with a
B
and ended with what happens when one gets poison ivy. It wasn’t a word that Princess could have imagined coming out of Mrs. Holy’s mouth, but then again, having broken their son’s heart only hours ago, she could understand the Stevenses’ feelings toward her being less than Christian.
Her phone buzzed. She hurriedly looked down, hoping it was Rafael. No. It was Kelvin calling. Again. She almost regretted that she’d given him her number. He’d called three times since she’d left him at the hospital. After he’d poured out his heart to her, after he’d said things that she’d never thought would come out of his mouth. He’d asked her questions. She had no answers. Too much had happened, she’d explained. The whole weekend was crazy! He pressed. She balked. Finally told him that she needed time alone, to think and clear her head. That’s how she’d ended up here, at Shawnee Mission Park. Being in nature always made her feel closer to God, and Lord knew she needed to feel Him right now.
Father God, please help. What should I do? What is going on?
Upon hearing God’s answer, she stopped short. They were the same words that had come to her this morning, while she was taking a shower. They were the same words that she’d forgotten . . . until now. And they were the same words that Kelvin had offered, when Princess had told him how his father’s unfortunate episode had affected her life. Wow, had this conversation actually happened just over an hour ago? Princess stood and began to meander along one of the park’s trails, remembering what was said.
“Princess.” Kelvin stood near her at the foot of his father’s bed, watching the exchange between him and King. “I need to talk to you.”
“Not now,” she’d answered between gritted teeth. “Everything isn’t always all about you.”
“But right now is all about us,” he hissed back, pasting a smile on his face when his father glanced his way. “Just give me two minutes. What I have to say can’t wait.”
Princess bit back a sigh and a huff and all but stomped out of Derrick’s hospital room. “Uh, we’ll be back,” Kelvin mumbled before he too hurried out of the room. “Princess, wait!” She wasn’t listening, so it was up to Kelvin to follow Princess out the hospital door and into the parking lot. “Princess!”
She whirled around. “What?!”
“Baby, can we just calm down enough to talk for a minute?”
“Hmm, let me take a look at the last twenty-four hours: my wedding was interrupted, my favorite uncle knocked on death’s door, and my ex-boyfriend flew a message-bearing plane over the courthouse where I was headed with my fiancé. You tell me just how damn calm you think I should be right about now!”
Princess observed the surprise in Kelvin’s eyes before he quickly recovered his calm demeanor. “I’m sorry about everything that’s happened to you, Princess.”
“Really? You’re sorry that I didn’t get married?”
Kelvin’s countenance was serious, his eyes unblinking as he answered, “Everything except that.” Princess hung her head. Kelvin dared to reach out and touch her arm. His confidence was bolstered a bit when she didn’t snatch it away from him. “I know that you’re dealing with a lot right now, baby, and that your emotions are all over the place. I know how crazy you are about my father and that you believe that you truly do love Rafael.” Princess looked up, her eyes wide and questioning. Kelvin took a deep breath and moved a step closer to Princess. “But I don’t think you were in love with him.” Before she could protest, he hurried on. “I know you’re hurting, Princess, but I’ve got to say this. And I’ve got to say it right now. I know how it was between us, and I don’t think what we feel for each other can be experienced with someone else.”
Princess turned away from his probing eyes. “Kelvin, now is not the time to—”
“Now is the perfect time.” Kelvin stepped around until he was again facing Princess. He caressed her chin, raising it until their eyes met. “Have you given that any thought, Princess? The timing? How you’ve told me that God’s timing is perfect and He doesn’t make mistakes? I know you think that all of your religious mumbo jumbo goes in one of my ears and out the other, but I hear you when you’re talking. Now, I need you to hear me.” His voice dropped, his tone warm and earnest. “As bad as the situation is with my father, maybe everything happened exactly as it was supposed to. Maybe it was the only way for God to stop what was happening, get your attention and give me another chance. Baby, maybe what happened was divine intervention.”
Princess brushed away the tears and looked at the caller ID of her ringing phone. In the last thirty minutes her phone had rung no less than five times, courtesy of Kelvin and Tai.
Don’t be so insensitive, Princess. She’s just worried about you.
Clearing the tears out of her throat, she answered her phone. “Hey, Mom.”
“Princess, where are you? Kelvin said you left the hospital. I’ve been worried sick!”
“Sorry, Mom. I saw that you’d called. I just needed some time away from everyone . . . and everything.”
“Where are you?” Princess told her. “Where is Kelvin?”
Princess shrugged. “At the hospital, I guess.”
“I doubt it. Vivian left the hospital with Derrick a little while ago. A chartered plane is transporting him to Cedars-Sinai.” A pause and then, “Maybe he went with them.”
Princess tried to ignore how her heart clenched at this news. She wasn’t ready to examine how Kelvin potentially being away from her made her feel. Her mother’s next sentence insured that she didn’t have to, at least not right now. “Ralph called.”
At the mention of her would-be father-in-law’s name, Princess’s thoughts went straight to Rafael. “They’re so mad at me.”
“Phyllis is furious, and I can’t say I blame her. But I think Ralph is more disappointed than angry. He already viewed you as his daughter-in-law.”
“Mama, I’m so sorry for everything that’s happened. A part of me really wanted to marry Rafael. And I can’t really explain why I didn’t because I don’t even fully understand it. I just know it wasn’t right to enter a marriage while feeling this conflicted.”
A brief pause and then, “So are you finally ready to admit what your daddy and I have known all along?”
“What’s that?”
“That you’re still in love with Kelvin Petersen, and he’s the reason you’re not Mrs. Stevens right now.”
Princess’s answer was so long in coming that for a while Tai felt that either she wouldn’t answer or they’d been disconnected. “Princess? You there?”
“I’m here,” came the quiet, hesitant response. A muffled sniffle and then, “Yes, Mama, I’m still in love with Kelvin. I thought if I focused on someone else long enough, prayed hard enough, or got busy enough . . . the feelings for him would go away. But they’re still here. Stronger than ever.”
21
Got Me Looking So Crazy Right Now
A
few hours later, Princess walked—as if in a dream—to the private plane located on an isolated section of Kansas City International Airport’s runways. The entire weekend had been a whirlwind and this felt like the eye of the storm—strangely peaceful and totally surreal. After another thirty minutes on the phone with her mother, Princess had placed calls to Kelvin, Rafael, Joni, Sarah, Michael, and Erin . . . in that order. She’d learned of Kelvin’s whereabouts and agreed to meet him, left a final message on Rafael’s voice mail, cried with a still shocked Joni, prayed with Sarah, asked her older brother, Michael, to retrieve her car from the airport, and coordinated with Erin a letter of apology to accompany the return of over five hundred wedding gifts.
Now, as she sat buckling her seat belt, dispassionately taking in the buttery leather seats and gleaming cherrywood of the private plane, she again asked the question that played like a loop in her head:
What are you doing?
Even as she wondered this, however, she marveled even more at how right it felt to be taking actions that signaled she’d lost her mind.
You got me looking so crazy right now.
A brief smile scampered across her face.
Yeah, Kelvin. Me, too.
“Is that a smile I see?” Kelvin asked, stretching out his long legs in front of him. When she didn’t answer immediately, he reached over and clasped her hand. “I’m glad you’re here with me, Princess. I don’t know if I could handle what all is happening with my dad if you weren’t around.”
“Mom and Joni think I’m crazy to be leaving with you like this.”
“Your mom never liked me and Joni knows you’re crazy.” Princess chuckled. Kelvin began making light circles on Princess’s palm with his strong, thick thumb. Princess pulled her hand away. “I’ve missed you, Princess.”
“Kelvin—”
“Have you missed me?”
Princess took a calming breath. “Kelvin, I’m as concerned about Uncle Derrick as you are and am here to help a friend through a rough time.”
“Just helping a friend, huh,” Kelvin drawled, reaching again for Princess’s hand. Again, Princess jerked it away. Kelvin hid a smile.
Uh-huh.
“When are you going to admit that I’m more than a friend to you, baby?” he asked, air quotes underlying the emphasized word. “I’ve always been more, I’ll always
be
more, and if you’ll let me, I’ll prove to you that is exactly how things should be.” The flight attendant came over to take their drink orders, and to let them know there would be a brief delay in their departure. As soon as she’d left them, Kelvin continued. “It’s been what, a year since we’ve seen each other? Tell me you didn’t feel something the minute you saw me.”
Princess looked out the window. She could not tell a lie.
“Exactly. You shut a brothah, your
friend,
completely out of your life; changed your phone number, wouldn’t even let me get at you through a three-way with Brandon or Joni. They finally convinced me to back off, leave you alone, respect your relationship with old boy and what not. And I did. But I’ve never stopped thinking about you, Princess. Never stopped loving you . . . never.”
Princess turned to look into Kelvin’s eyes. “Did you ever stop sleeping with every woman who threw herself at you?” she asked. “Or do you still have a girl in every nightclub and a woman in every town?”
“I’m a single, healthy young man,” Kelvin responded. “I have needs and I’m not going to lie. They get met. I’m not like you, Princess, believing that you have to be celibate. Heck, God made pussy. Don’t you think He knew what He was doing when he hooked up that shit?”
“Look, I don’t want to fight about our different beliefs. I only bring it up because these differences are the very things that stand between us.”
“They don’t have to.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because . . .” Kelvin reached for her hand again and wouldn’t let go. “I know about some pussy that would shut down all the others.”
“Really, Kelvin, you need to watch how you’re talking to me and let go of my hand.”
“Why? We’re both grown! What’s wrong with being real? Oh, would you prefer I call it cootchie, or vagina? Hell, both of those words sound nastier than
pussy
to me.” They were silent as the attendant brought Princess a soda and Kelvin a beer. “Baby, I know we had our share of rough spots. But when we were in the groove, nobody could touch us!” Kelvin leaned more comfortably into the seat, released her hand, and looked straight ahead. “I remember the first time I saw you, over at Dad and Mom Vee’s house. You walked in with your peeps, looking all good in those tight-ass jeans. You had on this oversized pink top that exposed your shoulder with a black tank underneath, coordinated with hot pink tennis shoes with black laces. Your hair looked as soft as silk and you were wearing very little makeup. You almost pulled off being city cool, but then I peeped that whack-looking purse you were carrying and saw small town.”
“Ha! Whatever.” Princess took a sip of her drink. “With your remembering all the details, I must have made an impression.”
“Yeah, I made an impression on you, too. Even though you tried to act like I didn’t, tried to act all preoccupied by spending that whole afternoon with the phone glued to your ear.”
“You weren’t all that.”
“Girl, please. You couldn’t keep your eyes off me.”
“Yeah, especially since you kept parading back and forth in front of me like God’s gift to humanity.” Princess smiled, remember the seventeen-year-old girl who’d spotted the months younger boy and experienced love at first sight.
Kelvin smiled, too. “You must have liked what you saw since you dropped those digits before a brothah could even ask you.”
Princess swatted his arm. “Liar! I did not!”
Kelvin laughed. “You hinted hard enough.” He adopted Princess’s higher-pitched voice. “I’m thinking about going to college out here. Maybe we can stay in touch.”
“I
was
thinking about going to school in Los Angeles, and did.”
“True that, but you liked me, too.”
Princess’s smile widened. “I did.”
The plane took off, and so did the wind beneath Princess and Kelvin’s rekindling love affair. They talked about those early months of clandestine phone calls and Kelvin teased Princess about her novella-length e-mails. Even though those first several calls were innocent—mainly about school, sports, music, and life in LA—they kept this interaction on the down low because of how Princess’s mom felt about Kelvin’s mom. Tai had forgiven Janeé “Tootie” Smith Petersen for the on-again off-again affair with King that had lasted for years, but she would never forget it. Then there was the fact that though not by blood, his being Derrick’s biological son made Kelvin almost family. “
Almost
ain’t is,” he had informed her during Princess’s next visit to Los Angeles, shortly before their first kiss.
Not long after Princess arrived in Los Angeles the following year, they’d shared something much deeper.
Kelvin nodded as the attendant placed down a simple yet scrumptious-looking meal of baked chicken, steamed vegetables, and rice. He reached for the pumpernickel roll he’d chosen, broke it in half, and slathered butter on both sides. “Remember how we used to sneak around after church; using our friends as shields to try and see each other?”
“Aunt Viv could read my face like a newspaper,” Princess said, laughing as she recalled their undercover antics during her first year away from home. “I couldn’t even look at you when you came to church.”
They both ate in silence for a moment, and then Kelvin broke the silence. “Oh, man!”
“What?”
“You know what I just thought about?” Princess raised her brow in question, while taking a bite of veggies and rice. “That time when we were in Dad’s Jaguar and that crazy woman tried to run us off the road!”
“Oh my God, Kelvin, that was a trip! She was weaving in and out of the cars and later we found out that she had a gun and had actually been shooting it—at us!”
“Yeah, that fool thought it was Dad she was chasing. When she saw that her stalker style wasn’t working to break up him and Mom Vee, she went to some gangster shit!”
“For real! And then remember how her car clipped a truck or something and she flipped over like three times. I’d never seen anything like that before in my life. I thought for sure she was dead.”
“Yeah, well, one thing’s for sure. She’s dead now.” For a moment, silverware against china was the only sound heard as both Kelvin and Princess remembered Robin Cook, the crazy woman who for a time invaded the Montgomerys’ lives.
Throughout dinner, the easy flow of conversation continued, largely about their shared past: attending UCLA, especially their time in the condo with Joni and Brandon; their Christmas holiday spent with the Petersens in Hintereck, Germany; and Princess being Kelvin’s biggest cheerleader as he became a Bruins basketball star. Unpleasant memories were interwoven with all of these moments, but the conversationalists chose to ignore these—for now.
Shortly after the captain had come out and chatted with Kelvin about basketball, the attendant approached them. “Is there anything else I can get you? An after dinner drink or coffee, perhaps?” Both Kelvin and Princess declined. “Well, then, just sit back, relax, and enjoy the rest of your flight. We’ll be landing in Las Vegas in about twenty minutes.
Princess frowned as the attendant walked away. “Las Vegas?” she said to Kelvin. “Doesn’t she mean Los Angeles?”
“No, she meant Vegas. We’ve got to make a stop there first.”
“Why? What’s in Vegas?”
“Our future.” Kelvin shifted so that he was facing Princess more directly. His look was at once smoldering, determined, and pensive all at the same time.
Princess’s heart pounded. “Kelvin, what are you talking about? I don’t understand.”
“It’s quite simple, really. I want us to get married, Princess. I want you to be my wife.”