Every Woman Needs a Wife (32 page)

V
ernon pulled up in front of A Time to Heal, housed in a three-story, silver-and-blue building, with more glass than brick and mortar. The manicured lawns and knee-high shrubs blended easily with the smooth lines of the tiered structure.

Walking into the counselor’s sleek office, the sweet smell of lavender, peaceful colors and abstract crystal sculptures that greeted him reminded him of Tanya’s house. Paintings of angels of every culture adorned the light blue walls.

Brandi walked in a few moments later. The receptionist announced them, and from the opposite side of the lobby Sesvalah, a beautiful woman wearing a peach-and-aqua flowing garment, came out to greet them. She had light skin, thick, wavy hair, and a bright smile. Once they entered her counseling suite, each taking a seat across from each other on the matching sofas, her intense eyes sized Vernon up as she started their session. “So, the judge believes you need marriage counseling.”

“We don’t need no damn counseling, she needs to get the bi”—he glanced sheepishly at Brandi—“
witch
out of my house.”

Sesvalah’s head whipped to Brandi, one thickly arched eyebrow raised.

Brandi’s lips lengthened into a soft smile. “His mistress is living with us.”

“Living with
you,”
he shot back, pointing a finger at his wife. “With you! I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Oh, get off it. You had everything to do with it. You slept with the woman for two years. Now that I’ve accepted it and formulated a plan to
make things work for both of us, you’re whining like a…a…” She glanced at the counselor. “You know.”

Sesvalah blinked, looked over her paperwork, and glanced up. “Let me get this straight—the mistress is living with you, him, and your two children.”

“That’s almost right,” Brandi said in a voice that rang with innocence. “He’s playing a little hard to get. He’s at his mother’s for the moment.”

Sesvalah pursed her lips to suppress a smile but the twinkle in her eyes gave her away. “I see.”

Vernon pointed to Brandi. “See, she’s crazy, isn’t she?”

Sesvalah shrugged. “Actually, I think it’s a brilliant concept. Everything’s out in the open. A man couldn’t ask for more than that, right?”

Brandi lifted her chin, grinning triumphantly at her husband.

Vernon’s jaw dropped. “You’re not going to tell her to make that woman leave?”

“That’s not my call, Mr. Spencer.”

“Then what the hell am I paying you for?”

Brandi chuckled, leaning over to pat one of his muscular thighs. “That’s okay, stud, this one’s on me.”

“I don’t get paid to tell you what you want to hear,” Sesvalah said, leaning back in her high-backed chair. “Let’s weigh all sides. What was going on with you two before Tanya came into the picture?”

“Everything was fine,” Brandi said in a nonchalant tone. “You know: work, home, children—every now and then he’d grace the kitten with a little pickle tickle—but nothing out of the ordinary.”

Sesvalah’s lips twitched. “When did you notice a change?”

“I’ve never—”

Sesvalah cut Vernon off with a wave of her small, delicate hand. “Give her a chance to speak. You’ll get your turn.”

“When his father stepped in and had so much to say about us. When he joined the League of 1,000 Professional Black Men. But the biggest change came after I landed a deal with Avistar,” Brandi replied.

“What was so different?”

Brandi looked at Vernon. “It was the first time in a long time that instead
of having my husband, I had to make appointments with a rubber appliance that will probably outlast everyone on the planet.”

Vernon groaned.

“So no sex?” Sesvalah asked, jotting down notes. “Not even a half order.”

Sesvalah turned to him. “Vernon, what happened to make you feel you needed to bring a third person into your marriage?”

“She was so busy making money she forgot about me.” Then he paused, as though somehow he had made a point.

“Okay, let me get this straight,” Brandi said, shifting in her seat so she faced only him. “You order up a side of ass,
white
ass at that, because I’m doing what I’m supposed to do? Taking care of kids I didn’t want to have in the first place? Cleaning the house and raking in more cash? And you
fault me
for that? You mother—”

“Hey, watch it.” Sesvalah’s hand whipped out like an NBA referee. “We get the point.”

“What about what
I
needed?” Vernon asked, facing Brandi. “All of a sudden I became more like an assistant than your partner.”

“Well, if you’d take some initiative and do your share of the work instead of flexing and being the social butterfly, maybe I wouldn’t have to work so damn hard on the back end.”

“Ooooookay, time out.” Sesvalah’s shimmied into the three-foot space between them, handing them each a blank sheet of paper. “I want each of you to make a list of what you expected from marriage in the beginning, what you think you’ve accomplished so far, what issues you need to address now, and what you’d like to see happen in your marriage. The fact that the judge thought you might want to salvage the marriage says something.”

Vernon glared at the counselor. “Can we do this later and bring it back in next time? I’m not paying you for sitting while you watch us write.”

Brandi grimaced, biting back a smart retort.
“I’ll
pay for it. We need this. I need to get some things off my chest. Things I’ve been holding in to keep peace—and it still hasn’t made any difference.” Against her wishes
tears welled up in her eyes. The pain she had felt resurfaced, long after she thought she’d put those feelings to bed.

“The first session is free anyway.” Sesvlah turned to him, eyebrows drawn in. “Did you read the court order?”

Vernon stood glowering angrily as his gaze traveled from one woman to the next.

Brandi snapped, “If you want to save our marriage, Vernon, make the list and quit acting like the world has done you wrong. You and your little wandering dick are the reason we’re here, so you don’t have a right to be pissed.”

He turned to face the counselor. “All I want to know is if you’re going to tell her it’s wrong to have that woman in our house.”

“I can’t tell anyone that they’re wrong,” she replied softly. “I can only point you to answers that you have inside yourself.”

“If I already have the answers, what the hell do I need you for?”

Brandi gasped. “Vernon, your manners are slipping.”

Sesvalah looked up at him, and said calmly, “The way you tell the story, Mr. Spencer, you don’t need anyone.”

He lifted his head proudly. “That’s right.”

“Then why are you so adamant about going back to your wife?”

The silence in the office became overpowering.

Vernon glared at the counselor, then tore up the paper. “That’s a cheap shot and you know it!”

Brandi looked up at him. “Sometimes the truth hurts.”

Vernon tossed the pieces on the sofa next to Brandi, grabbed his coat, and left.

Sesvalah turned to Brandi. “Let’s talk about the real reason you brought Tanya into your home.”

Suddenly Brandi wasn’t as comfortable as she had been a few moments ago. “She showed up.”

“And?”

“We talked about it and I saw a way to make this work for me.”

“You mean you saw a way to make Vernon angry.”

Brandi shrugged. “That, too.”

“Okay, let’s look at the facts. You have a strange woman come into your household. She looks after your children, cooks your food, has access to all of your personal belongings.” Sesvalah cast a solemn gaze on Brandi. “A woman, I might add, who may resent the fact that you’ve shattered her world. A woman who may hate the fact that your very existence has made her realize how trusting and naïve she’s been.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Brandi said after a short spell. “She had all of her belongings heaped up in the backseat of her car. She had no place to go.”

Sesvalah remained silent.

Brandi took a long slow breath before explaining, “At first I enjoyed seeing how pissed Vernon was, and how smoothly Tanya played into something I’d said earlier. It seemed like justice.”

“So how long is the justice phase going to last?”

“I don’t know, but at least six months,” Brandi replied, placing her sheet of paper to the side.

“Why that long?”

“That’s how long I thought they’d been seeing each other.”

Sesvalah crossed one leg over the other. “Do you think what you’re doing is fair to the kids?”

“Maybe not. At the time I was only thinking of me,” Brandi said, shifting uncomfortably on the sofa.

“You had every right to be angry. You had a right to be hurt,” Sesvalah said softly. “But now you’ve brought a whole new dynamic to your marriage that may make it harder to put things in perspective or heal things for the long run.”

Brandi’s gaze shifted to the window. A pigeon pecked on it, then waddled off and pecked on another area. Evidently he couldn’t find his way, either.

“Every time you see Tanya, do you see ‘the other woman,’ the woman who stole precious time and resources from you?”

Brandi thought about that a moment. “I see a young woman who was just as stupid and gullible as I was. She’s an uneducated, visionless woman who’s gonna be stuck in ‘the other woman’ role for the rest of her life if she doesn’t do something now.”

“Why do you care so much about her?”

Brandi looked up at Sesvalah, saying, “She’s me, if my father hadn’t pressed me so hard to get an education. She’s me, if my mother didn’t remind me that I promised him to go to college despite how much I was tired of school. She’s every woman who’s ever walked into The Perfect Fit looking for a job and had to settle for factory work because it was the only thing available for her. Tanya’s not so different from my mother—an uneducated woman who settled for staying at home while my daddy worked like a dog to keep her happy.”

“Education isn’t everything, and not everyone can go to college, Brandi.”

“Yes, but even a high school education or some trade training can make all the difference in the world to a woman. It means we have some power to make choices in our lives.”

“And you abhorred the ‘cook, clean, keep the kids, do the laundry, and balance the checkbook’ life your mother had?”

“She could have been so much more…”

“Yet you’ve forced another woman into that same role?” Sesvalah pointed out. “And as Tanya’s ‘husband’ what makes you any different? Your definition of a wife is no different than that of a sixties man. The only difference between you and Vernon is you’re not sleeping with her. Controlling the situation the way you did meant neither one of you has taken her feelings into consideration.”

“But I’m different! Vernon wants her out on the street groveling to come back to him.”

“You want her in your house, serving penance for her sins.”

“Having her close means I keep tabs on him, too.”

She remembered the time she saw her grandmother place a wad of cash under her breasts, lifting up the huge mounds to put the money in place. Her grandmother had smiled and said, “These are the only suckers I trust with my money. And even they’ve run off with it sometimes. The only people you can trust is God and yourself.”

Brandi had asked, “Well what about you, Grandma?”

“Child, I’m human, people are human, and they’ll let you down the moment you need ’em most. Not because they want to, mind you, but
because sometimes things are not within their control. Trust only God.”

Brandi’s eyes flickered across the room to Sesvalah as she asked, “So what do you think I should do?”

“My honest opinion would be that you might want to think about finding a fairer solution all the way around or let her go.”

T
wo days after her appointment with the counselor, Brandi thought she had come up with a solution. She pulled a sullen Tanya into her home office and said, “I’ve rewritten the contract.” Brandi slipped into the chair across from Tanya. “Two years. And after you get your GED, I’ll pay for your education at a community college. You’ll get a smaller salary, but you will keep your benefits.”

“Two whole years? And why a smaller salary? I like my salary!” Tanya protested.

“I’m cutting your salary and putting the difference into your education. You can’t have it both ways, girlfriend.” Then she noticed that Tanya still had a scowl on her round face. “You have any better offers on the table?”

She turned bright pink. “Well…no.”

“Any trips around the world, Miss America?”

Tanya glowered.

Brandi leveled a strong gaze into the woman’s blue eyes. “Then what’s the problem?”

“I just feel…uneasy being here that long.”

“My kind served your kind for four hundred years,” Brandi snapped. “Two years is short in comparison.”

“Oh, don’t start with that slavery shit,” Tanya shot back. “The white man didn’t start slavery.”

“Get a grip! They were the ones who brought us here.”

“And who sold your people to them? Other African tribes! So much for brotherly love.”

That shut Brandi up.

“Africans sold their enemies, neighboring tribes, and their own daughters off to the white men who had come to trade. So don’t think it started with white people. It didn’t just happen to Blacks. Slavery’s a part of everyone’s culture. Not just Blacks. And if you really dig deeper you’d find out that there were Blacks already here before anyone else ‘discovered’ American soil. So as much as you’d like to say your origins are across the waters, who’s to say your ancestors weren’t already here.”

Silence hung like dense fog between the two women.

“How do you know all this?” Brandi finally asked, after realizing there might be some truth to that.

“Grandpa James taught me a lot when I stayed with the Pitchford family. Learning from Grandpa James was twenty times better than listening to that drivel they taught us in school.