Sacrifices of Joy (6 page)

I looked from Laz to the envelopes, not sure where this was going, but determined to push back my tears.

It was obvious he wasn't for all that.

The envelope marked 1 was the thickest. I picked it up and slowly undid the clasp. Laz put on a dress shirt, sports coat, pushed up the sleeves; sat down in the accompanying desk chair, leaned back, and held his hands together, a slight smile on his face.

“Well?” he asked as I pulled out a collection of papers.

“What is this?” I flipped through them, noting certificates, programs from award banquets, business portfolios, and what looked like copied pages of high school and college yearbooks and old grade school photos. I held up one picture of a bucktoothed, large eyeglasses–wearing Laz dressed in a one-piece jumper patterned with frogs. He looked all of five or six years old. “Um, you intentionally wanted me to see this photo? What is this about?”

Laz chuckled. “I'm aiming for a few new positions in life, and when you go to an interview, you bring your résumé, right?”

“Please tell me this is not what you bring to job interviews.”

“No, of course not.” He laughed along with me, but then slightly sobered. “Sienna, there is a new position I am applying for and I'm putting it all out on the table. What you have in your hand is me in an envelope. I want you to fully know who I am, where I've come from, what I have accomplished. I want you to have visible evidence of my successes, my failures, my embarrassments, and my superiority above everything that has ever tried to keep me down.”

I studied some of the awards and chuckled at a few additional photos before looking back at him. “So I have you in an envelope. What am I supposed to do now, mail you off, wait for another delivery?”

“Aren't you tired of waiting for deliveries?”

I narrowed my eyes, inhaled, wondered where he was going with all of this.

“I remember,” he continued, “you telling me that at your old place, you used to keep out a lot of knickknacks from around the world, artifacts that were shipped to you from RiChard as he was traveling the world and neglecting you and your son. I can almost picture you waiting for the delivery truck to come back around to remind you that you were still relevant. To him.”

I was completely silent now. Though Laz was the only person with whom I'd really had any discussion about RiChard, it still pained me to bring up the subject, to hear that man's name. And those artifacts . . . The only facts that had come out of those deliveries, I'd learned, were that they were just overstock items from his small store on the West Coast, a store he'd used to support Mbali and their four children, all the while lying to us all.

“For reasons you probably could not even explain to yourself,” Laz continued, his voice barely above a whisper, “you've spent the last near twenty years calling yourself Mrs. St. James, even though there's been no Mr. St. James present. I've never pressed you, and I didn't ask you, but I'm assuming you avoided finalizing a divorce because you were too busy finishing school, raising your son, and growing your business.”

He took the papers from my hand and spread them out on the desk in front of me. “This is me.” He picked up the second envelope and passed it to me. It was remarkably thinner than the first.

“Sienna, envelope number two is the envelope that represents you. You can do the same thing as I did and fill this up with pages that represent your life. You are capable of doing that yourself, and I'm sure that you would put in old report cards, your degrees, some family photos, the license for your practice. There is one paper, however, that you don't have that needs to be added to those pages. A divorce decree. The good news is that I did the legwork for you. I researched the best attorneys and got the initial needed forms.”

He took the second envelope from my hands and pulled out the papers inside. “These are the documents you need to fill out to finally end the RiChard chapter of your life. There is more that needs to be done, but this is where you can begin. I've done what I can, but you need to do the rest, if you are willing. And I'm not sure why you wouldn't be.”

I picked up the forms, one by one, and tried to make sense of what I read, what I saw. What I felt. Why had I never done this? Laz was right. I didn't have an answer. My hands, my legs shook. I was numb, speechless. Still shaking.

“Last envelope, Sienna.”

Laz took the forms from me, placed them to the side, and then passed me the envelope labeled 3. He sat down in the desk chair again, his smile returning.

My hands shook even more as I tried to focus on opening the next clasp. I pulled out the single sheet of paper that waited inside.

“A . . . job offer?”

His smile grew even wider as he moved from the desk chair and sat on the edge of the desk, closer to me.

“What we've been waiting for.” Laz's tone was sober though his eyes glistened. “I was offered my own nightly news show with a national audience. This is as big as it gets, Sienna. I still have to iron out the format, but they are giving me a lot of say about its structure. All I do know at this point is that it's going to be taped live nightly at the network's headquarters in Atlanta. We're Georgia bound and going prime time, baby!”

“Georgia? We?”

“I told you that I'm trying to move up to new positions. The job in Atlanta is only part of what I'm after. Sienna, you have my credentials, my background, my life's résumé in that first envelope. I'm submitting my application to you to be the man in your life. Permanently. I want you to come live with me in Atlanta. I want you to marry me.”

My jaw dropped. My eyes widened.
Did my ears hear right? Is this man asking me to marry him?

“Sienna, yesterday was a game changer for me.” He wrapped both of my hands in his. “You could have been at that gate when it exploded, and I don't know how I would have handled that kind of news. Every time I called you yesterday and you didn't answer, I sunk into a lower depth of despair. I'm sorry that it took a terrorist attack to make me realize how much I treasure you, but I do. And the day you finalize your divorce, we can make ‘us' official. You will be my wife and I won't ever have to fear that you will leave this planet without knowing how much I care about you.”

His hands left mine and held my cheeks as he planted a kiss first on my forehead and then softly on my lips.

I was too numb to think, to feel, to speak; but as his words sunk in, my questions began, and not just about his proposal.

“Laz, I don't know that I want to pick up my life and move it to Atlanta.”

“It's a new chapter for both of us, together. From my estimation, the whole divorce process should take about six months. Six months from now you'll be divorced from your past and married to your future. Six months gives you time to figure out what you want to do with your therapy practice, whether you want to close it down and start new in Atlanta, or find a different type of social work job down there, or maybe stop working altogether and focus on your art. I will be making more than enough for the both of us.”

Wait, did this man just casually tell me what to do with my practice?
I'd spent years putting myself through college, going through the licensing process, establishing and growing my clinic, and he had the nerve to tell me to drop everything and follow him to a different state for him to pursue
his
dreams?

Whatever had frozen in me thawed.

“Uh, Laz, do you think you are being a little presumptuous with your plans for not just you, but me?”

“Not at all. Sienna, I've known what you needed from the first time I met you, and I'm about to give you the world.”

“And in six months, I'm supposed to drop everything I know and have in the town I've lived in my entire life and turn my back on a career that I have been building, so that I can focus solely on you and yours?”

“Social work is not your dream job.”

“Excuse me?” I could feel my nostrils flaring.

“Social work and therapy was your response to RiChard. You thought he was someone who was all about making the world a better place, but when he failed you, you made it your mission to show him that you could do it better by taking on a career that is all about service. But he never came back around to see what you accomplished without him. You need to let it and him go. Start your own life, Sienna, with me.”

“Have you lost your mind?” I sounded like my mother, but didn't care. Every now and then I had to summon that Isabel Davis attitude and tell it like it was. “How dare you? You think that I have wrapped my whole life, career, and reason for being around a man I haven't seen in nearly two decades? Are you serious?”

Laz, the journalist who never backed down from a fight, who made a reputation for not holding his tongue with anyone, simply shrugged at me. “If I'm wrong, then tell me why you never took the time to tear the knot with him. Why are you still walking around with his name, even now, three years after finding out he lied to you in every way imaginable? Why did
I
have to research your divorce options?”

“I kept my name because I wanted my son and I to have the same last name. I wanted Roman to have a sense of continuity, of family, and that is what I chose to offer him. I did not pursue a divorce because it was too emotionally exhausting and I was too busy putting my efforts on what mattered most to me: my son and, yes, my work. Don't pretend like you know anything about my intentions, my decisions, my sacrifices, or what I have had to go through!” I threw my hands up in the air. “I cannot believe, Lazarus Tyson, that you have the audacity to not ask me what I want, but stand there and tell me what it is you want me to do. This can't be a proposal. You didn't ask me anything. You haven't even offered a ring!”

“I was getting to that.” Laz's smile returned. He strolled over to a cabinet in the study, pulled open one of its solid wood doors, and took out a familiar bag: the bright yellow bag with the rhinestone and glitter sunburst.

The bag Skyye had given me back in San Diego.

Only now her carefully wrapped present, the crocheted purse I'd wanted to give to Roman's sister, was not inside, I noted, as Laz handed the bag to me. Instead there was a tiny velvet black box with a huge red satin bow tied around it. Laz sat back down in the desk chair, took off the slippers he'd been wearing and put on some shoes. His smile never left as he grabbed his fedora from the desktop where he'd laid it last and began twirling it around his fingers again. “Are you going to open it or not?”

A sound somewhere between a groan and a sigh escaped from between my lips. “You could go out and get a dinner and do all these wonderful things for me today, but you couldn't get your own gift bag? What did you do with my joy?” I'd meant to say “joy bag” but I was struggling again to get my words out. I was not trying to have a tantrum, but there were no words to explain the mixture of emotions colliding inside of me.

The past twenty-four hours had taken their toll.

“Open the box,” Laz demanded.

I shook my head no and pulled the ribbon off and lifted the top anyway. A vintage platinum ring was inside, with no stones set in its prongs, no jewels in its empty ridged sides.

“I want you to get the lion's head ring and disassemble it,” Laz announced, referring to the ring that had been passed from Kisu's father to RiChard's bloody hands, that had shown up in a package to me years ago in an urn that was supposed to be filled with RiChard's ashes but wasn't, that almost cost Roman his safety and me my sanity—the ring that had been the link that Mbali had found that exposed all of RiChard's lies.

“We're going to take the rubies, sapphires, and diamonds from the lion's head ring,” Laz continued, “and give those jewels a new home in the ring setting you have in your hand. I respect your past, Sienna, how it's shaped you, affected you, changed you forever. Now, I am offering you a chance to take that past, acknowledge it, and start over, make it work for you in a layout of your choice. That is what I'm offering to you. I'm not just asking you to be my wife. I'm giving you a chance to live your life.”

“I am living my life! And this is your idea of a proposal? Telling me what I need to do with my life to line it up with yours?”

“This is us, Sienna. You pull, I push. I give, you take. And at the end is a fat check from my dream job in Atlanta.” He cocked his head to one side and put his hat back on. “Don't feel like you have to figure it all out right now. Aside from the fact that this has been a ridiculous weekend, I have to get back to work. I don't have time this evening to wait for you to process all your feelings. I'm going for the night, Sienna. I'll send a taxi or something for you in a couple of hours so you can pick up your car at BWI. Go eat the chocolate quesadilla and enjoy your downtime.”

“Laz, you are the most arrogant man I have ever met.”

“And yet, I'm all the man you'll ever need.” He winked as he walked toward the door of the suite. “I mean, really, who else could take care of you better than me?”

I saw the apprehension flash in his eyes the moment he realized what he'd asked. He knew I saw it, too.

We both knew there was another.

Leon.

The two had been cordial to each other the weeks leading up to Leon's move to Houston; but the day Leon left, Laz seemed to exhale and never hold his breath again.

Until just now.

“I don't need anyone taking care of me. Good night, Laz.” I smirked and closed the door behind him, determined to win my power back.