Silver Currents of Change

Chapter 13

When Harvey Wilson left JCU that day, he headed directly to Evers International. His plan was to board the waiting private jet he and his dad owned, and to spend the weekend in Atlanta. But, on the way to the airport, he got a phone call that changed everything. His interviewee, Constantine Aurelius Butler, one of the well-known but aging veterans of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, had been hospitalized and wouldn't be available to meet with him. His daughter called to say his doctor assured them it was nothing serious, but for cautionary reasons, she asked if they could reschedule the TrueSouth interview. Harvey promised he would call to reschedule, and that put an end to his plans to go out of town that weekend.

After speaking to his jet's pilot on his mobile phone, he turned his vehicle around and headed home to his wife. She didn't know his trip had been canceled and he decided not to call to tell her. It would be a surprise. The two of them would have another entire weekend, again, to work on making a baby. It was exciting to think he and Dinah could one day have a little girl that might look like his biological mother, with some of the qualities his dad told him and his brother their mother had. It was his wife's close resemblance to his mother—her stature, her dark hair and blue eyes, that first captured Harvey's attention when he met Dinah.

She didn't hear him open the front door and enter the foyer when he got home that evening, because she was on the phone speaking rather loudly. Once Harvey punched in the alarm's security code, he was trying to think of something really silly he could do to make her laugh before sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her off to their master bedroom. Standing in the foyer near the front door for a few minutes, when he overhead what she was saying to someone on the other end of her mobile phone, he stumbled back and leaned against the door. He heard her, clearly, and she was saying she didn't love him. After saying that, she said she was miserable, getting what she deserved since she married him for his money and to gain a little class and respectability, to finally bury her trailer-park upbringing. He wondered who she was talking to, and if she might be joking around. 

It was after five p.m. on Friday, and all their weekday household staff had left for the day. Dinah scheduled separate staff for weekdays and weekends, and the weekend staff wouldn't arrive until Saturday afternoon. That gave the homeowners a whole evening and a morning, every week, to have the house to themselves. Harvey moved in closer, to a corner near the front door, because he needed to understand what was going on. In the living room, Dinah was fully immersed in her conversation, sometimes yelling, but laughing every now and then. She seemed certain she was alone in the house.

Still using the foyer wall for support, Harvey nearly convinced himself his wife had to be joking around. Choosing to believe she was playing with him, he felt his strength returning. She must have heard him come in, knew he was there, and was simply playing a prank on him. Maybe she wasn't even talking to anyone. Maybe it was all just a big prank. About to dismiss what he'd heard before, he was about to take steps forward to the living room where she was, but before he could move even one inch, she said something that made him know she wasn't joking. It wasn't a prank, and she was dead serious. He knew because what she said made a lot of things he never understood about her finally make sense. He heard his wife saying he'd married her five years ago only because he believed her when she told him she was pregnant. The words made his whole body go limp, again, and he felt like all his bones had suddenly melted. He had no choice but to step back, and, for support, to lean against the double front doors. In stunned silence, to keep from falling, he had to hold tightly to the elaborate doorknob in the grand foyer of their far North Jackson multi-million dollar mansion, on their multi-million dollar estate.

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"No, I do. I do mean it." Dinah kept yelling the same words over and over in her very Southern accent. "I really don't. Not now, and not ever. I most certainly do mean it. I have always meant it every time I've ever said it to you in the past five-plus years. I don't know why you don't believe me. It's true. I don't love him. I liked him, once, when I married him. He was real good-looking, kind. But I married him to have someone to take care of me. In grand style, just like I deserve."