My Time in the Sun Page 5

  “I never wanted to interfere with your calling,” she said, trying to steel herself against the pain filling her. “You said you made a promise to the Almighty when He spared your life, that from that point on you’d do His work. You can’t do God’s work if you don’t have a church. If I leave, then you can get your church back.”

  “They can have that place; the building,” he said in a tone so soft but certain, she couldn’t find a way to answer. “Evidently, all this time I’ve been teaching and they haven’t been listening. Church is not about a building. It’s supposed to be about healing people and giving them the tools to heal themselves.” He cupped her face in his hands. “Either I fooled myself or the entire congregation was doing nothing more than giving lip service.”

  Kari stared up at him, wondering how God could allow something that happened in her life to disrupt His plans for a man who’d been the greatest example of someone who lived with integrity, compassion, and determination.

  “I serve God through serving people who need it most.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “And I want my wife to be very much a part of that.”

  “This could happen again,” she admitted, trying to keep her voice level. “New place, new people, and it could happen all over again.”

  “And it won’t matter,” he countered. “So many women have a past like yours. The problem is that when people try to hide their skeletons, there’s always some hound dog who’ll sniff them out and dig up the bones.”

  Kari frowned. “I don’t understand your logic.”

  “Remember when it was all in the news that Janet Jackson’s husband was demanding a ridiculous amount of money from their divorce, even though they had a pre-nup? He was threatening to go public about some things if she didn’t pay up.”

  “Yes, so?”

  Tony stroked her hair while he spoke. “If she had told her own secrets, she wouldn’t have been in a position where he could hold her financially hostage.”

  Now that got her attention.

  “And I don’t want you held emotionally hostage by people like Terrence,” he warned. “If you don’t believe anything else, please believe me when I say that what happened today hasn’t interfered with anything concerning me and you,” Tony said. “I took vows with you before God and that right there comes before anything else.”

  “You’d really leave the church for me?”

  “I’ll always be a minister, sweetheart,” he said, giving her a smile that touched her heart. “But my service to God isn’t tied to a building. It’s tied to my relationship with Him and with you.”

  Kari looked up at him, unable to voice anything around the emotion that swelled in her heart.

  “We’re going to work on us so that we’re solid and our relationship is tight. And we’ll start with you answering a question that only you can answer.”

  She stiffened.

  Tony scrunched his eyebrows together, expression filled with concern. “Noooo, I’m not asking about your past.” He stroked he cheek. “If you’re not ready to share your truth, that’s your right. For now, I just want you to tell me how you think we can be of service to God.”

  “You’re asking me?” she asked in a breathy whisper, placing a hand over her heart. “Seriously?”

  “Why not?” he asked, laughing at her incredulous expression. “You’re the woman God sent me. I want to hear what you have to say.”

  She extracted herself from his hold, giving his question some thought. “You know what I admired about Jesus?”

  Tony tilted his head, waiting.

  “He never hung out with the people in the church,” she said. “In fact, He wasn’t real fond of them.”

  “Right about now, I understand His point,” Tony said in a dry tone. “This church has been more a test of my faith than anything else.”

  Kari tried not to smile, but moved to him, and entered his embrace once again. “He came to heal the broken-hearted. That’s what the Good Book says. And to me, there’s no one more broken than the woman I was before.”

  What she didn’t add was, The broken woman I still am today.

  Chapter Nine

  “We need to get some dinner,” Kari said, sighing the moment her stomach gave a growling reminder that she hadn’t eaten anything since she’d fixed breakfast early that morning.

  Tony held her firmly in his embrace. “Can we eat after we talk?”

  “That smothered chicken has been calling my name since Sunday School. We can talk all you want, but I need to put some soul food strength in me.”

  He laughed, snaked his arm around Kari’s waist and led her into their gourmet kitchen, decorated in navy with varying shades of white accenting, he insisted she have so she could indulge those already stellar cooking skills. Side-by-side, they heated up the food and prepared two plates.

  “Let’s have dinner in the solarium,” Tony suggested. “The sun will do us some good.”

  For a while they ate in silence at the glass patio table rather than the dining room where they normally shared their meals. Both seemingly lost in their own thoughts—most of which were about the person sitting across the table.

  “All right,” Kari said after she’d made a little headway into their meal of smothered chicken, rice and gravy, green beans, candied yams, and cornbread. “I know you’ve been holding back what you really want to say, so let’s have at it.”

  Tony studied her as he finished a mouthful of food. “I’m disappointed that I haven’t been the kind of man you felt you could trust with your past,” he began, placing his fork on the edge of his plate.

  She parted her lips to protest, but he held up his hand to stave it off.

  “People have opened up to me with the darkest parts of their lives, yet my own wife wasn’t able to do the same.” He trained those dark-brown orbs on her, his bottom lip held prisoner for a few seconds before he released it. “What does that say about me?”

  The anguish in his voice, the glassy shine of pain in his eyes, almost felled her completely. She reached out for him and he hesitated a slight moment before taking her hands in his.

  “It had nothing to do with you,” she confessed, suddenly losing what was left of her appetite. Her secrets had created a chasm in their marriage she never intended. “I mean, how exactly does a woman tell the man she loves, ‘By the way, I used to whore for a living’?”

  “For starters, she wouldn’t put it quite that bluntly.”

  “But it’s the truth,” she countered, and for a moment she was back in that police interview room with that blonde officer who wanted Kari to alter the story so she wouldn’t serve a single day behind bars. “That’s exactly the truth.”

  “You were … fourteen?” he said, pushing his plate toward the center of the table. “Fourteen-year-olds don’t enter that life without some help. Evidently, you were abused by someone who made their living off setting young girls up as prey.”

  Kari closed her eyes against the swell of pain as his summary hit all the way home.

  “When you were in high school, is that something you set out to do?”

  “No, I … I mean, when I was a girl,” she replied. “I didn’t know what I wanted to be in life, but it wasn’t that.” She let out a long slow breath. “My father was aiming for me to marry someone in the church. To become a housewife like my mother.”

  Tony brought the tips of her fingers to his lips, the tingle of warmth whipped through her. He always managed to do that so well.

  Kari looked away. She couldn’t make eye contact while sharing the details of a world he couldn’t begin to understand. After taking a few deep breaths and releasing them slowly, Kari began to unearth some of what she’d buried so deep.

  “There was this guy who worked in the cafeteria of my high school.” She shook her head; still unable to believe she’d been so naïve back then. “I thought he loved me, but what he loved was that I was young and dumb. We all were,” she admitted. “He was playing three of us, but he chose me to
be his girlfriend. I felt so special,” she said dryly. “This cute older guy was buying me things, sneaking me out of school, taking me places.” Kari left the table and looked out on the Koi pond at the center of the lush garden she’d taken three years to get picture perfect—the pinks, purples, and whites, plus arraying shades of green made it the most relaxing place to be. Except now. As though sensing her thoughts, Tony was around the table and sitting by her side in an instant.

  “I ran away from home and ended up riding with him to Memphis to meet his family,” she whispered. “His ‘family’ turned out to be those two classmates of mine and another group of girls not much older than I was. We had to call him Daddy. The first night, Trina tried to escape. He beat her so bad she couldn’t open her eyes for a whole week.”

  Kari left the glass-encased solarium and went further out on the patio, slipped off her shoes and stepped onto the grass, letting the softness tickle her bare feet. “Not a day went by that he didn’t rape at least one of us. He made the rest of us watch.” She looked over her shoulder at Tony, who kept his expression neutral, but she saw the vein throbbing at his temple. “He had high-end customers that wanted fresh, young meat.”

  Tony came to her, pulled her against him. She welcomed the warmth because a chill had settled inside her despite the sun’s rays shining down on them. What a beautiful day to share such an ugly story.

  “I made it through my first rape the night I arrived. It was … brutal,” she said as her voice cracked on that last word. “But I became used to living with pain. It prepared me to survive everything else.”

  And that “everything else” was no small thing.

  Tony listened without judgment, soothed her when she needed it most. Allowed her space when the anger resurfaced and she couldn’t contain any part of it. The sobs, the tears, the anger at God for letting it happen—Tony absorbed it all and gave her so much of himself. His love was giving her a healing that all efforts of trying to erase the past from her memory had never accomplished.

  “I was a church girl growing up,” she said after finishing a condensed version of her story. She gripped those muscular arms of his, gathering strength from his touch. “That’s all I ever did—church, school, and home. My parents wouldn’t let me watch television unless it was the Christian station. I had to read the Bible, chapters at a time. I couldn’t wear pants, makeup, jewelry—none of that.” She closed her eyes, allowing the image of her parents to surface. They, too, were part of the memories she had buried deep. They would never forgive her for what happened. Would never accept a daughter who had become tainted with the filth Daddy forced her to make an everyday part of her life.

  “All I knew was those three things, so I never imagined the kinds of people that were out there. My parents never warned me. And Daddy would do—correction, Daddy would make us do—whatever it took to keep the money rolling in. If a man liked girls who were comatose, Daddy would give one of the girls drugs that paralyzed her but still kept her conscious enough to see, hear, and feel everything that was being done to her. Some of those girls he stashed in that house hadn’t even experienced their first menstrual cycle yet. And they received the same horrible education that I did.”

  Kari shivered as the rest of the memories tumbled forward, begging to be released. “And then they went to a whole different level.”

  Tony held out his hand and she inched hers inside his. He tightened his grip as though sending her a silent dose of courage. Lord knows she needed it.

  “Daddy was about to take a few of us down to Mexico to film some type of movie that included … horses.” She paused long enough to let the sordid meaning behind that sink in. “That was a new thing. We stopped being shocked a long time before then. Especially since he seemed grateful it was something that could damage us enough to avoid the pregnancy issue he’d run into from time to time.”

  She glanced up at Tony, saw his jaw working as though biting back his anger, and wondered if she should have kept that last piece of information to herself. He wanted to know all of it, but could he handle it? He was ready to kill Terrence for calling her a whore. How much anger would surface if he knew how much of a whore she had been?

  “All I could think about was that my mama didn’t know where I was,” she whispered, letting her feet graze the waters of the pond. “And if she knew what I was doing, she’d know just how worthless I’d become.”

  “Your mother would never think that,” Tony said, and she wanted to laugh at the certainty in his voice. She definitely knew better.

  “She shunned every family member who wasn’t a church-going Christian. She stopped speaking to my uncle Victor and anyone who accepted him, all because he was gay. My cousin Shante started singing secular music and my mother wouldn’t allow me anywhere near that girl. She was like a sister to me.” Kari’s gaze connected with Tony’s. “So don’t tell me she wouldn’t turn her back on someone like me. I’ve seen her do it to too many people. Even the ones in church.”

  Tony’s lips set in a thin resigned line, and she waited for his response.

  “Maybe she’s grown since then. At some point, you have to give her a chance. You haven’t even tried to see them or talk to them all this time.”

  “She was right, Tony. If I hadn’t—”

  “No!”

  The word was said so vehemently, she took a step back.

  “You’re not going there with that whole “if I hadn’t thing,” he said, and his tone brooked no resistance. “This isn’t about self-guilt. I want to know what happened because I need to know how to help my wife. I can’t give any more energy to anyone else until I make sure you’re straight. That we’re straight. And if that means me not having another church for a while, so be it.” Tony pressed a kiss to her temple. “My wife comes first. I made a commitment to God, which I will fulfill. But I made a vow to you and He needs me to be about that business right now.”

  Kari stiffened, trying to hold in the hopeful emotions that his words brought on. She cried into the wall of his chest for the longest time, tried to get her voice working again to finish at least some of the experience.

  “I tried to get away,” she said after several moments had passed. “Even made it as far as the bus station one time, but I didn’t know Daddy had his people there. People he paid to inform him when young girls got off the bus alone or if one of his girls tried to leave the city. They all knew who we were. Even the police. We serviced them sometimes, too.” She stilled at the memory of the one officer she had worked up the courage to ask for help. He had done the exact opposite. Daddy had served her up to him to teach her a valuable lesson—there was no help for her anywhere.

  “He’d go back to Chicago from time to time and bring in more girls. I saw more classmates down there in Memphis than I ever did in class.” She wrapped her arms about Tony’s waist and laid her head on his broad chest. His heart rate was a lot faster than it should have been. Seems he was doing all he could not to let rage set in. Her hero. Her husband. Her love.

  “I tried to get a client to help me—told him to just take me with him and I’d make it from there. The man promised he would. Then after he was done using me, he told Daddy what I said.

  “That night, Daddy nearly beat me to death, then he brought in this six-year-old girl, crying, screaming for her mother. She ran to each of the girls in the apartment, begging, pleading with them to help her.” Her voice hitched and for a moment she was unable to speak.

  “It’s all right,” Tony said, stroking a comforting hand over the lower part of her back.

  The memory of the way Daddy gazed at that child ran Kari’s blood cold all over again. “They were so cruel,” she finally managed to say. “They were taunting her, telling her what Daddy was going to do to her. They, who were victims themselves, enjoyed her fear. She was screaming, crying … ” Kari closed her eyes, trying to block out the image of that pretty little girl. “Then she ran to me. Her voice was so raw from crying that she couldn’t get any
more words out. My own eyes were just as red and puffy as hers. She had no way of knowing I’d just been beaten. She could have thought in her little mind that I was shedding tears for her. Whatever it was, she latched onto me and wouldn’t let go.” Kari found it hard to swallow. “She was so tiny. Only a … little girl.” She removed herself from Tony’s hold, wrapped her arms about her own midriff, but the action provided no comfort. “For two years, he made me do anything and everything. And he was going to put her through that?”

  Kari shook her head and Tony came to her, pulled her back into the safety of his arms. “She needed me and I guess I needed her too. I couldn’t let it happen. I couldn’t ... ”

  She looked up at her husband, those green eyes sparkling with anger that he barely was able to keep under control.

  “Later that night, I used a kitchen knife,” she said. “The only sharp one we had. We’d been so afraid of him that not a single one of us had the courage to do anything. And trust me, we had plenty of opportunities. But he’d pit us against each other. You couldn’t make a move without one of the others running to tell him about it. He encouraged that by rewarding those who told.” Kari’s mind flickered to Tangie and Martina—the main ones. “Sometimes they’d get fewer clients to service the next day or maybe he’d take them out for dinner or a movie to thank them for looking out for him.”

  Tony’s eyebrows drew in. “How did you manage to get past the others without someone noticing the knife in your hand?”

  “Like I said, she wouldn’t leave my side,” Kari answered, tamping down her emotions or she wouldn’t be able to finish. “Clung to me as tightly as the expensive clothes Daddy gave me to wear. So when I went into the kitchen and slid the knife from the drawer, her body hid my actions.” Kari lowered her head while letting trembling arms fall to her side. “To this day, I don’t know whether he bruised or broke my ribs in that beating. One good thing that came out of it was that I couldn’t be set up with any clients for a few days. But I knew he would come to me that night because any girl who wasn’t out making him money had another job to do—keeping him happy.”