Song of Solomon (16 page)

“I told him yesterday that today was my forty-fifth birthday.”

Shaylynn did a double-take, then put down her fork and altered her seating position so that her entire body nearly faced Neil. Right away, he grinned, and she could tell that he was pleased by her spontaneous reaction. She wasn't trying to be cordial; the revelation had honestly taken her by surprise. Shaylynn knew that her face was a poster of the shock she felt, but it couldn't be helped. She asked the question that she knew he was waiting for. “You're forty-five? For real?”

“Yes, I am.” His satisfaction was obvious.

Shaylynn was surprised at how comfortable she felt while carefully studying Neil's face. It was the closest, most thorough examination that she'd ever given him, and she liked what she saw. He had to have a secret for his youthful appearance. The pores on his face were nearly invisible, and crow's feet were held to a minimum. She knew thirty-five-year-olds that didn't look as good.

“What would have been your guess?” he asked while she boldly continued her visual research of him.

Shaylynn offered a slight shrug before giving her assessment. She didn't want to reveal her true thoughts and swell his ego too much. “Thirty-seven. . . thirty-eight, maybe,” she said.

“I know I keep a low haircut, but can't you still see the silver?” Neil's laugh was clearly a flattered one.

“Lots of people gray prematurely. It's never easy to guess someone's age by looking at their hair. Age is generally presumed by skin elasticity and other facial features. You have nice skin and your face . . .” Shaylynn stopped. Somehow she'd allowed herself to get too comfortable with this charming gentleman who, just minutes ago, had her stabbing herself in the hand. It was time to reset some boundaries. She returned to her original sitting position and picked up her fork. Her babbling had left her feeling quite self-conscious.

“My face is what?” Neil urged.

“Nothing.” Shaylynn collected more calamari on her utensil. “You just don't look forty-five, that's all.” From her side vision, she saw Neil sit back in his seat, and although she couldn't hear him sigh, she felt the breath that he released, and so did the napkin that lay on the table between them. The corners of it rose slightly before returning to its former flattened state.

“What else about me do you not know?” Neil scratched his chin like he was talking to himself. It was apparent that he had no intention of letting her bow out this easily. “Let's see,” he pondered. “I like sports, although I've never really played any. I'm left handed. I love seafood and soul food. I grew up in a family of music lovers. I can play the guitar—”

“You play the guitar?” Once again, Shaylynn was taken aback, and she was too intrigued not to ignore her raised guard.

“Yeah. I used to play sometimes when my brother and I sang at church.”

Sang in church?
This man was getting more interesting by the minute. “You sing too?” She shouldn't have been so surprised by that one. His talking voice sounded like he had the ability to sing.

Neil nodded while he cut into his meat for the first time since he coaxed Shaylynn to his table. “I don't do it much anymore, but I can.”

Shaylynn watched him swirl the cut meat into the mashed potatoes before placing the mixture in his mouth. Then she pried for more. “What do you sing?”

Neil waited until he swallowed, and then said, “Gospel, mostly. I have a certain level of appreciation for all music, as long as the lyrics have a good meaning. Most of the secular stuff I've sung, I've borrowed from some other great composer. But a lot of the gospel songs that my brother and I used to sing, we wrote them ourselves.”

Shaylynn was studying his face again, this time for hints that he was teasing. “
Write?
You actually write songs?”

After wiping his mouth, Neil noted, “You seem surprised.”

“There's a good reason for that.”

Laughing, Neil said, “Most of the kids who grew up in the church during the time I was a kid either played instruments, sang, or did both. I'm one of those who did both. I sang and played a lot as a child, and even through my early adulthood. Now it's just every blue moon that my pastor will call on me to sing. Every now and then, a member of the church will put in a request, but not too often. They know I'm not really doing much of that these days.”

“Why? You don't like doing it anymore?”

“I actually love to sing. It's just that—” His sentence remained incomplete. “Let's just say that things are different now than when I was younger.”

They sat in silence for a little while, and while Shaylynn picked at her food, she watched Neil's healthy appetite at work. The way he ate—mixing broccoli with his meat, mixing meat with mashed potatoes, mixing mashed potatoes with his broccoli, never eating one food item at a time—it was all quite fascinating. Fascinating and engaging, just as he was beginning to be.

“I imagine it must have been nice to be a part of the church at such a young age.” Snapshots of Shaylynn's sordid childhood flashed in her head, shattering her earlier trance. “It's important to have Christian values planted inside you during that most impressionable time.”

She noticed the way Neil looked at her when he said, “I agree. I can't honestly say that I appreciated it all that much back then, though.” He released a reflective laugh. “Today, it's popular to say that you're a Christian. It seems like everybody makes that claim nowadays whether they're living like it or not. But when I was little, church boys like me got picked on quite a bit. We were called soft, punks, and sissies.”

“Because you were Christians?”

“Because we didn't cuss, fight, act all tough, grab our crotches, and feel on the breasts and behinds of the girls at school like a lot of the boys did.”

Shaylynn scowled. “Those were supposed to be the good things to do?”

Neil quieted his laughter behind a napkin. “I know you're a bit younger than I am, but times haven't gotten better; they've gotten worse. Are you trying to tell me that the guys that did that kind of stuff weren't the most loved when you were in school?”

School was such a painful blur to Shaylynn that she could barely remember going. She treasured her college experience, but memories of elementary, middle, and high school weren't the most pleasant. “I suppose you're right,” she settled for saying. “At that age, not many kids try to be examples of holiness.”

“Exactly,” Neil said. “Being saved wasn't cool, but my mama wasn't trying to raise us to be popular; she was raising us to be peculiar. It was almost like we didn't have a choice, really.” He laughed again. “Me and all of my siblings accepted Christ very young. I guess we all figured that we might as well.”

Shaylynn nodded in agreement, but could only wish that she shared his testimony. She could never even recall hearing the word
salvation
before she was an adult. “I was very much a grown woman before I ever started going to church on a regular basis. Emmett—” She paused, took a breath, and then continued. “Emmett was sort of an activist, I guess you can say. His passion was to see our young people grow up to make something of themselves. He always strived to be a role model, sort of like the ‘if I can do it, so can you' type. I think when I first started going to church, it was because I wanted to establish some kind of connection to God so that I could pray for Emmett's success and well-being.

“He traveled a lot and was rarely home on weekends, so every Sunday, I would go to this little storefront church that was near our neighborhood. Wanda Woods was the pastor's name, and boy, could she preach. I still remember the day I accepted Christ. It was the only day of my life that made me happier than my wedding day. I also remember being nervous about telling Emmett once he got home about the spiritual step I'd taken.”

When she quieted, Neil compelled her to continue. “But you did tell him.”

“Yeah, I did. He was a bit thrown, but he wasn't angry or anything. As a matter of fact, his only concern seemed to be that my new relationship with Christ might in some way pose a threat to my relationship with him. Emmett's first question to me was, ‘So what does this mean for us?' I think that as soon as I assured him that I didn't have to leave him in order to serve God, he was okay.”

“I'm assuming that he, at some point, followed in your footsteps, and that's why Chase says his dad lives in heaven.”

Shaylynn smiled and looked at Neil. “Yes, he did, but not right away. It would be a couple of years before Emmett made the commitment. He'd only been saved a few weeks before—” She stopped, and then abruptly said, “Let's talk some more about you.”

Neil's smile was one of understanding. “Okay. What else do you want to know?”

“You're forty-five and single. Should I assume that you've been married before?” She hoped that her question didn't sound like she had a personal interest in his marital status. Shaylynn watched Neil take in a large dose of water before answering.

“Yes, you may assume that,” he said, pausing as if he thought she might need a moment to let the verification settle. “I got married at the young age of twenty-two, and it lasted ten years before life happened and it all fell apart.”

He valiantly tried to hide it, but Shaylynn could hear a dash of pain, and perhaps a smidgen of bitterness in his voice.

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be,” Neil responded. Even the slightest grin showed off his alluring eyes.

He offered no further details, and Shaylynn took it as a cue to change the subject, whether he intended it that way or not. “Was your father a preacher?”

“No, he wasn't. But you would have thought so the way he and Ms. Ella Mae kept us in church.” He smiled like saying it brought back good memories.

Shaylynn smiled too. “You were born and raised in Georgia?”

“Mississippi.”

That was a state she'd never visited before. In fact, all that Shaylynn had ever really known about Mississippi was wrapped up in ghastly stories of prejudice and segregation that her grandmother had told her. In Shaylynn's mind, black people in Mississippi still tap danced and shined shoes for a living, and white people wore pointed hats and burned crosses just for kicks. She resolved to keep those thoughts in her own head, though. They might rub Neil the wrong way.

“What part of Mississippi are you from?” she asked. It was a pointless question, really. If he said anything other than Jackson or Biloxi, there was a good chance she would have never heard of it.

“Don't even worry about it,” Neil said with a fan of his hand and a carefree chuckle. “Even if I told you, it probably wouldn't ring any bells. It's a very small town that most people who are not familiar with Mississippi have never heard of. It was home, though. Still is, I guess. My siblings and I had some good times in that country town. We were poor, but most days, we didn't know it. We were happy. Very happy. When I retire, I plan to move back there. Probably to Jackson.”

Shaylynn remembered Eloise saying pretty much the same thing—that they were happy there—so maybe Mississippi wasn't so bad after all. Her mind also compared some of the other information that both Neil and his mother had shared. She'd wanted to ask Eloise one question, but didn't. Now she prepared herself to ask Neil. “You said earlier that you have four brothers and three sisters, including Val.”

“Yes.”

“But you said the two of you were numbers eight and nine in the sibling line-up, and you referred to Val as the knee-baby,” she pointed out.

“That's right.”

“Well, four plus three equals seven, and you make eight. The numbers don't add up.” Eloise had told Shaylynn that eight of her ten children were still alive, but Shaylynn wanted details.

Neil laid his napkin on his plate. “Pop and Ms. Ella Mae had ten children. One boy, born about four years ahead of me, died when he was only a few days old. Then Dwayne—that's the brother that used to sing with me—died about seventeen years ago.”

“Oh.” For the first time in her life, Shaylynn had a taste of what other people must have felt like when she revealed the demise of her husband. She now knew firsthand that it really wasn't easy to find something to say in immediate response to someone who admitted to having lost a close loved one. “I'm sorry.” It was the same thing she'd said when he spoke of his divorce, and it just didn't seem adequate for his current revelation.

“Dwayne was a great guy who loved God with a passion, and I know he's in heaven now. Probably up there leading the mass choir or something, knowing him.” Neil cracked a wistful smile that disappeared as soon as it came into view. “He was five and a half years my senior, and I have two brothers that are closer to my age than he was, but Dwayne was my best friend in the whole world. You asked me why I didn't sing much anymore. The truth of the matter is that Dwayne is the reason I don't sing as much as I used to. It was much more fulfilling when he was there with me.”

Shaylynn's mind drifted to Emmett. A lot of things about her life were more fulfilling when he was around. Neil's voice snatched her back to reality.

“I still remember that March day when Dwayne died. It devastated me to the core of my soul. It hit us all hard, but I just don't think anybody was as distraught for as long as I was. Sometimes I still struggle with it. He had been sick off and on, and even though he knew his body was slowly shutting down, he didn't tell us what was really going on. He finally told Ms. Ella Mae, but he kept it from the rest of us and made her promise to do the same. So when he died suddenly of heart failure, we weren't at all prepared. We were just really getting over losing my dad four years earlier, and now Dwayne was gone too. All of us were hurt, but I honestly think that if it weren't for me thinking of what it would do to Ms. Ella Mae, I would have just prayed for God to take me too.”