The Between Read Free Page B

filing a police report, that it didn’t occur to him until after he’d spoken that this wasn’t the way he’d intended to explain his late arrival. In fact, this way was dead wrong. He’d all but decided Kaya had a point, that it might be better to stretch the truth a little bit this time. Dede might see something in his eyes when he talked about Danitra, and the last thing he needed was to rouse in her the beast they’d spent hundreds of dollars in marriage counseling to quiet.
    “I should have known,” he heard Dede mutter, and he knew the beast was stirring already.

CHAPTER 2
    Anyone who lives in Miami or a subtropical climate knows that the color black draws heat, so it’s best to avoid it or else squirm with discomfort; in this way, Dede Campbell’s dark mocha complexion drew Hilton James. He saw her walking beside a duck pond on a pathway winding across the Coral Gables campus of the University of Miami, a woman with height and nicely proportioned heft and a natural shaved nearly to her scalp in 1978, when brothers and sisters were still growing Afros as high as they could reach. Her loose-fitting dress was bright yellow, dangling against her body’s gentle curves past her knees. Even from where he sat on a bench across the pond, Hilton could see she was wearing sandals and had a sterling silver bracelet draped around her left ankle. Silver glistened against her skin as though the precious metal were mined for that purpose alone. Her gait foretold all her ambition, all her confidence, all her promise. Hilton had come to grad school for two things: his master’s in public administration and to find a wife. Not even necessarily in that order. The sisters he’d met in the working world during the two years he’d spent as a teen counselor in Liberty City just hadn’t been doing it for him. They could boogie on the dance floor, and he’d found his own sweet corner of ecstasy between hot thrusts in his bedroom, but when it came to conversation and vision he was coming up dry. Forget about sisters, some of his friends told him when he complained, their arms wrapped around white women with blond locks and imaginations fixated on the Congo.
    Forget about sisters. He wouldn’t forget about this one. He found the bench every day at the same time, waiting for her to pass. Most days she didn’t. But some days, especially Wednesdays and Fridays, she did. He followed her at a distance and watched her take steps two at a time into the law school. He’d braced himself to discover that she might be an actress or a music major with her head untroubled by the worldly concerns that consumed his thoughts, but she wasn’t. Damn if she wasn’t a law student. This was fate, he decided.
    He had them married with two sets of twins before he’d even spoken to her or asked her name. After three months he was kicking himself because he hadn’t found the nerve to stop her on the path and introduce her future husband.
    When he was invited to a black graduate-student mixer at the union sponsored by UM’s Black Student Society, he chuckled at the invitation, thinking there wouldn’t be more than a half dozen people there. But he knew she would come.
    Seeing her there in a white sundress with thin straps, Hilton mustered the resolve to walk up to her. Her name tag identified her, so he tried to sound familiar: “DeeDee, it’s great to see you. I’ve noticed you around. Can I get you a drink?”
    She looked at him skeptically, not the way he’d hoped. Her face was wrinkled with a confusion over who this fool was pretending to know her; then she remembered her name tag and raised her long, unpolished fingers to touch it. “DAY-day,” she said. “It’s pronounced DAY-day. It’s African.”
    Strike one against him. He had to be especially smooth now. “Are you from Africa?” he asked, already counting that question as strike two. Of course she was, with that glorious skin and her natural face pure of makeup and the traces