Page 3 of A Lifetime in 30 Days
Great!The bowling party she’d booked for next Saturday was confirmed. She’d ordered cupcakes too, and was waiting for the baker she’dbeen using for the last year and a half to respond to the design ideas she’d proposed. After all the business she’d been sending the girl’s way, Vanna didn’t want to hear a word about the intricate designs for the two dozen cupcakes she’d ordered for every week of this month. Each design would represent something special in her life’s journey, so she wanted them to be perfect. She’d come a long way and was ready to face what was ahead, but she needed to mark this milestone even if nobody else cared to share it with her. And bynobody, she meant the mother who’d never wanted her for anything more than a check.
All her life, with every curveball that was thrown her way and every obstacle she had to overcome, Vanna kept her head held high and did whatever was necessary not to break under pressure. Not to falter beneath the dark cloud she swore was stalking her. She did whatever it took to save herself and to live up to those high-ass standards of a Black woman. And she did it without putting her hands on someone else’s child or burning shit down, the way she probably should have.
Now, that in no way compared to what her ancestors had gone through during those years of being enslaved, but she could certainly relate to Steven Willis’s poem about why Black people should honor their birthdays.
So this year, as she embarked on what she considered the next phase of her life, she wanted to celebrate. There were thirty more days until she turned forty—freakin’ forty and still fly, to be correct. That was what she was calling this monthlong celebration: Vanna’s FFSF Celebration. She’d already made the flyers and sent them out to everyone invited to the first of the events planned for the month. Dinner and clubbin’ were scheduled for Friday night, which was two days away, and she still needed to find shoes to go with her outfit.
“Savannah!”
Vanna’s head snapped up to see her grandmother peering back at her. They were stopped at a red light. “What? Oh, sorry, I was reading an email.”
“I said, you betta not tell me you still in love with him.”
“In love with who?” Vanna asked, wondering if she’d missed another part of this conversation.
Granny sucked her teeth. “You know damn well with who. Caleb!”
“Oh.” Vanna frowned. “No, I’m not—or I mean, I wasn’t still in love with him.” She sighed now that Granny had brought the current source of Vanna’s distress back to the forefront. “But I never wished death on him. I just wanted him to finally get his life together.”
Granny pursed her thin lips before she turned back around to put her hands on the steering wheel. “He needed to want that for himself. Just like he needed to keep a job and pay some bills. Always talkin’ ’bout he had some kind of get-rich scheme. His head wasn’t never on straight, not since day one.”
Granny had told Vanna that the night before the three of them had gone down to the courthouse, and again ten minutes after the ceremony, when Vanna had to rush to the bathroom because she’d been holding her pee so long.
The light changed, and Granny turned her attention back to the road. “Did they say how he died?”
“Drowned. At least, that’s what they said,” Vanna replied, and wondered for the second time since she’d received the call why the police hadn’t been the ones to notify her.
She wasn’t 100 percent sure that they should have, because again, she worked in medical malpractice and personal injury cases. The extent of her criminal-law knowledge had been obtained from her favorite police procedural shows,Criminal MindsandLaw and Order—the original, not those other convoluted spin-offs. She was fairly certain she’d seen episodes where the detectives knocked on somebody’s door and told them their loved one had been killed. Was there a different procedure if the person drowned?
“Hmm. Well, I guess that was painful enough to teach him a lesson.”
“Granny!” Vanna shouldn’t have been surprised. Her grandmother did not bite her tongue for anybody. Vanna had inherited that candorbut had also developed a modicum of act-right throughout her years of working in the legal field.
Granny was a retired cafeteria worker from the DC Public School system who had taken on the job of trying to guide her only granddaughter through a rewarding life. That wasn’t an easy feat, but Vanna was grateful for her attempts.
“What? Don’t act like you thought I was gonna be in this car shedding tears for the likes of Caleb Carlson, because you know better,” Granny said. “I taught you better. At least most of the time you act like I did.”
Vanna rolled her eyes at that response and looked back at the city whizzing by through the window. It was no secret that Granny created her own speed limit, which was evidenced by the mountain of speeding tickets Vanna was always paying for her.
And as she turned her attention once again to her emails, tuning out the new conversation Frito and Granny had begun, Vanna knew she would be writing even more checks to keep her grandmother’s driving privileges. Although she wasn’t totally sure if that was a good idea.
Chapter 2
Immediately after receiving the call from the ME’s office that morning, Vanna had sent a text to let everyone at her job know she was going to be late. Herbert Cahill Hampton Sr., as expected, had been the first to respond to the message. As the senior partner at Hampton Associates, he liked to keep his nose and his unnecessary comments in everything except the right thing at the firm. HC Jr. had more important matters to tend to at that time of morning: making sure he woke up in the right bed—meaning the one beside his wife of twenty-two years—being the top one. Sanni, the paralegal, and Neshawn, the secretary, couldn’t care less when Vanna came in, mostly because they were usually late themselves.
While Vanna was in the car on her way to the rental-car lot, she called HC Sr. to tell him that her husband had been found dead, she was having car trouble, and, subsequently, she would not be coming in today. Surprisingly, he hadn’t given her a smart retort. His curt “Okay, keep me posted” signaled he was in the middle of dealing with an insurance company that had offered an insufficient amount to settle one of their cases. That always put him in a bad mood. Vanna didn’t have the mental capacity or enough give-a-damn to inquire about it at the time, so she hadn’t. After that, she’d called AAA to arrange for her vehicle to be picked up from the house and taken to her mechanic.
Now it was a little past one in the afternoon when she pulled up in front of the row house on Bryant Street.
She’d been to this house many times in the twenty years since she’d known Caleb. Had stood on this front porch, her body trembling with rage over something that someone in Caleb’s rude-ass family had said. Had sat in the backyard during summer cookouts and at the dining room table for Thanksgiving and whoever’s birthday was being celebrated, or dinners ... She knew the scent of coffee and cigarettes that would greet her the moment the red door was opened, just as she anticipated the scowl that would be on Gail’s face the second she noticed it was her.
That’s why she needed a few extra minutes to get her head right. She pulled down her visor and looked into the mirror.
Who was this woman staring back at her?
She was a smart and driven thirty-nine-year-old with fabulous cheekbones; flawless walnut-brown skin, thanks to an expensive skin-care regimen; a soft, full hourglass figure; and straight white teeth, which Granny’s good city-employee dental insurance had financed. She was a fighter, a survivor, generally a morning person, and a lover of the color pink. She was not built to break.
Not even when the world steadily threw punches at her. Because that’s exactly what this morning had been: a sucker punch to the gut that would’ve knocked the wind right out of her had she not been so used to taking her licks and keeping it movin’. That’s what she was supposed to do—or at least, that’s what she’d been taught.
