Excerpt - A Different Kind of Blues

Chapter one

            Petra Fields sat on her back porch that early June evening, fanning the unseasonable Ellicott City, Maryland heat, drinking sweetened ice tea and playing cut-throat pinochle with her two friends, Lurlene Bruce and Twylah Hill. In her thirty-six years, she didn’t remember experiencing such unbearable heat.

“Girl, I sure am glad you left your cigarettes home,” Petra said to Lurlene. “Smoke gives me a headache:

“Everything gives you a headache,” Lurlene said and threw out the ace of spades, trumping Twylah’s ace of hearts. “You didn’t use to complain so much.”

“I don’t complain unless you’re smoking. Everybody with any sense has quit.”

Lurlene raked in a winning sixty-four points, folded her cards and stacked them in front of her, an indication that she didn’t intend to play any longer. “Now you get off my case, girl. I’m trying to quit, and the least you can do is help by not mentioning the word, smoke. I wish you’d go see about those headaches. It’s probably that job of yours stressing you out.”

“Yeah, my boss is to die for.” Petra said, looking skyward and pretending to swoon. “I ache just thinking about him, and I have to watch his idiot secretary crawling all over him, hugging him and doing everything but you know what. The man’s married, but does that tart care? Lord forgive me.”

“What you need to do is pray,” Lurlene said. “You’re in church every time the door opens, but you’re as big a sinner as I am.”

            Petra looked toward the ceiling and rolled her eyes. “I’m not sinning when I tell the truth. That girl is a tart.”

“Now don’t y’all start dragging that poor girl’s name through the mud,” Twylah said. “For all you know, she ain’t doing a thing more than you see.”

“I gotta be going,” Lurlene said. “It’s hot, and I wanna get out of these clothes. One of these days after I get rich, I’m gonna have everything I own air conditioned, starting with my brassiere.”

“Me too,” Twylah said, “not to mention a few other garments. Y’all want to play after work tomorrow?”

“I can’t,” Petra said. “Right after work, I have an appointment to get my annual checkup. Dr. Barnes is so self-important that he makes you pay if you miss an appointment. We can play day after tomorrow. Okay?”

Lurlene pulled air through her front teeth. “Barnes makes me sick with his prissy self. If he was practicing in Baltimore or Washington, he wouldn’t make a living. See y’all day after tomorrow.”

Twylah released a guffaw. “My daddy says Barnes is in cahoots with Ken Woods, the undertaker over on Pratt Avenue. He said Woods ought to give Barnes a percentage of what he takes in.”

Petra didn’t care for those sentiments. “Everybody knows Barnes isn’t a genius,” she said. In a voice suggesting boredom with the topic, “but he’s the only black doctor in this part of town, and we have to support our own.”

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Minutes after Petra arrived at work the following morning, Jack Watkins, her boss and head of Watkins Real Estate Agency called her to his office. “Have a seat Petra. This will only take a couple of minutes,” he said in what appeared to her as cold and unfeeling tones.

 Petra sat down, but she didn’t lean back in the chair; indeed she sat ramrod straight, pressed her elbows to her side and waited for the ax to fall. “Yes, sir.”

When he raised an eyebrow, she remembered that she hadn’t addressed him as sir in at least seven years. “I’m promoting you from receptionist to office manager as of today, and you’ll get an additional fifty a week. That means you have your own office.”

She closed her mouth, thanked him and managed to get out of his office without dancing like a wild woman. Then, she cleaned out her desk and moved into her new office. Petra remembered to telephone her mother with the news that she’d just gotten a two hundred dollar a month raise, and her chest seemed to swell to twice its size. Oh, how she enjoyed telling that to her mother, the woman who said she’d never amount to much, that she had sacrificed a good life for a few minutes of sex with a man she thought so little of that she didn’t even tell him she was pregnant with his child. Forty-two thousand dollars a year was at least proof that she wasn’t a failure.

“You deserve every bit of it,” her mother said. “You’re a hard worker, and I’m proud of you.”

Petra caught Jack and his secretary holding hands in the coffee-room pantry and, knowing that he wouldn’t object because he was vulnerable, she asked him if she could leave half an hour early to keep her doctors appointment.

“Sure,” he said. “For half an hour, you don’t have to ask. Just let me know ahead of time.”

She left work at four o’clock, stopped at Orchid Nails, got a manicure and arrived at the doctor’s office promptly at five-fifteen. After a lengthy exam and several tests, she looked at her watch. Seven o’clock. He still hadn’t told her to get dressed. At a quarter of eight, he came into the little cubicle, where she lie freezing in a thin white gown, treated her to his patented smile said, “That’s all for today. I expect you’re exhausted from these tests. Drop by tomorrow after work, and I’ll give you the test results.”

            Didn’t he care that she’d been freezing in that over-air conditioned office for nearly three hours? With chattering teeth, she tried to smile.  I’m more tired and hungry than exhausted. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She dressed and left, wondering how doctors managed to diagnose a patient’s illness before they had access to high-powered MRI  and CAT SCAN testing machines.

As soon as she left the doctor’s office, she called Lurlene and Twylah and cancelled their date for the next afternoon. Apart from some annoying headaches, nothing was wrong with her; she was only thirty-six years old and hadn’t taken a day of sick leave from work in at least four years. She wished Reginald Barnes didn’t have to seem so important, but at least she only had to see him once a year. Recently, she’d been tempted to switch to Dr. Meredith, the white doctor who some of her acquaintances used, but she believed in supporting her people when she could.

Buoyed by her promotion and the additional two hundred dollars a month income, she decided to eat dinner at The Trolley Stop Restaurant on Oella Avenue, a few blocks from the Benjamin Banneker Museum. Her daughter, Krista, was at her grandmother’s, so she didn’t have to cook if she didn’t want to. After a steak dinner, she passed a movie theater on her way home and, on an impulse, decided to see the movie. At last, she could afford to splurge occasionally. Life was good, and she’d been waiting a long time to say that. She went home, kicked off her shoes and turned on the television. With Krista away, she didn’t have to watch the BET channel with its tasteless messages. Steve Harvey’s jokes were more to her taste.

The next morning, Petra decided to go to her doctor’s office on her lunch hour instead of after work so that she could meet with her girlfriends, provided they hadn’t made other plans. “Hadn’t expected you till later today,” the doctor’s receptionist said when Petra walked in. “Have a seat, and I’ll get your test results.”

Petra sat down, picked up a copy of The Maryland Journal from the table beside her and began to read. “Come in, Ms. Fields and have a seat.”

She looked up and saw Dr. Barnes standing just inside the door of his private office. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” she said, sat down and crossed her knees.

“Any pains in your head?”

Petra stared at him. Why would he ask her about headaches now? She hadn’t mentioned her headaches to him, because he hadn’t previously asked. “Uh…yes. Sometimes, they’re very unpleasant.”

“Hmm. I can imagine.” He pulled up a chair, sat with his knees almost touching hers and took her hand. “I’m afraid the news isn’t good.”

She lunged toward him. “What do you mean? There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said, her voice rising. “Is there?”

He nodded his head up and down. “I’m sorry to tell you that you have a brain tumor, and it’s inoperable. You’ve got four to six months left.”

“What?” she screamed. He repeated it.

Petra jerked her hand out of his and jumped up. “You’re lying. You don’t know a damned thing about medicine. You’re making this up to sound important. I knew I should have gone to another doctor.”

“Petra, please. I know this is difficult for you. It’s hard for me to have to tell you this, and I’d give anything if I didn’t have to do it.”

“I don’t believe you. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She tried to control her trembling lips and to ignore the tears that cascaded from her eyes and dripped down her dress. He reached out to console her, and her fists pounded his chest.

“Leave me alone. Just get away from me,” she hissed as anger furled up in her. Anger at the doctor, at Providence and at life. Helplessly, she sank into the chair, devastated.

“Miss Parks,” Barnes said to his receptionist, “please get Ms. Fields some water.”

“At least you know,” he said, “and you can put your affairs in order. I’d do that right away.”

Petra gazed at the man who had just taken away her hope for the future. “Put my affairs in order? Is that what you say I should do? I don’t have any affairs, Doctor. I don’t owe anybody a cent. I pay my bills at the end of the month, and I never buy more that I have money to pay for.”

Barnes cleared his throat. “Well, they’re final arrangements to be made, and you can spare your mother and Krista the need to take care of all that.”

“Final arrangements. What do I care about final arrangements? If they want to dress me up and put me on display, that’s their business. I want no part of it. Thanks for nothing.” She stared at the astonished man. “And you be sure you don’t leave here before I do. All you doctors know is how to stick your hands out for money. You’re as greedy as a hook worm in a large intestine and just as useful.”

She walked out of the office without looking back. Never mind his hard fast rule that bills should be paid when service was rendered, or that her home was not within walking distance. She struck out down Oella Street with tears obscuring her vision, not considering the direction or the distance, even unaware that she walked. Her cell phone rang, but she didn’t connect the sound to the gadget in her pocketbook. It rang continuously and, irritated by the noise, she looked around for a way in which to quell it and realized that the sound came from her phone and that she had walked all the way to the Patapsco River. She sat on a bench several yards from the river’s grassy edge and answered the phone.

“Petra, this is Jack. Where the hell are you? My two agents have closings, and I have to check out a store that’s just been put up for sale. Get the hell back here.”

Simultaneously with Jack’s demand, a sharp pain settled in the top of her head, not worse that any other she’d had, but sufficient to remind her of what she faced. She took a deep breath, closed the cell phone and put it back into her purse.

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