Silver Currents of Change

Chapter 36

Looking at the digital clock on his nightstand, Thurgood Williams' saw it was after midnight when his landline phone started ringing. He decided to ignore it. To let it go to voicemail. It was hot, he was having a hard time falling asleep, and he knew it wasn't his wife calling. She never called this late. She was blissfully happy at home in Chicago—in their regal twenty-two-acre Barrington Hills estate, the largest of four residences they owned. He would be spending the whole next week there with her and their two children, and they would be throwing a big party for their son's sixth birthday, next weekend. There was no reason for her to be calling, and everyone else who knew his private landline number could go to hell. 

When the phone stopped ringing, still hot and drenched in sweat, he started drifting off to a fitful sleep when, ten minutes later, it rang again. He picked it up and was surprised to find out the caller was his cousin's soon-to-be ex-wife. He wanted to be angry, but it was probably a good thing for him that Dinah felt as though she had a right to call him that late. Their friendship was something he could probably use one day, in some way. He threw back his one-hundred-fifty-thread-count top sheet and got out of bed. It was hot, so he needed to check his AC.

"I saw your lights were still on," Dinah said, "so I thought maybe you were still up."

"Are you gonna make me regret telling you about that awesome estate across the street from mine?" Even though he sometimes enjoyed hearing this woman's pleasant, decidedly Southern, always congenial and melodious voice, he didn't appreciate hearing it on his landline after midnight.

"He gave me a month," she said. "Your not-so-lilly-white cousin? After promising me all the time I needed, he called me two days ago and told me I have one month to file for divorce. He's only been sleeping with Malibu Skipper for a minute, and now I have one month to set him free."

"Malibu who?" He turned on the ceiling fan over his bed.

"Skipper ... Barbie's teenage sister."

"Oh. You mean Zarah. Well. Dinah, you know he could have filed for divorce a long time ago." Thurgood felt the need to remind her she was partly responsible for the current state of things between her and his cousin-by-marriage. "Maybe you should be grateful he's already given you nearly two years to file. I'd say that's pretty generous. I wouldn't have done that." 

Before Dinah called, as he was falling asleep, he'd been thinking maybe the fiery heat he couldn't seem to purge from his body was just a side effect of living in his neighborhood. Not a lot of people knew it, but the city of Jackson was built on top of a volcano. It was the only state capital in the United States to have this feature, and the volcano's peak sat just twenty-nine-hundred feet beneath the Mississippi Coliseum. His neighborhood was just around the corner from the coliseum, so, he thought it might explain why he couldn't cool off, even though he had his air conditioner cranked down to a cool sixty-seven degrees.

"I should have known you'd be on his side."

"I didn't know we were in a war, or that I was in the middle of something and needed to choose a side."

"You don't," she said. "It's just. I'd like a little more time. At least another year, to make sure it looked like he was suffering after I left him. Everyone already knows I left him. Plus, I wanted to give my new boyfriend a chance to propose."

"I see. You want to make sure your lies stick, and you want a sealed deal from the second guy before closing out the deal you made with the first one." Thurgood laughed while checking his home's thermostat. Since it was registering a cool sixty-seven degrees, he wondered why he was sweating.

"I'm the one who moved out," Dinah said. "Since I left Pinehaven, he bought me out of it, so it appears I left him. I bought a new estate, and as far as anyone knows I did leave him. Anything else is just pure speculation and hearsay."