Searching for Tina Turner - By Jacqueline E. Luckett Page 0,32

I decided?”

“I take it the fancy gym bag means you’ve decided.” This is the icy tone that makes Randall the great businessman sought after by corporations looking for more than just a black face to fill some arbitrary affirmative action slot. Lena shivers in the doorway, her back to Randall. Stay. That is all he has to say, and she will put down her bag. Get up from the chair and hold her tight is all he has to do, and she will stay.

“I’d think twice if I were you, Lena. You’re the one who’s got everything to lose.”

“Maybe it all stops here.”

“Maybe it all stops. Period.”

Lena prays that her keys are in her purse, her purse in the kitchen so that she does not have to go back into that room or look at Randall. She pauses, then sets one foot ahead of the other in the same thoughtful way she did when John Henry walked her down the aisle, all the way down the stairs and to the garage to give Randall time to act. Night camouflages her car while she watches her bedroom window from the driveway. After ten minutes the bedroom lights darken, and Lena drives away.

Chapter 9

At the grand hotel on the Oakland-Berkeley border a rosemary bush hedges the front of the building and releases its savory fragrance when Lena brushes up against it. Fresh rosemary is the herb she loves most, a pleasure for the tongue and the nose. Sure she looks like a hooker, all dolled up with no place to go, she hands the night clerk her platinum credit card and demands a room. He examines her from head to toe, this young man ensconced behind the well-oiled, wood-paneled counter in a pin-striped suit and gold badge, his name and place of birth engraved on it in two lines: Ali from Kenya. His eyes are shadowed by a furrowed brow as if she should be ashamed of checking in to his high-ceilinged, Oriental-carpeted hotel by herself at midnight, as if she should be ashamed of her fuzzy slippers, the pooled mascara under her light brown eyes, and her thousand-dollar designer tote.

Lena grunts from the doubt that cramps her insides; she has no place to go. She has no plan—her tote is evidence of that. Whether she charges this hotel for one night or a thousand, she cannot pay the bill. She has no real money. Snatching her upscale credit card back from Ali, Lena turns around and stalks out the lobby; her back dares him to say one more word to her so that she can scream, “Fuck you and Randall, too.”

When the valet hands Lena her keys, she sits in the car under the poorly lit portico until he goes back into his little booth. Lena picks through her bag and pulls out her book and lets it fall open to a random page for guidance.

“Some of these people read cards, some read the stars… Some of them weren’t for real but others gave me something to hold on to, some insight into what was going on in my life.”

Tina visited readers, psychics, for a hint that a better life was in her future. Images crowd into Lena’s head of places she has seen without seeing when she is out and about. There is a reader on Piedmont Avenue, a familiar street where Lena gets her nails done, does her banking, and lunches on Kung Pao beef. The words Psychic Healer & Palm Reader Always Open are pasted in careful strips of preformed block letters on the sandwich board in front of the small house. She has walked by the sign a hundred times, more fearful than curious to drop in.

By the time she gets to Piedmont Avenue, the streets are still crowded. Who are the rest of these night-owl drivers, she wonders? Nurses on late-night duty, philanderers and bar-hoppers, singles on their way back home reluctant to spend the night in a lover’s messy bed? Other wishy-washy women who cannot make up their minds what to do with their lives?

She swerves into the short driveway beside the clapboard house. Clay pots full of red and white geraniums line the four stairs and lead to the glow-in-the-dark stripes painted on the wooden porch. Tiny moths dance around the pale overhead light, drunk, perhaps, on the geraniums’ grassy perfume. Lena presses the doorbell; the scratch of soft soles against a hardwood floor follows the strident buzz. A short, bald man opens the