I came around the desk. 'I will,' I said.
I went and shut the door and came back and pulled one of the client chairs a little closer to her.
'Sit down, please,' I said.
She looked at the chair and then at the closed door. Her movements were all slow, as if she had to think through each one before she made it. She looked at me again and then at the chair and then carefully smoothed her skirt against the backs of her thighs with her left hand and sat down. She sat upright, forward in her chair, her knees together, both feet on the floor, side by side.
I went around my desk and sat down and smiled at her. Encouraging. Supportive. Attentive. Entirely without sexual or racial prejudice. She could tell me anything.
She did not smile back. She gazed at me without any affect at all that I could discern. She held her purse now in her lap with both hands.
We sat and looked at one another. The steam knocked for a moment in the pipes and then stopped. I heard heels clack in the corridor again.
'Dwayne don't know I'm here,' she said. Her quiet gaze didn't move. 'He be really pissed off if he knew.'
I nodded. Nice to hear a human voice again. We were quiet some more. She turned the purse once in her lap so that the open end now faced her. Too bad I didn't smoke. The heels in the hall clacked back from wherever they had clacked before.
'Excuse me,' Chantel said. 'I don't mean to just stare like this, but I'm shy around white people until I know them.'
I nodded again.
'I don't know many white people,' she said. 'Even at Taft I stay mostly with other black people.'
'You live with Dwayne?'
'Yes, since the end of sophomore year.'
'You going to get married, you think?'
'Un huh. After graduation. Dwayne probably going to be drafted by the Clippers so we probably going to move to LA.'
'You mind?' I said.
'No,' Chantel said. 'Me and Dwayne be fine anywhere.'
I nodded. 'How's his reading coming?'
Chantel shrugged. We sat and looked quietly some more. She didn't seem to be uncomfortable with the silence. I wasn't either. I'd heard too many silences to get uncomfortable.
'You told anybody?' Chantel said.
'About Dwayne can't read? No, nobody that you'd care about.'
'How 'bout the other thing?'
'Same answer,' I said.
Chantel nodded, as much to herself as to me. I waited.
'You married?' Chantel said.
'Not quite,' I said.
'You got somebody?'
'Yes.'
She nodded again, as if I'd passed some kind of test.
'What you going to do?' she said.
'I can't seem to help Dwayne from Dwayne's end,' I said. 'So I'm going to try to go back door. I'm going to bust his connection and see if I can spring him free.'
'Dwayne's a boy,' she said. 'I know we not supposed to say 'boy.' We supposed to talk that man child shit; but it's true. He looks like a man, and he's good as any man, but he hasn't grown up at all.'
'He's been a star so long he's never had a chance to,' I said.
Chantel nodded her head four or five times rapidly. 'Yes,' she said, 'that's right, and he always been bigger and stronger than everybody and he never had to, you know, do stuff he didn't like, do stuff he wasn't too good at.'
'Like reading and writing,' I said.
'That's right,' Chantel said. 'He wasn't so good at that so he just didn't do it. He so good at other stuff that he don't have to do it.'
'What happens when you try to teach him?' I said.
'He get mad,' Chantel said. 'No, he don't get mad. That's not right.' Chantel paused for a moment and looked out my window while she thought. She pushed her lower lip. And frowned just slightly. I wanted to pick her up and kiss her on the forehead.
'He gets embarrassed,' she said.
'Yeah,' I said.
