“Probably in the next few months,” he said. “I’ll be closing on a property sometime at the end of the month, but it has to be restored before I’ll be able to move in.”
“Is it in New Orleans?” Jasmine asked.
“Yes. It’s only blocks from where I now live.”
“You must really like the CBD.”
Cameron smiled as he stared out the windshield. “I do. Some folks like the Garden District because of the big houses, and others prefer the Upper and Lower French Quarters, but I’ve always been partial to the CBD.”
“What’s the appeal?”
“It reminds me a lot of lower Manhattan with narrow streets lined with office buildings, banks, and Victorian warehouses. You can also find skyscrapers belonging to financial institutions and oil companies. There are a number of hotels, museums, and galleries, and an outlet at the Riverwalk with more than one hundred and twenty stores.”
Jasmine gave him a quick glance. “Did you say outlet?”
“I did.”
“Now you’re singing my song. I love shopping at outlets because there are so many of my favorite shops in one location. There’s an outlet in Riverhead, Long Island that I visit at least two or three times a year.”
Cameron slightly reclined the seatback, stretched out his legs, and crossed his feet at the ankles. “Is it anywhere near where we’re going today?”
“We’ll pass it on the way. Are you thinking of doing some shopping?”
“I hadn’t planned on it, but if I think of something maybe we can stop on the way back.”
There came a comfortable pause before he asked, “How long will it take us to get there to your aunt’s place?”
“Barring delays, we should get there in about two hours.”
* * *
Cameron stared out the windshield as Jasmine headed toward the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. “Tell me about your family.” There was so much he wanted to know about the woman who had intrigued him the instant he spied her at Hannah’s wedding.
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
“How did your parents meet?”
“My father saw combat in Vietnam and—”
“I thought you said your mother is Filipino,” Cameron interrupted.
“She is. My father met her in Manila. He was drafted during the Vietnam War, and his unit was shipped to Philippines. A typhoon hit the islands and his unit’s deployment to Vietnam was delayed more than a week. My mother was a first-year nursing student at that time and she was recruited to help with injured civilians when my father offered to carry one of her elderly relatives who’d suffered a broken leg to a nearby mobile hospital. They struck up a friendship and Daddy gave her his military address and home telephone number and told her to write him. She never wrote, but after she graduated she called and left a message with her address with his mother to thank her son for saving her grandmother’s life.”
“What happened after that?” Cameron asked, totally engrossed in the story.
“By that time my father had returned to civilian life and had enrolled in college as an engineering student. Of course he was shocked to hear from someone he hadn’t known more than a couple of days. There was something about Marta Avila he couldn’t forget, so Richard Washington decided it was time for a reunion. Their mutual attraction for each other hadn’t waned and after spending a month courting Marta, my father proposed marriage. They were married in the Philippines and had another ceremony once they got back to the States for his family.
“My mother got pregnant right away, and a couple of weeks after she delivered me she went back into the hospital to undergo a procedure which would prevent her from having any more children. Meanwhile Daddy got a position teaching at a specialized New York City high school and after a couple of years he bought a house on Long Island. I was two when Mom was hired by a local municipal hospital. She eventually applied for citizenship, earned a graduate degree in public health and went on to head the Trauma Center. After nearly twenty years of teaching, my father was hired as an assistant principal in a high school within walking distance of where we lived.”
Cameron thought about how uneventful Jasmine’s parents’ marriage was when it had taken years before his parents finally called a truce and stopped their verbal and psychological rivalry. And as the eldest of their four children he had been the one to witness the hostility, while wondering why they would stay together when they were complete opposites.
Whenever his father moved out of the house to stay in the country club, Cameron felt as if he could exhale normally for the first time. When his father returned, he never knew what he would encounter. Either his parents were glaring at each other and exchanging barbs, or they were hugging so tightly he didn’t know where one began and the other ended.
He’d reached adolescence and his father decided it was time to have a man-to-man talk with his eldest son, and Cameron knew he’d shocked his father when he angrily told Nathan Singleton there was nothing he could tell him about how to treat a woman because he hadn’t been the best role model. He and Nathan engaged in a hostile stare-down before the older man walked away without saying a word. It was another month before Cameron apologized to his father for his tone, but refused to retract what he’d said because his father had shown him hownotto treat a woman. And once he’d begun dating he made it a practice never to raise his voice at a woman or engage in a verbal exchange about something on which they would never agree. He had lost count of the number of women he’d stopped seeing because he’d found them too argumentative.
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Jasmine asked, breaking into his musings.
“Yes. I have two brothers and a sister.”
