On opening night, I sat in the audience with a headset, giving lighting cues as the performance came off without a noticeable hitch, and my husband sat next to me, looking smug and comfortable. I did him proud, and he liked feeling proud. We went home and after some heart-to-heart discussion, we disbanded the company, promising to come back to it after the baby was born. It would take a lot of time and energy to turn a profit. For now, I wanted to focus my energy on the baby.
I also worried that it was an expensive production to put on the road, and while I wasn’t super involved in our family finances, I knew that distribution deal had gone bad, and that was not a good thing. I had never asked a lot of questions about money, but one day he sent me along with one of his bodyguards to buy a new Jeep Cherokee—white with a cream interior and every option known to automobile kind. He sent me along to pay for the $46,000 vehicle with an American Express card.
I remember when I was a little girl, the very first check I wrote (one of those fake checks you get in your junk mail) was made out to Daddy for a million dollars. This felt kind of like that.
At the end of that summer, my husband played the Pyramid Arena in Memphis, and he noticed that Larry Graham was playing a small venue nearby that same night. There was an aftershow at Music Mix Factory in Nashville. called Larry and asked him if he wanted to come over and jam. He was elated when he called me afterward. He said that he and Larry had an unspoken rapport—they didn’t even have to look at each other to know where the music was going. Larry’s psychedelic soul/funk pedigree was stellar—he’d come up with Sly and the Family Stone—and he’d innovated his own particular style called “thumpin’ and pluckin’,” which involves slapping the strings and creating a whole different sound.
But the connection my husband felt with Larry was spiritual, not just musical.
“This man’s faith is so certain,” he said. “There’s no room for doubts or fears.”
I was happy for him. I thought this friendship would be a healthy, positive influence. He told me Larry was a strong family man and a brilliant musician. He’d had a handful of R&B hits, one that crossed over to Billboard’s Top Ten in 1980. After that, his experience in the industry was more typical than my husband’s. He worked hard and toured hard with genuine passion for the music and genuine faith that he would be led in the direction God wanted him to go. When Larry and his wife, Tina, came to Minnesota to hang out with us, I was impressed with their daughter and their obvious bond as a family. Tina was a personality-and-a-half, with a great laugh and church-lady grace. Larry had kind eyes and a broad, easygoing smile, and he was unabashedly crazy in love with his wife, which I found charming.
The only thing that made me a little uncomfortable was that Larry sometimes went off on these long sermons about—I don’t even know. I can’t even tell you what they were about. These long-winded teachings were like no brand of Christianity I’d seen before. The more I heard about the Jehovah’s Witnesses and The Watchtower and Armageddon and the pagan root of birthdays and Christmas, the less it appealed to me. There was so little room for celebration and even less for doubt. This was not a problem for me. I respect the belief systems of others, but I didn’t feel that mutual “whatever peanut butters your jelly” vibe coming back from them. It just didn’t sit right with me.
“I’m not judging. I’m just not feeling it,” I said to my husband after sitting through another mind-numbing evening. I smoothed my hand over my belly. “I don’t know what kind of medical treatment this little one might need. And when he gets here healthy and strong, I’m not going to tell him his birthday’s been canceled. We’re celebrating. Balloons, acrobats, those inflatable jumping things, petting zoo—the whole nine yards. You’ll think you died and went to Glam Slam heaven.”
In September, he went out on the Jam of the Year Tour and took Larry with him. As fall went by, he worked on Newpower Soul, staying late every night in the studio, and I was determined to stay by his side. Sometimes by three or four in the morning, I was sleeping with my eyes open, but I sat on that studio sofa, my head bouncing to the beat.
We welcomed every little sign of a healthy pregnancy. If I got light-headed or sleepy, he’d be there with his arm around my waist. He’d spread his hands over my midsection, measuring the little pooch that was starting to be noticeable. This pregnancy felt very different from the first one, and we agreed that that was a good thing. My weight was on point. My belly wasn’t growing much, and my symptoms weren’t nearly as visible. My boobs grew, and I got dizzy, but nothing else. We wanted to wait until the three-month mark to listen for a heartbeat and start getting ultrasounds, but we were confident that this baby was healthy. Come on, November 19, I prayed silently. We can do this, little one.
On November 19, I woke up, prepared for a busy, joyful day. I went into the bathroom and found blood seeping out of me. It felt like a long walk to the telephone.
“I’m bleeding.”
He took a short, sharp breath. “Okay.”
“I’m going to the doctor.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll call you.”
“Okay. Bye.”
Click.