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Overview
He's a successful African-American entrepreneur, devastatingly good looking, personable, yet unable to escape the pain of a past love who is gone but can't be forgotten.
Yesterday fades in the dawn of a new tomorrow...and the magic of a love they have dreamed of all their lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780380805792 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 06/01/1999 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
After graduating from Florida A&M, Timmothy established Timmothy McCann and Associates, a financial planning firm. The agency achieved national recognition within its industry, but Timmothy sold the business to pursue his true passion, which has always been writing, and a gift that began with composing love letters grew into Until...,his first novel. He currently resides in Florida and is at work on his second novel, For Always.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Thursday Morning
Betty flung her childhood comforter to the floor, flip her pillow to the cool side, and lay quietly on her bed as she gazed at the ceiling fan. In darkness, the cream-colored, room turned to shades of blue. Her pillowcase was damp, but not with tears. From within the silence of the room, it seemed each sound outside her home was magnified. She heard the sweeping thrash of her neighbor's sprinkler system against her wall. She heard the soft sigh of the pine tree next door moving in the breeze. On this morning, even the chirps of the crickets were more audible. The time was 4:17, and in three hours she would face the most important day of her career. She had been tossing in bed for over an hour. Neither the taste of warm milk nor the counting of yawns had worked, so she closed her eyes and whispered, "God, please let me go to sleep." The ghost in the shadows of her mind had made a return visit.
With a shallow inhale of the peach-hyacinth-scented air in her bedroom, she said out loud, "I need to relax." She thought about Jacqui and smiled as she remembered their last conversation and the story about a certain police officer in town. Her thoughts went to Evander and how much she missed sleeping beside him, especially on a night like this one. Betty thought of the courtroom that smelled like an old textbook and the look on the sequestered jurors' faces. And then she noticed the clock. It was 4:18. She curled around her pillow with the sheet tucked over her shoulders and dosed her eyes with the knowledge that once again, for her, sleep would not come easy.
"We the people of the state of Florida, in the matter of Lopezversus Midway Railroad United, case number 98-170C, rule in favor of the plaintiff."
As the foreman of the jury read from the index card, the widowed mother of two children wept. A couple of individuals in the gallery screamed, "Yes!" as the judge brought the court back to order with a swift pounding of the gavel. As a tear slid down Mrs. Lopez's face and under her chin, her lawyer reached over and covered her quivering hand. With a peripheral glance, the attorney dosed her eyes while anticipation evaporated in her throat. Years of litigation were over, and the two ladies waited to hear the amount awarded to the family.
"Count one, in the charge of wrongful death and reckless endangerment of Mr. José Roberto Federico Lopez, the people award in the amount of one million dollars," the double-chinned brunette juror read from the card. After they heard the award amount, the spectators in the court again displayed their approval.
"This is my final warning," the judge said, and opted not to pound the gavel but to point its handle toward the disrupters.
"Count two, in the charge of wrongful death and reckless endangerment of Lorenzo José Roberto Lopez, the people award in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars." After saying these words, the jury foreman allowed a smile to appear, but never looked up from her card. Spectators in the gallery were again ecstatic, but restrained, as they squirmed with excitement.
The people had spoken and Betty Anne Robinson had won the case no one in her firm wanted to take. She looked across the courtroom at the long table of attorneys and the CEO of the railroad company as they huddled together. Their appeal process had no doubt begun, but it didn't matter to Betty. Once again she had reached into nothingness and pulled out a victory.
Mrs. Lopez, the thirty-three-year-old Mexican fruit picker who always wore a stroke too much makeup, sat placid as the eyes of the courtroom fell upon her. In the months prior to the trial, she and Betty had worked closely in preparation of the case. While they'd had numerous meetings in the conference room of Murphy, Renfro and Collins, there were often times Betty felt she sat in the room alone. And then one day she pushed her chair away from the dark mahogany table and turned to face her client. She knew their chances of winning the case were minimal if she did not get full cooperation from Mrs. Lopez, so she asked her point-blank what was wrong.
As she cleaned her glasses with the hem of her floral dress, Mrs. Lopez looked at Betty with eyes rimmed in red and then told of how she'd been working in her garden on a chilly, overcast afternoon. How she'd been putting a protective covering over her tomatoes and squash when she heard the phone ring and ran into the house. The first thing she'd looked at was the Caller ID box and noticed the call was from the Gainesville Police Department. Since Federico, who had had a pet peeve about punctuality, was more than two hours late from his run to the store, she'd refused to answer it. She recounted how she'd walked into the living room and taken her rosary beads from the mantel over the fireplace and held them to her heart. She'd murmured a prayer to herself as the phone rang because all was well until it was answered. And then her twelve-year-old daughter had lifted the receiver, said "Hello?" and changed her life forever.
"Miss Robinson, I don't know if you have ever lost anyone you've loved, but it's a feeling that I can't describe," she said as she gazed back and forth at the shelves of the conference room lined with gold-trimmed law books. "The best way to describe the way I felt is that I was dead too. But still breathing. No mother should ever bury her child and husband." With a shaky voice she continued, "A hundred times I've thought about dropping this suit. It seemsevery time I tell the story, a little part of me dies all over again and I don't know if I can go through it in court..."
What People are Saying About This
An excellent novel…stands head and shoulders above the rest.
—(E. Jerome Dickey)