by Mary Monroe
“I was a size twenty-four when I was at my heaviest,” I confessed. Then I sniffed and tilted my head, looking from her companion to her. “By the way, I heard you flunked out of Louisiana State,” I said with a sneer. “That’s a damn shame.”
That cheap shot hit Jade right below the belt.
Her smug look disappeared so fast, you would have thought that she’d just slapped on a mask.
CHAPTER 28
It took Jade a few moments to recover from the smack-down I’d just delivered. She let out a little gasp and blinked a couple of times.
“That was a bunk college! A pooh-butt, Mickey Mouse college that didn’t allow me to use all my talents! Those professors hated me!” she shrieked. My comment had upset her tremendously. She was so mad that her bottom lip was poked out so far, it looked like the tip of a penis.
“Now that’s a damn shame,” I quipped, shaking my head.
“I can do so much better! You know I can!”
“I’m sure you can. But, Jade, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but I was surprised that you got into any college at all. Your grades were not that good….” Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have wasted my time bickering with somebody young enough to be my daughter. However, there was nothing normal about this situation. It felt good to fight fire with fire.
Her voice changed in the twinkling of an eye. She sounded so gruff and disembodied, it seemed like I was watching The Exorcist. “I know I can get into Morehouse next if I want to!”
“Well, when you do, you be sure and let me know, because you’ll be making history,” I replied.
She released a major gasp. “What do you mean by that?”
“Last time I checked, Morehouse was a men’s college.”
“I knew that! I meant Spelman or Yale!”
I nodded. “Well, maybe you’ll do better at Spelman or Yale,” I said, turning to leave.
“How is your husband? Is he still with you?” Jade asked, speaking louder than was necessary. She had always enjoyed having an audience. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see two of the boutique clerks watching and listening.
“My husband is doing just fine, and, yes, we are still together,” I reported.
“Well, whoop-de-do for you,” Jade said. Then she wrapped her arm around her companion’s waist and finally introduced him. “Have you met Marcelo, my fiancé?”
As soon as she said the word fiancé, the man with her gulped and turned his head so fast to look at her, his hair slapped the side of his face.
“Hello, Marcelo,” I said, extending my hand. He had a nice, firm handshake. But something told me that he was not as strong as he looked. Jade was in charge. He nodded and gave me a shy smile.
“Marcelo and I were going to grab a bite to eat. Would you like to join us?” Jade said, looking down at my feet. Then she looked back up at my face, with her trademark fake smile.
I’d rather break bread with Idi Amin, I thought. But I said, “No thanks. I’ve got a few more stops to make.” I was glad that another customer approached the entrance to the boutique, so we had to move out of the way. But there was one more thing I had to ask Jade before she got away, because I didn’t know when I’d see her again. “Are you really back in Richland for good?” I sucked in so much air and held it that my chest felt like it was going to explode. I was forced to exhale before Jade responded.
“I’m home for good,” she told me with her chin tilted in the air. “And I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around. Now you do have a blessed day, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she added, wagging a finger in my direction. Her nails were almost as long as her tongue.
“That’s highly unlikely,” I said under my breath.
“What did you say?” she asked, looking at me with her eyes narrowed into slits.
“I said for you to have a blessed day, too.”
Why she felt it was necessary to blow me a kiss before she departed was beyond me. She motioned with her head for the boyfriend to follow her, then they strolled into the record store next door. I suddenly lost my desire to shop. Now all I wanted to do was go back home. But I dismissed that idea right away. If Jade was on the loose at the mall, that meant Rhoda was probably available. I called her from a pay phone a few feet away. I was disappointed when I got the answering machine.
Without giving it much thought, I called Louis up next.
“Annette, ooh, baby, I am so glad you called. I’ve been thinking about you all day. Can you get away for a couple of hours tonight?”
“What time?”
“Things are kind of busy here right now. We always get huge church groups every Sunday. Say around seven or eight?”
“I think so. Where do you want me to meet you?”
“Let’s start with a few drinks at Antonosanti’s. Then we’ll play it by ear.”
“I’ll meet you in the lobby at seven thirty,” I said. My heart was racing. I was suddenly so giddy and happy that I started humming an old Luther Vandross ballad right after I hung up.
I continued walking through the mall, with renewed strength. Before I talked with Louis, I’d prayed that I wouldn’t run into Jade again. Now I didn’t care. I went back to the boutique where I had seen her, and this time I went in. Five minutes after I entered the store, while I was going through the items on the clearance rack, I heard somebody call my name. I whirled around. It was Lizel Hunter, and with her was her cousin Wyrita Hayes. These were the two women who helped Rhoda operate her child-care center. Like almost every other woman I knew, these two were nosy and meddlesome, and they loved a good piece of gossip.
“Annette, you seen that Jade yet?” Wyrita asked, looking at me from the corner of her eye.
Wyrita and Lizel were both petite and attractive, with nut brown skin, thick black hair that reached their shoulders, and the same soft, delicate features. They didn’t even need makeup to enhance their looks, but they never left home without a generous coat of powder, rouge, and lip gloss. Like Rhoda, they would check their makeup on the way to their autopsies if they could.
Lizel had been married four times and couldn’t wait to marry husband number five. She referred to her long-suffering fourth husband, Clarence, as “that thing I married.” I didn’t know the man that well. But he couldn’t have been that bad, because every time he left her, she tracked him down and brought him back home. According to Rhoda, Lizel was just too picky when it came to men. If she made it to husband number ten, she’d find something wrong with him, too.
Wyrita had the opposite problem. She had never been married, and that was her main goal in life. She had tried everything to find a husband, from enlisting a notorious dating service to visiting lonely men in halfway houses. She was currently not involved with anybody, but she was so confident that she’d eventually get a man to the altar that she had already purchased her wedding dress and compiled a guest list. She also had blank wedding invitations ready, the church picked out, the date set (Christmas Day in a year to be determined), and the wedding reception feast decided. She had everything to indicate that she had a fiancé, except a fiancé.
“Yes, I’ve seen Jade. Just a little while ago,” I said, rolling my eyes. “She and I had a lovely reunion.”
“I bet y’all did. I love Rhoda to death, and helping her care for them children is a dream job, but if Jade keeps coming up to me, telling me how to do my job, both of us are going to quit,” Lizel told me, looking at her cousin for confirmation.
“Sure enough,” Wyrita promptly agreed.
“I don’t blame either one of you,” I said, looking at my watch. “Well, I don’t want to hold you two sisters up. I know you must have more shopping to do.”
“You seen that Mexican hottie that Jade got?” Wyrita asked, with a gleam in her eye. “I got an itching to run for that border lickety-split and pluck me one of them hombres off a beach when my vacation comes up.”
“You ain’t got to go all the way to Mexico to get you no husband. You can have that th
ing I married,” Lizel grumbled, looking at her cousin like she wanted to slap her.
“If you don’t want Clarence, what makes you think I want him?” Wyrita snapped.
“Uh, ladies, I really do have to go!” I said, walking toward the boutique entrance. I could still hear Lizel and Wyrita fussing at each other when I reached the door in the mall that led to the parking lot.
Talking to Louis had brightened my day tremendously. I started humming my favorite Anita Baker tune, “Caught Up In the Rapture.” And that was exactly what I was feeling like. I was still caught up in the Rapture when I got to my car at the end of the parking lot. As hard as it was to believe, Jade had parked her mother’s SUV two cars over from mine. She was loading packages into the backseat and didn’t see me this time. But seeing her again didn’t seem to bother me now. I had convinced myself that since I had Louis to fall back on now, it would be a lot easier for me to endure all the negativity that I had to deal with.
CHAPTER 29
Pee Wee and I arrived home at the same time, which was around five thirty. He parked in our driveway; I parked on the street in front of our house.
“I see you didn’t catch anything,” I said, following him onto our front porch. I was no longer humming Anita Baker. But I was still in a fairly good mood because of my conversation with Louis and our upcoming date in a couple of hours.
“The fish wasn’t bitin’ worth a damn. I guess them night crawlers I used to bait my hook with was too old,” he told me, sliding Charlotte’s dusty bicycle to the side with his foot. “Where you comin’ from?”
“Uh, I went shopping at the mall,” I muttered.
He looked at my empty hands as he fumbled with his keys to unlock our front door. He was moving like an old man, slow and uncertain. I didn’t know if he was doing it on purpose just to antagonize me, or if he had really gotten to that point. But as far as I was concerned, age was just a number. I felt that way because he and I were the same age, and I certainly didn’t feel or act old. Once we got inside, he took his time clicking on the living-room light.
The house was so quiet, it was eerie. It was always quiet when Charlotte was absent. My daughter was popular, so when she was home, the phone rang off the hook until I chased her to bed. And if her friends weren’t calling her on the phone, they were knocking on the front door and the back door. I was not looking forward to the day she moved out and into a place of her own. It was times like this that I regretted having only one child. The thought of spending the rest of my days alone in the same house with Pee Wee gave me a headache—but only because of the way he was acting toward me now.
“What happened? Did all the stores close up before you got there?” I didn’t like the suspicious look he gave me, so I gave him one, too.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I see you didn’t buy nothin’,” he said, looking at my empty hands again. “You don’t never come home empty-handed after you been shoppin’.”
“I guess that makes us even,” I told him as we moved slowly into the living room. He didn’t even respond to that. He put his fishing pole back into the kitchen closet, then stumbled back into the living room and plopped down in his chair.
“I packed Charlotte’s things for her trip to the Bahamas. Daddy said they’d pick up everything in the morning on the way to the airport,” I said, not taking my eyes off his face. Even if I had drunk a couple of glasses of rum and Coke, which made me very mellow, my jaws would have still been tight. I managed to display enough disgust in my face for him to see it.
“Why you lookin’ all hot and bothered?” he asked, speaking as casually as he did when he asked me about dinner.
“I just told you that I packed Charlotte’s things for her to go to the Bahamas tomorrow.”
“Yeah. So what? Somebody had to do it,” he responded with a shrug. I plopped down hard on the sofa, facing him with scorn. “I hope you packed some of that salve in case she has another incident with another eel or somethin’ worse.”
“I packed everything she’ll need.” I paused and cleared my throat. “I guess you forgot to tell me that you already knew about this Bahamas trip this morning. My mama told me they had already talked to you about it. She was just as surprised as I was that you hadn’t mentioned it to me.” I tried to keep the anger out of my voice, but he knew me well enough to know when I was pissed off at him.
“I forgot,” he replied, his lips barely moving. “I got a lot of things on my mind these days.”
I am sure you do, motherfucker! I wanted to scream. I had never known him to go fishing and return empty-handed. I figured that the weekly “doctor’s visit” excuse was not enough now. His fishing trips were just another ruse for him to spend time with whomever he was spending time with, doing whatever philanderers did. I had to freeze the thoughts running through my tortured mind. Despite my own guilt, and maybe because of it, I was determined to beat him at his own game. The only thing that kept me from going completely off on him was the fact that I had my own agenda now.
I groaned when I noticed how hard Pee Wee was looking at the TV remote control on the coffee table. He looked like he wanted to eat that damn thing. I leaned over and picked it up and dropped it on the end table next to me, guarding it like a mad dog.
“I wish we could go to the Bahamas, too. I sure need a vacation, and you probably need one, too, huh?” I offered.
He gave me a blank look before he responded. “You can go if you want to go. For a couple of weeks at least. I am sure that collection agency won’t fold if you take off for a little while.”
“What about you? As grumpy as you’ve been lately, a vacation would probably do you a world of good.”
“Grumpy? You think I’m grumpy?” he asked. His mouth remained wide open, like a small commode.
“Never mind,” I said with a heavy sigh.
“I can’t go nowhere as busy as things are at the shop.” He gave me a rare smile. “But it’s all right with me if you go….”
My lips tightened; my jaw twitched. I couldn’t stop the man from having an affair, but I damn sure was not going to make it easier for him by making myself scarce!
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said firmly. “I’ve got just as much going on at work as you got.”
“I’m sure you do. You always was a busy woman. You and Rhoda spend so much time patrolling them malls, y’all ought to be put on the payroll out there.” He laughed.
“I’m going out for dinner tonight,” I said, rising. “Either you can heat up that neck-bone casserole and those greens in the refrigerator, or I can pick something up for you on my way home.”
“Yeah, you can do that. Pick me up a plate. That ain’t a bad idea. That sissified caterin’ dude cooks a mean meat loaf. Bring me a plate from there. I went by there for lunch today.”
Just the mention of Louis made me shiver. “Oh? You like the food at Off the Hook that much?”
He nodded.
“Oh, that’s nice,” I said in a low, hollow voice. I left the room so slowly and quietly, you would have thought I was a burglar.
“You know me. I’m like you and Rhoda. I’m tryin’ to support black businesses more,” he hollered. “Them sissies need just as much support as the rest of us.”
I stopped in my tracks and whirled back around. “Sissies? I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” I snapped.
“What’s it to you? You ain’t one.”
“How do you know that the man is gay?”
“How do I know? Who don’t know? That brother got more sugar in his tank than RuPaul, Michael Jackson, Boy George, and Little Richard put together.”
“How many times do I have to remind you that a lot of people thought you were gay when we were kids? And I was one of them!”
I was immediately sorry for making that last comment. Pee Wee’s face looked like it wanted to melt and slide down his body like lava.
“And how many times do I have to tell you that if anybody knows I ain’t no fa
g, it’s you?”
I forced myself to laugh.
“Oh, so this is funny now?”
“No, it’s not funny, and we need to change the subject before one of us says something they will regret,” I replied.
“I think we’ve both already crossed that line. But to tell you the truth, I ain’t got nothin’ else to say on the subject.”
“Neither have I,” I declared. “Uh, I’m going to take a quick shower before I go out.”
“That’s nice, baby. Hand me the TV remote,” he said. “And tell that fag not to be so stingy with the gravy on my meat loaf, like he was the last time. I straightened him out real good that time, and he bowed down like I knew a sissy would. He gave me a side order of gravy on the house! But if he get ghetto mean with you on account of you bein’ a woman, you tell him who your husband is.”
“I’ll do just that, Pee Wee,” I said with a gloomy sigh. I handed him the remote control on my way out of the room.
CHAPTER 30
The evidence that my husband was having an affair was purely circumstantial, and I knew that in my heart. I also knew in my heart that even if he was having an affair, that didn’t justify me having one. But none of that mattered to me. I was having too much fun.
I felt like I was on a string and that Louis was the one controlling that string, like a yo-yo. When he wanted me, all he had to do was roll me up. Nobody could have talked any sense into my head or made me think seriously about what I was doing. And as far as me feeling any real guilt or weighing the consequences for my actions if I got caught, I forced myself to think about all of that as little as possible. I was a woman who believed that if you ignored something long enough, it would go away.
Nobody could have talked me into giving up Louis as long as I wasn’t getting what I needed from my husband. But there was something that stood out in my mind even more than that. I couldn’t ignore the fact that Louis had pursued me with so much vigor. No man, including my husband, had ever made me feel as special as Louis did. It was because of him that I felt young and beautiful for the first time in my life. I wanted to enjoy it while I could.
