Lies of Love

by Hannovah

  “Her friend has never come over before?” Brandon asked.

  “Yes . . . but.” Joshua massaged his brow. “You see, Ashley used to be a lesbian, but she is straight now.”

  My eyebrows almost touched the hair on my head.

  I knew Brandon had an opinion on the matter and I waited for it, and sure enough, here it came: “One either is or is not. There is no used to be. Once a dog’s hunting eggs, he’s always hunting eggs.”

  “Well, that is what she said. I don’t know if I believe her or not. I’m not judging.”

  “So, what did you say to her . . . about the girl?”

  “I told her I didn’t want her bringing anybody into our relationship, but if she must, she must. But I wouldn’t sit back and watch them have fun together; I would have to join in.”

  Brandon sniggered, “Ah-hah. If one pound of sugar is sweet, two pounds must be sweeter.”

  Joshua laughed.

  My stomach began to grumble, but I paid it no mind.

  “So, did Ashley bring her over?”

  “Not yet.”

  Or you’re too respectful to tell us, I imagined.

  Brandon did not render any advice because he was not asked for any. But if I were asked, I would say ‘Run! Run! Run like hell, boy! And never look back!’

  “What I can’t stand,” he continued, massaging his forehead, “is that Ashley can do whatever she wants, but if I simply look at another female, it’s war. That’s what happened on the cruise when she cussed me out.”

  “I did notice some attitude that night,” Brandon recalled. “But then . . . she was so devoted when you got sick.”

  “I know. She could be sweet sometimes, but at other times she is a devil.”

  “Really?”

  “The problem on the cruise was that we stopped for me to say hi to a girl I knew from class. Right away Ashley walked off with a temper and I didn’t even get a chance to introduce them.”

  Brandon echoed my sentiment. “But . . . I don’t understand. She’s lap-dancing strange men almost every day and night.”

  “True. But, you know, the dancing doesn’t bother me because I know that she’s working. As long as she’s not dancing at a totally nude club, like she promised, I’m okay.”

  “Total or partial, she’s engaging with men all the time . . . in a sexual kind of way.”

  “I guess I don’t have to worry about that any more, now that she quit dancing.”

  Then Joshua rolled over to his side and faced his therapist, and I felt a tinge of guilt for spying on them. But it was juicy.

  “And another thing: when Ashley’s at home and sees me studying, she interprets it as me doing nothing. She wants us to go out and hang or stay in and watch movies or talk all day. I keep telling her, ‘Babe, I have to study,’ but she doesn’t understand, and then the arguments start. If I go to the library to avoid the confrontation, she thinks that I’m hanging out, and so she keeps calling me. More arguments.”

  “Ah-hah. I guess she doesn’t understand that school is more than just going to class. Have you explained that to her?”

  “Many times, but she just doesn’t get it. Also, she can’t let her mom and friends know that she’s minding a man. She said she was working too hard, hurting her feet and hands while I was taking it easy. So that’s why she quit her job, and she’s looking for something else to do.”

  “Not a bad idea, her getting a different job,” Brandon stated.

  I, in my hiding place, nodded in agreement.

  “Yes, but remember, I’m taking seven classes. I only signed up for so many because she had agreed to work and support me.” He reverted back to his original position on the futon and placed his hands across his forehead.

  I suspected that anything else that Joshua had to say could not be any juicier than what he had already said, and besides, Brandon would most likely fill me in sooner or later. Now would be a good time to make my retreat and satisfy my stomach which was hurting so much I felt like its walls were rubbing together. Note to self: eat first, spy after.

  Moments later, the men found me at the table enjoying my meal, and Joshua helped himself to a bag of red chips and a soda.

  “Joshua, do you and Ashley plan on going to the Caribbean parade?” I asked, polishing off my mac and cheese.

  “I have to work. But Ashley has already bought her costume.” He sipped on his soda. “Are you going?”

  “Yeah,” Brandon answered. “We plan to. Yvette’s in the parade and we always go to support her.”

  “Sorry, but I’ll have to miss it,” he said and kissed my cheek as he headed off to his job.

  Soon afterwards, Brandon attempted to give me the 411 on the Brownings, but I informed him that I already knew.

  “How do you know?” he inquired.

  “I was passing by the office and –”

  “Oh! You snoop!”

  I laughed. “You know something?” An idea hit me as I cleared the table. “Maybe you should write a book on Joshua and Ashley?”

  “Ha!” He sounded amused. “That might be an interesting book. Those two have a lot of drama. But I’m not into stories. I’ll stick to my technical writing.”

  And he was excellent at it. While I had been studying Chemistry, he had been studying Agricultural Science at The University of Florida; that’s where we met. But he never used his degree; he had always been self-employed. In Gainesville, after graduation from U of F, he ran a taxi business and later on, he owned a small fleet of trucks too. He left the trucking industry to take up a truck driving instructor position at a technical/vocational institute here in Miami. While there, he had found that the textbook for his students wasn’t ‘all that’, so his dean had encouraged him to write his own. That turned out to be the best advice that he had ever received in his life. Brandon wrote an instructor’s guide, a student text, and a workbook, and all three were so well patronized nationwide, that he sold his rights to the publishing company for a nice chunk of money. That was the down payment for his apartments. Although he no longer taught Truck Driving (land-lording requires flexibility), the publishers kept in contact with him, and he has since produced second and third editions of his books.

  “I know that writing is not my forte,” I said from the kitchen sink. “I only know chemicals, but I think that I need to be writing down all these juicy episodes. You know what, I’ll start jotting down some notes.”

  “You?” Brandon pointed an index finger at me. “Edna Bergail Rayburn? Write?” He laughed like a hyena. “A cockroach has no business in a fowl party.”

  I stared menacingly at him.

  He cleared his throat and rolled his eyes. “Okay Eddie, I’ll help you.” He only volunteered because never in his wildest dreams would he expect me to undertake such a venture. Well, we’ll see about that.

  I was really glad when Ashley popped in days later and told us the good news that she found a job, waiting tables. True, it was still at a strip club, but at least she would no longer have to injure herself by swinging and climbing on those disgusting poles. And, she would not be stripping, thank goodness.

  She also stopped by on Friday afternoon before leaving for her job at Casa de Fiesta, looking very chic under her shoulder length black wig. She wore black and silver high heel sandals and a black mini dress that showed off her curvy assets. It was a somewhat Gothic look, but the girl was hot. A little overdressed for a waitress, I thought.

  “We’re so grateful that you all allowed us to stay here how about lunch at our place on Sunday?” she asked. Her baby blue eyes and spacey teeth portrayed such a picture of sincerity and goodness that I could not say no even if I wanted to.

  “Sure Ashley,” I said. “We would love that.”

  She did not stay much longer since she was on her way to work. She said goodbye, and as she left, I heard Brandon laughing softly to himself while peering through the window.

  “What’s up? Why are you laughing? What’s up?” I asked, moving closer to him. />
  “Take a look,” he said, spreading the shutters wider with his fingers.

  I did. I had not noticed it while she was inside our house, but Ashley’s dress was plenty shorter at the back than in the front, and as she walked, her butt-cheeks flashed intermittently.

  “What type of dress is that?” I marveled. “She will get a lot of tips tonight.”

  On Sunday morning, since I did not have to cook a major meal, Brandon took me for a sunrise walk on the beach, followed by a refreshing dip in the Atlantic. Then, around nine thirty when hunger pangs tore at our stomachs, we headed home.

  “Hey. What happened here?” I exclaimed, pointing to Ashley’s yellow SUV parked on the street in front of our house.

  Brandon looked over to my side. “Ah-hah!” he said, shocked too.

  We exited our wagon and walked out to the curb to take a closer look. Someone had taken a can of red spray paint and sprayed the hood of her vehicle in a criss-cross fashion, totally messing up the pretty ganja leaf rendition. Both headlights and both side mirrors were smashed, and both wheels on the driver’s side were replaced with doughnut spares. The vandalism continued onto the driver’s side where, I almost missed it until Brandon began tracing with his forefinger, the words, fuck you bitch, were keyed into the door.

  “I wonder who did this and why?” I thought out loud.

  Brandon responded, “We’ll have to investiquire.”

  “Huh?”

  “Investigate and inquire.”

  I thumped him on his shoulder for being so silly.

  We were so curious about the condition of the Tracker that, although sandy and salty, we cut a path directly to our little cottage in the back. But we stopped when we got to our pool because we heard expletives ranging from a gruff bass to a squeaky soprano, with the soprano in the lead. Then, through the glass door (the blinds were opened), we saw bare-breasted Ashley marching back and forth, and frantically waving a hand above her head.

  Brandon and I exchanged glances, and immediately turned around for our dwelling.

  “Ray, I think we made a mistake by having them here,” I said.

  “Ah-hah. I bounced my head with this one. But I’m hesitant to ask him to leave because I don’t want him to think that I just used him to fix up the place.”

  We entered the main house, both sighing.

  In the early afternoon when the next door ranting concluded, we made the short trek to the Brownings to keep our much looked-forward-to lunch date. I’m always eager to taste someone else’s hand, but I made sure to eat a little something before we left our home just in case our hosts were late in their cooking. I usually can’t stand hunger pains, except when I’m eavesdropping on good gossip.

  When we entered the guesthouse, Brandon wasted no time. “What happened to Ashley’s vehicle?” he asked.

  “Ashley pissed off somebody at the club last night,” Joshua answered with disgust while finishing up the cooking. “I keep telling her not to go out dressed the way she does, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  “I can take care of myself thank you,” Ashley countered with a neck roll. “I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time and besides I went out last night to work not just to have fun.”

  “So . . . what really, really happened?” I asked.

  Ashley greeted us with a hug, and began her tale. “I was waiting tables and this Spanish guy came up to me and told me that he knew me from the other strip club he was looking kind of crazy and drunk and he was trying to grope me and I did not appreciate that I had to give him the finger and say a few cuss words to get him to stop he said something to me in Spanish and then disappeared when I came out of the club I saw that I had two slashed tires and all that shit done to my ride.”

  Brandon and I sat on their only seat, a sofa, and I asked, “So you think he did all that stuff to your Tracker?”

  “It had to be him!” she replied.

  “Or some other guy,” Joshua injected painfully.

  I was curious. “How did he know which vehicle was yours?”

  “Duhh?” Joshua said, raising both hands in the air. “Yellow truck. Big ol’ ganja plant on the hood.” He sounded flabbergasted. “I told her not to paint that shit on there, but she insisted that it was her ride and she would do what the hell she wants.”

  I totally agreed with her husband. I mean, a convicted weed trafficker should not have that type of decoration on her vehicle. Any other plant: a rose, a hibiscus, a magnolia maybe. But not cannabis sativa.

  “If he knew me from the strip club then he probably knows the Tracker too but tomorrow I am going to have the truck painted over.”

  “This could’ve all been avoided,” Joshua said at the kitchen entrance with a pot spoon in hand. “But you’re just too stubborn.”

  As guests, we sensed a little trouble in the love nest, and so I tried to change the mood by talking about the trimmings in the apartment. Brandon and I got up and walked around the tiny living room.

  “I like the décor,” I began. “Ashley, did you dress up the place?”

  “Yes we thought to use things that have meaning to us like our wedding clothes.” She pointed to her wedding outfit together with Joshua’s trunks and bandana that were all pinned up on a wall. “And this was my first pair of shoes when I started working,” she reminisced while touching a white pair of high platform, plastic shoes that hung to the left of the wedding garments. Then she tip-toed and caressed a collage of paper money from various parts of the world. “Here are some of the foreign currencies that I got from customers.”

  “Nice. I like it. A little different, but very nice.”

  The steel-pan was not used for decoration like it was in Joshua and Joanne’s townhouse; here, it remained in its case in a far corner of the room.

  Joshua was finished cooking now, and so Brandon and I sat on the sofa (there was no dining table) to dine. Joshua turned their little TV on to a football channel and he and his wife then sat on the floor.

  I noticed Ashley adding a special hot sauce to her meal and so I did likewise. “This is some good food,” I commented, “especially with the hot sauce.”

  Joshua smiled in appreciation. It was a really tasty meal, and we all had a second helping.

  Then Ashley decided to entertain us with a photo album. As she turned page after page, there were some pictures that she would not let us see, calling them, “Inappropriate.”

  In the appropriate ones, she pointed out relatives and friends, and I noticed that all of her friends were male. The only pictures of females were of her mother and a cousin, but all of the other two dozen or so, were of male friends, mostly black, and mostly from the Caribbean. There is something to be said about Ashley, I thought, but I just don’t know what that something is.

  The last page of the album had a newspaper clipping of a scantily dressed young woman at the top of a pole with several male faces looking up at her. It was not Ashley.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “Oh that’s my mom she won a pole climbing contest back in the eighties.”

  Brandon and I sneaked a glance at each other and I knew exactly what he was thinking: The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

  By late evening, we gave our thanks for the meal, and Ashley handed me a new bottle of hot sauce as a parting gift. What a sweet soul.

  On Sunday of the Columbus Day weekend, Brandon and I headed out to the annual Caribbean Carnival parade. It was something to do, and Yvette appreciated our support. This colorful festival exited in Toronto also, but when I lived there I had never attended; I only watched snips of it on TV.

  Personally, I don’t get any fun out of watching women in skimpy outfits gyrating their bodies to music, which is all that this parade was about. But my husband would not miss this event for all the grapes in California, and I would be fit for the insane asylum if I should let him attend this event by himself. And the mister was fully prepared, wearing his dark sunglasses and all. Hmmm.

  The
city had blocked off a few streets and created a route for the masqueraders to dance their way to their final destination, a large municipal park. Being early, we were fortunate to find a great spot from which to watch the parade: under a big, spreading tree about a hundred yards from the big park. It sure pays to be early sometimes. As usual, we planned to watch the parade to its end, and leave without following it into the park.

  We dragged out two folding chairs from the back of the Volvo and set them up on the curb. Then Brandon prepared his video camera and I placed our cooler of drinks under my feet for relaxation.

  Other people followed our lead, parking near our vantage point and hauling out their chairs and coolers. Then before I knew it, our shady tree spot became crowded with spectators who had no umbrellas and wanted to escape the punishing Miami sun.

  Soon, in the distance, I heard the first rumble of calypso music, and all heads turned towards the semi-truck, the first of many, that had just rounded a corner. It was pulling a flatbed trailer loaded with speaker boxes so gigantic that they could entertain the whole universe. The music grew louder as the semi-trucks crawled towards us, and there were people dancing on the beds of the trailers like if they had lost their minds. Also, chipping jubilantly behind these trucks, like children following the Pied Piper of Hamlin, were throngs of scantily costumed revelers, male and female. Their bodies glistened with sweat and tinsel, and their waistlines rocked and jerked in rhythm with the booming of the speakers. They looked ecstatic. Sometimes they jumped, sometimes they waved, and sometimes they wined down to the ground. They didn’t give a damn. This was carnival.

  Brandon never put the camera down.

  “Are you shooting for Playboy?” I yelled over the blasting music.

  He laughed. Then he shouted back, “Nah! National Geographic!”

  I shook my head and smiled.

  One after another the bands partied by, each with a banner stating their individual theme, and bearing the colors of their national flags. I never saw the point in having a banner and theme because, in my opinion, all the costumes looked the same after a while.