by Miasha
“What, are you at a party?” Angela asked.
“My girlfriend’s cookout. What’s up?”
“I’m just calling to tell you my court date is tomorrow. Do you think you’ll be able to make it? It’s at ten.”
“Oh, um, yeah. I’m glad you called, though, because I had plans for tomorrow. But I’ll just cancel. Where will it be?”
“The hospital, as always,” Angela said.
“Norristown State?” Ashley confirmed.
“Yeah, I’m not sure what room, but you can just—”
“Ask the guy at information,” Ashley finished Angela’s sentence.
“Yeah, you know what to do.”
“Okay. Well, I’ll see you then,” Ashley said quickly.
“Well, um, I see you’re busy, so I’m going to let you go,” Angela said.
“All right then. I’ll see you tomorrow. ’Bye.”
Angela hung up the phone.
“Thanks, Vanessa,” Angela said, emphasizing Vanessa’s name as she walked away from the window.
The young girl smirked at her and said, “Vanessa? I’m the one who handed you the phone.”
“Yeah, after Vanessa told you to,” Angela snapped.
“Just ’cause Vanessa told me it was okay didn’t mean I had to let you make your call. Technically, you would have had to wait until eight o’clock like it says on the chart, regardless what Vanessa said.”
“Little girl, I will—” Angela began before Vanessa came out of the office and stood in front of her.
“Angela,” Vanessa said, “remember your goal now. You’re tryin’ to get discharged tomorrow. Don’t let nothin’ get in the way of that.”
Angela took a deep breath and turned her back to the girl. She proceeded to walk down the hall toward her room.
“It’s Labor Day and y’all get to go outside and enjoy the beautiful weather, eat some barbecue, and listen to some music. Don’t mess that up,” Vanessa added as she walked alongside Angela.
“You’re right. Now you see why I stay in my room. It’s like these young girls be just waitin’ to take you off your square.”
“I know. And you’re doing the right thing by staying to yourself. Speaking of which, you filled that diary up quick. You must have had a lot on your chest. I didn’t know anybody could write so fast. The last diary I kept took me two years to fill up. Who was that you had me mail it to anyway?” Vanessa finally asked.
“Oh, just a friend of mine. It’s all a part of the therapeutic process, you know?” Angela said, turning the knob to her room.
“So what now? Your friend’s supposed to read it?” Vanessa asked.
“I would hope so. I would hope I didn’t do all that writing for nothing,” Angela said, smiling before she disappeared into her room.
Dear Diary,
How did I ever get caught up in this lifestyle? Just four years ago I was a wife on my honeymoon planning the happily ever after, and now here I am taking that plan away from another woman. But am I wrong? I mean, I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and I must say the trade is much more fair being the mistress. Why sit at home carrying the burden of wondering, is my man fucking another woman? And even if you do trust his ass 100 percent, you still have to wonder if he’s fucking another woman. Because let’s face it, that is what men do. They find a good woman, somebody they proclaim to want to spend the rest of their lives with, somebody perfect enough to bear their children, and then shortly after or shortly before they marry, they find the woman they can just fuck. You know, the one with no strings attached. The one who won’t ever argue with his ass because she doesn’t give a damn about him. The one that won’t ever nag his ass because she’s getting everything she could possibly want from him. The other woman. Me now, but her then. Maybe that’s what this is all about. I married my high school sweetheart. We were both eighteen and deeply in love. We were each other’s soul mate until I went off to college. In the beginning it was fine. He visited the campus so much people thought he was a student. Then he got a new job, and things changed. The visits slowed up. He claimed the fifty-five miles each way was too much on his car. The next thing I knew, he was having an affair with a coworker, and they produced a child. To him he was just cheating on me. To me it was an affair. We were married shit! When a man or a woman cheats while they’re married, it’s called an affair, jackass. That just went to show how young and not ready for marriage he really was. He didn’t consider himself to be having an affair. He didn’t consider the other woman his mistress. He must not have considered us married. In his underdeveloped mind we were probably still just boyfriend and girlfriend. Not to say that cheating is okay when you’re just messing with somebody, but damn it, when you get married, that’s supposed to be that! Listen to me blabbering on about how my husband hurt me. That was then, and this is now. I’m twenty-six years old. I’ve been divorced for just over a year. I have no children. I have a master’s in communications. I’m very attractive, with a body guys would call perfect: 36-24-36. And I’m independent. It would be wrong for me to let all this good woman go to waste on a muthafucka that’s gonna do me dirty. So what, I’m the other woman. In a relationship it’s the other woman who has all the fun. Do I feel sorry for the wives of the men I deal with? Well, maybe I would if I believed that their husbands would be faithful if it weren’t for me. Guys are going to sleep with another woman anyway. So it might as well be me. I might as well be the one to get the perks. Yes, there are perks to being a mistress. Gifts, money, vacations, and overall good times. You see, the mistress gets a lot of things just for her cooperation. A wife, on the other hand, is expected to stand by her man regardless of what she gets or doesn’t get. All he has to do is lie and say he’s financially fucked up at the moment, and she’s supposed to be like, okay, baby, we’ll work through this together. All the while his ass is funding my lifestyle. And that’s supposed to assure him that I won’t blow his cover. Lil’ Kim said it best, “I’ma throw shade, if I can’t get paid,/ Blow you up to you girl like the Army grenade.” And don’t get me wrong, I’m not a money-hungry chick who listens to too much Lil’ Kim shit. I’m just saying. Anyway, the question was am I wrong. The answer so far is no.
“What the hell?” Monica mumbled as she came to the end of the diary entry. Who sent me this nonsense? A woman’s diary and my husband’s shirt, she thought as she held the shirt in one hand and the diary in the other. This can’t be what I think it is. Well, hell, I’m sure about to read and find out.
Monica put the shirt back on the bed and reopened the diary to the page where she had left off. With her brow furrowed, she reread the last couple of sentences and turned to the next entry.
Dear Diary,
The time has come for you to meet Carlos. He’s fine as shit. And he’s half Puerto Rican, so you know what that means—good hair. He’s a personal trainer too, so you know what that means—nice-ass body. And he took a trip down the aisle, so you know what that means—he’s married. He lives in the Northeast with his wife, Monica, and their twin sons, C.J. and Christopher. They would seem to be the perfect family from the outside looking in, but, according to Carlos, it’s boring. He loves his sons to death and wouldn’t consider being a dad boring but being a husband to Monica is. He tells me that she never wants to do anything but sit on the couch watching talk show after talk show and occasionally a home-decorating show. And as for the sex, he told me it’s like pulling teeth. He said ever since their twins were born her sex drive been in neutral. He said he has to push with all his might to move it, and then when it finally does move, it rolls real slow. I had to laugh at that analogy, although it really wasn’t funny. It’s fucked up how men have a hard time understanding women’s issues with hormones and surgeries and shit that they don’t have to deal with. But let the shoe be on the other foot. Let a man have problems getting up. His woman is supposed to support him, get him some Viagra, or use a vibrator or something. The bottom line is, she’s not supposed to use his malfunction as
an excuse to mess with another man behind his back. But a man? That’s a whole different story. He’s most likely going to have an affair anyway, so if he has a so-called good reason to do so, that’s even better—for him and his conscience.
Anyway, Carlos and I met at a restaurant downtown. He was eating with a client of his, and I was having dinner with David. I never told you about David because he wasn’t worth the pen and paper. He was just a fling for me, especially after I found out just how scandalous he was. You’re probably thinking shit, any man who sleeps around on his wife is scandalous. But that’s not necessarily the case. You got some men that just can’t help themselves but they do it respectably and still manage to keep their wives happy. And you got some men who love their wives and are happy with their wives but who were probably ugly in their younger and broker days and didn’t get many women and definitely not any pretty women. Then they get successful and attract all kinds of chicks when they pull up in a Benz. So they jump at every opportunity they missed in the past. It’s almost like a once-in-a-lifetime thing for them, so they kind of go buck wild sleeping with different women. It makes them finally feel good about themselves. It makes them feel like men. Then you got other men who just don’t give a fuck. They’ll fuck your next-door neighbor in the five minutes it takes you to brush your teeth. That was David—the type that would go to the store for a pack of cigarettes on a Saturday afternoon and not come back until Monday morning. But some things men do you have to blame their wives for, because that chick, Sharon, would let his ass do anything under the sun, and all she would do was curse his ass out and tell him she wasn’t letting him leave her. Now that was some retarded shit. Her theory was that he would cheat on her and disrespect her like that just so she would have a reason to leave him. And in her mind, she figured if that’s what he wanted she wasn’t going to give it to him. Naw, hell no, just for that she was going to stay with his trifling ass forever and make him miserable. Bullshit! He was not miserable. He was the happiest muthafucka on the planet. He could blatantly cheat on his wife over and over again, and his only consequence was that he had to stay with her. A woman like that deserves to be cheated on because she got her shit all fucked up. Needless to say, I had no remorse whatsoever for her. But I eventually had to stop messing with David. He was just too scandalous for me. I mean, I participated in some scandals with him, like when I almost got caught in his house while his wife was at work. She wasn’t supposed to be home for another two hours. But this day she decided to leave work early. She probably had a feeling something was going on at her house. You know that women’s intuition shit is right!
Anyway, I was upstairs in the bathroom getting myself together. The next thing I knew David was screaming, Yo! My wife is coming, you gotta bounce! Yeah, David was hood. Anyway, just as she was opening her front door, I came walking out of her house smiling. Luckily, I was quick on my toes. “You must be the lucky lady,” I said to David’s wife. She was looking at me confused, like she didn’t know whether to start going off on me or listen to me explain why the hell she was so lucky. “I’m Ashley, an Avon representative, and I just sold your husband here a cosmetic demonstration that includes a makeover for you and four friends. He wanted to surprise you for your birthday, but he wasn’t expecting you home so early.” David was standing in the doorway smiling nervously. His wife started smiling too, after I fed her that lie. She thanked David and gave him a big hug and a kiss and everything. I was cracking up laughing on the inside, and even though I could have left like that without Sharon getting any suspicions about my story, I sealed the deal. I pulled my wallet from my pocketbook and took my sister Ashley’s business card out. I handed it to Sharon. She smiled again and thanked me. I told the happy couple I would set up an appointment with them over the phone. Well, I really saved David’s ass that time because I had my sister set up a demonstration and give Sharon and four other chicks free makeovers. I had to stop messing with David after that, though, because he expected me to take more risks like that one. He figured I could get us out of anything, like I was a genie, like I walked around with a rabbit in my hat or some shit. I had to explain to him that I was lucky only that one time, and besides his wife was hood just like him. I wasn’t tryin’ to walk outside one day and see my car all keyed up with my windows busted and my tires flat. Fuck that.
But back to Carlos, my week-old romance. I was going in the ladies’ room, and he was coming out of the men’s room. We locked eyes for a moment, and then we each went our separate ways. All through dinner I kept looking around the restaurant trying to find the man from the bathroom. Apparently, it was a mutual thing. We made eye contact again and signaled to meet back at the restrooms. I slid him my number and returned to my booth with David.
I got a phone call the next day. Carlos and I talked on the phone for hours, feeling each other out. He told me right away about his wife. I usually bypassed conversations about the wife, but I was curious this time. I asked Carlos why did he ever pursue me if he was married. He told me that he and his wife were having problems, and he was simply looking for something different. He said he was just unhappy and bored with his love life. He was looking for some excitement, and he said he and his wife would soon be divorcing.
Monica slammed the diary shut. She could not believe what she was reading. After a minute, she started laughing to herself uncontrollably. She figured somebody was playing games with her, trying to mess up her marriage. Me and my husband are absolutely happy. This jealous bitch don’t know what she’s talkin’ about. She should have really got her facts straight before she tried to pull one on me. I have to call Rita and tell her about this shit.
“Well, hello, there. How was Marco Island? Did you fulfill all your fantasies?” Rita sang into the phone.
“Hey, Rita. I had a wonderful time. And I still got some bones to pick with you, miss. Keeping a secret like that from me. I’m shocked!”
“Believe me, it wasn’t easy. I still got blisters from biting my tongue,” Rita said.
“Well, anyway, I’ll have to tell you about the trip later, but guess what I got in the mail?” Monica began.
“If you anything like me, bills and cheap thrills.”
“Oh, but this is the best cheap thrill you gonna ever hear about.”
“What?”
“Why did some chick send me one of Carlos’s sweatshirts—”
“What?” Rita butted in.
“Wait. Hold up. That’s not it. Underneath the shirt was a diary,” Monica continued.
“A diary?”
“Yes. At first I thought it was something from Carlos because he’s been in this surprising mood lately, and it didn’t have a return address on it. But I opened the diary and started reading, and it’s a woman talking about messing around with people’s husbands. And not only that: my husband is one of them.”
“You lyin’,” Rita gasped.
“Rita, I lie to you not. But the funny thing about it is she’s talkin’ about stuff that ain’t true. Like for instance,” Monica started to explain as she opened the diary, “she talks about how Carlos told her we’re having problems and on the verge of divorce.”
“Oh, well, there you have it. It’s a prank. You know like I know, for every one happy woman there’s one thousand miserable ones just waiting to take her place,” Rita concluded. “I would like to know which miserable one is bold enough to send some shit to your home. She don’t say her name in there anywhere?”
Monica began to scan the pages in search of the woman’s identity.
Her voice was muffled as she read aloud, “ ‘September 20th, 2000—’ ”
Rita cut her off, “2000! She’s talkin’ about shit that happened four years ago. Oh, please.”
“I know, right.” Monica chuckled. “Listen to this. ‘Dear Diary: Carlos and I are really hitting it off. He’s a romantic. Today he met me outside of my job with a bouquet of white roses. He said it was just something small to celebrate our one-month anniversary.’ ”
“One-month anniversary? Is it really that serious?” Rita burst into laughter. “Like a man would really put out the time and effort to make plans for a one-month anniversary. Shit, it’s hard enough to remember his yearly anniversary with his wife, let alone some month-by-month shit with some side dish! Oh, you gotta be kiddin’ me. This chick is tryin’ hard to piss you off, Monica. Read the rest. This shit is crackin’ me up.”
Monica chuckled at Rita’s comments, but inside she was feeling insecure. She thought herself that the diary was made up and sent by some jealous woman, but her husband’s shirt was still an unsolved mystery. She couldn’t help but wonder how this unknown female got her hands on Carlos’s clothing. She continued reading.
“ ‘He had reservations for us at a bistro in Jersey. I really enjoyed myself. It was easy for me to forget he was married. After dinner we drove to a deserted location where we just watched the stars and talked. It was very late when he dropped me off at my car, which was parked back at my job. He politely kissed me on my lips and drove off. He was a perfect gentleman. I felt bad for his wife because she was losing a good man. But some relationships just aren’t meant to last.’ ”
“Um, um, um. What other bullshit is in that book?” Rita asked.
Monica skimmed through the pages. “Oh, here goes something from 2001,” she said, feeding Rita’s frenzy.
“ ‘December 28, 2001. Dear Diary: Last year Carlos had to spend Christmas with his family. But this year he said he would spend the holidays with me. He had a well-thought-out plan too. He told his wife he would spend the early part of the day with her and the kids and then drive down to Florida to spend some time with his mother and brother. He knew his wife would avoid any chance to visit his mom because they didn’t get along with each other. As for his boys, Monica was still at the point where she didn’t trust them being anywhere without her. So he knew it wouldn’t seem suspicious if he took the drive alone. His wife fell for it. Shit, let that had been me. I would have checked his mileage. But anyway, he came to my apartment around six o’clock Christmas Day. I had a good meal prepared, some Cornish hens, sweet potatoes, rice and gravy, sliced ham, collard greens, and cranberry sauce. For dessert, I baked an apple pie and served it with vanilla ice cream. We ate dinner then went out for a movie in Langhorne. Once we got back to my place we finally made love.’
