by Mary Monroe
She glanced toward the doorway leading to the kitchen, and then she gave me a concerned look. “If you promise not to yell and scream at me about sticking my nose in your business, I can. I’ll meet you at the deli across the street from my shop.”
“I just want you to listen to me.” I leaned toward her and squeezed her hand.
Inez gave me a bleak look, but she nodded. “Fine. We have a date.”
She turned all the way around and looked toward the doorway again. I didn’t like the look on her face when she returned her attention to me. “Have you seen what’s behind his mask yet?” she whispered, grabbing my hand.
I reared back, snatching my hand away from hers like I’d been burned. “What’s that supposed to mean? Look, Leon is my husband now. If he is the demon you sometimes make him out to be, you should have told me before I hooked up with him.”
“I tried to,” Inez wailed, with an exasperated sigh. “He is your husband now, and I do respect that. I can put up with him if he can put up with me, I guess. The fact that he offered to pick me up from the airport says a lot. Don’t you think so?”
“I love him and he loves me and that’s all that matters,” I insisted. A few moments later Leon entered the living room, with our drinks on a tray. He sported a smile that covered almost half of his face. “Baby, Inez was just saying how nice it was of you to pick her up from the airport,” I told him, taking a long swallow from my glass.
“It was no trouble at all,” Leon said, scratching the side of his head. He plopped down on the sofa, next to Inez, even though there was more than enough room closer to me. It was the first time that I’d ever seen my best friend and my husband within a foot of each other.
I felt better already, and the strong margarita had a lot to do with that. As a matter of fact, I decided that I didn’t need to meet Inez for lunch and cry on her shoulder, after all. I needed to be with my husband.
CHAPTER 14
Inez didn’t waste any time getting back into the single life. A week after she got back from her latest jaunt to the Caribbean, I heard that she had found herself a new man. An Iranian this time. That didn’t surprise me, but the way I found out did. Leon told me!
“Who told you that Inez was involved with an Iranian?” I asked him. We were in the new Range Rover he’d just purchased, on our way to Mama’s house for dinner that Sunday evening. Mama had called up and invited us, and Leon had accepted without even checking with me. I had planned to spend the day grading papers and doing laundry. It didn’t bother Leon when I told him that I didn’t like always having to rearrange my schedule at the last minute. All he did was roll his eyes at me and give me a stupid grin.
“Nobody told me anything about that woman and her Iranian. I saw her with him at the Victory Club the other night,” he revealed, keeping his eyes on the road.
“I didn’t know you still went to that club,” I gasped. I removed my arm from around his shoulder and gave him an exasperated look.
“There are a lot of things that you don’t know about me, Renee.”
“I knew that a long time ago, Leon. The man I met that night in the Victory Club is not the man that I married. I am really getting worried about what other surprises you might have in store for me,” I said hotly. My ex, Robbie Dunbar, was meek and docile compared to me. But I was meek and docile compared to Leon. However, there were times that I was so assertive, I surprised myself as much as I surprised Leon. “I am not your fool, Leon!” I said in a loud voice.
“Don’t you start that shit, woman. I am not in the mood for a fight.” He gripped the steering wheel, his eyes still on the road. Just from looking at the side of his face, I could see that he was angry. I didn’t care, because I was angry, too.
“I’m not in the mood for a fight, either, but you brought it up. First, you tell me something about my best friend that I didn’t know. Then, you tell me that you were at the same club where everybody in town goes when they want to meet someone.”
Leon turned sharply, giving me a harsh look. “I went there for a drink with some of my boys. You went there to pick up somebody, but I didn’t. I just happened to be there that night I met you, doing the same thing I was doing the other night, having a drink with some of my boys.”
“Well, maybe I’ll go there tomorrow night,” I said, with a snort, crossing my arms so that I wouldn’t haul off and slap the side of his head.
Leon balled his fist and socked the steering wheel as he glared at me. Saliva was oozing from the corners of his mouth. “Look, woman, that’s one place you don’t go unless you go with me!”
“You can’t tell me where I can go and where I can’t go, Mr. Man. I don’t tell you where to go,” I shouted, giving him the most incredulous look I could manage. “If Inez and other women can go there without their men, so can I. And if you can’t give me one good reason why I shouldn’t, you can just shut the fuck up.”
“I’ll give you a damn good reason—I can’t trust you!”
My mouth dropped open. “What? What have I done to make you think you can’t trust me?” I glared at Leon’s head, wanting to slap it on both sides. “I don’t cheat!”
“The hell you don’t!” he guffawed. “Is that what you told my man Robbie? If I recall, you were still engaged to marry him when I met you. We had quite a few dates before you broke it off with him. Did you forget all of that?”
“That was different,” I said slowly, my head spinning. “I…I didn’t feel the same way about him that I feel about you. I wouldn’t cheat on you.”
“And I am supposed to believe you?”
“You should believe me. I believe you when you tell me something.”
We were silent for the rest of the way to Mama’s house.
“Why y’all both looking like undertakers?” Mama asked as soon as we got inside. There was an amused look on her face.
“I don’t feel well,” I muttered, tossing my jacket onto the plaid sofa, next to my sister Frankie’s lap, in Mama’s neat little living room.
Leon remained silent and went straight to the liquor cabinet.
Frankie lifted my jacket with a flyswatter and inspected it with a sniff. With a giggle and a slight frown, she tossed it aside. “I don’t like most of the mammy-made stuff you wear, but can I have that see-through blouse Inez brought you back from Jamaica?” Frankie asked, her eyes on the television in front of her. My sister was thirteen now and really into BET, MTV, and any other station where she could watch music videos. As much as she got on my nerves, I loved my sister more than words could say. Like Inez, I knew I could count on this nitwit when I needed her.
“No!” I snapped, flopping down hard next to her. I gave my kid sister a playful tap on her head, and then I grabbed a handful of her neatly braided hair.
“Leon must not be giving you any,” Frankie teased, saying it low enough so that I was the only one who heard it.
“Girl, you need to slow down,” I advised, shaking a finger in her face.
Leon sat down on the wobbly bamboo chair across from us.
“Don’t y’all get too comfortable. I got a pot roast in the oven, a pot of pinto beans on the stove, and a gallon of lemonade in the icebox,” Mama said, coming into the living room, wiping her hands on her plaid apron. She still had on the white usher’s uniform that she’d worn to church. “Leon, I am so glad to have you in the family. I thank the good Lord that I don’t have to worry about my baby spending too much of her time with a jezebel like Inez now.” Mama let out a disgusted sigh before she started fanning her face with the tail of her apron.
“Inez is not a jezebel, Mama,” I said, with conviction, looking at Leon to see his reaction. “Is she, baby?”
“She’s all right, I guess,” he mumbled, picking up the latest copy of Ebony off of the coffee table. “Mama, remind me to take a look at your dishwasher before we leave.” I had learned how to tell when Leon was nervous. He would scratch his head a lot and do annoying things, like tap his knuckles on the coffee table
. He was doing both now.
“Leon tells me that Inez has got herself a new man,” I added, my eyes still on him.
“Already? Didn’t she just get a divorce from her third husband?” Frankie laughed. “That sister gets around like a loose wheel! I hope she’s using some protection. Me, if I was a man, I wouldn’t touch her with a flagpole.”
“Frankie, did you finish all your homework?” Mama asked, shaking her head.
“Yes, ma’am,” Frankie mumbled, her head bowed submissively. Then she sucked in her breath, sprang from the sofa, and galloped across the floor to the telephone on the stand by the doorway. “Speaking of Inez, she told me to call her up, and she’d make me an appointment to do my nails for free. I’m going to baby-sit for her this weekend,” Frankie announced, with a huge smile, as she dialed Inez’s number.
“Let me speak to her before you hang up,” I said. Leon shot me a hot look, and then he promptly started scratching his head some more. With all of the nervous scratching that he had been doing lately, I was surprised that his head didn’t have holes in it by now.
I was glad when Frankie handed the telephone to me.
“Hey, Inez. I’ll be by the shop tomorrow after work if you’re going to be there,” I started.
“Sounds good to me. What’s up?” Inez said in a voice that was exceptionally cheerful, even for her.
“You tell me.”
“That’s what I want you to do,” Inez insisted, with a laugh.
“For one thing, I want to hear about your new friend,” I said, choosing my words carefully. Even though I was Inez’s best friend, she would cuss me out and tell me to mind my own business as quickly as she would anybody else. I softened my voice, making it sound like I was only casually curious, not straight-up nosy. “Uh, Leon told me he saw you with him at the Victory Club the other night.”
“He’s the one.” Inez sighed.
“Ok. He’s the one what?”
“He’s the man I’ve been looking for all my life, I think. He’s from the Middle East and looks like a young Omar Sharif. His daddy’s a sheik—I looked him up on the Internet—and he’s worth a couple hundred million dollars,” Inez told me. The way she was swooning, you would have thought that she’d reeled in Lawrence of Arabia. “His name is Hassan Hassan. Isn’t that an intriguing name?”
“Uh-huh. Like Sirhan Sirhan.” I sighed.
“Who?”
“Bobby Kennedy’s assassin. He was from the Middle East, too,” I chided.
“Don’t you start,” Inez warned, with a gentle laugh. “And whatever you do, don’t make any remarks about him being a terrorist, or any of the rest of that shit that everybody thinks every man from the Middle East is involved in. Mama almost had a cow when she found out that Hassan’s from Iran. ‘I didn’t raise my girl to sleep with the enemy’, she told me. And right in front of Reverend Beauchamp. You should have seen the look on his face!” Inez laughed again, so I knew she was not the least bit angry or concerned about what other people thought about her new lover. But she sounded eager to talk about him, so I did.
“Oh. Did you meet Hassan at the Victory Club, too?” I asked.
“Of course, I did. That is the place to go when you want some new meat.”
I glanced at Leon. His eyes seemed to be looking straight through me. “That’s what I told Leon. He doesn’t want me to go there unless I’m with him.” I didn’t want to say too much in front of Mama and Frankie, so I let Inez do most of the talking.
“Fuck him! He is not your daddy. You can go to that club and any other club you want to go to without him. I tried to tell you that he was going to try and run your life. Tell you what to do. I tried to tell—”
“I’ll come by the shop right after work,” I said, cutting her off.
I knew that Inez and Leon still couldn’t stand each other. Even though they were cordial to each other around me. But I couldn’t forget about him being nice enough to bring her home from the airport when she returned from the islands. Despite his macho attitude and his gruff demeanor, he was a good man, and I loved him. I knew in my heart that he was doing his best to tolerate my best friend. And, in her own way, Inez was trying to get along with him, too. She didn’t have to accept a ride home from the airport with him. She could have called a cab. But she didn’t. And I knew that it must have been difficult for her to sit by herself in the same car with Leon. I was glad that the two of them had made some progress in improving their relationship.
I was also glad that Frankie and Mama dominated the dinner conversation. I didn’t have to say too much. Leon hardly spoke at all. But he did a lot more nervous scratching that day.
CHAPTER 15
When I found out I was pregnant, the first person I called up was Inez.
“I am so happy for you!” she squealed. “I can’t wait to tell my girls. Those two little monkeys are always asking me how come their auntie Renee doesn’t have any kids of her own.” Inez paused and then started talking in a low, serious voice. “How is the proud papa taking this blessed news?”
“I don’t think he’s going to be anybody’s proud papa when I tell him,” I told her, gripping the telephone in my sweaty hand. “He wanted us to wait.” Leon’s daughter, Collette, had only been to the house a few times since I’d moved in. I liked the girl. She was no better or worse than any of the other kids her age that I knew. At least, that’s the way she was around me. However, Leon had one horror story after another to tell me about how Collette misbehaved when he was alone with her. He’d even told me about an episode at the mall where she had thrown a major hissy fit because he had refused to buy her the new Prince CD. She had stomped out of the music store and run into the mall atrium, screaming, until a burly security guard calmed her down.
“You have to make young kids feel like they are important. Especially girls,” I told Leon when he told me about Collette’s tantrum at the mall.
“Well, from now on when she comes to visit and wants to go to the mall, you take her,” he told me. His voice was cold and steely, and his jaw twitched.
Leon was not a patient man. Even when it came to his daughter. So I knew that I always had to watch my step with him. I eventually reached a point where I could pretty much read him like a book. As long as it wasn’t too much of a hardship, I bent over backwards to keep the peace between myself and Leon.
Whenever Collette visited now, I volunteered to take her to the mall before she even asked, and she seemed to enjoy my company. When I refused to buy her something, she didn’t even sulk. I had a way with kids, which was why I had chosen a teaching career, and why I was looking forward to having one of my own in a few months.
“Leon is so full of surprises, I never know what to expect from him. But I hope he’s happy about the baby. He’s been awfully nice lately. And by the way, I am glad to see that the two of you are acting more and more civil to each other these days,” I told Inez.
“I’d still keep my guard up if I were you,” Inez advised, with a snort. “Leon wears a mask more often than a full-time bandit.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Look, I know he is trying his best to tolerate you—”
“Tolerate me? What in the world…why…That’s a strange word,” Inez said, cutting me off in mid-sentence. “I have never met a man yet who felt he had to tolerate me. I won’t tolerate behavior like that from a man!”
“Well, Queen of Sheba, if you feel that way, why should you care if my man only tolerates you? He sleeps with me.”
I didn’t like the silence on the other end of the line.
“Did you hear what I said? Leon sleeps with me,” I said in a firm voice.
Inez cleared her throat before speaking again. “Now, yes. But I assure you that Leon wasn’t a virgin when you hooked up with him, like Robbie was.”
“Where is this conversation going?” I demanded. “How did we get from talking about my pregnancy to talking about Leon and Robbie?”
“I didn’t want to go there. You bro
ught up Leon. I didn’t.”
“No, you brought him up. You started talking all that shit about him wearing masks. What is your problem, girl?”
Inez gritted her teeth and let out a tremendous sigh. “I am sorry, Renee. I don’t like it when people talk trash about my men, so I should know better. It’s just that…I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“Hurt how? Why are you so worried about me getting hurt? What do you think Leon is going to do to me?”
“Renee, let’s just drop it. I am happy for you, and I will pray that you have a healthy baby.” Inez sniffed. “Where do you want to have drinks tomorrow?”
“That bar on Morrison is nice. Ernie’s.”
“That’s fine with me. But I am telling you right here and now, you will not drink any alcohol! I don’t want that baby coming here with two heads and hooves.” Inez laughed.
I laughed, too. But a strange feeling came over me. I was not satisfied with her responses as to why she seemed so concerned about Leon hurting me. I knew Inez well enough to know that she was not the type to hold back critical information. Especially when it involved me.
When I arrived at Ernie’s Bar on Morrison Street the next evening after work, enduring a bumpy fifteen-minute bus ride because Leon wasn’t answering his cell phone and I didn’t have money for a taxi, Inez was sitting in a booth in the back. Shonda and Pat from her nail shop were with her.
So was my husband, Leon.
It was too late for me to slink back out of the door without being seen. If Inez had not spotted me and started waving and drawing attention to me, I would have made a U-turn and left that place, running. The way Leon looked at me, wide-eyed and amused, you would have thought that I was naked. I sat down hard next to him, purposely hitting his knee with mine. I pinched his thigh under the table, not surprised that he didn’t even react.
“Did I miss anything?” I asked, forcing myself to smile.
“Shonda and Pat insisted on joining us,” Inez explained, looking at Leon as she spoke.
