Family of Lies

by Mary Monroe

  Despite my obvious wealth, Vera continued to shop in discount stores and she still preferred to dine in rib joints and chicken shacks at the time. However, her frugality did not last long. Once she met some of my friends at the country club and realized what a position of privilege she was in now, she changed her tune and all hell broke loose! She began to spend money like it was going out of style. Within a month after I married her, she was spending more on one dress than all her other dresses put together. She went hog-wild in all the high-end stores, and she used my money to make herself over, starting with breast implants and a butt lift. But she was more than a vain, extravagant trophy wife; she was my savior.

  Until Vera entered my life, I had not really lived or loved. I had always felt empty and lonely. Most of my family had passed, and I was afraid that if I didn’t produce an heir, my family would become extinct.

  As much as I wanted to find out if I was a daddy now, I couldn’t bear the thought of losing Vera.

  Just thinking about my predicament gave me the strength I needed to prop myself up in bed and call Cash.

  “You may be right about Lois’s daughter being mine,” I told him, clutching the bedside telephone in my hand so hard my fingers got numb.

  “Uh-huh. What about Vera?”

  “She saw the newspaper. I don’t think she remembers meeting my niece, or she would have noticed the resemblance between her and Lois’s daughter. The funeral is today.”

  “Are you going to attend it?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to try. I need to see the girl up close before I say or do anything. And I want her to see me.”

  “Why do you want her to see you?” Cash paused. “Do you think her mama told her about you, showed her a picture of you or something?”

  “Lois could have done that. I never heard from her after she called in and resigned that Monday morning, so I have no way of knowing whether she did or not. And I’ve never even met Lois’s mama.”

  “I feel for you, bro. I don’t think you should deal with this by yourself. If you want me to go to the funeral with you, I will. You might need a backup.”

  “Why would I need a backup?”

  “For one thing, you don’t know what Lois told her mama as to why she quit such a good job. She might have even told her you took advantage of her.”

  “I didn’t take advantage of any damn body!” I hollered. “Lois was of age. She knew what she was doing!”

  “True. But like I just said, you don’t know what she told her mama. She might have even told her you raped her. And another thing: if you do go to that funeral, I’m sure people will be wondering who you are and why you’re there.”

  “You’re right. Okay. Let’s assume Lois didn’t tell her mama about her having an affair with me. If I go to the funeral and somebody asks me who I am, I’ll tell them the truth. And as Lois’s former boss, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for me to attend her funeral. Last year I attended my bookkeeper’s daddy’s funeral. And the year before that I attended the funerals of two of my folks in sales.”

  “Yeah. If you change your mind and want me to go with you, just let me know by the end of today. And you know how Collette is. She’ll be asking all kinds of questions and I’ll have to tell her something eventually. If the child is yours, we might need to do some damage control in advance before you tell Vera, my brother.”

  CHAPTER 8

  KENNETH

  THE DAY WAS ALREADY GLOOMY ENOUGH. BUT WHEN THE RAIN started, it got even gloomier. I glanced out my bedroom window and saw that the sky looked like a dark gray blanket. There was thunder and lightning like never before. Within minutes it sounded like I was inside the belly of a military bunker complete with torpedoes. I felt doomed.

  Somehow I managed to crawl out of bed around ten, but I was still aching from head to toe. My head was throbbing like it was about to explode. But the main thing I was concerned about was my heart. I had had rheumatic fever when I was eight and had almost died that year. The illness had left me with a weakened heart. That was the reason I couldn’t play any football in high school like my friends or any other sport for that matter. My mother didn’t even want me to ride my bicycle that often. “I ain’t going to bury another child,” she said, hugging me so hard I couldn’t breathe. My older sister Louise had died a year earlier at the age of eleven. She had run in front of a speeding car with a drunk behind the wheel. Two years after my sister’s funeral, my mother gave birth to my brother Alonzo. Sadly, she had to bury him too. He died in a boating accident in a city park when he was twenty-one, leaving behind a new wife and a baby daughter.

  Losing two children had practically destroyed my mother. Her grief had caused her to quit her job as a seamstress, so money became very tight. Thank God my father was an enterprising man. He used the settlement money from my brother’s accident and opened a manual typewriter sales and repair shop. He employed my brother’s widow and a few other family members, including myself.

  After the manual typewriter had bitten the dust and everybody started buying electric typewriters, Daddy reluctantly went with the flow. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” he said. For many years, we did quite well. And when the word processors entered the picture, we did even better.

  Health issues kept me out of the military, so I focused more on my education. By the time I had completed some business courses at Texas State, my daddy was too old and senile to make good business decisions. My mother talked him into retiring and letting me take over. Both of my parents passed the following year. By then, computers had come along, so I started selling them too. The next adjustment I made was to move the business to California.

  My brother’s widow had remarried the year before, so she stayed in Houston with her husband and the baby girl she’d had with my brother. Sonya Ann was not just my niece; she was the daughter I had always wanted. A lot of people used to say that she looked more like me than her daddy. A few years ago, she married a young doctor from Belize whom she had met on a cruise ship. They moved to Belize shortly after they got married, and I no longer saw her when I visited Houston. We communicated by letter and telephone a few times, but after she started having babies, that stopped. I had not heard from her in years. That was why it was so important for me to find out if Lois’s daughter really was mine.

  Somehow I managed to get back up and dressed again before noon. Vera had told me she’d be back in a few hours, so I didn’t have much time. I knew that if she returned before I made it out of the house, she would probably interfere with my movements. It had suddenly become very important for me to see Lois one last time, even if it had to be at her funeral.

  It was still raining when I left the house. Then a traffic jam on 101 slowed me down considerably. It was 1:10 p.m. by the time I made it to the church on Third Street where Lois’s funeral was supposed to start at one o’clock. The closest parking spot I could find was three blocks away from the church. And with the way I was limping around like a dying man, it took me another fifteen minutes to walk down the street and up a steep hill to the church.

  For the first time in my life, I was glad that black folks had such a hard time being on time. Even our funerals often ran on what we jokingly refer to as “colored people’s time.” Lois’s funeral had not even started by the time I entered the church fifteen minutes later.

  There were not that many people present, so there were a lot of empty pews. I decided to plop down on one near the back in case I wanted to leave early. I was sure that none of these people would recognize me, but I was wrong. Five minutes after I’d sat down, an elderly birdlike woman wearing a hat that looked like a bird’s nest sat down next to me.

  “Ain’t you the one that own Lomax Electronics in one of them strip malls going toward Ghirardelli Square?” she asked. “I seen you on a TV commercial one time.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m Kenneth Lomax,” I mumbled.

  “My grandson bought me my first computer from your store in South San Franc
isco. That was ten years ago. It still runs real good and it should—you charged enough for it.” The old woman smiled. “It’ll probably conk out in another year or so, but I don’t care. I’ll be dead by then. Me and my whole family used to buy our computers and TVs and stuff from Circuit City until we found out about you. When my neighbor’s daughter started working for you, she told us to put our money back into the black community.”

  “Oh. Well, I appreciate your business, ma’am. Next time you see your neighbor’s daughter, tell her that I thank her for sending me more business.”

  I glanced around and blinked hard a few times, hoping nobody else would recognize me. The old woman fished a handkerchief out of her large bamboo purse and wiped tears from the corners of her eyes.

  “I won’t be seeing that sweet child again until I make it to heaven myself,” she told me, nodding toward the closed casket in the front of the church. “Poor Lois Ann. I remember when she got that job working for you. She was so happy, and everybody in the neighborhood was so proud of her. She had been all over town trying to find work, and you was the only one that gave her a chance. Bless your heart and soul.”

  “Oh,” was all I could say at first. I had to blink hard again to hold back my own tears. “She was a good secretary.”

  “She was such a pretty young woman. She got so messed up in that crash—burnt to a crisp—that they couldn’t even have an open casket service.”

  I looked toward the front of the church. Another elderly woman and a young girl, both dressed in black from head to toe, walked up to the casket. They were holding on to each other and sobbing hard and loud. Nobody had to tell me who those two were. It was Lois’s mother and her daughter, Sarah. A grim-faced usher led them to the front pew.

  About ten minutes later, the funeral finally started. An enormous young woman in a red wig began to play the piano, and a thin young man got up and sang four different hymns in a row. There was a lot of weeping and wailing going on. And before I knew it, I was crying like a baby myself. I hawked into my handkerchief every few minutes.

  After the service ended, everybody went downstairs to the dining area. Nobody was weeping or wailing down there. The way some of those folks were pushing and shoving trying to be the first ones to get to the food, it resembled one of my kinfolks’ family reunions.

  I didn’t have much of an appetite, so I didn’t have to fight with the hungry crowd to get a plate. Lois’s mother and daughter sat at a table near the front of the room. As soon as everybody stopped hugging them, I went over and introduced myself to Lois’s mother. From the way she frowned when I sat down in a chair next to her, it didn’t seem like she was happy to meet me.

  “You the one that fired my baby!” she accused. “She needed that job!”

  “Excuse me, ma’am. I didn’t fire your daughter,” I protested, one hand up in the air. “Lois called in one morning and resigned. That’s all I know. I would have never fired her. She was one of my best employees.”

  “She sent my stepdaddy to one of your stores to buy me my first computer,” the young girl said. “That was last year on my birthday.”

  “You must be . . . Sarah,” I said, almost choking on my words.

  “Yeah. I’m Sarah.”

  “I hope you’re enjoying your computer.”

  “I was enjoying it until somebody broke into our apartment one night while we was sleep and stole it a week after I got it,” Sarah said with a pout.

  “Well, I am sorry to hear that. I’ll make sure you get a new one.” I smiled so hard my jawbones ached.

  “Not unless it’s free,” the grandmother said sharply. “We fixing to get seriously behind with our bills this month. My daughter and that fool she married didn’t have no insurance, so I got to use my little savings and ask for help from the church to cover this funeral.”

  “Grandma, can I go now? This is too depressing,” Sarah whined, already rising and waving to another young girl near the exit.

  Instead of answering, the grandmother dismissed Sarah with a wave of her hand and then quickly turned back to me.

  “Mrs. Cooper, this is not the time or the place for it, but it’s really important for you and me to sit down and talk,” I told her, glancing around. I was glad I had not been approached by another customer who recognized me.

  “What you need to talk to me about? Y’all turned me down when I tried to get some credit, so I know I don’t owe you no money.”

  CHAPTER 9

  VERA

  I HAD NO LOVE FOR LOIS COOPER, BUT I WAS SORRY TO READ ABOUT her death. However, I was still angry about her sleeping with my husband and having his baby.

  It made me sick when I thought about all of the new clothes and jewelry I could have bought and how much fun I could have had with my lovers with all the “hush money” I’d paid her the past sixteen years! Only another married woman who had to deal with her husband’s mistress and their baby would know exactly how I felt.

  I didn’t know all the details of Lois’s short life, but I knew enough to determine that she had had a miserable one. She’d been raised by a single mother in a low-income neighborhood and had struggled to get from one day to the next. But then so had I before I landed Kenneth.

  I don’t want to know what might have happened between Kenneth and me if Lois had not disappeared from his life and gone along with my plan. The fact that she was no longer in the picture meant a whole new outlook on life for me.

  The newspaper had reported that Lois’s teenage daughter, Sarah, lived with Lois’s mother. The article didn’t say but I assumed Lois’s mother was one of those elderly sisters who had been beaten down by life in more ways than one and who had lost her man many years ago. So typical. Women like Lois got pregnant with babies they didn’t need and the grandmothers or some other family member ended up raising those babies. The last time I got a call from my mother, she complained about how my three younger sisters left their numerous children in her care for days at a time. “I can’t keep feeding all these kids with just my pension check,” she informed me. Of course, the real reason my mother told me about her latest setback was because she wanted me to send her more money. I didn’t mind helping out family. But it seemed like the more I did for them the more they expected. I had been sending money and expensive gifts to my mother and my sisters ever since I married Kenneth. It had begun to get on my nerves, so I had slowed down considerably. And what made the situation even worse was despite all of the financial aid I had provided, my mother and sisters were no better off than they had been before my help! It had made me quite bitter. I felt like I had been taken advantage of, which I knew in my heart was the case, but I never threw it in their faces. I had always felt that you didn’t kick a person who was already down. You just got bitter and resentful. Paying all that money to Lois had made me even more bitter and resentful about “helping” people.

  Sarah was no longer my problem. I was off the hook! I wanted to protect my investment in Kenneth more than ever now. I had no payment plan with Lois’s mother, so she wouldn’t be getting a plugged nickel from me.

  I couldn’t wait to speak to my lawyer and tell him to stop sending those cashier’s checks to Lois’s post office box. I didn’t have my cell phone with me, so I called him up from a pay phone at the pharmacy I’d stopped at for condoms on my way to Tony’s apartment. It was almost 2:00 p.m. I’d just come from a two-hour session at the spa where I’d enjoyed a Swedish massage. I always needed to be extremely relaxed when Tony got a hold of me or my body would take days to recover from all the ecstasy he put me through.

  “Mitch, this is Vera Lomax. You can stop sending the checks to Lois Cooper, effective immediately. I hope I caught you in time so I won’t be out any money this month.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Lomax. Well, due to the holiday and my secretary being on vacation, we’re a little behind. I am glad you called me today because this month’s check was about to go out in this morning’s mail. May I ask why you’re making this adjustment?”
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  “She’s dead. She died in an automobile accident last week.”

  “Oh for goodness sake! Well, my condolences. I am so sorry to hear that the child is deceased.”

  “Not the child, the child’s mother.”

  “I see.” My lawyer cleared his throat. “The child is still a minor, but you wish to discontinue the payments? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. For all I know, that woman might not have even been using the money to take care of that child anyway! You’re a brother from the hood, so I know you know how trifling some of our sisters are! Lois Cooper got married somewhere along the line and the grandmother’s been raising the child for God knows how long.” For the first time, I regretted that I had not communicated with Lois from time to time. Had I known she had married and dumped Kenneth’s child on her mother, I probably would have modified our arrangement. As far as I knew, that heifer could have been using my money to help support the man she married!

  “Hmmm. Well, come in so you can sign off on a few documents. I’m available this afternoon from about three p.m. to six.”

  “I don’t like signing anything that connects me to that woman. I don’t like leaving a paper trail. I told you that from day one.”

  “Mrs. Lomax, this situation is highly confidential. But for your own peace of mind, and mine, I’d like for you to sign a release form that will end this arrangement. And don’t worry about a paper trail. You and I are the only ones who have ever seen any of these documents associated with Lois Cooper. My secretary has never even seen them, so you don’t have anything to worry about.”