God Ain't Through Yet

by Mary Monroe

  I had sent my daughter off to Reed Street Elementary School, which was only a few blocks away. I still had time to have a couple of cups of coffee before I left the house. And if Pee Wee had something else in mind for me to do, there was time for that, too.

  Despite all the problems that we had encountered in our eleven-year marriage, Pee Wee and I still had it good.

  Life was so good to me.

  I was happy. My husband was happy. I had everything I wanted. My proverbial cup was not just running over, it was falling over.

  I never would have guessed in a million years that I was about to lose that cup and everything in it.

  I looked at my watch again. I listened and waited. The longer I listened and waited, the more anxious I felt. The wind was howling like a wounded animal. Normally, it was one of the sorriest sounds in the world as far as I was concerned. It didn’t bother me much this time, though. The wind was also blowing hard. It made the tree branches on the cherry tree that leaned toward the side of my kitchen rattle the window above my sink like a clumsy burglar. It seemed to be taking a long time for Pee Wee to get out of the car and into the house. But then he was not as spry as he used to be. Like with me and most of our friends, intruders such as arthritis, gout, excessive gas, incontinence, and other ailments associated with age had become some of his most frequent visitors. He was still in good shape for a man his age, but he had slowed down considerably over the years. However, he wasn’t that slow. Several minutes had passed since he pulled up in our driveway!

  I rose from my seat at the table and was about to trot over to the window above the sink so I could look out into our driveway on the side of our house. I wanted to check and make sure he had not stumbled on a rock, or stepped on a pop top and landed faceup on the ground like old man Kelsy next door did from time to time. Before I could reach the window, I heard his car door slam. A second later, I heard a second car door slam. That was odd, but I didn’t go to the window to investigate. I scrambled back to the table and sat back down, trying not to look too excited.

  As soon as Pee Wee opened our back door and entered the kitchen, I knew that something serious was about to unravel.

  CHAPTER 3

  Even though I read Pee Wee like a book, there were times when I had no idea what was on his mind. He kept secrets from me, but that didn’t bother me because I kept a few secrets from him, too. But I could usually tell when something was wrong. This was one of those times. Something was definitely wrong. For one thing, he didn’t look directly at me, and he was not alone. Elizabeth Stovall, the manicurist who worked in his barbershop, was with him.

  “Annette, we all need to talk. We need to talk right now. It’s real important,” Pee Wee blurted, his eyes darting around the room as he shuffled across the floor. He stopped in front of the table and finally looked at me. His face was so stiff it looked like he had turned to stone. When he coughed to clear his throat, his lips didn’t even move. Then he glanced at the Krispy Kreme donut box, frowning at it like it was a dirty diaper. He was the one who had coaxed me into eating those damn things on a regular basis. But by the way he was wringing his hands and glaring at the box, you would have thought that he was looking at a hand grenade. He nudged Lizzie with his elbow.

  “Uh, yeah, we all need to talk,” Lizzie said.

  Now, this was an interesting turn of events. I had told Pee Wee just yesterday to tell Lizzie that I wanted her to help us plan our next backyard cookout. I decided that she must have been anxious to share some ideas with me for her to come to the house so soon.

  I liked Elizabeth. We had all attended junior and high school together, and I had been one of the few classmates who had not teased or made fun of her. And even though she liked me, too, back then we didn’t have enough in common for me to consider cultivating a friendship with her. But she was a friend now because I had handpicked her to work for my husband when she lost her job. One reason that I’d encouraged Pee Wee to hire her was because I pitied her. Poor woman. She was so socially isolated and awkward. She was the kind of wallflower whom other wallflowers felt sorry for. I knew that for a fact, because all through my teens I’d been a wallflower and I’d felt sorry for her. She was also so shy and withdrawn that she didn’t have a lot of friends other than her staid parents and the elderly people at her church whom she played bingo with one night every week. Bingo! And on the most popular night in the week: Saturday. If that was not the last refuge for the truly desperate, I didn’t know what was.

  It was my nature to do things for other people that I thought would make them happy. However, my willingness to do “good deeds” sometimes backfired. I’d been betrayed and abused by more than one person over the years. But I had survived my trials and tribulations intact, and learned a few important lessons because of them.

  At the end of the day, I felt blessed. However, I was now more alert, and not as trustworthy. I was so busy trying to avoid all of the wolves with sheep’s clothing in their closets that I didn’t even consider the fact that there were a lot of sheep who owned a few wolf outfits as well.

  In the meantime, it was refreshing to have a friend like Lizzie in my life now. Life had not been too kind to her either.

  Unfortunately, because of a bout with polio, one of Elizabeth’s legs was noticeably thinner than the other. People called her Little Leg Lizzie. She admitted that she liked her cute nickname, and she encouraged people to call her that. She said it made her feel “special.” But she didn’t like it when people stared at her leg or made fun of her because of it. “It makes me feel like a freak,” she had complained to me one day in Miss Krayling’s gym class in tenth grade. Feeling like a freak was one of the things that she and I had in common all through school. That and the fact that none of our male classmates wanted to date us.

  She had come such a long way. Now here she was in my kitchen for the first time (that I knew of), with my husband.

  Why?

  Pee Wee moved a few steps closer to me. Lizzie walked behind him, dragging the foot on her skinny leg like she was dragging a mop. This was the first time I’d seen her in running shoes. She was very fair skinned and she had sharp European features. As a matter of fact, people who didn’t know her thought she was a full-blooded white woman because she had not inherited any of her black Jamaican father’s features. Her straight, jet black hair was covered under a black scarf. She wore a yellow and brown tweed dress with the hem halfway down her legs and a long beige trench coat with a thin belt around the waist. And it must have been colder outside than I thought because her ears and nose were red.

  I glanced at Lizzie’s leg, the thinner one. I gave it, and her, a confused look. What I didn’t understand about Lizzie’s handicap was that it was not always that noticeable. When she wore pants or long skirts, you couldn’t see the difference in her legs, and she didn’t walk like there was a difference. However, I did notice that she walked with a mild limp when she got upset or nervous. Well, whatever it was now, she had entered my house walking like she had two club feet. And her eyes were on the floor.

  “I hope you don’t take things the wrong way,” Pee Wee told me, blinking so hard his nostrils flared.

  “I hope you don’t either,” Lizzie added, talking to me but looking at him.

  I suddenly got the feeling that they had not come to talk to me about a backyard cookout. They didn’t look too happy or comfortable to be in the same room with me. And what they had just said sounded ominous. My eyes darted back and forth from him to her. Then I fixed my gaze on my husband’s face. He couldn’t look me in the eyes. The way his eyes rolled up, he was looking more at the top of my head than he was my face.

  “Pee Wee, talk to me,” I ordered. “Look at me!” I hollered. He did, but he took his time doing it.

  It felt like the air had been sucked out of my lungs by a gigantic vacuum cleaner. My left leg was shaking so hard against the table leg, the top of my pantyhose suddenly split open with a run that reached from my knee to my ankle. “What
’s going on?” I asked, finally rising. I had to grab the back of the chair to steady myself so I wouldn’t fall. “Pee Wee, Lizzie, what’s going on?” I asked again. I looked from his face to hers some more. He looked at her; then they both looked at me. My words stuck in my throat like a fish bone. I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. Bile and a large lump had begun to rise from somewhere within the pit of my insides. “What…is…wrong?” I demanded, sweat forming on my face.

  “Wrong? Um, nothin’ is wrong,” Pee Wee managed, looking like a condemned man.

  “The hell it isn’t! Why else are you both standing here looking like pallbearers?” I hollered.

  Something was definitely wrong. I could tell that just by the way my husband and my friend looked. If Pee Wee’s face got any longer, it would be on the floor. There was sweat on his face, too. He was obviously nervous about something.

  Lizzie looked guilty.

  But guilty of what?

  CHAPTER 4

  “Annette, I want you to know that you are the last woman in the world I ever wanted to hurt,” Lizzie mumbled, choking on a sob. “You’ve always been good to me….” She removed a wrinkled white handkerchief from the small denim purse in her hand. She honked into her handkerchief; then she blinked real hard a few times. The next thing I knew, she grabbed my husband’s arm—which was shaking like one of those branches outside on my cherry tree—with both of her hands. “I was glad when we all became friends.”

  Friend?

  She didn’t look like a friend of mine now. And the way she was holding on to my husband’s arm, she looked more like his nurse than his friend. What she said next stung my ears like a wasp. “Baby, you tell her.”

  Baby? Had all of that sugar from those Krispy Kreme donuts dulled my mind to where I couldn’t hear right? Had I just heard this woman address my husband as “baby” right in front of me? Yes, that was exactly how this woman had addressed my husband.

  When I cleared my throat it sounded more like I was growling. “Well, baby, you or somebody better tell me something before I turn this damn house inside out!” I yelled. My voice was loud, dark, and deep, like thunder rolling out of a black hole in the sky. I had to press my lips together to keep the bile from oozing out.

  “I’m gettin’ to that,” Pee Wee replied in a shaky voice with a shaky hand in the air. There was so much sweat on his face now that it looked like he’d just climbed out of the shower.

  “Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on here? And you’d better tell me now!” I ordered, fists clenched. “What the fuck have you done to hurt me?” I looked so hard at Lizzie’s hands on my husband that she released him. But the look that suddenly appeared on her face angered me even more. She looked like she had just swallowed Big Bird.

  “I’m in love,” Lizzie announced, dabbing at her eyes with the same handkerchief that she’d just used to blow her nose.

  I don’t remember what my first thought was when I heard that bitch croak that line because several thoughts danced around inside my head at the same time. In addition to those thoughts, there was a buzzing noise going back and forth, gnawing on my brain like a shark’s teeth. The bile in my throat and mouth had turned into the worst kind of slush. I wanted to vomit, and the only reason I didn’t was because I didn’t want to soil my favorite T-shirt. But something told me that there was going to be a lot more than bile for me to deal with.

  Lizzie had once been the plainest Jane in town. But after a recent extreme makeover—that I had encouraged—she’d been transformed into a more glamorous version of Betty Boop. However, she didn’t look like Betty Boop to me right now. She looked more like one of those cheesy blow-up dolls that they propped up in the windows in adult sex product stores. No, that description of her was too mild. She looked like the devil. She had eased her wretched ass into my life, my husband’s bed, and now my home.

  Like with a terminal illness, when dealing with the devil, a person didn’t know what all to expect. I sure didn’t. If my husband and his she-devil had told me that Pee Wee’s barbershop, which provided the lion’s share of our impressive income, had burned to the ground or that they had been robbed, it would have been less painful than what they had just told me.

  “You’re in love, Lizzie? In love with who?” I asked, my eyes burning, my ears ringing. “I know you are not standing here telling me …you and my husband…” I couldn’t even finish my sentence because I could not believe my ears. Even though I knew in my heart that what I’d just heard was true, I still managed to laugh.

  I was the only one laughing.

  I stopped laughing because my throat suddenly felt like I had a rock stuck in it. I had to cough hard, so hard I almost choked on some air, to clear my throat before I could speak again. “Come on, you two. What is this really about?” I asked. I almost didn’t recognize my own voice. It was so hoarse and husky I sounded like a man. I shook my head, rubbed my ear, and blinked. “What is really going on here?” I demanded. The words felt like rocks in my mouth, but I laughed again anyway. “Who are you in love with, Lizzie? Did Pee Wee finally hook you up with one of his friends?”

  My mind felt as raggedy as a bowl of sauerkraut. I was talking out of my head. It made no sense for Lizzie to be telling me that she didn’t want to hurt me if the person she was in love with was one of Pee Wee’s friends. But what was becoming more and more obvious to me didn’t make any sense either.

  “Annette, maybe you should sit back down,” Pee Wee suggested, nodding toward the chair I had risen from. “You might take this better sitting down.”

  “Sit down my ass!” I screamed, my lips trembling. I kicked the chair over and slammed my fist on the top of the table so hard that the newspaper and everything else on it fell to the floor, even that Krispy Kreme donut box. “Talk to me, dammit!”

  Pee Wee’s hand was in the air again and it was still shaking. “Hold on now! You ain’t got to tear the house down!” he advised. For the first time, this man looked ugly to me. He had on the crisp white smock that he worked in, and the way I was feeling it could just as well be his shroud. I wanted to kill him, but first I needed to know exactly why I wanted to kill him.

  “If you don’t talk to me and tell me everything, this house won’t be the only thing I tear down!” I threatened, kicking another one of the four chairs to the floor. My feet must have been heavier or stronger than I thought. Because when I kicked that second chair over, it landed with such a thud the radio on the counter came back on by itself. I was glad to see that I had put some fear into Lizzie. Her eyes got big and I could see the terror in her face. Now I knew why she had worn running shoes to my house. There was a strong possibility that she might have to leave in a hurry.

  “Annette, please try to understand,” Pee Wee’s voice trembled as he spoke. As frightened as they both appeared to be, I couldn’t figure out why they’d been brave enough to face me in my own house in the first place. “I don’t know how to tell you…”

  “All I want is for you to finish what you came here to tell me!” I roared. My head was throbbing so hard now, my ears went numb. “Keep going and give me the whole story!”

  Pee Wee put his arm around Lizzie’s shoulder and pulled her closer to him. My eyes burned as I watched this scene unfold in front of me like a cheap beach towel.

  “Uh, I didn’t mean for this to happen, but it…but…it…did,” he stammered. “And I feel the same way Lizzie feels. You are the last woman in the world that I ever wanted to hurt. I mean, look what you done for me,” he said, making a sweeping gesture around the kitchen with his hand. He swallowed so hard he had to lift his chin. “You made a good home for me, and you gave me a beautiful daughter. I will always appreciate that. But”—he stopped and shook his head. He even smiled, but that smile was so empty and false that it stayed on his face for just a split second.

  Then he gave me the most pitiful look that another human being had ever aimed in my direction. “I think I’d be happier with Lizzie for now. I a
m sure enough sorry, Annette! Honest to God I am!” he wailed.

  My heart felt like it had been pierced by a poisoned dart. I couldn’t think straight for a moment, and it took me a few more moments to get a grip on myself.

  In the meantime, Pee Wee’s words rang in my ears like a death sentence. And as far as I was concerned, that was exactly what it was.

  CHAPTER 5

  There was a taste in my mouth that was so sour and nasty you would have thought that those donuts I’d eaten had been glazed with shit. I slid my tongue up, down, and around the walls inside of my mouth, hoping it would dissolve the coat of slime that was threatening to make me sick. It didn’t help. All it did was move that slime from one spot to another, and that made my stomach roll with nausea. If somebody had dropped a piano on the top of my head, I could not have been more stunned. I slapped the side of my head with the palm of my hand and rubbed my ear. I blinked hard, because not only was I not sure of what I was hearing, I was not sure of what I was seeing. But there was nothing wrong with my vision. My husband and a woman whom I had considered a friend, were standing in front of me telling me that they were in love. It made zero sense.

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. When I opened my eyes, Pee Wee was looking at me like I was the most pitiful and disgusting woman on the planet. And that was exactly how I felt. I was getting sick of the way he and Lizzie kept looking at each other before they turned to look at me at the same time. I had to wonder how long they had been rehearsing their performance in this real-life soap opera. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me that you and Little Leg Lizzie are already having an affair?” I wanted to know, hands on my hips.