by Mary Monroe
“Never heard of him.”
“He moved here from Fresno. And, before you even ask, he knows everything about me.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. He dragged a skeleton out of his closet, too. He told me that if he hadn’t cheated on exams all through college, he wouldn’t be where he is now. He didn’t even try to pass judgment on me.”
“My daddy always said we’ll all reside in a glass house at least once in our lifetime. He’s been straight ever since he got caught collecting unemployment and working at the same time. There are and always will be somebody doing something a lot worse than what you did. And don’t think I don’t feel guilty for accepting all the stuff you gave me. I just wish I’d have been more of a real friend and slapped some sense into that head of yours. I knew that what you were doing was going to end up a big mess.”
“Well, it’s all behind us now. I wish I hadn’t hurt Daddy and James so much, though.”
“Speaking of James; remember Sarah from the beauty shop? She wrote me last week and told me she ran into James and his new squeeze at the mall. They were holding hands and acting like a couple of kids.”
“That’s nice. Girlfriend, I’d love to sit and chat with you for a while, but I have to go. Roy’s on his way to pick me up for dinner.”
Roy was a therapist, and did give me professional advice on almost every one of our dates. Tonight was no different. “The trauma of losing your mom, your brother, and your uncle all so close together had a lot to do with what you did. It impaired your ability to know right from wrong. You were crying out for help and attention,” he told me. We occupied a booth at Kincaids, a seafood restaurant in Oakland. “You risked losing a lot more by your actions. Identity theft is a serious offense. You did the right thing by paying off some of those banks.” Roy had a receding hairline and blunt features. However, he was a man with a beautiful soul and that was what I needed in my life for a change.
“It seems like I’ll be paying the rest of them from now on,” I said seriously.
“The important thing is, you’ve learned your lesson.” Roy dropped his gold American Express card on the table when the waiter brought the bill. A strange look came over his face. He glanced at me, then his card. He plucked the card off the table and slid it back into his wallet and replaced it with a hundred dollar bill. He gave me a thoughtful look before he laughed.
I laughed too. I knew what he was thinking. “You don’t have to worry about me stealing anything from you or anybody else,” I assured him.
“I hope not,” he told me.
CHAPTER 79
I didn’t know that I was going to miss James as much as I did. He had been in my life for a long time. Not enough time had passed yet for me to put him out of my mind completely. I had strong feelings for Roy and I was pleased that Daddy approved of him. I didn’t know if Roy was going to be the man that I spent the rest of my life with, but he suited me for the time being. He was always there for me when I needed him. Like when Daddy dropped the next bombshell on me.
“Sadie’s grandson’s dead,” he announced. I had not heard him open the door to my room. “And he was the only one in the bunch she thought would amount to somethin’.” Daddy pushed my bedroom door all the way open and shuffled into my room. I had just come in from my date with Roy and still had my clothes on.
“What happened?” I asked, swinging my legs to the side of the bed. I had been in my room for about half an hour, just going over my thoughts.
“Kenny’s dead.”
I went from being groggy to being wide awake within a matter of seconds. “Kenny? Isn’t he the ‘good’ one?”
“Was. Listen, I’m fin to go out to Sadie’s house,” Daddy said. He looked away and blew his nose into a large white handkerchief. “Poor Sadie. Now she done lost all three of them young’ns. Them other two that’s in jail, they good as dead.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
Daddy held up his hands. “Naw, baby. You stay home for now. But I would appreciate it if you’d honor Sadie by going to the boy’s funeral. It’s just a cryin’ shame that the first time you see Kenny is at his funeral.”
“Of course I’ll be there, Daddy. That poor woman. What happened to Kenny? Was he in an accident?” I yawned and rubbed my eyes.
“I wish it was somethin’ like that. Like I told you more than once, there was somethin’ about the boy that I didn’t trust. He was sneaky and evil. I could see it in his eyes. I never told Sadie, but somethin’ told me the boy was gwine to come to a bad end one of these days.” Daddy looked at the floor and shook his head, rubbing his neck and moaning. “He fell in with a bad crowd, and they went and tried to rob somebody.”
“Oh.” I sighed.
“Like I told Sadie, you live by the sword, you die by the sword.”
“You said he tried to rob somebody. Do you mean to tell me that the person he robbed is the one who killed him?”
Daddy nodded. “And who would have thought it’d be one of them little old Vietnamese gals runnin’ a nail shop. That gal had been robbed one time too many so this time she was packin’. She was ready.” Daddy whistled and started to walk away. “That gal grabbed a sawedoff shotgun and blowed half that boy’s head off. Hallelujah ! Don’t wait up for me. I got a feelin’ Sadie’ll want me to stay the night and go with her to the morgue in the mornin’ to identify that boy.” I knew that Daddy was thinking about the day that he had to go to the morgue to identify my brother’s body. He had made the horrific trip alone and had come home looking like a dead man himself. “That ain’t nothin’ nobody need to go through alone.”
The boy’s name was Kenneth Leroy Freeman. He was eighteen years old. Because of the damage the shotgun had done to his face, it was a closed-casket funeral. His high school graduation picture, in a silver frame, sat on top of his casket in the church, which was filled wall to wall with more than three hundred mourners.
It was a nice photograph of Sadie’s grandson, even with the smirk on his face. That picture was worth more than a thousand words. I could see the confusion, defiance, and sorrow in Kenny’s eyes. I could see the faint, half moon–shaped birthmark below his right eye, too. Just as I’d seen it the day he had come in and robbed Daddy’s liquor store, and pressed a gun against my face and forced me to suck his dick.
“Sister, you all right?”
“I’m . . . I’m fine,” I said to the man in line behind me, his hands on the small of my back, urging me to keep the line moving. I couldn’t feel my feet, but somehow I made it to the ladies’ room in the basement.
The light switch in the closet-size ladies’ room didn’t work, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t need the light. I could see what I needed to see even in the dark. “Kenny, you son of a . . .” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. But another sentence was running through my head like a broken record. “Kenny, how long did you think you could get away with robbing folks, boy? You should have stopped with me. Look at you now.”
I heard a woman laugh. It took a minute for me to realize that the woman was me.
I rose from the commode and rearranged the simple black dress I’d purchased from Wal-Mart for the funeral. As I opened the door, I recalled the sneer on Kenny Freeman’s face the day he robbed and sexually assaulted me. I recalled a lot of other things that had occurred to me. The robbery/assault and my experiences with Bon Voyage had come full circle. But something more important had occurred to me. My mother, my brother, and my wayward Uncle Pete were gone and I had to let go of the lingering grief that had been partially responsible for the fool I made of myself. As far as I was concerned, the black cloud of pain and confusion that had plagued me for so many years had moved on, and so had I.
Bon Voyage.
Don’t miss the next book in the God series . . .
GOD AIN’T THROUGH YET
In stores June 2010!
CHAPTER 1
My husband was the last man in town that the people in our close-knit circ
le of friends expected to have an affair. Why he didn’t cheat was as much of a mystery to me as it was to them. When I mentioned to one of my female friends that I was married to a man who didn’t cheat, her only question was, “What’s wrong with him?”
It saddened me to hear that some people thought that there was something wrong with a man who didn’t cheat on his wife.
“There is nothing wrong with my husband. He’s as normal as any other man,” I told that friend.
“Ha! If that’s the case, he’s not normal,” that friend told me.
Maybe she was right. If it was normal for a man to cheat, then he was not normal.
Despite the fact that I had cheated on my husband just a few months ago, (yes, I’d cheated and I’ll get to that later) and accused him of being unfaithful on numerous occasions, I knew in my heart that he had not slept with another woman since he married me. However, one of my concerns was the other women who were dying to get their hands on him . . .
“If you ever break up with Pee Wee, send him to me,” another female friend had jokingly suggested. “He’s perfect.”
When I told my mother what my friend had said, she told me, “Girl, as brazen and desperate as women are these days, I’d be worried if I was you.”
Even after my mother’s comment, I didn’t worry or complain because I felt secure and comfortable. Looking back on it now, I realize I was too comfortable. That was my first mistake. I had a ringside seat in the eye of a major hurricane, but I was so comfortable I didn’t realize that until it was too late.
The day that Pee Wee, my “perfect” husband, abruptly and cruelly left me for another woman had started out like any other day. It was the middle of March, and still a little too cold for my tastes. I’d been a resident of Ohio for over forty years by this time, and I still hadn’t adjusted to the weather. When I was a child growing up in Florida, I used to run around naked in our front yard in March. Kids doing such a thing in Ohio, in March, was unheard of.
I had crawled out of bed during the night and turned up the thermostat. When the weather was nice enough, Pee Wee slept in the nude, and I usually slept in something very skimpy. Right after dinner the night before, he had slid into a pair of flannel pajamas. I’d wiggled into a pair of purple thong panties, a matching Wonder Bra, and a snug cotton nightgown. I’d slid my freshly pedicured feet into a pair of nylon socks. Large pink sponge rollers covered every inch of my head, individually wrapped around my thick, recently dyed black hair. A rose-scented, wrinkle-busting white gel, one of the many weapons that I used to fight Father Time, covered my face. We looked like we were made up for a Halloween party, but it had been a night of raw passion. I had peeled off my socks and that snug gown like a stripper. He’d helped me remove everything else. Within minutes I had hand prints on parts of my body that hadn’t been touched since my last physical exam. And I had assumed positions that I hadn’t been in since I gave birth to my daughter. Afterwards, I fell asleep in his arms. But when I opened my eyes the next morning, I was in bed alone.
Pee Wee had already left the house by the time I got up and made it downstairs to the kitchen. That was odd, but it wasn’t that big of a deal because he didn’t do it that often. He usually waited for me to fix his favorite breakfast; grits, biscuits, scrambled eggs with green bell peppers mixed in, and beef bacon. And when I didn’t get up in time to cook, he strapped on an apron and did it. The last time he had prepared breakfast, he had served it to me in bed.
For some reason, Pee Wee had not made breakfast this particular morning. He’d left the small clock radio on the kitchen counter tuned in to some rap station (how many people listened to rap music this early in the morning?) and a mess on the kitchen table, which included the morning newspaper folded with the pages out of order, his empty coffee cup, a Krispy Kreme donut box, and an ashtray with the remnants of a thick marijuana cigarette piled up in it. I made a mental note to scold him about leaving a roach in plain view. It was hard enough trying to hide certain things and activities from our inquisitive eleven-year-old daughter, Charlotte, not to mention nosy relatives and friends who dropped in at the most inconvenient times. One day my mother went snooping through my bedroom closet and stumbled across an XXX-rated VHS tape that I often watched with Pee Wee when our sex life needed a shot in the arm. She took me aside and quoted Scripture nonstop for twenty minutes. By the time she got through with me, I felt like I knew every harlot in the Bible personally. She’d “excused” Pee Wee and “reminded” me that men were too weak, stupid, and horny to know better.
Pee Wee and I had shared a good laugh over that. Our life together was so idyllic at times that my meddlesome mother’s antics and crude comments didn’t bother us. I had the best of both worlds. He was not just my husband; he was also my best friend.
In spite of all my shortcomings and flaws, I looked at matters of the heart from a realistic point of view. I knew that no man or woman was perfect and that anybody could make a mistake. Me jumping into bed with that low-down, funky black devil that I got involved with last year was one of the biggest mistakes I’d ever made in my entire life. It had been such an intense and passionate affair that it had me acting like a fool. I had done things for him that I had never done to please a man. I’d told lies to be with him. And I’d given him money. It had begun gradually, but when I realized I was “paying” for some dick, I got real concerned because that went against everything I believed in. When I refused to continue paying for my pleasure, the relationship ended in a violent confrontation. Luckily, I had escaped uninjured, at least physically. But I had “paid” a very high price for my mistake. I was so disgusted with myself that for a long time it was hard for me to look in a mirror without flinching.
My husband had reluctantly forgiven me, and we had moved on. “Annette, you ain’t the first woman to cheat, and you won’t be the last. I’ll get over what you done . . . I guess,” he told me, cracking a weak smile to hide some of the pain that I’d caused.
I could not have been more repentant and humble if they’d revised the Bible and included a psalm in my honor. “Honey, I swear to God, something like this will never happen again,” I assured him with reconstructive ideas about how I was going to repair my marriage swimming around in my head.
Once that that was behind us, I began to focus on the only intimate relationship that mattered to me now. But I was no fool. I knew that if I could fall into the deep black hole of infidelity, anybody could. However, since it was usually the man who acted a fool and got involved in an affair, it was more important for me to focus on what my husband might or might not do. I believed that if he ever did cheat on me, I had to look at the situation from an overall point of view: Would I be better off without this man? Does he no longer love me? Is he worth fighting for? Is this marriage dead? Has he become such a slimy devil that he is no longer good enough for me anyway?
Had any of that been the case, the bombshell that my husband dropped in my lap that morning wouldn’t have caused so much damage. Because when he informed me that he was having an affair, I could not have been more stunned if somebody had told me that the Easter bunny was a pimp.
He had committed the granddaddy of indiscretions; which was a torrid, ongoing, “I’d rather be with her than you” sexual relationship with a woman whom I had called my friend. To me, that was the worst kind of affair. If I couldn’t trust my husband and a woman I called my friend, who could I trust?
To make matters even worse, I was probably the last person in our circle to hear about his affair!
Enjoy the following excerpt from Mary Monroe’s
THE COMPANY WE KEEP
Available now wherever books are sold!
CHAPTER 1
Teri Stewart had no idea that two of the secretaries she worked with were secretly trying to set up a date for her with a popular male escort. It was going to be expensive, but worth every penny. That didn’t matter, though. The money was going to come from the company’s petty cash fund that the two secretarie
s controlled.
“John, if that woman doesn’t get some dick soon, we are all going to be in therapy,” complained one of the secretaries with a weary look on her face.
“And if this escort thing doesn’t work, I’ll screw her myself! I’ve been gay to the bone for my entire thirtyseven years and have never even seen a woman’s pussy, so you know this is serious,” moaned the terrified male secretary. “Either that or you’ll have to strap on one of those dildo dicks and do it. We can’t take too much more of her foolishness.”
Unfortunately, the scheme didn’t work. The only agency that the two desperate secretaries could afford had only one black escort. And he had dates lined up for the next two months. When the agency suggested another one of their studs, a very dark-skinned Iraqi, the two secretaries considered him until they saw what he looked like. That poor man looked enough like bin Laden to be his twin. Teri was very patriotic. She’d never sleep with a man who looked like the enemy.
“All we can do now is hope that the upcoming New Year will be better for Teri,” the female secretary said hopefully. “And better for us . . .”
Teri had not been involved in an intimate relationship with a man in six months, and it was beginning to get on her last nerve. She had gradually become a tense, frustrated, abrupt Donna Karan–wearing bitch. She knew she was beginning to get on the last nerves of everybody she came in contact with. Just yesterday she actually saw the guy from the mailroom duck into the stairwell as soon as he spotted her thundering down the hall trying to track down a fax she’d misplaced. And the two nicest secretaries in the company had started looking at her in some of the strangest ways. She had no idea what was going through their heads, and she didn’t want to know.
It wasn’t that no man was interested in her. That had never been the case and probably never would be. If for no other reason, men came on to her because of her looks. Most didn’t care about anything else she had to offer. Few could resist her big, shiny brown eyes; smooth mahogany complexion; and full lips. Not to mention her hourglass-shaped body on legs that would put Tina Turner’s to shame and a mane of dark brown hair that didn’t need a prop like a weave to cascade around her shoulders like a silk scarf.
