Richard’s eyes closed momentarily, then he breathed deeply. “Hey, baby. I thought you would have called my cell today,” he replied in a choppy staccato manner as if he was piecing the sentence together as he went along. When Nadeen sneered at him, he cleared his throat. “It was unacceptable what happened at the church today. I feel real bad about how it looked too but that’s all behind us now.” He tried to saunter past her to enter the kitchen. Nadeen shook her index finger mere inches from his nose, motioning for him to stay put.
“Oomph, you want to talk about unacceptable? For eighteen years, I’ve carried your name, eighteen. And during those years, I carried your dreams in my chest and your children in my womb. At times, I even carried your burdens and your bad credit. If that’s the best you can do in the way of explaining to me what’s been going on, I may as well get the girls’ bags packed and catch the midnight plane to Georgia. Nothing could possibly be put behind us until I know what’s been going on behind my back.”
“You’re right, Nadeen. You have been there for me every step of the way. I’m thankful for that. Maybe, maybe a few days away would do everyone some good,” he uttered foolishly.
Nadeen chuckled with an air of disbelief. “Whew, that sounds just like you, Richard, always trying to minimize things to take the heat off. Got news for you: that ain’t gon’ get it this time,” she whispered fiendishly. Nadeen was unraveling. Richard was surprised when she managed to control herself and sustain a modicum of restraint instead of cutting him to bits. “I already have half a mind to notify Mahalia’s and Roxy’s schools first thing in the morning, from Atlanta, that they won’t be coming back.”
“You’d do that to me?” he growled, with a glint of resentment in his eyes. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Funny you should mention that. I’m still waiting for you to tell me the same thing. What and who’s gotten into you, Richard? Don’t lie to me. I know Phillip isn’t the only one. How many others have there been?”
“Phillip? Others, other-other-what?” he stammered, his eyes darting erratically to and fro.
“No use in holding back now, I heard you and him talking about sweet secret lovin’ and his decision not to be there for you any longer,” she mocked. “I heard it all so you can stop pretending!”
Richard stood back on his heels. He’d slipped up and broken his vows more times than he wanted to remember at the moment but what she was suggesting sounded ridiculous, even for him. “Nadeen, you cannot think I’ve had a sexual relationship with Phillip. Baby, baby, you know me better than that.”
She laughed at how funny that sounded coming out of his mouth. “You know, I thought I did until I found myself at the doctor’s office today, submitting blood for an AIDS test.”
“What! Oh wait a minute. What doctor? Dr. Griggs? Now she thinks I’ve been fooling around with men?”
Nadeen licked her lips when his last statement smacked her hard. “You care more about what she thinks of you than I do? Negro, you’ve done it now. If you won’t spill it, then keep it. I don’t need this in my life. You can hang out with the boys, play poker, or whatever it is y’all call it. Just leave me and my children out of it!” Nadeen turned to abandon the discussion that to that point had failed to compel Richard to admit a single infraction.
“Wait! Wait!” he yelled, grabbing her by the arm. “Wait a minute!”
“So now you want to talk?” she snapped back. “Tell me then. How often have you had unprotected sex? Anal sex?” Richard’s eyes flew wide open. He reached for answers but found none. Admitting he had unprotected sex was admitting he’d had relations, and with Dior of all people, the one woman he profusely denied being involved with. In the wake of his silence, Nadeen jerked her arm from his grasp then parked both fists on her hips. “Tell me all about it, Richard. Tell me how long you’ve been gay!”
Richard looked as if he’d seen a ghost. His ashy lips quivered as a small shadow eased around the corner just ahead of Roxy. She eyed her parents after growing concerned about the boisterous accusations thrown about the room. “I heard y’all fighting,” she said, not settled on quite how to feel about it. The pointed question she leveled on them explained why. “Are y’all getting a divorce?”
“No, Roxy,” answered Richard without hesitation.
“That depends on what your father says to me next,” Nadeen replied flippantly.
“It wouldn’t be so bad,” Roxy added naïvely, having contemplated the idea when a classmate’s parents called it quits. “I could have two bedrooms and a whole ’nother set of toys and dresses if you do.”
“Why don’t you go back in there with your sister, Roxy,” Nadeen demanded sternly. “I promise, you’ll be the first to know.” She watched her daughter rush off, blind to the situation involving all of them.
“Listen to me, Nadeen. You might have heard me and Phillip fall out over a situation but it didn’t have anything to do with me and him caught up in some sort of homosexual, twisted affair.” He scratched his head, trying to come up with an explanation that wouldn’t likely force his wife to follow through on her threats to leave him. Richard was running out of options and out of alibis. He coaxed her to come back inside the utility room, then he closed the door. “Okay, you’ve got to know I didn’t mean for it to come to this. Phillip was covering for me when I went to see Dior.” He paused when the name circulated in Nadeen’s head. “It started out like I told you, me ministering to her, and then I got too close.”
“Dior? Dior?” she questioned peculiarly. “Isn’t that the same little tramp I asked you about? The one who pranced down the center aisle after service had begun and you lied to my face about seeing? No, that couldn’t be the same hood chick who all but challenged me on the sidewalk after church.” Nadeen’s eyes turned bloodred. She reached up and slapped the taste out of his mouth the same way she had to Mahalia. Only this time Richard deserved it. So much so, Nadeen allowed venom to hang on her bottom lip as she walloped him again. Too mad to let Richard see her cry, Nadeen threw her hands up, wiped her nose, and spun on a dime. While she twisted the doorknob to exit the tiny, angry room, he made a last-ditch effort to explain. Unfortunately, truth went flying off his tongue on the back end of a lie.
“It’s not like you’re making it,” he groveled. “I did develop feelings I shouldn’t have and it was immature to think I could get close without stumbling.”
“Why do I get the feeling you did more than that? Just how far did you fall? Never mind, I’ll wait on the test results to find out.”
“Nadeen, it’s over,” he announced sorrowfully. “I mean it. It’s done between me and Dior.”
“Don’t! You’ve already brought that woman into our bed. I won’t stand for hearing her name spoken in my house. Expect a call from my lawyer. I mean that!”
Twenty-two
Mama, I Lied
Over the next four days, Dior avoided Richard’s futile attempts at closure. She sensed it in the scores of messages inundating her voice mailbox. Richard’s hesitant tone warned Dior that he’d experienced a change of heart compelling him to end their relationship. However, she wasn’t nearly finished with him. The changes he underwent during the month she’d entertained him played over and over in her mind as she took the country drive to Azalea Springs Federal Prison for women. Richard’s weight loss and ever-increasing need for Dior’s affection made her smile. The thought of coaxing him to explore her desires while improving his expertise one episode at a time made her tingle.
She stepped out of her car in the federal penitentiary parking lot, firing off pheromones and craving another sheet-drenching session with the man she planned on being hers someday, hers and hers alone. Dior soared through the visitor intake area, turning the heads of several male correctional officers and quite a few female personnel as well. She grinned devilishly when the grim-faced guard, who typically treated her as if she didn’t have anything he wanted, gestured cordially for her to walk ahead of him down the long corridor when it
was a hard and fast policy for visitors to follow behind by two paces. She felt him picking up her scent and staring at her apple bottom, tight cotton blouse, and high heels. She found it difficult to blame him for finally acting like a man instead of a eunuch.
When the stoutly built officer unlatched the chain-link fence separating the corridor from the congregation room, he stepped aside with his eyes again attentive to her curves. Dior almost giggled. The poor man’s innermost thoughts were plainly stenciled on his face. His mouth, hanging open like a gaping hole, irritated Billie Rae just as it would have watching any grown man salivating over her daughter. Her brilliant smile, the one she’d been saving for Dior’s visit, quickly faded. It had been months since Dior strutted into the visitation section dressed for a night on the town instead of a heavily guarded early morning meeting at a federal facility. Billie Rae’s soured expression displayed exactly how strongly she disapproved of Dior’s attire and the response it drew. But Billie Rae decided to suppress any other signs of her displeasure. She decided to hold back other news too: She had recently been informed of her release date to a halfway house in the city. Because the ink hadn’t dried on her discharge papers, Billie Rae hesitated to share the good news with Dior, for fear of being disappointed by an unforeseen glitch in the bureaucratic red tape, which could have potentially upset everyone’s plans for a homecoming celebration.
Dressed in a starched and pressed khaki uniform, Billie Rae inched forward on the cold metal bench when Dior entered the twenty-by-twenty-foot room. As usual, Billie ran her eager fingers along the creases of her pants after internalizing the jailer’s instruction: Remember, Wicker, no contact. “Yes, sir, I remember,” she answered in a softer voice than she’d used in weeks. It was nothing short of misery not being allowed to reach out and embrace her child as Dior approached the gray table constructed of the same lifeless material as her perch.
“You look good, Mama,” Dior hailed pleasantly, much to her mother’s surprise. It was the first time she had acknowledged her lineage while in Billie Rae’s presence.
“And you smell nice,” the inmate replied, grinning ear to ear. “ ‘Mama’ — I like that. Thank you for making me a very happy woman. I–” she started to say before Dior interrupted.
“I met somebody special,” she sang sweetly. “He’s a good man, makes a legit living and everything. He’s kind of a holy roller but I’ve been trying to loosen him up some.”
“A good and Godly man? Okay, that’s different. If you like it, I love it. So, how’d you meet him?” she asked, swallowing yet another hearty helping of surprise. Billie Rae listened intently as she shared her first such conversation with Dior regarding men in her life. She generally kept tabs by getting the scoop from Dooney. Having been separated from her daughter for close to eleven years by bars and barbed wire, Billie promised herself that she wouldn’t exhibit any signs of concern if she heard something hinky about the man who had Dior buzzing from head to toe.
“He came into the shop one day, looking for a new suit for a special event he had to do,” Dior said, her smile soft and inviting. “I wasn’t really busy so I watched him pick through neckties, expensive ones. Richard, that’s his name, said he didn’t often do business with such pretty women,” Dior added, telling the story with exaggerations thrown in here and there. “Since I bump into fine men all the time, I blew him off until I saw he wasn’t trying to size me up. He was just being nice; that’s his way. Our first conversation was rougher than most. You know me, always trying to figure out the answer even if there’s no problem to speak of. I actually pushed some of his buttons to irritate him after he told me his wife did most of his shopping.”
“His wife?” asked Billie Rae with panic-stricken eyes. By the way her mother’s forehead wrinkled with worry, Dior recognized she had slipped up in underestimating Billie’s comprehension of the sort of things going on in the free world. She was still a woman after all.
“No, no, not his current wife,” she lied. “Richard is happily divorced.”
“Oh, I see. Has he got any kids?” Billie asked, now feeling more at ease about Dior’s love interest.
“Yeah, two gorgeous daughters. They love them some daddy,” she asserted. Dior chuckled as if she’d seen them interact fondly on numerous occasions.
“It seems to me Dior loves her some daddy too,” Billie asserted. She glared playfully at her visitor from the corner of her eye. “Watch your back, baby girl. Daughters can tend to be overprotective of their fathers, especially good ones. They’re so hard to come by nowadays.”
“Wasn’t too easy getting good ones to line up on yesterdays neither,” she cracked glibly. Dior’s father turned out to be a rolling stone, a married salesman she never met. Billie Rae received very little support from him because it was hard to track him down due to a number of fake aliases he kept under his belt. “Richard is the settling down kind but I think I’ll let him marinate awhile before accepting his proposal.” Dior was on a roll and couldn’t see one reason to douse her delusions of grandeur. “I keep the two-carat diamond and platinum engagement setting he bought me in a deposit box for safekeeping. He’ll appreciate it a lot when I let him rebound completely from his first wife.” Dior’s eyes sparkled as she strung lies together continuously. As far as she knew, Billie Rae was slated to be incarcerated another eight months at least. By that time, she honestly hoped that every fabricated word from her shiftless story would have come to fruition. Once breathing life into those empty lies, she became more determined than ever to pull off the slickest man-grab of her life. There were at least two obstacles standing in the way: namely Nadeen Allamay and the married woman’s utter repugnance for selfish and scandalous homewreckers like Dior.
With the prison in her rearview, Dior sailed down the interstate on a natural high. After selling Billie Rae a bill of goods that didn’t exist, she couldn’t see her way into turning back now. She felt as if every aspect of her life had just gotten that much sweeter. Looking down the road in rose-colored glasses, Dior blushed when envisioning her name on the church registry as the pastor’s wife, the first lady. She remembered hearing Dooney’s heart-wrenching response after being sentenced to jail. He could have thrown himself on the mercy of the court or begged for probation instead of paying his debt to society in the state penitentiary. When the judge glared at him, asking if he had anything to say before they took him away, Dooney glanced over his shoulder at Dior sitting behind his public defender. He’d done the best he knew how to keep the lights on, food on the table, and her out of harm’s way after their mother was convicted. “Yes, I do, Your Honor. In a very short time, I’ve come to learn how a house divided cannot stand and also just how easy the right amount of pressure can bust a steel pipe.” It didn’t matter if the judge comprehended Dooney’s soulful revelation; Dior understood. She had experienced barely scraping by, up close and personal, seeing it develop from the inside out. Years later, an opportunity presented itself to assert her brother’s jailhouse philosophy, standing on the outside, looking in.
Sunday morning, the M.E.G.A. Church men’s choir wailed joyously. The congregation clapped along with the spiritual beat, while swaying and praising to their hearts’ content. Rose, sitting next to Nadeen, smiled at her when the chorus rolled into “I’m Looking for a Miracle” with resounding intensity. It was as if the entire building and everyone in it were on fire. Nadeen hadn’t gotten over Richard’s confession but she was moving toward it. For days on end, she’d threatened to file separation papers unless he came clean about everything. Richard apologized profusely but disagreed when Nadeen pushed for marriage counseling. He said he had a hold on his curiosity, stating that’s all it was, and how he couldn’t risk having his business floating around the medical community after some arrogant psychologist started digging into the dark corners of his life. Nadeen let up on her Gestapo interrogation tactics when Richard shed tears over allowing himself to get drawn in by Dior’s temptress ways, although he wouldn’t admit to doing
anything past infrequent intimate canoodling. Nadeen was sorry too. She had vehemently accused her best friend’s husband of engrossing himself in homosexual activity and then concealing it from his wife. Rose said she understood how Nadeen could have gotten things mixed up. Overhearing a woeful argument about secret love and the like, it was foreseeable that misunderstandings would abound, especially on the heels of Richard’s flat-out refusal to discuss the incident initially. Furthermore, Nadeen recognized the difficult position she’d backed Rose into and why she remained tight lipped regarding what Phillip divulged to her in the strictest of confidence. As the pastor’s wife, sustaining silence and a straight face when crossing paths with members whose dirtiest secrets she’d been privy to always seemed to eat at her insides too. There weren’t any new transgressions under the sun; most of them were merely the normal garden variety, recycled and duplicated a million times over with slight variations. Nadeen was jubilant when she squeezed Rose’s hand thankfully. She was hopeful the worst was behind her and Richard. What happened next caused her short-lived jubilation to get snatched up around the collar and body-slammed.
Nadeen’s eyes filled with utter disbelief. Dior came swaggering down the aisle as bold as you please in a short white sundress with low cleavage and spaghetti straps. Despite another grand entrance, no one other than those who knew what Dior was up to appeared to notice. Hymns and spiritual songs played on while Nadeen’s world stood still. She eyed Richard’s plaything disapprovingly. The fact that Dior’s legs were bare and extremely toned didn’t make it any easier. Rose had asked in retrospect what Nadeen really thought about Richard chasing after a younger woman. Nadeen replied that the chasing aspect didn’t amount to anything worth worrying over in her book unless he had lied about catching the skank a time or two while he was at it. Now that Dior’s brazen entrance drew the attention from several men in the choir, Nadeen had to rethink her position. Suddenly, it came to mind how wrong she’d been about marriage and the suffering that oftentimes aids in building the institution. Throughout her upbringing, she thought her mother was a fool to let her father run around off the leash and then act like everything was going to be alright. In that instant, Nadeen knew why her mother stayed with a philandering preacher. She wore a cloak of indispensable commitment like a tattoo, proud and permanent, because love had a hold on her and it was stronger than pride.
Sinful Too Page 19
