by Mary Monroe
“I do, I guess,” Jade said with a severe pout on her face.
“If you don’t mind now, I need to call my sister in Florida and let her know about Daddy. She might want to come up here,” I said, lifting the telephone from the end table by my end of the sofa.
“Yes, ma’am. Tell Miss Lillimae I asked about her,” Jade said over her shoulder as she headed for the steps to my guest bedroom with that pout still on her face.
But this time, I didn’t care about that pout. It had finally lost its potency.
CHAPTER 39
“It’s so good to hear your voice again, girl,” my half sister said to me when I called her at her home in Miami. “I was thinkin’ about callin’ to check up on you and Daddy anyway. Y’all both been on my mind a lot lately. I had planned to do so on the weekend when the rates are so much lower.”
“Well, Daddy’s out of the dark, but I don’t know what is going to happen next. He’s got a good doctor, and he says that Daddy is still pretty strong for a man of his age.”
“Is he in good enough shape to talk if I call him tomorrow mornin’? To tell you the truth, I don’t want to see him if I don’t have to. I would rather wait to see him when he gets well. After all them years he lived with me, sick almost every other week, I don’t think I could stand too much of it right about now. Me, I been wrestling with fibroids and a high blood pressure myself.”
“Lillimae, you don’t have to explain anything to me. I know you love our daddy just as much as I do. If I wasn’t already in Ohio, I wouldn’t want to come see him lying in a hospital bed either.”
Lillimae took a long time to respond. “But if he gets any worse, I’m comin’ up there even if I have to come on a dogsled. No matter what, I would like to see him, and hug him at least one more time before…before he leaves us.”
“Lillimae, Daddy is not going to die any time soon. I promise you that. I didn’t call to worry you. Muh’Dear tried to talk me out of it because she didn’t want you to worry yourself.”
“No, you did the right thing. I am glad you called me. And I expect to hear from you every day as long as he’s sick. Do you hear me? You don’t sound too hopeful to me. Now, is there anything else botherin’ you?”
“Uh, no. It’s getting late so I will let you go. Why don’t you call the hospital and talk to Daddy yourself in the morning? In the meantime, I will be praying.”
At least one of my prayers got answered. Daddy made a miraculous recovery and according to his doctor, would be almost as good as new. It was a different doctor, but the same thing had been said about Rhoda when she had her stroke ten years ago. She had made a recovery that was so complete, only the people who knew her knew that she had had a stroke.
“See there, I was right. I been tellin’ y’all that the more ornery a person is, the longer he, or she, lives,” Scary Mary observed with a chilly grin. “Look at me. Look at Rhoda. God couldn’t strike her down with a stroke!”
If what the old madam said was true, my days were numbered. At no time in my life could I have ever been described as ornery. I was too passive for my own good and I had suffered because of it. But I could not change who I was, and I didn’t really want to change this late in the game. I didn’t know what I was going to do about other personal issues, but right now, my biggest issue was my daddy.
I went to visit Daddy at home the day after he got discharged. It pleased me to see that he was looking and feeling much better, although he looked even older than his seventy-nine years. He had lost his handsome looks a long time ago. Like so many other Black men, he had really let himself go. But for a man who had just had a heart attack, he looked as well as could be expected.
“I don’t care how good you feel, you are not drinking any beer or anything else with alcohol in it,” I scolded, ignoring the petulant look on my daddy’s sweaty face.
“You a little too late for that, girl,” Muh’Dear informed me. He snuck and drunk up three beers last night before I could even get his dingy black ass in the bed. As soon as I turned my back on him he was drinkin’ like a carp! It was a damn shame, and I told him so to his face.”
I shot my mother a hot look, then an even hotter one in Daddy’s direction. There was now a blank expression on his face, like he had just woken up from a long sleep.
“How did that happen?” I yelled, punching Daddy’s pillows and roughly pushing his knotty head back on the bed. He blinked and then lowered his eyes like a naughty child. He scratched the side of his head, then patted his brittle white hair back in place.
“Scary Mary slid through here and hooked him up while I was lookin’ the other way. She done had two heart attacks herself, and she is still tickin’ better than Big Ben, so I guess beer can’t be that bad on no heart patient after all,” Muh’Dear croaked.
“Well, if I see any beer in your hand I’m calling Dr. Peterson,” I threatened. “I got enough to worry about.”
The telephone rang and Muh’Dear stumbled out to answer the extension in the hallway outside of Daddy’s room. Just as I was about to open my mouth to continue scolding Daddy, I heard Muh’Dear speaking in a loud and angry voice.
“Who the hell is this? Don’t you be usin’ that kind of nasty language with me, you trollop! That’s my daughter you talkin’ about!” Muh’Dear shouted.
Daddy gave me a puzzled look. His sorry eyes looked like they had been pushed halfway back in his head. I gasped and stumbled out to the hallway and snatched the telephone out of Muh’Dear’s hand. As soon the caller realized I had come on the line he, or she, slammed the telephone down. I stood there listening to the dial tone, and blinking at the phone in my hands.
“Muh’Dear, who was that? What did they…say?” I asked, as if I didn’t know already.
There was a stunned, wild-eyed look on my mother’s face. Like she had just witnessed a crime, and in a way, she had.
With a click of her teeth she told me, “I don’t know who in the world that rude and crude devil was. Some wench with a mouth as nasty as a outhouse! I ain’t heard such mean-mouthin’ since I quit cleanin’ and cookin’ for some of them mean old White heifers in Florida! This hussy that just called here, she said you and me both was nothin’ but cheesy-ass whores, and she was gwine to teach you a lesson you ain’t never gwine to forget.” Muh’Dear’s mouth was hanging open. “What did you do to make some woman that doggone mad?”
The incredulous look on my mother’s face was so extreme, it disturbed me almost as much as the telephone call. I wrung my hands and gave my mother a pleading look. I was taking too long to respond.
“Talk to me, girl! I already got one half-dead body on my hands. Don’t you ball up and fall out on me, too,” Muh’Dear hollered, looking toward the room where Daddy was mumbling under his breath.
I leaned to the side and peeped around the corner of the door and saw Daddy sitting up in the bed looking at me. It was obvious that the telephone call had attracted his attention. He looked more alert than he had in months.
“I didn’t want you to find out about this. At least, not this way,” I told my mother, beckoning her from the hallway into her dimly lit living room.
Muh’Dear and Daddy spent most of their time at home in the kitchen watching a small color television on the counter next to the microwave oven. They rarely watched the big screen television that Pee Wee and I had given to them three years ago for Christmas. It occupied a corner in the living room, standing as silent and dark as a big oak tree. Like a lot of older folks with nice things, they wanted everything to stay nice. And they thought that they could keep it that way by not using it. There was an expensive floor lamp in a corner facing the big screen television that had only been turned on once because Muh’Dear didn’t want the bulb to burn out.
I pulled Muh’Dear down on her living room sofa, which was covered in plastic, next to me with my arm around her shoulder. I wanted to be out of Daddy’s hearing range. This was something I didn’t want him to find out about either. I told my mother about the
blacksnake, the note, and the other telephone calls.
“You didn’t want me to find out?” Muh’Dear hissed, looking toward the door. “Gal, what in the world you done got yourself mixed up in? I never heard such cussin’ and name callin’ as I just heard on my own telephone.” Muh’Dear paused and brushed some lint off the plastic-covered arm of her nice beige sofa.
I shrugged. “Some woman has decided to give me a hard time,” I said, shrugging again. “I can handle it, though. I don’t think it’s anything serious enough for me to worry about. She wants to get my goat.” I sounded so uncertain that even I didn’t believe my own words. And from the look on my mother’s face, she didn’t either.
There was a frown on Muh’Dear’s face. The long, deep lines that had destroyed her beauty years ago suddenly seemed twice as deep and twice as long. In just a few seconds her face looked like it had slid from its original place. “Well, if she callin’ my house, it don’t sound like you handlin’ it too good. Who in the world would do something like that to a nice young woman like you?” Muh’Dear stuck the tip of her finger in her mouth to wet it. Then she used it to dab at my cheek. “You ain’t never hurt nobody before in your life. Whoever the hell that slut is, she better hope I don’t find her out. I ain’t so old I wouldn’t beat her brains out.”
Muh’Dear’s face looked like it was dropping lower with each second that passed. She sucked on her teeth and upgraded her frown to a scowl so severe that I removed my arm from around her shoulder and slid a few inches away from her. Unlike me, my mother had always been a feisty woman.
“I have no idea who this woman is,” I mumbled, feeling so helpless.
Muh’Dear looked like she was tuning up her brain, trying hard to come up with something that might help me resolve this knotty problem. I now believed it was a lot more serious than I’d originally thought. But I didn’t want her to know that. It was enough that I had burdened Rhoda and Jade with my mess.
“Now, baby, you need to think real hard. Somewhere along the way, you done pissed off some woman. Real bad! And the sooner you find out who she is, and what you done to her, the sooner we can whup her ass.”
“Muh’Dear, the last thing I plan to do is whup some woman’s ass. I’m too old for that.”
“Well, I ain’t too old! I ain’t never gwine to get so old that I can’t take care of my business. When I do, you might as well drop me in the ground, and pray that my soul get to heaven in one piece. But I ain’t dead yet, and I ain’t gwine to set around and do nothin’. Like I said, the sooner we find out who she is, the sooner we, or at least I, can whup her damn ass. I never heard such foul language before in my life. And certainly not about my own child. I won’t stand for it!” My mother had to stop talking and catch her breath.
“Muh’Dear, uh, I am sure it’s nothing but a prank,” I said with a nervous chuckle. “Whoever it is, she will get tired sooner or later, and move on to something else to amuse herself with. In a way I feel sorry for her. She must have a truly miserable life.”
“No, she ain’t miserable yet. Just let her wait till I get my hands on her!”
“Muh’Dear, this is my business. I wish you would let me take care of it my way.”
“What Pee Wee got to say about this mess?”
“Um…we haven’t really talked about it much yet. I tried to talk to him about it the day Daddy got sick.”
The truth of the matter was, the subject had not come up since the night Pee Wee and I had the heated discussion in my car on the way home from the hospital, the night of Daddy’s heart attack. Since then, we had been almost like strangers. We only spoke to each other when we had to, and that was one of the most awkward things in the world to do. A few times we had even communicated by writing notes to each other.
“What you waitin’ on? Your daddy is gwine to be fine.”
“I’ll talk to Pee Wee when I get home tonight.”
As soon as I walked out of Muh’Dear’s house and got in my car, I fished around in my purse until I found a notepad and a pen. Gripping the pen in my hand like a weapon, I immediately wrote: Dear Devil.
Before I could figure out what else to say in the note that I had planned to wave in Pee Wee’s face as soon as I got home, I realized how ridiculous our little feud had become. I ripped the piece of paper to shreds and tossed the pieces and the pen back in my purse. It dawned on me that a note was the worst way in the world for me to say what I had to say.
Especially since it was also one of the ways that an evil and mysterious individual had decided to communicate with me.
CHAPTER 40
The weather was still warm during the day, but with fall approaching, it got cold enough some nights for us to turn on the heat in my house.
But even with the heat on, it had been really cold in my house since the night I had attempted to talk to Pee Wee about the phone calls. As hard as I tried to ignore the mess I had on my hands, I knew that it would have to be addressed again sooner or later. Pee Wee had made several attempts to deal with it, verbally and with notes, but each time I had brushed him off.
“I am not in the mood to talk about this right now,” I had said the last time, dismissing Pee Wee with an angry wave of my hand, while I was still holding a hot frying pan.
“Well, you better hurry and get in the mood, because I ain’t goin’ to stop until I get this whole story out of you,” Pee Wee told me, his eyes on the hot frying pan.
One thing I could say about Black men was that some of them had eventually learned that the kitchen was the last place in the house to provoke a Black woman. There were too many “weapons” within an angry woman’s reach in the kitchen. I had just heard a gruesome story about a sister who had flung a pan of hot grease at her husband, then batted his burning head with a rolling pin. My own daddy still had a scar on his neck where Muh’Dear had poked him with a fork when he’d accused her of having an affair with the preacher who was coming to help us eat the dinner that she had just prepared. I was only three when I witnessed that, but there were things in my life that I never forgot.
Like how angry and disgusted I was when I realized I had an enemy.
My perpetrator had taken her assault to another level by calling my mother’s house. And as far as I was concerned, she had crossed the wrong line. I had to take some action. But what? And against who?
Either Pee Wee had read my mind or Muh’Dear called him up before I got home from her house. As soon as I entered our living room, he led me to the sofa and pushed me down. I still had my coat on.
“We need to talk about this mess you brought up the other night,” he began. He hadn’t shaved in days. The stubble on his chin and the sides of his face made him look like a man I didn’t recognize. I found myself wondering just how well I did know this man I’d been with so many years.
“Did you get a telephone call tonight?” I blurted, unbuttoning the thin blue denim jacket I had on.
“From who?”
“Muh’Dear!” I boomed. “Did my mother call you tonight and tell you that some woman’s been sending me crazy stuff in the mail and she’s been calling me up saying all kinds of crazy shit?”
“I don’t know nothin’ about all that. But I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s probably some lonely, broken-down woman on the block that ain’t got nothin’ better to do with her time. Now she sees you over here in this big fine house, driving a nice car, and she wonders how come she ain’t that lucky. Folks don’t like it when people around them start lookin’ like they doin’ too good. Especially us. Crabs in a barrel don’t want none of them other crabs to get out that barrel, and they’ll do everything they can to make sure they don’t.”
Pee Wee didn’t seem that concerned about what I had just told him, and that didn’t help his case.
“I…We’ve been doing well for years, Pee Wee. Why would somebody decide to start up some shit like this now?” I took off my jacket and draped it across my arm, trying to act as normal as I possibly could. But it took all of my st
rength for me to keep from losing my temper again.
“You tell me,” Pee Wee said with an amused look on his face and a casual shrug. That made his case even weaker, and it was already so thin that I could see through it with my eyes closed.
“No, you tell me, motherfucker!” I snarled, stabbing his chest with my finger.
“Tell you what, woman? And I would appreciate you not usin’ that foul-ass language in front of me. You know how I feel about women cussin,” he replied, pushing my finger in another direction.
“Yes, I know how you feel about women…” I sneered. My jacket fell to the floor when I angrily placed my hands on my hips.
“What the hell are you talkin’ about, Annette? So far you ain’t said nothin’ that made no sense.”
“Did somebody call this house tonight?”
“Like who? People call this house all the time, woman!” Pee Wee yelled. I could see that he was getting angry. But he was nowhere near as angry and disgusted as I was.
“That bitch who called me and sent me that shit in the mail. She called Muh’Dear’s house tonight talking all kinds of trash to my mother. How did she know I was there and not here? I sure didn’t tell her where I was going to be tonight and I doubt if she’s psychic.” I let out a loud, angry breath and glanced around the room to keep from looking at Pee Wee’s face. “I don’t remember the last time I saw my mother so upset,” I told him, looking at him now. There was a look on his face I didn’t like. He looked like he wanted to cry.
“And you think I know something about this shit?” he asked in a low, shaky voice.
“I don’t know what you know. All I do know is, if you are involved with another woman, you better get out of my life now while you are still able. I refuse to be made a fool of at my age.”
“Annette, I don’t know who this woman is that keeps callin’ you and sendin’ you shit in the mail. I ain’t perfect, but one thing I don’t do is fuck around on you. When I married you, it was because I was through with all the rest of them women I knew. You was the only woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Don’t you know that by now?”
