by Mary Monroe
Then I had to deal with Jade when the time was right, if she regained her memory. Our relationship would never be the same. I seriously doubted that I could continue to work with her at the same place of employment. As a matter of fact, if she did return to work, I planned to fire her immediately. But that wouldn’t be the end of it. Jade had been such a huge part of my life that losing her would be like losing an arm or a leg.
Otis and Bully left the room to go to the cafeteria for coffee. A few minutes later a stout, grumpy nurse entered Jade’s room with a cup containing some pills, a thermometer, and a chart. She chased us out so Rhoda and I left to return to the cafeteria.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose her,” Rhoda sniffed in the elevator, her head on my shoulder. “She’s all I got. She’s my only chance to be a grandmother.”
“You won’t lose her,” I said sadly, knowing that I had lost Jade. “You can get past this.” I gave Rhoda a firm hug before we left the elevator.
“And what about you?” she asked, squeezing my hand.
I bowed my head. “I’ve survived worse,” I said evenly. “But then you already know that,” I said, blinking at Rhoda. Somehow I managed a smile.
“I want you to know…I want you to know that what Jade did to you, it won’t ever happen again. I promise. But she is still a child, my child, and I can’t get past that.”
“I know you can’t get past that, Rhoda, and I don’t expect you to choose me over your child. But don’t forget, I love Jade, too. Despite all this, it’s not the end of the world. We’ll work through it.”
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am for what I did to you in your kitchen. I just snapped,” Rhoda sobbed. She produced a handkerchief from her purse and blotted her eyes and nose.
“I just snapped, too,” I said, biting my lip.
Rhoda and I joined Otis and Bully in the cafeteria. I wasn’t surprised to see them drinking sodas while two cups of cold coffee sat off to the side on the table.
There was not much to talk about. I certainly had very little to talk about. I excused myself to go call Pee Wee to let him know what had happened.
The one telephone that I was able to locate on the same floor as the cafeteria was occupied. It was near a waiting room so I waited around for about ten minutes, listening to a redneck with a ponytail yelling into the telephone about an Indian doctor who’d just performed an emergency C-section on his wife.
I don’t know what made me do what I did next. But before I could stop myself, I was back in the elevator. I got off on the third floor, and with my head bowed, I padded past the nurse’s station back to Jade’s room. Despite what she had done to me, she was still that same little girl who had accused me of being Santa Claus.
The door to her room was ajar. I moved as quietly and quickly as I could. I stopped before I got all the way in the room. Jade was not in her bed, but I could hear her. I moved a little closer. She was in the bathroom, singing “I’m Every Woman,” and dancing a jig like one of the Soul Train dancers! I leaned forward a little more. She was looking in the mirror, mugging like she was in Hollywood, posing for her close-up.
With a heart that felt as heavy as a large rock, I backed out of the room and waited a few moments before I coughed loud enough to get her attention. While I was peeping around the door, Jade shot out of the bathroom like a cannonball and leaped back into the bed and pulled the covers up to her neck.
She immediately closed her eyes and started moaning, “Mmmmmm…Where…am I…Where am I? Aarrggggh.”
I couldn’t resist what I did next. I moved over to the bed and stood over Jade with my arms folded. I didn’t say a word, but there was a stern look on my face that I wanted her to see. She cracked open her eyes just enough to see me. And as soon as she did, she started babbling some more gibberish. She was still doing that when I left the room.
I went back to the cafeteria and hugged everybody good night. Even Bully. And then I left. I couldn’t wait to get back to my house where I belonged.
CHAPTER 73
Charlotte cried when I told her that Jade was going to live with her grandparents in New Orleans for a while.
“But she didn’t even come say good-bye,” Charlotte sobbed. “Why is she leaving?”
“Well, she’s going to go to college down there next year, and she wanted to get used to living there first,” I explained.
“Oh,” Charlotte said, drying her eyes. “I hope she brings me a present when she comes back.”
That was it. Charlotte ran off to be with one of her friends who lived in the neighborhood, and she forgot all about Jade. Well, she didn’t really forget about Jade, but she accepted the fact that Jade was not going to be around for a while.
Muh’Dear, Scary Mary, and Daddy had stopped badgering me. But only because I had told them the whole story. I knew that they wouldn’t until I did. So I did.
I didn’t tell Rhoda or Otis, or anybody else, what I’d seen when I’d peeped in Jade’s hospital room that night. I didn’t see any point.
It was Sunday, a few days after my visit to Jade at the hospital. Around six o’clock that evening, my telephone rang. I was in the kitchen alone. Charlotte was at the movies with Muh’Dear and Daddy. Pee Wee was in the living room slumped in front of the television with a can of beer and a plate of snacks.
“Auntie?” It was Jade.
“Jade.”
“Auntie, please don’t hang up. They are about to take me to the airport to go to New Orleans, and I wanted to say good-bye. And I just want to let you know how sorry I am about what happened. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You did a pretty good job anyway.”
“Auntie, please try to understand me. I thought Pee Wee wanted to be with me. I thought that if you were out of the way, me and him could be together. Honest to God, I did!”
“Well, you thought wrong, Jade. Pee Wee is a forty-five-year-old man. A successful man with everything in the world going for him. What did you think you had to offer him?”
“Just myself, Auntie. I’m pretty…I’m young. I thought he’d be glad to have me. He was like…He is like…so cute and funny and nice and everything. He looks at you like you are somethin’ good to eat. I wanted me a man like that.”
“First of all, he looks at me like I’m something good to eat. You just said so yourself. That doesn’t mean he would have looked at you like that. What you need to do is find you somebody who will look at you the way my husband looks at me.”
“I tried to kiss him one time and he cussed at me,” Jade sobbed. “That was last year.”
“You should have stopped there, Jade. Just because you throw yourself at a man doesn’t mean he’s going to catch you.”
“But he looked at me all the time. Especially when I wore my white shorts,” Jade said, defiant to the bitter end.
“Jade, I looked at you when you wore those white shorts. Everybody looked at you when you wore those white shorts. That means nothing. But just because people, men especially, look at you, that doesn’t mean they want you. All you are doing when you walk around half-naked is attracting attention. But it’s negative attention, baby. And believe me, that kind of attention won’t get you anything but a baby you don’t need, or a disease that might put you in the grave. Life is one game where people don’t play fair.”
“You mean people like me? Mama sat me down and talked to me for hours that night I…that night I…tried to kill myself. My daddy jumped in the mix. And even Uncle Bully tried to talk to me and here he is doing the wild thing with my mama!”
“That’s your mama’s business, Jade. What you don’t seem to realize is, you are still a child.” There was an uncomfortable pause. All I could hear was Jade breathing through her mouth. “By the way, I’m glad to see that you’ve recovered from your amnesia,” I said.
“Huh? Oh, that? Yeah, I recovered from that! I feel fine!” Jade said, talking so fast she almost lost her breath. Then there was more silence. “Do you hate me, Auntie?”
/>
“No, I don’t hate you, Jade. I hate what you did to me.”
“I didn’t mean any of that mean stuff I said to you that night you found out.”
“I know you didn’t, Jade.”
I wondered if I was just incredibly stupid and gullible, or if I was crazy after all. I had asked myself a thousand times how I could have let something like this happen.
Scary Mary had told me to my face, “Girl, you don’t never give no woman, ugly or pretty, young or old, a position of power in your life, your house.”
I had given Jade so much power in my life and in my home that it had overwhelmed her. And I had trusted her when I knew in my heart that I shouldn’t have. No, I couldn’t hate Jade for what had happened, no more than I could hate myself, because I was in it, too.
“Auntie, are you still there?” Jade asked, her voice just above a whimper.
“I’m still here. I was…just thinking about something else, that’s all.”
“I have to go now. Maybe one day, we can forget about this and you’ll love me again.”
“I still love you, Jade. Nothing can change that.”
“Then maybe one day, you’ll be my favorite auntie again?”
“Maybe I will.”
“’Bye…Auntie.”
“’Bye, Jade. Have a safe trip.”
I hung up the telephone and wiped a tear from my eye. Pee Wee entered the kitchen, chewing and balancing an empty plate.
“I heard the telephone ring. Who was it?” he asked, heading to the refrigerator.
“Huh? Oh. Just some telemarketer,” I said, turning my head so he wouldn’t see my tears.
“Tryin’ to sell you some shit you don’t need?”
I was glad that he had his back to me, as he leaned his head inside the refrigerator. I wiped my eyes and nose on the tail of my muumuu. “Uh-huh,” I mumbled. “Just another telemarketer, trying to sell me some shit I don’t need.”
Pee Wee removed two beers. I was glad he handed one to me.
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 secretaries 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 thirty-seven 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.
It seemed like the older she got, the more men she attracted. She predicted that forty years from now she’d be beating off dirty old men with her walking stick. Just last week somebody had stopped her on the street and asked if she was Kerry Washington, one of the most attractive black actresses in Hollywood. So why did her pussy feel like a condemned piece of property on no-man’s-land? Beauty was not the cure-all for loneliness that some people thought it was. She was probably one of the best-looking lonely women on the planet. But in her case, it was by choice. And it was all because the right man had not approached her in six months.
“At least you still got your health and a good job,” somebody—she couldn’t even remember who—had told her a few days ago. That same person had advised her to contact an online dating service. An online dating service! If that wasn’t the last refuge for the truly desperate and a paradise for predators of all kinds, she didn’t know what was. She’d made it emphatically clear that she was not that desperate…yet.
“I’m doing just fine, thank you very much.” That was how she always responded when some busybody’s nose sniffed in her direction and asked about her love life.
No, she wasn’t getting any and didn’t know when she ever would again. What the hell. She could live with it. She still had more things to be thankful for than a lot of other people. Yes, she did still have her health and her job and had been thinking about getting a cat.
Right now her job was the main focus in her life. She enjoyed being the Executive Publicity Director for Eclectic Records. The prestige and all the perks that went along with her high-profile position meant as much to her as the fat paychecks she collected twice a month. This was one sister who didn’t have to worry much about where she was going in the hectic business world and how she was going to get there; she had already arrived.
Unfortunately, a lot of Teri’s peers hated their jobs, so they didn’t share her vision or enthusiasm. She didn’t know of a single person in L.A. who wanted to be at work on New Year’s Eve. It was hard enough for most people to come to work on the rest of the days in the year. But work was where Teri Stewart was tonight (she’d worked well into the night on Christmas Eve, too). Not because she wanted to be, but because she had to be.
Teri didn’t give a damn what everybody else in L.A. was doing. If nothing else, she was disciplined and considerate. To her, every commitment she made was important. Last year on a much-needed vacation to Puerto Vallarta, she had offered to take her friendly hotel maid and her kids to dinner. She didn’t think to ask the woman how many kids she had, but she expected at least two. When the maid showed up with all nine of her kids in tow, including the eldest boy’s wife and their two kids, Teri didn’t back out. Now here she was on New Year’s Eve trying to finish a monthly media report that was late because one of her sources had dropped the ball.
The building that was home to Eclectic Records was almost empty. But that didn’t bother Teri. There was a pit bull of a security guard at the front desk on the first floor at all times. The sixteen-story building was located on a busy street near downtown L.A. Even though there had been a few muggings in the area recently, it was still fairly safe compared to other parts of the city.
Holiday lights were still in place, inside and out. The soulful R. Kelly jam emanating from a CD player in t
he center of Teri’s cluttered desk in a corner office on the sixth floor didn’t do a whole lot to make her feel more at ease. Her mood was dark, and she was more frustrated than usual. The impatient frown on her face and her pouting bottom lip, which would have made a less fortunate woman look like a hag, made her look even younger than her twenty-nine years. She mumbled profanities as she searched for a document that contained information she needed to complete her report. “Shit!” she hissed as she thumped the button on the speakerphone next to the CD player, speed-dialing her secretary at home.
“Nicole, you didn’t put a copy of Reverend Bullard’s report on my desk,” she insisted, glaring at the telephone as if it were the source of her frustration. There was no answer. “Nicole, are you there?”
“Uh-huh, I’m here,” Nicole finally replied with a mighty hiccup. Somebody had popped open a bottle of champagne in the company break room to jump-start the New Year’s Eve festivities. Like a fish with a long swallow, Nicole had guzzled two glasses before she left the office two hours ago.
By the time Teri had concluded a tense conference call with two long-winded clients on the East Coast and made it to the break room, all the champagne was gone. If she ever needed a liquid crutch, it was now. She appeased herself with the reminder that she would make up for it in a couple of hours.
“I thought I told you to put a copy of the Bullard report on my desk. You know we can’t afford to not get our artists mentioned in the tabloids and the music rags whenever they do something good.” Teri was convinced that a story about an ex-con preacher making gospel CDs for troubled teenagers would be good press for the preacher and for Eclectic Records. “I thought I told you twice.”
“Well, I thought I did,” Nicole said with a burp. “I meant to…”
“You thought you did and you meant to, but you didn’t,” Teri snapped.
“Will you please calm down? You’re making me nervous.”
