Bad Blood

by Mary Monroe

  I could tell from the surprised look on Mrs. Garrett’s face that the dinner invitation didn’t include Lucy. But Mrs. Garrett handled it well. “Oh! Uh, I’m glad you’re coming, too, Lucy. I’m dying to hear about that singles’ cruise you took to Alaska last month,” she said, looking embarrassed and annoyed at the same time.

  “The Martins will be having dinner with us,” Seth’s father said quickly, clearing his throat again. He furrowed his brows and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Isn’t that right, dear?” he asked with a nervous look on his face. From that, I decided Mrs. Garrett was the one who ran the show.

  “Yes, the Martins will be joining us for dinner,” Mrs. Garrett announced. I couldn’t believe how gruff her voice sounded now.

  “Oh. They will? Well, in that case, maybe I’ll take a rain check,” Lucy said, looking disappointed. She had dated the Martins’ divorced son, Ronald, for three months before their bitter breakup two months ago because she couldn’t get along with his parents. That was the main reason that Lucy had gone on that singles’ cruise to Alaska last month and had slept with two different men in seven days. Lucy looked at me and shrugged. “Rachel’s car is in the shop for a tune-up, and I’ve been hauling her around for the past few days. I don’t mind dropping her off for dinner.” There was a petulant tone in Lucy’s voice. But she was the kind of woman who bounced back from disappointment real fast. I already knew that she would probably head straight to a bar or go on a shopping spree on her way home from church.

  “Rachel, I can pick you up this evening,” Seth said quickly.

  “I don’t want you to go to any trouble on my account. I can take a cab—”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Seth interrupted. “You live in the Dover Circle apartment complex on College Avenue, right?”

  “My doctor’s eldest son lives in that neighborhood. He’s already a very successful pediatrician. That’s an expensive residence for a girl your age. What do you do for a living?” Mrs. Garrett asked with a guarded look on her face.

  “I’m the assistant bookkeeper at Steele-Royce Middle School, a private school,” I said proudly.

  All three of the Garretts gasped and looked at me in awe.

  “That’s one of the most exclusive and expensive middle schools in Berkeley! My two older boys went there. They wouldn’t allow Seth to enroll, because his grades were not up to their standards. They pay the staff very well at that place,” Mr. Garrett said. “Hmmm. Your family must be real proud of you.”

  “With your looks and shape and everything else you have going for you, how come you’re not married yet, Rachel?” Mrs. Garrett asked. “I got married when I was nineteen.”

  “Mother! That’s kind of personal,” Seth scolded. Then he turned to me. “Give me your address, Rachel. I’ll pick you up around six, if that’s all right with you.”

  “That’ll be just fine, Seth.” At the same time I asked myself, What am I getting myself into this time?

  Chapter 26

  Seth

  IT HAD BEEN ONLY TWO WEEKS SINCE I’D MET RACHEL. THE MORE I got to know her, the more she impressed me. She was a great cook and loved to pamper me, so I didn’t have to scramble around to borrow money to take her to a bunch of fancy restaurants like I did with the women I usually dated.

  Having a woman who saved me money was good enough, but having one who eagerly prepared my favorite meals two or three times a week, did my laundry, and took care of me in bed was just what I needed. Compared to the other women I’d been involved with, Rachel was the Holy Grail. I already knew that she was the one. So did Mother. Rachel had joined us for dinner several times already, and she had even taken Mother to lunch and shopping a few times. However, Mother still had some concerns.

  “Rachel is not exactly what I had in mind for you. I can’t believe she didn’t go to college and has never even been to Europe, doesn’t like to play bridge, and doesn’t even drink tea. What is the world coming to? But she is a hard worker, and she’s good-looking for a black girl and is respectful of her elders,” Mother said.

  This particular Sunday afternoon, my two older brothers, Damon and Josh, and their snooty wives, Helene and Faith, had come to have dinner with me and our parents. The way they were all wolfing down the lamb stew that our cook had prepared, you would have thought they had not eaten in days. I had begun to hate family get-togethers like this. I always left the table feeling like I’d been pepper sprayed and dragged through the mud.

  Josh and I were very close, even though he was eight years my senior. I enjoyed spending time with him. He always had my back, no matter what I did. When I got arrested for drunk driving last year, he bailed me out of jail and paid my fine, and he didn’t tell anybody. A week after that, I got caught with a hooker during a sting operation. Being a very successful attorney, Josh had enough connections to get me out of that mess, too, without any publicity.

  My brother Damon was only two years older than Josh, but he and I had never really gotten along that well. He made it no secret that he thought of me as the “family fool,” who had very little hope of changing. He and his prim and proper wife, Helene, an ex-model who thought her piss didn’t stink, had a ten-year-old son named Anthony, who was spending the night with one of his friends. Josh and Faith were expecting their first child in two months. Both of my brothers practiced law, just as Father had before he retired three years ago.

  My brothers’ wives had both stopped working as soon as they got married, which was something Mother didn’t appreciate. She believed that women needed to pull their load in a marriage. That included contributing to the household income. Mother had worked as a registered nurse until her weak heart forced her to retire two years ago. She tolerated my brothers’ wives, but in private she complained about how much she couldn’t stand either one. So far, she had not said one negative thing about Rachel. As a matter of fact, she praised that girl so much, it got on my nerves. Well, not really. I was glad that my mother, who had always been my favorite girl, approved of Rachel. And so did her fussy, busybody friends.

  I promptly lost interest in church and had been back only a few times since the day I met Rachel. But I was in the company of what Mother called our “church family” on a regular basis. These individuals were meddlesome old farts, if you asked me. There was bald-headed, mole-faced Reverend Mays and his plump, bug-eyed wife, Pearline. They came to my parents’ house for dinner every other Sunday. They usually arrived late, after everybody had been seated and served. But they made up for it. This Sunday was no different. Nobody paid much attention to their tardiness. As usual, I was the center of attention. This time I felt like a goose about to be shoved into an oven. Not only were Mother and Damon saying all kinds of shit that made me want to holler, but the preacher and his wife joined in right away.

  “Son, you’ve got to get yourself together. Life is too short, and God will give a person only so many chances to redeem himself. I hope things are working out for you with that nice young woman you met at church a couple of weeks ago,” the reverend began. He sniffed and adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses and looked at me with a suspicious look on his homely face.

  He was so anxious to dive into the feast on the table, he didn’t even bother to wait for his wife. Sister Mays had a bowel disorder, which she made sure everyone knew about, so she spent a lot of time sitting on a commode. She had made a beeline to the restroom as soon as she entered our house. By the time she waddled back into the living room, with a pinched look on her face, and sat down at the table, Reverend Mays had already started shoveling food into his mouth. He glanced across the table at Josh and Damon and then back at me, shaking his head and chewing like a camel at the same time. After he swallowed the lump of food in his jaws, he started up again.

  “I know you want to be as successful as your brothers in everything you do, hmmm?”

  “He’ll have to slow down first,” Faith said. For an ordinary-looking, heavyset woman who had a mother who worked for Goodwill
and a father who drove the snow-cone truck in their low-rent neighborhood during the summer and cabs the rest of the year, she certainly had a highfalutin’ opinion of herself. “And I hope he’s being careful with this one. The last thing Seth needs is another baby.”

  “Or AIDS or some worse nasty sex disease,” Sister Mays threw in.

  “What could be worse than AIDS?” Damon asked with a raised eyebrow and an exasperated look on his narrow face. Josh and I had inherited Mother’s good looks and bronze complexion. Damon had Father’s light skin, shifty eyes, and thin lips. But the difference was, Father had a jovial demeanor and he smiled a lot. With a perennial scowl that appeared as if it had been painted on, Damon usually looked angry enough to cuss out the world. “Seth, you just take care of yourself with this new girl. You don’t know how many men she’s been with.”

  Mother gave me a thoughtful look, and I knew she had something to add to Damon’s last comment. “I like Rachel, but she’s got a thing or two about her that concern me. I have heard from more than one person that she used to be quite close to Paulette’s shady, woman-crazy brother Skirt. If that’s true, there’s just no telling where else she’s laid her . . . uh . . . head,” Mother said.

  “She seemed like a nice enough young lady when I met her, so let’s give her some leeway,” Reverend Mays said, giving me a sympathetic look.

  “I enjoyed Rachel’s company when she joined us for dinner a couple of nights ago,” Father said, turning to me. “How come she didn’t come with you today, son?”

  “She wasn’t feeling well,” I replied. “Cramps.”

  “She told you that?” Mother asked with a gasp.

  “Most women don’t discuss female-related issues with men,” Sister Mays said with an embarrassed look on her moon face.

  “Especially something as personal as cramps. You better be careful with a girl who is that loosey-goosey,” Mother added.

  I was tired of being talked to and treated like a child. From some of the comments I had to listen to on a regular basis, you would have thought that I was just as irresponsible and impulsive as I had been in my early teens. I had had a few encounters with the cops for doing stupid, petty shit with my buddies, such as egging people’s cars on Halloween night and knocking over mailboxes. I had never done drugs, not even weed, and everybody knew that. However, as far as my family members were concerned, I had a long way to go to live up to their standards. I still needed my family, so I didn’t want to piss them off. That was why I always remained cool and calm when they got on my case. But I was itching to finish my meal and bolt so I could go be with Rachel, a woman who appreciated and respected me. I made a promise to myself that I would skip the next few dinners if they included such a large audience. I was glad that Damon was in the process of moving his family to Sacramento. He didn’t come around that often, anyway, but the less I saw of him and Helene, the better. And from some of the things Mother had shared with me, she felt the same way.

  “As I was saying a few minutes ago, before the conversation took a slight detour . . .” Reverend Mays paused and turned to face me again. “I hope things work out for you and that young woman.”

  “Yes, sir,” I muttered, shifting in my seat. I usually enjoyed spending time with my family, even when they roasted me. And the only reason Rachel had not accompanied me today was that she was spending the weekend in Reno with those crazy-ass heifers she called her friends. Me telling everybody she had cramps had stirred up enough mess, but there was no telling what they would have said if I had told them she was in Reno, gambling and drinking. “Things are really looking up for me.” I coughed and cleared my throat. “Rachel is the kind of woman I’ve been looking for all my life. I’m glad I met her. If things continue to go as well between us as they have so far, I’ll do whatever I have to do to take our relationship to the next level.”

  “And it’s about time,” Sister Mays snapped, waving a fork in my face. I hated that she’d chosen the seat right next to me. Even though she always looked neat and well preserved, she always smelled like Vicks VapoRub to me. The curly black wig on her head, the false eyelashes she wore—other than the hookers I used to hook up with from time to time, I didn’t know any women who wore those damn things these days—and her orange lipstick made her look like a clown. “After that mess you got yourself into that time with that shameless hussy from the projects, you should walk a chalk line when it comes to females from now on.”

  Sister Mays’s comment made me recall a very unpleasant time in my life.

  The incident with “that shameless hussy from the projects” had happened more than ten years ago, and some people were still talking about it as if had happened last week.

  Chapter 27

  Seth

  YES, I HAD HOOKED UP WITH CAROLINE MITCHELL, A GIRL WHOM almost every boy I knew had already been with. Not only was she cute, but she was also the first girl who spread her legs for me. I was fourteen at the time and she was fifteen, and it was my first time having sex. Well, my first time with a partner. I’d started masturbating when I was around twelve. The older I got, the more I needed to release myself. The times I couldn’t jack off, I dry-humped any girl who’d let me. The girls my Mother would have approved of were interested only in the boys who wanted to commit. All Caroline wanted was some dick.

  When she smiled and winked at me in the cafeteria the day we returned from Christmas vacation that year, I gave her my undivided attention. Being from a low-income family, she usually brought her lunch to school in a greasy brown paper bag that contained Spam or bologna sandwiches and a bruised piece of fruit. That day, I offered her the rest of the lunch on my tray—half of a chicken breast and some salad. She was so grateful, she asked me to escort her home after our last class so we could “listen to some new Prince tunes.” I eagerly accepted her invitation. I had second thoughts when some of my buddies teased me about her. But when I met up with her after school, I forgot all about the mean things my friends had said about her.

  We had to take a bus and transfer twice to get to her run-down neighborhood on the south side. After we got off the last bus, we had to walk three blocks through a war zone to get to the place Caroline called home. I was stunned, to say the least, because her building looked like it had been condemned. Almost every window on the ground floor had been boarded up with plywood.

  “Is this where you live?” I asked with a gulp.

  “Yeah. I live on the second floor, where it’s safer and looks better.”

  We took the creaky stairs to the second floor, which didn’t look any better than the first floor to me. The hallway smelled like stale cigarettes, and the lighting was so dim, I could barely see in front of me. A few feet from the unit Caroline lived in, a disheveled man in a rumpled trench coat and mismatched shoes lay on the floor, snoring like a moose. There was a large gray cat standing over him, licking his face.

  “That’s Clyde, the neighborhood wino. He don’t bother nobody,” Caroline explained. “I don’t know whose cat that is.”

  Caroline’s mother, Mrs. Mitchell, a former stripper, wore a filthy flannel housecoat and pink sponge rollers all over her head. She was on the living room couch, passed out drunk. Empty beer cans and wine bottles were scattered all over the scarred coffee table, on top of the TV, and across the floor. Flies and huge roaches were everywhere, even on the ceiling. Caroline took my hand and led me to the small, cluttered bedroom she shared with her four siblings. Other than a dresser drawer and a metal chair, two lumpy mattresses with no sheets were the only “furniture” in the room. But I didn’t let any of that bother me. I wanted my first piece of pussy, and I didn’t care what I had to go through to get it. I had decided a long time ago that I wanted to know what the other boys were making all the fuss about.

  When I pulled from my pocket a package of condoms, which Josh had told me to keep with me at all times, Caroline slapped my hand. “I don’t like the slippery way them damn things feel,” she told me. “Besides, I’m on the pill
.”

  Since I had never had intercourse, I had no idea how it would feel to stick my dick inside a girl, with or without a condom, so I didn’t protest.

  From that day on, I escorted Caroline home almost every day for the next three months. Her mother was always drunk and her siblings were always outside, roaming the streets, when I visited, so we had all the privacy we needed. No matter how disgusting it was to fuck her on that urine-stained mattress, I kept going over there.

  There were only a few other kids I knew in that neighborhood, because most of them went to different schools. The only way Caroline got to attend Berkeley High, which was better in every way compared to the schools in the low-income neighborhoods, was by her mother claiming that they lived at the address of the rich white woman she cleaned house for when she was sober. A lot of the parents who lived in sleazy neighborhoods did that for their kids, so it was no big deal as long as nobody ratted them out. Caroline’s excuse for attending a better school was that she wanted a better education, but I believed then, and even now, that it was so she could meet a better class of potential “baby daddies” for the kids she was destined to have. Not only would it elevate her status among her peers to get pregnant by a boy from a prominent family, but it would also secure her future. Almost every other teenage girl in her hood had at least one baby. It never occurred to me that she had set me up to get her pregnant, but that was exactly what she did.

  She called me one evening and told me she was pregnant, and I almost fainted.

  “Pregnant? By who?” I asked. I was glad I had answered the extension in my bedroom. I glanced at my door, glad I had locked it so Mother wouldn’t barge in before I could end this hellish conversation. My heart had already begun to race.

  “By you, that’s who,” she barked.

  “Oh, hell no!”

  “Oh, hell yeah!”