by Mary Monroe
“I’ve been busy. Taking care of a husband and a house is a full-time job.”
“Is everything all right?” Bertha asked. Before answering, Libby looked at me and nodded toward the door, a hint for me to leave the room so she could have some privacy with her mother.
I cleared my throat. “I’ll go start breakfast,” I said, easing toward the kitchen. As soon as I turned the corner, I put my ear to the wall.
“Mama, I need another grand.”
I heard Bertha gasp and choke on some air before she responded. “For what?”
“Um, the water heater went out last night.”
“That’s what you told me when I gave you that thousand dollars last month! Libby, please tell me you’re not still spending my money in the casinos. You told me you’d stopped gambling.”
“I did stop gambling and I did tell you last month I needed money for the water heater. That incompetent stooge who came out the first time didn’t do a good job and we’re right back where we started.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t have that much cash in the house. I’d have to go to the bank Monday morning. If you can’t wait that long, I’ll write you a check and you can get Mr. Thomas at the market to cash it without charging a fee, like one of those convenience stores.”
“Write me a check then. And hurry up. I have a lot of things to do today. I still have to go to the beauty shop to get my hair done and then to Macy’s to get a dress to wear to Jeffrey’s supervisor’s son’s bar mitzvah today.”
“Is that what you need money for?”
“How many times do I have to tell you not to get all up in my business? I told you, I need a thousand bucks to get the water heater fixed. Now, if you don’t want to give me that money, just say so and I’ll get up out of here and go borrow it from somebody else. I’m sure I can get money from one of daddy’s people. . . .”
Nothing hurt Bertha more than to hear that her children still had a relationship with her ex-husband’s family. Especially since every single one of them had never accepted Bertha. Libby and Marshall only mentioned that side of their family when they wanted to manipulate her.
“Honey, you don’t need to ask your daddy’s people for anything as long as there’s a breath still left in my body. Let me go upstairs and get my purse.”
“By the way, Mama, how much allowance do you give to that girl?”
It was bad enough that Libby was so mean-spirited, but it hurt when she referred to me as “that girl” when she didn’t know I was listening.
“I give her twenty dollars a week like her daddy used to do. Why?”
“Last week when I was at the mall in Milpitas, I saw her and that slutty Joan Proctor shopping in Neiman Marcus. How can that girl afford to shop at a place like Nieman on twenty bucks a week?”
“Hmmm. I don’t know. I hope she’s not shoplifting.”
“I doubt that she’s stealing, but I wouldn’t put it past her. They didn’t see me, but I saw her and Joan hand cash to the girl behind the sportswear counter for whatever it was they were buying. Probably more hoochie-coochie frocks. And the fact that they already had a few shopping bags with them told me they weren’t stealing. At least not in that store.” Libby paused. “Can we get upstairs so you can write me that check? I told you I was in a hurry.”
“I was hoping you’d stay and visit for a while. I’m getting old and I’d like to spend more time with you and your brother. . . .”
“Mama, I’m telling you again that I’m in a hurry. Now, are you going to go upstairs to write me that check or not?”
“Libby, your spending is out of control. Every time I see you, you have on a new dress or a new pair of shoes.” Bertha didn’t stand up to Libby or Marshall often, but when she did, it made me feel good to know she was not a complete pushover. It was bad enough that I was straddling that same line myself. “After this, don’t you come back over here for more money for a while.”
“Then you’d better make that check out for three thousand bucks instead of one so I won’t have to come back for a while,” Libby said dryly.
As soon as I heard them walk up the creaky stair steps, I ran to the wall phone in the kitchen and called Joan.
“Hello,” she said in a cheerful voice.
“Libby called you a ‘slut.’ ”
“That heifer! That—that slut!” Joan yelled. “Is that what you called to tell me?”
“That’s one of the things.” My heart was pounding as I leaned toward the door listening for Libby and Bertha to come back downstairs. “I have to talk fast, so listen up. Remember that day you borrowed your stepfather’s car and we drove out to the Great Mall in Milpitas?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“Libby saw us shopping in Neiman,” I told Joan in an angry, breathless whisper.
“So, what if she did? A lot of people shop at Neiman.”
“Yeah, but she knows all I get is my twenty-dollar-a-week allowance and a few babysitting dollars every now and then. She was telling Bertha about it a few minutes ago and that’s when she called you a ‘slut.’ What will I say if they ask me how I could afford to be shopping in such an expensive store?”
“If she asks, just tell her you went with me to pick up a few items for Elaine. Everybody knows what a high-maintenance woman she is and they know she gets a fat alimony check every month.”
“Okay,” I muttered. I was a nervous wreck and I couldn’t believe how nonchalant Joan sounded. I was glad for that, though. If she had sounded nervous too, I would have been falling apart even more.
“Don’t worry about Libby. She has nothing on us.” Joan paused and snorted. “Did any new mail come for me today?” I didn’t like her casual tone of voice. She didn’t seem the least bit concerned about Libby. I didn’t want to get into a conflict with her, so I didn’t say anything else about it.
“No. And that’s another thing. I’m glad nothing came for us today because we had a close call. Libby got here at the same time this morning as our mailman and he handed her the mail!”
“Shit!” Joan yelled. She sounded concerned about Libby now.
“We should rent a private mailbox, just to be on the safe side,” I suggested.
“Didn’t I tell you that those things cost more than a couple of hundred dollars a year? And they are not even that secure. My cousin Preston has his mail delivered to one. He complains all the time about those idiots putting his mail in the wrong box. What if we rent a box and one of our letters with cash in it gets put in the wrong box and the person at that address opens it? They could be dishonest enough to keep the money, or mean enough to turn the letter over to the post office authorities. It wouldn’t take long for them to figure out what’s going on.”
“Damn! We don’t need anything else to worry about, so forget I mentioned renting a private mailbox. I’ll just have to be more careful and make sure Libby or somebody else doesn’t go nosing through the mail. Until . . .”
“Until what?”
“Until we decide to stop, or until we get caught. . . .”
Chapter 12
Joan
I COULDN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT WHAT LOLA HAD SAID A FEW MINutes ago about us getting caught. I knew we’d eventually stop writing to those old men, but it never occurred to me that we’d “get caught.” I pushed those words, and what she had told me about Libby bringing the mail into the house, to the back of my mind. I was convinced that as long as we were careful, we had nothing to worry about. To keep myself busy so I wouldn’t have time to worry about Libby or anything else related to our activity, I decided to go on about my day. In other words, it was business as usual. I treated myself to a spa treatment and a very expensive lunch. I ate caviar for the first time in my life.
The following Monday, Lola received a letter from one of her pals that contained eight hundred dollars, all in hundred-dollar bills. I asked myself over and over if these old dudes’ brains had become pickled due to age. It was easy for me to see why so many old people ended up bei
ng victims. I was glad that most of the money came in money orders or checks. Later that same week, six more letters arrived—three for Lola and three for me. Each one contained cash!
When we received checks and money orders, we cashed them at a different location each time. The reason for that was because the bank tellers and the clerks who worked in convenience stores were just as nosy as everybody else. Sooner or later, some of them would start keeping track of two black teenagers cashing checks several times a month and blab enough for some meddlesome investigator to get involved. That was one chance we could not afford to take.
I kept my money in a cigar box, which I hid under a pile of junk in our garage. There was so much junk in there already, Elmo and Mama had to park their cars in our driveway. The only time anybody went into the garage was to store more junk, or to get rid of something else to make room for more.
By the first week in June, I had so much cash in my cigar box, I had to secure it with thick rubber bands to keep it shut. By the first week in July, I had two cigar boxes full of money! Even though Mama never asked about the bank account she had opened for me, I was still too afraid to deposit more than ten or twenty bucks at a time, which was what I earned babysitting and running errands for people.
I didn’t like the fact that Lola and I couldn’t use our money the way we wanted to. We still had no choice but to continue doing our spending on the down-low. We wore our most expensive outfits when just the two of us were together. We ate meals in expensive restaurants instead of the pizza parlors and rib joints we used to eat in. Every week we spent two to three hundred dollars each on spa treatments, manicures, pedicures, and trips to the beauty shop. On a Monday, the week after the Fourth of July, Lola accompanied me to a surgeon’s office in San Jose. I had an early-morning appointment for him to remove a hairy mole from the side of my left boob. It was minor outpatient surgery and didn’t take long. I paid the doctor two thousand dollars in cash. He told me I had to wear a special bra for two weeks. I wanted to wear a different one every day, so I needed to buy fourteen. The cost was forty dollars for each one. I didn’t have much cash left in my wallet after paying the surgeon, so Lola paid the five hundred and sixty dollars, plus tax. She also paid another hundred dollars to cover the prescription for the pain pills the doctor thought I might need. On the way home, she treated me to a lobster and filet mignon lunch with all the trimmings. That was another couple of hundred bucks. We were almost living the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
By the time we returned to school in September, I was very comfortable with our routine. I even wrote some of my love letters in Mr. Dowling’s history class. I sat in the last seat in the last row, where nobody could see what I was doing. At home I composed letters in my room on my laptop. And I was always careful, or so I thought. One Saturday morning, ten minutes after Too Sweet had rolled out of her bed and left the room, I scrambled out of mine and padded over to my desk. I plopped down into the new desk chair I had purchased a few days ago and turned on my computer. I started a “thank you” letter to a man who had just sent me another cashier’s check. I was so preoccupied that I didn’t hear the door open.
“Joan, what in the world are you up to this time?”
I whirled around so fast, I felt a crick in my neck. Too Sweet was standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. “I thought you were downstairs eating breakfast,” I wailed, minimizing the screen on my computer at the same time.
“I wish I was. Elmo burnt the grits and had to start a new pot,” she told me with a frown as she rubbed her nose. She pursed her lips, turned her head slightly to the side, and looked at me from the corner of her eye. “Joan, I hope you ain’t messing around with some married man.”
“Who me? Why would you say that?”
“I seen the top of that letter you trying to hide. You started it with a ‘Dearest something or other’ and that ain’t the normal way kids talk.” There was a suspicious look on her face that was so extreme it looked like it had been tattooed on. I blinked and my mind raced to come up with something that would make her back off. She was as gullible as my pen pals, so I didn’t have to use much brain energy.
“Please promise me you won’t tell,” I began speaking in a feeble voice and blinking even harder. “I don’t want to get Lola in trouble.”
Too Sweet did a double take and folded her arms. I knew she thought she was about to get a real juicy piece of news that she could spread. “Oh? Is Lola the one fooling around with a married man? Humph! The way she was raised, I ain’t surprised. Whose husband is it? How come you writing a letter for her?”
“Her computer is in the shop for repairs, so she couldn’t write a letter to the man herself to tell him she wanted to break up because she found out he’s married,” I explained.
“Why is she calling him ‘dearest’ if she’s breaking up with him? A low-down, funky dog who’s cheating on his wife needs to be called anything but dearest. What’s wrong with Lola?”
“She still has feelings for him, see. She told me what to say in the letter.”
“Do say!” Too Sweet rolled her neck and placed her ashy hands on her hips. “How come she couldn’t tell him to his face? And if her computer is broke, how come she couldn’t handwrite him a letter?”
“I don’t know. I guess she’s too upset.”
“Or too lazy. So she makes you do her dirty work.” Too Sweet gave me a woeful look. “You poor thing. I had a feeling Lola was taking advantage of you. I hope you don’t let none of her bad habits rub off on you. A girl like her, who grew up in a house with her daddy’s girlfriend and mama living there at the same time, must come up with all kinds of devilment to lead girls like you into.”
“I won’t let Lola do that to me,” I mumbled. I wondered what my cousin would say if she knew that I was doing most of the “leading.”
“Do I know the man?”
“What man?”
“That hound from hell Lola’s involved with!” Too Sweet said sharply.
“No, you don’t know him. He just moved here last month from San Francisco.”
“Oomph, oomph, oomph. So he’s from Frisco? That figures! No wonder he’s such a freak. But that ain’t no excuse. He’s new in town and he’s already acting a fool—with a teenager. His wife ought to peel his dick with a dull knife.”
“Uh-huh,” I agreed as I turned off my computer. I rose and stretched. I was glad to see Too Sweet walking back toward the door. “I’ll finish this letter tomorrow. I’m getting real hungry.”
“Well, let’s just hope Elmo don’t burn another batch of them grits.”
As soon as Too Sweet was out of the room, I locked the door and scurried back to my computer and finished typing the letter I had started. I sealed it in an envelope I had already addressed. This particular man was so antsy, if I didn’t reply to one of his letters within the same week, he mailed a new one each day until he heard from me. He had been bugging me for a telephone number so he could finally hear the voice of the “sweet woman” he hoped to marry someday. I wanted to mail the letter as soon as I could to thank him for the money. I couldn’t take a chance on him sending an avalanche of letters again in the same week. Some mailmen were just as nosy as bank employees and the people who cashed checks at convenience stores. I didn’t want the man who delivered the mail to Lola’s house to get suspicious about a pile of letters from the same man in the same week. My goal was to keep everybody at bay so Lola and I could keep the cash flowing a little while longer.
Chapter 13
Lola
TWO DAYS AFTER THE LAST TIME I’D TALKED TO JOAN, I TROTTED over to the convenience store a few blocks from school to cash a three-hundred-dollar cashier’s check I’d received from one of my pen pals.
I was on my way into the store, and a woman I hadn’t seen since I was twelve, and thought I’d never see again, was on her way out: Shirelle Odom. I still cared about Shirelle and I still thought of her as my other mother. Her niece, Mariel Odom, had been one of my c
losest friends, but after Shirelle severed ties with my family, so did Mariel and everybody else in their family.
“Lola, is that you?” Shirelle hollered, grabbing my arm. “You’re so grown-up and pretty!”
“Shirelle?” She no longer resembled the woman I used to know who had always worn a long blond weave and enough makeup for two women. Her hair was black and short now and the only makeup on her face was some lip gloss and a little face powder. She was about twenty pounds heavier and in her middle forties now, but she was still a very attractive woman with her big, shiny black eyes and high cheekbones. “I am so happy to see you!” We moved out of the doorway and she gave me a big hug. “Do you live around here now?”
“Um, no. I was just in town visiting my folks,” she said quietly. “I live in San Francisco with my husband.”
“Oh, you’re married now.”
She nodded. “I wasn’t going to wait forever on your daddy to marry me, and I knew he wouldn’t as long as your mama was alive. I, uh, I heard she died and he married Bertha Mays.”
“Yeah, he did. He died about three years ago.”
“I heard that too. I would have come to his funeral, but I was in Mexico with my husband at the time.”
Seeing Shirelle gave me a warm feeling. She had been more like family to me than Bertha, and I hoped she wanted to resume our relationship as much as I did. “I’d love to meet your husband. Where did you meet him? Do I know him?”
Shirelle blew out some air and gave me a pitiful look. When she shook her head, I no longer felt the warm feeling I’d experienced a few seconds before. “No. Um, you don’t know him. His name is Harold Ledford and he’s from San Diego. He’s an architect and we have two little boys already, thirteen months apart.” She paused and gave me a guarded look. “Only a few people know I met him on the Internet.”
“You met your husband on the Internet? Did you meet him in a chat room?”
“Heavens no! It was nothing that tacky. I met him three years ago on a Christian dating site. We got married four months later. He’s a deacon in the church we belong to. He’s one of the sweetest and most decent men I’ve ever known.”