by Mary Monroe
Scary Mary held her hand up to my face and cackled. “Girl, shet up. You ain’t got to waste up no excuses on me. Save that shit for your husband.”
“Would you do me a big favor and keep this to yourself?” I asked with a pleading tone of voice. “Can you do that?”
“What’s wrong with you, girl? You know me by now. I know how to keep my mouth shut. I ain’t never told nobody how you stole business away from me,” she said, leaning forward and giving me an accusatory look. I was glad that Louis was still out of earshot.
“I was just a teenager when I did that,” I hissed. “A stupid, desperate teenager who would have done anything to make enough money to leave Ohio.”
“You got paid big-time for that young pussy, too. Part of that money you made off my tricks behind my back should have come to me. It would have been fair, on account of you wouldn’t have never known nothin’ about sportin’ if y’all hadn’t met me.” I couldn’t think of a sight that was worse than an old woman pouting like a baby. “I could have done a lot with that money that you didn’t give me….”
“Will you put this behind us if I pay you what you think I owe you? I’ll write you a check right now if it’ll make you happy.” I glanced over at Louis; he looked confused, but there was no indication that he was in a hurry to return to his seat.
“A check?” Scary Mary croaked. There was such a twisted look on her face that for a moment I thought she had had a mild stroke. “What the hell would I do with a damn check, girl?” She threw her head back and laughed. That made me feel a little less uncomfortable, but her presence was still getting on my last nerve. “Annette, you know I still love you. I don’t want your money, and I wouldn’t do nothin’ to hurt you. Don’t you know that by now?”
I nodded. “But if you blab that you saw me out with another man, people might get the wrong idea,” I said, my voice getting weaker by the second.
“Wrong impression? Then explain to me why his face is so stiff?”
“Stiff?”
“Yes, stiff! The last time I seen a face that stiff, it was in Orleans, and it was a mask some fool had on during Mardi Gras. You sittin’ up in a out-of-the-way place with a man that ain’t your husband, and y’all was sittin’ closer than Siamese twins when I walked in. What other impression could a person get?”
“It’s a long story,” I said, holding my hand up defensively. What else could I say? “I’d appreciate your discretion.”
“Discretion? You stop chunkin’ them ten-dollar words at me, girl. You was just out of diapers when I met you. Ain’t I always had your back?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I admitted.
“I still got your back,” Scary Mary assured me with a nod. “I ain’t got a damn thing to gain by broadcastin’ your shame. Shit. I’m a businesswoman. If somethin’ ain’t got nothin’ in it for me, it don’t interest me.” Scary Mary lifted her chin and gave me a dry look. “However, it’s always good to be in the know about some of the things I stumble up on. It just might benefit me some day.”
Louis threw up his hands in exasperation when I looked at him again. There was no telling how much longer Scary Mary planned to honor us with her presence, and he must have come to that conclusion. He returned to the table, looking like an unruly schoolboy on his way to the principal’s office.
“Ma’am, I’ll call you tomorrow so we can finalize our catering arrangements,” he said, sitting back down with a grunt.
“And that’s another thing,” she yelled, swiftly turning her head to the side so she could look Louis in the face. “Don’t keep callin’ me ma’am. I ain’t that old.” She still had the handkerchief that I had returned to her in her leathery hand. Shaking her head and mumbling under her breath, she leaned over and wiped my lipstick off Louis’s cheek, and then she left without another word.
“You sure know some interesting folks, Annette,” Louis said, rubbing his cheek. Scary Mary had rubbed it so hard that now it was a different shade of red from the friction of her heavy hand. “I’ll bet you got some stories to share that would curl my hair.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I told him.
Like with Rhoda, I was confident that I could trust Scary Mary to be discreet. I knew that I didn’t have to worry about her exposing my dirty little secret. Other than Rhoda, she was the only person I knew that I could say that about. However, the old woman’s intrusion had put a damper on the evening, to say the least.
“I’m not so hungry now,” I told Louis a few minutes after our intruder had departed. I finished my wine and rubbed the side of my head, which was now throbbing with a mild headache. “Maybe we should leave.”
“But it’s still early,” he whined, giving me a pleading look. “And after last night didn’t happen the way we wanted it to, I was really looking forward to seeing you tonight.”
“Let’s go someplace else then. What about that same motel where we got together that first time?” I suggested, already rising and looking around to make sure nobody else I knew had entered the premises.
“I’ve got a better idea. Let’s go to my place,” he offered. “But I have to warn you about the litter box, which I haven’t emptied in two days. And the thin walls…”
I nodded. “Any place is fine with me as long as it’s a place where we don’t have to worry about unexpected company showing up.”
“You can count on that.”
Louis promptly paid our wine tab, and we left. I followed his van to his apartment, which was about ten blocks away from Antonosanti’s.
He lived in a three-story complex near downtown Richland. His building was nothing to write home about, but from the outside, it looked clean and secure.
As soon as we entered his cluttered studio apartment on the first floor, he trotted across the room to a padded jacket hanging on a hook on the wall and removed a set of keys. A plump gray cat waddled from behind his plaid sofa in the middle of the floor and started rubbing its bloated cheek against my leg. The cat looked up at me and let out a loud meow. I noticed that the creature was cross-eyed, a condition I’d never seen in an animal before.
“That’s Sadie. She’s real friendly,” Louis explained. “I rescued her from the shelter. Not too many folks want a cross-eyed cat.”
Was there no end to this man’s kindness? I quickly decided that if just half of the men in America were as thoughtful and concerned as Louis, we’d all be so much better off. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be in the position I was in. Louis canceled out all the things that had been bothering me lately. Well, at least he did when I was with him.
The cat didn’t bother me, but I shuddered when I saw an albino roach crawling up the wall in front of me.
Louis strolled back over to me, removing a key from the ring. “You take this,” he said, handing the key to me. “I want you to know that you can come by here anytime you want to.”
I shook my head, but I still accepted the key. “Louis, isn’t it kind of soon for you to be giving me a key to your apartment?” Before he could answer my question, a scratching noise made us look toward a slightly opened window by the door we had just come through. Something was trying to crawl under the window sash from outside. We could hear it squealing, and we could see the top of its furry black head.
“What the hell?” Louis mouthed, running toward the creature with a fork that he had grabbed off a small round table sitting at the end of his sofa. But before he reached it, the small bat squeezed under the window sash and flew straight toward me!
What happened next happened very fast. The squealing bat, which was probably more frightened than I was, because I was squealing just as loud, flew straight at my head and got tangled up in my hair. I beat at that creature with one hand and flailed my other like I was trying to flag down a train.
“Louis, do something! Get this damn thing off me!”
I was frantic as I hopped up and down, praying that I wouldn’t lose control of my bladder. I could not believe what was happening. Because o
f the incident in the restaurant with the madam and now this, I could not ignore one of Muh’Dear’s most frequent warnings: God don’t like ugly. I didn’t like it when somebody confronted me like Scary Mary had done, and especially in a public place. And as far as bats were concerned, well, no woman in her right mind would ever want to deal with a bat, whether it was dead or alive. Those creatures shared the number one spot with mice on a woman’s shit list.
I had to wonder if God was trying to tell me something by putting roadblocks in front of Louis and me. If He was, I was listening. I just wasn’t listening hard enough.
“Baby, hold still! I got everything under control!” After Louis beat that bat out of my hair with the fork, he stomped it to death. I practically ran out of the door.
We ended up back at the Do Drop Inn motel, after all.
CHAPTER 35
I was still shaking when we entered the motel room. The first thing I did was run into the moldy-smelling bathroom and wet a towel to blot my hair. My heart was still beating like a drum, and my skin felt like it wanted to crawl right off my body. The light in the bathroom was so dim, my skin had a green tint when I looked in the mirror. But that still didn’t diminish the terror in my eyes.
I closed the door with my foot and sat down on the commode. I wrapped my arms around my stomach, because it felt like somebody was break-dancing on my insides. I could even hear a rumbling noise. That commotion was being caused by my bladder and bowels. They were fighting with each other to see which could embarrass me first by making me lose control of my bodily functions. It was a tie. I remained on the toilet so long, Louis knocked on the door.
“Annette, are you all right in there?” he asked.
He sounded concerned, but I knew he was embarrassed, too, about what had happened in his apartment. I had been too frazzled to drive my car, so we had come to the motel in his van. Throughout the ride, he had apologized profusely about the bat, but even more so about taking me to his shabby apartment. He had gone on and on about how he couldn’t afford to live like a king and keep his business afloat at the same time yet, but that he would in a year or two. No matter how many times I told him that I understood, he’d insisted on running that subject into the ground. I’d been glad when we reached the motel. I had waited in his van while he ran into the office to register and pick up the key.
He was all over me within minutes after I emerged from the bathroom, fondling me, kissing my lips and face, and purring in my ear. I responded immediately, doing the same things to him. The way we started clawing at each other’s clothes, while still fondling, kissing, and purring, you would have thought that we had both just been released from prison and hadn’t fucked in years.
He had removed his shirt and shoes, but I was already completely naked on the bed by the time I clumsily unzipped his pants and slid them down to his ankles. He attempted to finish getting undressed so fast, he stumbled and fell on top of me. We both laughed.
Louis was not a better lover than my husband. He could certainly give him a run for his money, though. But I had to be fair to the man. For one thing, he was not as familiar with my body as my husband, whom I’d been making love with for more than twenty years.
I had just reached my sexual peak when Pee Wee pulled the plug on my action. I had to do something to keep from going stone crazy. Had Louis not come into my life when he did, I didn’t know what I would have done with myself. When it came to sex, self-service and sex toys didn’t cut it with me. The one time that I’d experimented with a sex toy, which Rhoda had recommended, some banana-shaped thing that had to be plugged into an electrical outlet, it was so clumsy and complicated that the only thing I managed to do was almost electrocute myself.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, Pee Wee came home early from a fishing trip and caught me tangled up in that shit. After we’d shared a good laugh, he gave me just enough loving to calm me down. But from that point on, everything went downhill. We went from a guaranteed six-nights-a-week fuckfest to a one-day maybe, and finally to nothing. I felt sorry for Pee Wee, but I was not ready to throw in the towel. Had Louis not rescued me from sexual bankruptcy, it would have been somebody else. That was one thing that I was totally convinced of.
The mattress on the bed had a slight valley in the middle. I couldn’t decide if that was because it was just a cheap-ass mattress or because so many heavyset people like me had spent so much time fucking on it. During the first few minutes of our lovemaking, I had glanced in the mirror on the dresser by the side of the bed. Because of the slump in the mattress Louis had resembled a swaybacked mule as he pumped into me. I had snickered.
After our first round, we lay naked in the bed, on our backs, with our eyes on the ceiling. I couldn’t tell which one of us was breathing the loudest.
“Why did you laugh a little while ago?” Louis asked. He turned to me with a worried expression on his face. “Am I that bad?”
“Huh? I wasn’t laughing at the way you were making love. And you are not bad. You’re one of the best lovers I’ve ever had,” I told him. He continued to look at me with the same worried expression on his face. I lifted myself up and nodded toward the mirror. “I laughed because of the way this damn mattress made you look like…a swaybacked mule on top of me,” I explained. I was glad when he laughed and lay back down.
A few minutes went by before either of us spoke again. “Tell me more about yourself, baby,” he said, but then he interrupted my thoughts with a passionate kiss. I could taste myself on his tongue. And I could still feel the aftermath of his tongue between my thighs. My breasts were tender from him playing with them nonstop for the last five minutes.
“There’s not a whole lot more to tell,” I said with a sigh. I was in his arms, running my fingers through his soft hair. It reminded me of the soft, wispy hair on a newborn baby. I didn’t like to even think about the “good hair, bad hair” debate that black folks had been waging for the past few centuries. But compared to Louis’s hair, my husband’s hair felt like cockleburs. And Pee Wee was so tender-headed, he pushed my hand away every time I tried to rake my fingers through his hair. Louis enjoyed me doing that to him. When I attempted to stop, he ordered me to keep doing it, telling me how good it felt.
“Annette, you told me one time that your mama raised you by herself, but now your daddy is back in the picture. What’s up with that?”
I snatched my hand away from his hair. Then I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees.
“If I’m getting too personal, just say so,” Louis said. He propped himself up on his elbow and kissed me some more. And then he caressed my chin and turned me to face him. “I just want to get to know you better, baby. That’s all.”
“My daddy left us for another woman. We were still in Florida, and it was really bad for black folks back then. Especially interracial couples.”
He gasped. “The other woman was a peckerwood?”
“I never thought of her as a peckerwood, or any other white person, for that matter. That’s such a crude word. She’s the mother of my half siblings, and I love them.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.”
“It was really hard on us for a while. My mother worked her fingers to the bone cleaning and cooking for rich white folks. Some treated her like shit. Some didn’t. Like Judge Lawson. He’s the one who left us the house I live in now.”
“You own your own house? Free and clear?”
I nodded. “Free and clear. All I have to do is pay the property taxes every year. And when my mama passes, the Buttercup restaurant will belong to me, too.”
“Don’t tell me that Judge Lawson left the restaurant to you and your mama, too.”
I shook my head. “My late stepfather left it to my mother in his will.”
Louis gave me a look that I could not interpret. It seemed like he was studying me like I was a piece of artwork. “You and your mother have always managed to hook up with people that come through in a big way, huh?”
“That’s what happens
when you treat people right. One of the old white women that my mother used to clean and cook for more than forty years ago, she owned the house in the Bahamas that my parents and daughter were headed to this morning to spend the rest of the summer, for free. But they have to do all the upkeep and maintenance on the property until the son returns from some out-of-town business in August. After the woman died, her son went out of his way to locate my mama. We’ve been blessed so much, I know it pays to be good to people. I had it hard when I was young, but I’ve got more than I will ever need now.”
“It’s good to see a sister doing so well,” Louis said, squeezing my shoulder. “Black women deserve more glory than any other race of women. And I love me some strong, ambitious, successful sisters! The next time you offer to pay for dinner, I’m gwine to let you.” Louis laughed.
“Well, since we didn’t order dinner at Antonosanti’s, I’ll treat you this time, like I offered,” I declared.
“That’s fine, baby.”
CHAPTER 36
I paid for the medium-size pepperoni pizza that we had ordered. Then I suggested that Louis trot across the street to the liquor store to get us a bottle of wine. I attempted to hand him the change from the fifty I’d just broken, but he refused to accept it.
“Nuh-uh. The wine is on me,” he insisted, rooting through several of his pockets and flipping through his battered wallet until he came up with enough bills to pay for the wine.
After we made love again, Louis told me more about himself. He had such an endearing quality about him that I was not surprised to hear that we had some things in common. Like me, he had been raised in the church and had had no relationship with his father. There had been a lot of love in his home, but the money had been so tight that he had to do odd jobs after school and contribute to the household expenses. He had played with used or hand-me-down toys, and his grandmother had bought his clothes from secondhand stores, including the suit he’d worn to his high school prom.