by Mary Monroe
“Annette, calm down,” he managed, holding up both hands.
“Calm down? Calm down my ass,” I shouted. “All I want to know is, who is the bitch, and what does she mean to you?”
CHAPTER 47
Pee Wee carried more weight on his frame than he needed. So by no means was he a puny weakling that a strong wind could blow over. But from the look on his face now, I was convinced that a ball of cotton could have knocked him to the ground. His shame had to be of the highest magnitude. I decided that that was the case by the way he kept looking away from me. Every damn time he turned his head, I turned mine. Whatever he had to say to me, he was going to say it to my face.
“I’m waiting. Are you going to answer my question or not? I want to know who the bitch is,” I hollered.
He looked me in the eyes and shook his head.
“No, you won’t tell me who she is? No, you are not fucking another woman? Which one is it?”
He shook his head again. His face was blank, emotionless, like he didn’t give a damn about my feelings, and that angered me even more.
“The thing is, I’ve had a few problems down there.” Pee Wee nodded and pointed at his genital area.
“Tell me about it,” I snapped, my anger rising like a pan of biscuits in progress.
He was still looking down. When he lifted his head, he didn’t look directly at my face. Instead, his eyes shifted from side to side. “You just hold on now!” he roared, holding up his hand and waving it in my face. “You got it wrong, baby! You got it all wrong if you think I been foolin’ around with another woman! That’s somethin’ I couldn’t do if I wanted to.” I was getting more and more confused by the second. He paused and took a deep breath.
“Why did you stop? Need more time to get your lies straight?” I hissed.
He took another deep breath and then lifted a glass off the counter. He filled it with water from the tap, drank it all, and then turned back around. “Like I just said, I’ve had a few problems…down there.” I gave him a confused look until he pointed to his crotch area again, this time tapping his crotch with his finger. “Discharge, blood, burnin’.”
I could not believe my ears! Things were much worse than I’d thought. I’d never suspected that on top of everything else, I had to be concerned about having a damn venereal disease!
“You caught something!” I screamed, with a lump in my throat that felt like it was the size of a golf ball. “Somebody gave you something, and you gave it to me?” It hurt for me to swallow, but I had to. The lump in my throat was choking me.
“Not exactly,” he muttered.
“Not exactly what? Please get to the point, Pee Wee,” I ordered, my blood rising like floodwaters.
“Will you be still and just listen?” he said calmly. Next, his eyes rolled up, and he stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. Then he sucked in a mouthful of air and let it out like it was his last breath. “I went to two different doctors. One said that what I had was untreatable. He advised me to ‘get my house in order,’ ’cause six months was about all the time I had left.” He paused at this point and looked at me. This time I was the one who sucked in a mouthful of air and let it out like it was my last breath. I opened my mouth to speak, but he stopped me by holding up his hand. “Well, if somebody is goin’ to tell me somethin’ like that, I want to make sure it’s true. I went to Dr. Epstein over in Canton.”
There were not enough words in the English language to describe how I felt at that moment. I felt like I had shrunk and shriveled up like a prune that had been in the sun too long. I didn’t know what to think now. The next thought that entered my mind was, Could I have been wrong about him having an affair all this time?
“What did Dr. Epstein tell you?” I asked, my voice so low I could barely hear myself. “The same thing?”
Pee Wee shook his head. “His diagnosis was even worse. He said he was surprised that I was still alive. That sucker said my white blood cells were gobblin’ up my red blood cells like Pac-Man. He was so cold and casual about it, I wanted to sock him in the mouth. But I didn’t, because I’ve always felt that that coldness was so typical of doctors. That’s why I always hated them suckers. That and the fact that some quacks misdiagnosed both my grandfathers and treated ’em for somethin’ they never had. Both died within two months of each other.” This was the first time Pee Wee had ever offered me a reason as to why he had so much contempt for doctors.
My head suddenly felt like somebody had bounced a tire iron off it. My eyes were so full of tears, it was almost impossible for me to see clearly. I blinked hard several times, until Pee Wee came into focus again. I tried to be compassionate, but denial was lurking around me like the devil’s advocate. For one thing, he certainly didn’t look like a dying man! What if the fantastic story that he had just told me was just another one of his lies?
“You look like you don’t believe me,” he said.
“I’m trying to,” I muttered. “Go on. Get to the end of this story, because it’s making me sick myself.” I stood in front of him, wringing my hands.
“I didn’t stop there. I went to that lady doctor out on State Street.” He stopped again and gave me a sheepish look. “She’s that other woman I’ve been seein’.”
Now my head felt like it wanted to explode. “Are you telling me the truth? Is that all just a cover-up so I won’t know what you’ve really been up to?” Pee Wee was not the kind of man to joke about something as serious as his health. The more he talked, the more I felt like he was telling me the truth. But there was something on the side of my brain that was still trying to convince me that him having an affair was all I had to deal with. Him dying was something I knew I couldn’t deal with.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, leaving the room before I could say anything else. He strolled over to the refrigerator and opened the door next to it that led to our basement. He rushed downstairs, with the soles of his shoes clip-clopping on the wooden steps like the hooves on an overweight horse. He returned a couple of minutes later with some papers in his hand.
“This is just part of the insurance paperwork. I left some at the shop,” he told me, handing the papers to me. “I know how you like to snoop, so I kept them hid in a box in the basement, in that corner behind the furnace. I thought that’d be the safest place in the house because of all them spiders’ webs you’ve always been so afraid to go near.”
As soon as I glanced at the first sentence on the first document, I saw one of the most feared words in the English language: cancer. I stopped reading and looked at the wall, trying to digest what I’d just read. The tears returned to my eyes, and this time I had to blink twice as much to get rid of them.
“If you flip to the next-to-last page, you will see Dr. Emmogene Stone’s detailed diagnosis,” said Pee Wee.
I had seen all I wanted to see for the time being. I handed the documents back to him. My hands were shaking, but his were shaking even harder than mine. He dropped the papers twice before he could grip them more securely.
“How long did she say you’re going to…be…alive?” I never thought that I would have to ask my husband, or anybody else I loved, an ominous question like that. I was in a hellish position. But the position he was in had to be a million times worse.
Pee Wee gave me a mysterious look before he filled the same glass he’d just drunk from with more water. He took a sip, then handed it to me. I drank it, even though I knew it was not going to do me any good. I needed something a lot stronger than water.
“Stoney—that’s what she tells her patients to call her—is the kind of individual that goes against the grain. She studied in Sweden and Germany for a while before she set herself up here. Stoney leaves no stone unturned. As soon as she told me about my cancer, which is a rare form of a prostate condition, she also told me about some experimental treatments she’d heard about. It was a long shot, but I had nothin’ to lose.”
“So you have been going to see a doctor every Friday?”
Pee Wee gave me a relieved look. “You knew about that? Who in the world told you? I bet it was that loose-lipped Bobby Jones!”
I nodded. “Bobby didn’t know it was me when I called, though. I’ve known since June.”
“How come you never asked me about it? You don’t have no trouble askin’ me about anything else.”
“I didn’t want to start up a lot of mess until I got all the facts,” I explained.
“All what facts?”
“I just needed more evidence. It was hard and painful, but I wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about when I confronted you.” My excuse was weak, and I knew it, and from the slack-jawed look on Pee Wee’s face, he thought so, too.
“So you chose to walk around thinkin’ I was fuckin’ another woman? Look, Annette, when I married you, I told you I was through with other women, and I meant that. I don’t know why you ever let that notion enter your mind in the first place. I’ve been as faithful to you as you’ve been to me.”
I looked at the telephone on the wall. And the next thing I knew, I burst into tears and cried like a baby for the next twenty minutes.
CHAPTER 48
“Annette, please stop cryin’ and finish drinkin’ that water.” Pee Wee held the glass up to my lips, but my lips were so numb, I could barely feel them. He parted them with his fingers and managed to get the lip of the glass in between them. I managed to take a few sips, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I dried my tears with the back of my sleeve and wiped my nose with a paper towel that he’d snatched off the towel rack and handed to me.
I looked at him long and hard before I spoke again. “Your health is more important to me than anything else involved,” I rasped. “But I need to know everything there is to know.” I took the glass from his hand and drank the rest of the water and then set the glass on the table with a thud. “If I’m going to be a widow, I want to know as soon as possible,” I said firmly, wiping drops of water from my lips.
“Anyway, Stoney has a relationship with a doctor in Toledo,” he continued. “That doctor had already dealt with another man who had the same ailment I had. Or one similar to mine, I should say. That dude’s case was so serious, he was peein’ through a tube. The good doctor had treated the dude with some kind of shots. Don’t ask me what kind of shots. Shots is shots to me. Anyway, the man responded for a while, but then the shots stopped workin’, and his condition got even worse. The doctor talked with some other doctors, and one hooked him up with some sort of cocktail. That cocktail concoction, combined with the shots, had some success. It took several months, but that patient got better. That was five years ago, and that man is still walkin’ around.”
“You didn’t answer my question. I want to know how much time that Stoney woman gave you,” I said, my voice cracking.
“Well, I’m forty-six. I should be around for at least another thirty or forty years. If you don’t kill me first because of somethin’ you think I’m doin’.” He gave me a dry look. I just blinked and bit my bottom lip.
“Go on,” I advised, with a sharp nod and a guarded look.
“As of three months ago, there is no trace of the cancer in me at all. But Stoney wants me to continue with the shots and the cocktail for at least another six months.”
“If all this is true, why didn’t you just tell me? I am your wife, and I had a right to know. When was I supposed to find out? When the coroner called me to come identify your body?”
“I didn’t want to worry you if I didn’t have to. I know how hysterical you get when you hear bad news,” he replied, his hand in my face. “I couldn’t tell anybody. I was scared to death.” I could see the fear in his eyes. He looked like he wanted to cry. “All I could think about was that. I was angry about it, and I took out a lot of my frustration on you. Makin’ love to you—or any other woman—was the last thing on my mind. Besides, I couldn’t get a hard-on even if I had put a ton of starch in my dick.”
He dipped his head and pursed his lips. “Ever since Stoney gave me a somewhat clean bill of health yesterday, I’ve been as hard as Chinese arithmetic. I was just waitin’ until after that weddin’ today to approach you, when you’d be more relaxed….” He took my hand and placed it on his crotch. It felt like there was a brick inside his pants. I didn’t respond. I didn’t know how. He stood back. “Baby, I know you got a lot on your mind now. What I just told you needs to sink in so you can adjust to it. But when you’re ready for me, just let me know.” There was a naughty look in his eyes now.
I looked at the telephone again, wishing it would ring so that I could have a brief respite. I needed time to absorb everything my husband had just told me. When the telephone rang, I was so happy I could have kissed it.
“I’d better answer that. It’s probably Rhoda calling to give me an update on…Jade,” I said. I couldn’t even feel my legs as I wobbled over to the phone. It was my mother.
“So Jade had a nervous breakdown, huh?” she asked.
“Something like that. I’m sure she’s going to be fine, though. She’s young. She’ll bounce back,” I said hopefully.
“Well, you reap what you sow,” Muh’Dear said with a casual sigh. “Listen, if you get a chance in the next couple of days, go by the beauty shop and pick me out a wig hat and send it down here by the FedEx folks. This humidity is wreakin’ havoc on my hair. That perm Claudette gave me before I left was bogus. As soon as you see her, complain.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t send me no wig hat that’ll make me look like Tina Turner. It’s too dangerous to be lookin’ too sexy down here with all these frisky island mens. They already lookin’ at me like I’m somethin’ good to eat. I’d feel safer with a do more like the kind Aretha Franklin is wearin’ these days. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I was glad when Muh’Dear hung up. I returned to my seat at the table. Pee Wee had pulled out a chair and was seated directly across from me.
“I am real sorry about everything,” he said, tapping the side of my arm.
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” I assured him. “If you were worried about your health, you had a right to focus on that.” I blew my nose into the same paper towel that he had handed to me earlier.
We looked at each other for a long, uncomfortable time. Had he not spoken when he did, I would have fled the scene. “Remember that bed-and-breakfast place we went to last year with Otis and Rhoda? You want to go up there for a weekend?” he asked.
“A bed-and-breakfast? You and me?”
He nodded. “I think it would do us both a world of good. Besides, we got a whole lot of hoochie-coochie homework to catch up on.” He gave me a weak smile as he tapped my arm again. Then he grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “I’ll even bring some of my island CDs, some tacky flowered T-shirts, and some baggy shorts so we can pretend we are down there in them islands, too. Don’t you think that sounds like fun?”
“I…I guess so. That does sound nice,” I muttered, rising. “But if you don’t mind, I’d like to stay close to home for a while. Rhoda might need me for emotional support.”
“Aw shit. Jade is goin’ to be all right. Devils like her always land on their feet,” he said with a dismissive wave. I knew that he was concerned about Jade, but I was glad that he was not overreacting.
“I know. But I’m doing this for Rhoda and Otis. I am sure they would do it for us if Charlotte was the one having a problem, Pee Wee.”
“I guess you’re right,” he agreed with a shrug. “Listen, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll swing by Rhoda’s house tonight just to pay my respects.”
“She’s probably still at the hospital with Jade, so just wait until we hear from her or Otis. In the meantime, do you mind going out to get us some takeout?” I needed to be alone in the worst way.
Pee Wee gave me a surprised look. “You didn’t bring home none of that good stuff you told me was goin’ to be served at the weddin’? Knowin’ how that caterer
dude likes to show off his kitchen tricks, I know he put both his feet in whatever he cooked up.”
“Uh-huh,” I mumbled. “I’m sure he did, but I didn’t bring any of it home with me.” He was still looking at me with that surprised expression on his face. “There was nothing left that I liked after everybody had taken what they wanted.”
“Oh. Well, that’s us. We descend on free food like locusts. If black folks could eat while they were gettin’ embalmed, they would.” He laughed at his stupid comment. I did, too, even though I didn’t think it was funny at all.
“I don’t mind if you just swing by Al’s for some ribs, or McDonalds or Burger King.”
“Oh, hell no. I know better, and you know I know better. I will go by your smiley face caterin’ dude’s place because I know that’s what you really want, and it’s what I want, too. I just hope he’s still open.”
“They stay open until ten every night,” I reported. “Except Friday and Saturday. They stay open until eleven on those nights.”
“Did you get a chance to talk to your caterin’ boy at all today?”
“Huh? About what?”
“Well, I thought he might have said somethin’ to you about his restaurant hours for today. With him caterin’ that weddin’ and all, I thought he might close up early.”
“I didn’t talk to him at all this afternoon. He had everything under control, so I didn’t need to. I think he knows how to handle his business,” I mumbled.
“Sure enough! Brother Louis Baines can do no wrong in the kitchen,” Pee Wee told me, with a sly grin.
Or in the bedroom, I thought.
“You know, he is a nice dude. I don’t mean no harm when I make fun of him,” said Pee Wee. “We ought to throw a cookout and invite him. I’m sure either me or Otis could hook him up with a lady friend, if he ain’t already got one. We’ll wait until Jade gets better so we can include her, too.”
I stared at Pee Wee in stunned disbelief.