“Oh…okay,” Stormy said, sounding a bit confused.
“What’s wrong?” Tisa asked. “You sound skeptical, or disappointed, or something.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Don’t lie. What’s wrong?”
“It’s just that I expected T. Calloway to pick me up from the airport. I thought we were going to dinner…you know, so I could be better prepared…”
The sound of Tisa’s laughter caught Stormy off guard. “Stormy, I am T. Calloway.”
JUST LIKE STORMY THOUGHT THERE WOULD BE, there were suits in a row behind a table…seven pairs of eyes staring at her…
But all they wanted to know was if she had faith in the forthcoming magazine and what visions she had for her part in it. Name, rank, and social security number aside, Stormy relaxed and told them exactly what they needed to hear. She relaxed in her seat and told them exactly how she felt. She had already been to hell, twice over. If they did not like what she had to say, she would simply go back and start over. Or not go back, and still start over.
“You cannot hold a blog in your hands. You can’t lay back in the bathtub with a website on your laptop without running the risk of shock, or rip out the pages of an internet recipe while you shop for the content of your husband’s dinner. There is a future for print media,” she said. “There is a future for The Cutting Board.”
Fourteen minutes of deliberation was all it took for them to make a formal offer. It took Stormy seventeen minutes to renegotiate for a $150,000 annual salary and fifty-percent ownership rights to any radio or television broadcast of “Stormy’s Cutting Board.”
In any other field, it may have been unethical for Stormy to walk out of the newsroom door with the woman who had brought her there and presided over the board, but in the world of journalism, it seemed like this was perfectly normal. In fact, several board members who had been as captivated by her thighs as they had been by her presentation, had invited themselves to the celebration. But in the end, it was just Stormy and Tisa on a rollercoaster ride laid on a track of truth and trust.
“Do you love her?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want her?”
“No.”
“Do you envy her?”
“Not anymore.”
Tisa’s was the sweetest of kisses and when Stormy opened her mouth to her, it was as if she had that day in the Pastor’s study to do all over again. It had been twenty-four years since she had lost her power. It was strange she had to go three thousand miles to find out that she had been the author and finisher of her fate all along.
“Go Stormy, go Stormy.” She laughed and surrendered to love as Tisa did a stud dance in sea green cotton boxers and a yellow Lycra wife beater that did not match at all. “I could stay here forever, you know? But I have to go home.”
“Do you?”
STORMY WAS FALLING IN LOVE BUT SHE WAS WAY BEHIND KOREA. Korea knew the very first night she got inside of Hartford. She didn’t know how to explain it. Where she was from, you didn’t explain. You cut your losses and moved on. But who could walk away from a woman as sweet as Stormy? How could she explain that she had grown bored, without her seeming primitive? Stormy had allowed more than the average wife when it came to sexual exploration, but Korea had learned in her lifetime that the way a thing begins is the way it will end. She had been consumed in her own conceit the night she had met Stormy. She had groped and kissed another man’s wife. And although she had mentioned as much to Stormy when they joked about sexual deviance, she had never truly considered the weight of their words. The woman had practically made love to a perfect stranger in the bathroom of a business affair. Why then should it have surprised her that night at Club X, that she would have agreed to bareback with a man she’d never met?
And, she reminded herself, as she thought of Stormy again. Why couldn’t she just let her go? Korea knew there was no room for her in her bedroom. There hadn’t been a long time before Hartford had popped onto the scene. Was it love? Perhaps it was, but what does love really have to do with anything?
If it meant giving up home-cooked meals, Korea would have to hire a cook, as she had always threatened to do.
Korea didn’t know why she hadn’t been fucking men this way for years. It was the only way she wanted to fuck for the rest of her life.
“DIVORCE HER,” SHE SAID.
“It is as good as done,” Hartford said, dialing his home number. “Hey, baby girl?” he said to Raven. “Let me talk to your mother.”
Raven hummed into the receiver as she walked down the hallway to her mother’s room. “Mommy! The telephone is for you.”
Raven sat on the floor by her mother’s bed, trying to make herself invisible so she could listen. Her daddy could be gone for a week without calling. This must have been important.
There was something about being in the presence of Korea that made him feel invincible. Hartford did not wince when he told his wife of nine years, the mother of his eight-year-old daughter, “I don’t love you anymore. I want a divorce.”
If she had pleaded with him, Hartford was prepared to say, ‘there’s someone else,’ just as Korea had told him to.
But Shawna could not plead. She could only repeat the word, “Divorce?”
SHAWNA LOOKED DOWN AT THE PISS STICK AND SMILED. “Gotcha,” she said. This could not have come at a better time, she thought. She didn’t know where Hartford had been spending his time lately, but this baby was going to bring him back home and make him rethink getting a divorce. She had very strong intuition, bordering on a sixth sense, and her intuition was telling her that there was something foreign inside of her.
“This baby is a boy,” she said. She knew how much Hartford wanted a son.
She called until he finally answered his cell phone. “Happy Father’s Day,” Shawna said.
“Excuse me?”
“Hartford. I’m pregnant. It’s going to be a boy. I just know it.”
CHAPTER 15:
EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY
“Let’s be honest. You are finished.” Grace Riley was talking to Korea. “That old white woman, with a wrongful termination lawsuit that I hear you tried to bury, is the very least of your problems. You’re romantically linked to a child endangerment case and the suspicious death of a woman infected with HIV. I’m so sure the ADA will find some kind of way to tie you into that. And now, you have sexual harassment charges? Very few nonprofits can afford the distraction, or financial consequences, of a lawsuit even alledging sexual harassment, and you think the City of Oakland, Alameda County Social Services, and the State of California want to be affiliated with you or Project W.H.Y.? Ever again? To be frank, my friend, you’re a nonprofit nightmare.”
“I know it looks bad, but I’m telling you, I wasn’t harassing Melody. I don’t care what she says,” Korea said in her defense. “Tell me the truth, Grace.”
“I am.”
“No, tell me the real truth. Are you ditching out on me because I’m fucking a man now? Is that it? Because it’s not what you think. He’s not the man in this thing. I am.”
“You know what? What you do in your bedroom is your business. I really wouldn’t give two flying fucks to know about it. But what is clear is that you haven’t been handling your business. Maybe being the man has gotten you all caught up in some new kind of pussy. But the real truth is that you held the key to over half a million dollars in funding to decriminalize prostitution and save young women from street life and subsequent imprisonment and all along, you’ve been fucking and degrading a seventeen-year-old girl.”
“What?”
“Seventeen,” Grace said, pulling a cigarette from a wrinkled pack, and a lighter from her pocket.
“I thought you stopped smoking?”
“Bitch, are you listening? You and I are joined at the pocket-book like financial Siamese twins. If you go down, I go down, if I don’t shake you loose. And, baby, you are going down.” Grace lit up, took a drag of the little white stick, an
d exhaled smoke into the air. “It’s bad, Korea. It’s real bad. Still, it may be in your favor that she came to me instead of the police. You must have done something right.”
“She’s in love with me,” Korea said, still stunned.
“In love or not, from what she tells me, you’ve been doing a whole lot more than fucking. I mean for Christ’s sake, Korea, spitting on her? Choking, whipping her with newspaper, and making her bark like a dog? When did sex with women become so hard for you that you had to resort to such things to get off? I thought you were a woman; I thought you loved being one. But I see, you are a man, even if, as you say, you are fucking one.”
“Those were her ideas, I swear.”
“Maybe, but as you already know, if seventeen-year-old girls can’t sell their own pussy, they certainly cannot negotiate how their pussy is used. So tell me, girlfriend, what is it that I’m supposed to do? I can give you recommendations for some good lawyers but, Korea, I’m afraid you’re on your own with this. Do yourself a favor,” she told her friend. “Shut it down. Start all over. Put somebody else in charge if you have to, but shut it all down now.”
“Grace, this is crazy. I thought we were friends? I thought we had each other’s backs. I’m telling you, that woman is not seventeen years old. There is no fucking way a seventeen-year-old can even know the stuff she knows.”
“It’s true; I talked to Sally in your own Human Resources department,” Grace said sadly.
Korea did not even bother pleading her case any further. Thinking about the parade of young women who had been in Melody’s place over the years, Korea realized that Grace was right. She had also underestimated the gaze of Big Brother. She had been sloppy in not doing more thorough background checks.
“I wash my hands of it,” Grace said, standing on her feet.
When Grace walked out of her office, Korea instantly began shutting it down.
“First things first,” she said. She wrote a check out to Martha, Ten Thousand Dollars and no 100’s, she wrote. Just as she was getting ready to sign it, the strangest feeling was coming over her. It started with a lump in her throat and then there was a burning in her eyes. Korea shook her head and attempted to swallow, but it was as if everything in her head was throbbing and her sinuses ached. She reached to her eyes to pinch the aching nerve between them; there was wetness there. She pulled her hand away from her face and looked at her fingers. Are those tears?
“Sixteen will get you thirty-two!” she heard herself scream at Keith through the bars. The day Korea found out he had infected her, was the first and last time she actually remembered crying. Her mother had told her that when she was a baby, she only cried when she was hungry. Gladys often told the story of how she would sometimes have to pinch Korea to make her cry from time to time on her doctor’s orders. Korea didn’t even cry when they took her mother away. But the thought of writing a check for $10,000 that Martha hadn’t earned was bringing the tears, one after the other. She opened her desk drawer to look for a tissue. There lay Melody’s panties, signed, sealed, and delivered with a kiss.
“If that bitch is seventeen, I’ll gladly go to jail,” she said to herself, remembering all the ID cards she had seen in Melody’s bedroom.
“Effective immediately,” the letter to all of her employees began…
Korea decided, from that day on, she would do all her own typing. She printed the letter and called Sally in Human Resources.
When she had the $10,000 check couriered to Martha’s house, Martha called her and sang like a canary. She told her that she and Sally and Melody had been in cahoots to get paid. She said Melody had expected her to pay her off without ever having to go to court. She said the whole thing was Melody’s idea.
CHAPTER 16:
BLOOD AND BLADES
Shawna sat in the nurse’s station getting blood drawn, thinking of how her son would change everything between her and Hartford. Now that she was giving him a son, he would love her more. He would respect her position in his life and quit threatening to leave her. He would put her and the baby in his will and dispose of that ridiculous prenuptial agreement he was so proud of. She hoped for all this, anyway, though all he actually promised was not to leave her right now and to stick it out until the baby came.
“Haven’t things been getting better already?” she thought as she was escorted back to the waiting room.
“Right this way, Mrs. Crow,” the nurse said.
Hadn’t Hartford said that he was very happy about the baby? Shawna thought. Had he said happy or pleased? She couldn’t remember. Man, she’d been so tired lately; her memory was starting to fail.
Hasn’t he been coming home most nights? It’s been at least a month since his last trip to L.A.
“Excuse me?” Shawna asked whoever was barging into her thoughts.
“I said, you need to cover your mouth when you cough,” another patient said.
Now that she was pregnant, Shawna promised herself that she would change, too. She would slow down on the extracurricular fucking and dress up for him more. I wonder if Bebe has a maternity line. She would let Hartford get involved this time around. She would let him put cocoa butter on her belly, and talk to little Hartford while he’s still in her stomach, instead of being embarrassed by the whole thing, as she had been with Raven.
“Mrs. Crow, the doctor will see you now,” another nurse said.
Now that she was pregnant, she would try to find joy in motherhood, instead of looking at it as a sacrifice she had to make to be taken care of. She would change diapers this time. She would only use a nanny after her tummy tuck. She would let him fuck her until the moment she went into labor.
“Doctor, you know Mrs. Crow,” the nurse said, opening the door to let Shawna in.
“Hi, Shawna. How are you feeling?”
“I’m tired, but otherwise good. This pregnancy was unexpected. I’m tired but very excited. We’re very excited.”
“Hmm, hmm. Well, it looks like you’re about six weeks along.”
“Yes, well, Hartford would’ve come but he’s so busy these days. I’ll let him know that we’re six weeks along,” Shawna beamed. That bastard is embarrassing me already. Where in the hell is he?
“Mrs. Crow? Shawna?”
“I’m sorry; did you ask me something?”
“That cough; how long have you had it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. About two weeks, I guess.”
“Alright, Shawna, I want you to listen very carefully to what I am about to tell you. I ran your blood work. You’re definitely pregnant and you also tested positive for HIV…”
“HAVE YOU BEEN DRINKING?” HARTFORD ASKED when he walked into the house and found Shawna with a bottle in her hand. “Are you crazy?”
“Yeah, I’m crazy. I was crazy to marry you. I shouldn’t have married a pretty-ass metro-sexual I met at a goddamned nail shop. You selfish asshole,” Shawna said to her husband. “I’ve been to the doctor. Thank you so much; thank you for giving me HIV.”
“Giving you what? You have HIV? Are you saying I’m gay? Are you calling me a fag, huh? You think I did some shit to you. Gave you some shit. You fucking cunt. I should beat your ass.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I told them about your ass, too. They want you to come to the doctor’s office on Monday and give them a list of…”
“Oh, no, we don’t have to wait until Monday, you little skeezer. We’re going to get this shit straight right here, right now, tonight,” Hartford said, snatching Shawna up by her arm. He practically dragged her to his car.
“Dr. Maddox,” Hartford said into his cell phone as he peeled away from the curb. “This is Hartford. Look here…can you get your hands on two of those twenty-minute HIV tests? No, right now, it’s got to be right now. Come on, man; it is. Trust me; it’s a matter of life and death. Thanks, man.” He clicked the OFF button and threw the phone at Shawna, who had begun to cry.
“Me and this cheating BITCH are on our way!” Hartford screa
med from his open car window. Hartford turned to his wife. The heat in his eyes could have bent steel. “You whore! You had better fucking pray I don’t have HIV. You had better pray I don’t have so much as a yeast infection. Ooogh!” Hartford said, choking his steering wheel. “You had better pray.”
SHAWNA CRIED, SOBBED AND ROCKED IN HER CHAIR in the lobby of Dr. Maddox’s office. Hartford didn’t sit. He leaned calmly against the wall and looked smugly at her from across the room for the longest twenty minutes of her life.
“You look scared,” Hartford said. “You should be scared. You weren’t HIV positive when Raven was born. I’m only going to say this once. I have not fucked a man in my entire lifetime. Nor have I been fucked by one. Until this month, I have never stepped out on you. You hear me? I’ve been faithful to you. And now that I’m fucking her, I haven’t been fucking you. I’ve only been with one other woman, my true wife, and she did not die of AIDS.”
“Okay. Would you like to get the results together or separately?” Dr. Maddox asked, entering the room.
“Cut the formalities, Doc. Please. Just tell me if this bitch has gotten me sick.”
Dr. Maddox looked at Shawna and shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said to the woman. Then he turned to Hartford. “Your text was negative, Hartford.”
“Thank you, Jesus!” Hartford said, falling to his knees and clasping his hands together.” He dropped his head for a moment, in deep thought or prayer; Shawna was not quite sure which. She was shaking now. Then, with his head still down, he turned it slowly to the right, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. “I’m going to need you to get your shit out of my house immediately. If you’re not gone by the end of the week, I’ll file charges of attempted murder against you. You cannot have any money. You cannot have any property. You cannot have my daughters. Just get your nasty, disease-ridden ass out of my fucking house.”
The Punany Experience Page 21