by Hannovah
Brandon barely broke a sympathetic smile, but I, on the other hand, could not believe what I was hearing. I gawked, “For real? Did you all speak?”
“Oh yeah! For quite a while . . . and we met at Snapper Grill yesterday for a late dinner while Ashley was at work. Then we drove out to the beach. We sat on the shore and talked for about two hours.”
“What about?”
“Well, I apologized for the way that I had treated her during the marriage. I told her that I now appreciate her as an excellent wife because she took good care of me and the home, cooking, cleaning, etcetera . . . and not once did I have any doubts about her fidelity.”
Brandon said, “When you’re in a good house, a bad house often calls you.”
“Does she know that you’re married?” I asked.
“She didn’t know at first, but I told her that I remarried on the rebound, and that it was a mistake, and I really want to be with her.”
“Umm-hmm?”
“She’s considering reconciliation, but she wants to be sure that I’ve really changed – that I’m serious about committing. She’s no longer living in Miami, you know.”
Brandon and I both perked up; this was news to us.
“She got laid off, and the townhouse ended up in foreclosure. She recently got a job in Boca and she comes down here every weekend for church. You know how that goes.”
“Where does she stay when she comes here?” I asked.
“At a sister from the church.” Then Joshua’s voice took on a tinge of excitement as he turned to Brandon and asked, “You remember that football legend, JJ Greeneyes?”
My heart bounced against my ribcage, and I hoped no one noticed how my eyes had expanded. Brandon nodded to Joshua.
“Well his wife is the sister from the church. They live in a mansion not too far from South Beach, in a really nice gated community with guards and everything.”
“Really?” Brandon sounded intrigued.
“Excuse me,” I said, and took off for the bathroom where I was free to clamp a hand over my mouth and express my astonishment. Joanne? At the Josephs? It’s such a small world. Well, I shouldn’t be surprised at the choice of people she assembled with because she usually gravitated to anything that seemed church-like. I wondered if the dean had asked her any questions about me and Brandon, or if he even knew that Joanne was connected to us.
I left the bathroom and went to the kitchen where I pretended to be doing something while I eavesdropped. Thank goodness the TV was low.
“Josh, I think you should come clean with Ashley,” Brandon said. “Lay all the cards on the table and try to straighten out your life.”
That’s the shittiest piece of advice, I thought to myself. Ashley would go ballistic. It seems like they had forgotten all about her behavior on the cruise.
I vacillated between intervening on Josh’s behalf, and remaining in the kitchen. But I hesitated too long because Joshua announced with optimism, “Ray, I’ll take your advice. Tonight when Ashley comes home, I’ll have a heart-to-heart with her.”
Then he bid us goodbye and left.
I joined Brandon now, because Josh’s situation was the issue that was first and foremost in my mind. There was no way that my facial expressions could reflect anything else and betray me.
I took a seat on the nearby sofa to express my opinion. “Ray, I don’t think it’s a good idea – him telling Ashley how he feels about Joanne.”
Brandon glanced at me with only a hint of a smile, but said nothing as he directed his gaze at another basketball game on TV.
“Brandon Rayburn?”
“What, Eddie?”
“You’re up to something, aren’t you?”
He laughed softly, “Heh, heh, heh.”
Around ten thirty p.m., I left him watching a movie and I turned in for the night.
Just after midnight he came and shook me. “Eddie. The shit just hit the fan.”
I awoke all disoriented. “What? What?”
“Ashley is throwing a fit out there in the back.”
I sobered-up quickly and said, “Let’s go.” I pulled a robe over my nightie and we went out to the back yard, and from the pool area, we could hear banging and Ashley cussing loudly. And at that hour of the night it sounded like all hell had broken loose.
“Hello! Hel-loo-oo!” a voice rang out from across the wooden fence. “What’s happening?” It was Yvette. We quickly opened our back gate for her. She too was draped in a bathrobe and as she clutched a phone to her chest, her eyes batted rapidly. “Me hearing all this commotion. Everything alright?”
More bangings and mother-fuckers came out of our villa, and I got scared, but Yvette looked more scared than me. With her fingers trembling over the phone keys, she asked, “Should I call the police?”
“Hold on,” Brandon said. The young ones are just having a spat. We’re going to check on them. Don’t worry. It would be alright.”
“Sorry for the nuisance,” I said.
Yvette left shakily.
Brandon locked the gate, and we approached the villa and into Ashley’s tirade.
“You’re what? You’re what? In love with her stinking fucking pussy? Are you fucking her? Are you sucking her cunt?”
I knew it.
We reached their front glass door, and through the open blinds we saw Ashley, in a white tank-top and red thong, jumping up and down in one spot near the little kitchen counter. She reached for the napkin holder and threw it at Joshua who was in the living room. He ducked, and I did too, even though I was outside. She grabbed a textbook and pelted it at him. He and I ducked again.
“He’s not saying anything,” I commented.
“He’s not doing anything either,” Brandon observed.
Then Ashley began talking out loud to herself like a mad person: “He told me that he loved me but that is a lie like everything else that he fucking told me he called Joanne a bitch and he told me that she never liked fucking that she never even sucked his dick but now he’s in love with her.” She looked at Joshua and yelled, “Fuck You!” Then she pranced around the apartment with her hands on her head and screamed.
Brandon knocked on the glass door.
Joshua spotted us and dodged his way around his wife to open up.
We entered, and Ashley never looked at us – maybe she saw us – maybe she didn’t, but she disappeared into the bedroom.
The walls of the cottage had been splattered with different color liquids, gels, and food; the window facing Yvette’s bedroom was cracked; broken plates, glasses and cups lay on the carpeted floor near each wall; and torn newspapers, magazines and textbooks were scattered in the center of the living room and on the sofa. The once cute villa now looked like a warzone.
I was growing more scared, but Brandon was as calm as the midnight air outside. He took a position next to his adopted son, and I got right behind them for protection.
“Be careful,” Joshua warned us. “The last time that I saw her like this, she pulled a knife on me.”
“Should we call the police?” I asked.
Brandon was quick, “No. Not at all.” Then he suggested to Joshua, “Maybe you should call her mother.”
Joshua pulled his cell phone out from his pants pocket, and dialed. Although it was almost one in the morning, he was fortunate to speak with his mother-in-law, and after he related the whole fiasco to her, she asked to speak with her daughter.
“Ashley!” he shouted. “Your mom wants to talk to you.”
She suddenly appeared and flung something at Joshua. We ducked as a DVD sailed over our heads and through the open door, landing in the pool thirty feet away.
“Ashley! Ashley, your . . .”
“Fuck you!”
We ducked again as a book landed right in front of Joshua.
This is insane.
It was obvious that Ashley was not going to speak to her mother, so Joshua spoke to her instead. Then he relayed to us that her mom said to ignore her and she will calm down. We decided
to do just that.
Then Joshua felt his pockets and exclaimed “Shit! My car keys are on the dresser in the bedroom.” He made one step forward reluctantly. “I have to get those keys before she gets them; there’s no telling what she’ll do. Call 911 if I don’t come back out.”
He made a dash for it, and Brandon and I ventured closer.
“Go to hell mother-fucker!” Ashley yelled as Joshua zipped by her.
She did not throw anything this time, but she came out and pulled down her wedding outfit from off the living room wall, along with her husband’s wedding trunks. Then she entered the kitchenette and began to rummage through a drawer.
Joshua gingerly returned to us.
She found a pair of scissors.
We three sane people stepped backwards. I didn’t know about the guys, but I was ready to run. Surprisingly, she didn’t come after us.
Right before our very eyes she sat on the floor and proceeded to cut up her wedding clothes and Joshua’s wedding trunks with the pair of scissors, saying, “he’s still in love with her ass he wants to fuck her well I’ll show them the mother-fucker wants to be married to the bitch well they can have the wedding dress and his fucking trunks too.” And she kept on cutting.
I whispered, “Oh. My. Lord.” With one hand I hung on to Brandon’s shoulder while the other was pressed over my chest.
Brandon whispered, “This girl is really mad.”
Ashley snipped the clothes into tiny pieces, looking up at Joshua a few times without saying anything. That made me very uneasy. I kept watching those scissors just in case she tried to throw it in our direction. Soon, she dropped it on the floor and began looking around for something.
Her eyes located a box, and she got up and dumped all the destroyed garments into it. She seemed to calm down a little now.
“Her mom was right,” Brandon said.
After a few sighs, she went over to a desk and put pen to paper, writing what looked like a letter.
When she was finished, she folded the paper, and picked up the box and her car keys. As she whizzed past us, scantily dressed, she announced, “I’m taking this to your ex-wife.”
“Oh Lord no!” I said, hoping that one of the men would stop her. Nobody tried to intervene, and Brandon took a hold of my arm as if to tell me to stay put.
“Joanne doesn’t play,” he remembered. “She knows the law and her rights. She’s a Paralegal.”
When Ashley reached the back gate, she turned and yelled, “By the way I’ve been back at Secrets and I’ve been seeing clients on the side too and they all fuck better than you.” With a mean cross-eye, she pitched her middle finger at us and opened the gate.
As soon as she drove off, Joshua called up Joanne. She wasn’t picking up at first, so he texted her and put 911. He kept calling, and when she finally picked up, he warned her that if her doorbell should ring or if she heard a knock at the door, do not answer and feel free to call the police. He didn’t give her any particulars, and he apologized for disturbing her sleep, and hung up.
I wanted to follow Ashley because she was not in her right mind, and she was barefooted and in her underwear. But after thinking it through, I decided to stay in my lane and out of trouble. Plus I had a job to go to later. I excused myself and went back to bed, wondering if the episode was truly over, and worrying about Ashley’s safety.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Six thirty already?
My alarm was rousing me out of my sleep. Brandon was not around as I sat up in bed. Suddenly I recalled last night’s drama and was about to call out to him when he appeared with two cups of coffee and sat next to me.
He said, “I haven’t slept yet. I couldn’t.”
“Is Josh okay?” I asked.
“Ah-hah,” he nodded.
After I made a bathroom visit, I returned to my coffee. “And what about Ashley?”
Brandon shrugged his shoulders. “After you left us, Josh and I sat under the Joint, talking. Then after about an hour Ashley came back. I left them out there, and around four o’clock I heard her drive away.” He sipped his coffee. “I’m writing him a seven-day notice to cure or quit.”
“I agree. This is too much drama.”
I whipped up a quick breakfast, and then showered and dressed for work. When I came back out to the breakfast table, I met Joshua sitting with Brandon, and the Cure or Quit notice lying on the table in front of him.
He may have sensed my disappointment because his first words to me were, “Edna, I want to apologize for last night. I can assure you that nothing like that would ever happen again. Ashley is never coming back here.” He waved both index fingers, “I done. I can’t be with a prostitute.”
I only nodded; I had heard that before. I sat down to have my breakfast, but it was hard for me to look at him.
“Go on,” Brandon said to him. Apparently, they were in the middle of a conversation before I came in.
Joshua toyed with his dreadlocks and continued, “She went to the townhouse, but it was empty. She doesn’t know that it’s under foreclosure and that Jo had moved out. In all the pandemonium, I had forgotten that. So bottom line, when she returned later, she packed up all of her stuff . . . including the bird and the cat . . . and said that she was going to Daytona and would not be back.”
I really hope so. I excused myself to pack a lunch for work.
Brandon asked, “Have you spoken to her since she left?”
“Nah! I’m not interested in speaking with her.”
“No sweat. I just wanted to know if she got to Daytona safely.”
“Oh, she can take care of herself,” Joshua assured him. “But I will be filing for divorce. Shameful, but I can’t worry about what people will say. I have to do what is best for me.”
I felt sorry for Joshua, but more so for Ashley who had gotten her heart broken, and probably needed some professional counseling. I walked over to Joshua, gave him a comforting hug and kiss, and said, “It would be okay.” He was really like a son to us; I couldn’t stay mad at him for long. Then I kissed Brandon goodbye and left.
When I returned home from work that afternoon, the men were again seated at the kitchen table, and I wondered if they had sat there all day talking about Ashley. But on further examination, I realized that they were clothed differently from this morning.
I kissed my husband, and said hi to Joshua.
“I’m going to the library now,” he stated. “Ashley destroyed a few of my text books, so I have to borrow them. I’ll be back to visit you later.”
When he left, Brandon told me that Joshua had skipped a few classes this morning for the villa’s sake. He had spent his time cleaning up the mess in the guesthouse and replacing the window, which Brandon assisted him with. And he changed the door lock too. He might be serious this time.
Mr. Browning came by later that day and almost every day after that. He had dinner regularly with us, along with his stack of automotive textbooks that took the place of a fourth person at our dinner table. He did his homework right there, and when he got weary he took naps on the futon in our office. At one point I wondered if he wanted to move back into the main house, but I never suggested it. I guess he hated being alone.
Whenever he had a free moment, he would call Joanne and they would talk for such a long time that he would have to pull himself away to resume his studies. He invited her out on dates, but she often declined, and then, to top it off, he started going to church with her on Sundays. They would also go out for lunch right after church.
It seemed like he was really through with Ashley because he did actually file for divorce and mailed the papers to Daytona for her signature. But she refused to sign them, claiming that her love for Joshua was as strong as ever and she wanted to reconcile.
But Joshua said that he would be a fool to go back with that ‘mad-ass’ girl who had no respect for marriage. He had said that before and still went back.
So while Joshua was hollering at Joanne on a daily basis,
Ashley was doing the same to him, begging him for them to get back together. But he was unwavering in his decision.
Money was not flowing like it did when Ashley was there, so Joshua found himself a part-time job at a car dealership.
“I got two A’s, three B’s and a C,” he announced to me when he called one evening while he was on a fifteen-minute break from work.
“That’s great,” I said, “considering all that you have going on. But we need to stay away from those C’s.”
“Well according to one of my professors, ‘C’s make degrees.’” We chuckled. “And the A people usually end up working for the B people who end up working for the C people.”
“Whatever.” I had a good laugh. “Are you taking the summer off?” I asked. “Because I was hoping you could help us remodel our kitchen and bathrooms.”
“Sorry, no. I’ll be taking five classes starting this week – it may even be seven, if I could get to take some at the community college. I’m trying to be done with this degree by the end of June. By the hook or the crook, I will be graduating this summer, either at the end of June or the end of August. But we could work on that after my graduation. But wait, why do you think you need me? Ray could hold his own, pretty good you know.”
“I don’t want to bad-mouth my husband, but he always puts our projects on hold . . . or he starts a project and never completes it. And I mean never.”
“But not so with the apartments?”
“Oh no! He makes sure to finish those. That’s his income . . . his livelihood. But with this house . . . he doesn’t care. I know that you will not treat me this way, so I’ll wait on you.”
“Time to clock back in, Edna. I’ll call again soon.”
One Sunday afternoon, Brandon was setting up to watch basketball on TV when he glanced out the back window of the den, and uttered, “Aay-aay. Is that Joanne out there?”
I paused from filing my nails and took a peek through the window. It was her, alright. And she looked nice, dressed in a church suit and heels, and she was standing at the front door of the villa, obviously awaiting Joshua.