Who Asked You?

by Terry McMillan

  Nurse Kim

  Good morning, Mr. Lee,” I say, shaking him. “Wake up!”

  He opens his eyes and smiles. He may not recognize his wife some days but he sure as hell don’t have no problem recognizing me.

  “You ready for your shower or you want your breakfast first?”

  He shakes his head no, then points to his mouth.

  Men. They’re all so fucking predictable. Even the old ones. I reach between the mattress on his side of the bed and grab his bottle of blue pills. I take one out and push it into his mouth. I pick up his glass of lukewarm water and put the straw up to his mouth. He sucks and swallows. I lift the covers and toss ’em to the side. He got his morning hard-on, and oh what a hard-on it is. It’s easy to understand why Miss Betty would have a hard time letting all of this fall by the wayside, and the funny thing is Mr. Lee don’t look no sixty-five, none whatsoever. I been lathering him up and down close to a year now and I can’t lie, I get a lot of pleasure out of touching him.

  I unbuckle my sandals and kick ’em off. I pull my T-shirt over my head and lay it flat at the foot of the bed, on Miss Betty’s side. I watch Mr. Lee’s eyes get bigger. Glassier. Almost like they’re breathing as much as he’s starting to. I unhook my bra and drop it on the floor. Then I climb on the bed so I’m standing over him. I unzip my skirt and step out of it. Then throw it on the floor, too. Mr. Lee starts to moan. I wiggle out of my thong and drop it next to his face. I can see him trying to inhale me. He moans again, louder this time, and then opens his mouth. This is when I grab the headboard and drop to my knees. I feel his warm lips against my lips and that little muscle gets firm and fiery and I move like I’m rowing a boat and I ain’t in no hurry to get there, but when I can’t stand it no more I grab the headboard and press hard against his lips until I hear myself yell, “Shit!” But I’m greedy, so I do the exact same thing until I explode again and again and then I lean back and pull off his pajama bottoms and that thing is jumping around like it’s looking for something, so I grab it in my hands and make it be still by sliding all the way down on it. It only takes three or four minutes to make him yell out, “Oh, Kimmie! Oh, Kimmie!”

  Which is when I get up. I love being his breakfast. I have to admit, out of all the old farts I’ve tended to, Mr. Lee is the best, except for maybe Mr. Jackson. He had dentures. I made him take those suckers out because his gums were so warm and smooth I hardly had to move at all.

  He falls on back to sleep and I lie next to him, turn on the TV, and watch the rest of the Today show. I don’t know why I like that Katie Couric. She looks like a little girl and got a little-girl voice and a little body and she even got little-girl teeth. When Mr. Lee wakes up, I take his pajama top off and walk him into the bathroom. I put on Miss Betty’s shower cap ’cause it takes me a whole hour to blow-dry my hair, which of course everybody in L.A. thinks is a weave just because it’s long. As if black women’s hair don’t grow long. I take him by the arm and get in the shower with him. He acts just like a little kid when I put a million bubbles on that washcloth and rub it up and down and all over his whole body. He really don’t look all that bad naked. You’d think since he’s so old his skin would be all shriveled up and wrinkly, including his dick, but that thing is just as long and thick and solid as some of these young dudes I been with. What I like about this kind of situation is ain’t no strings attached. Which is why a young woman like myself is grateful to have access to it. Mr. Lee has shrunk some. Standing up, it’s easy to tell. He was almost six feet but now he feels closer to my height: I’m five nine and a half.

  I dry him off with a fluffy towel and then put a fresh pair of pajamas on him and take him out to the dining room and sit him down at the table. He’s still smiling. Poor thing. I really think it’s time Miss Betty think about getting him ready for a facility, but I’m keeping my mouth shut. Hell, I’m looking at my income here. I ain’t never stayed long enough for one of my patients to die on me, but pretty damn close. I can usually tell. They smell different. Well, they don’t have no smell at all, really. And they get this tired look, like they know what’s coming. It’s creepy as hell, and this is when I usually give my notice because I don’t like walking in on death.

  “Hot damn!” Mr. Lee yells out, and then starts laughing.

  He does this a lot. Sometimes I think he’s probably remembering when somebody made a three-pointer or a touchdown or hell, I don’t know. All I know is he’s laughing and it makes me feel good to know that whatever’s going on inside of him is lifting his spirits.

  I feed him some microwave oatmeal and give him some juice in a sippy cup, and then he says, “Well, well, well,” and I walk him back into the bedroom and turn on the Western Channel. It cracks me up to hear Mr. Lee say, “Giddy-up!” except when he says it like five or ten times in a row. I don’t know which is worse, listening to him trying to speak Spanish with Dora or pretending like he’s riding a goddamn horse. Plus, Dora is not cute and I wish they could give her a makeover, because that hairstyle is played out. Even though I’m not crazy about kids, it’s a lot livelier around the crib since those boys been here. Not to be mean, but they’re both a little weird-looking. That oldest one reminds me of Chucky without the freckles and his eyes look too close together. The younger one looks like he didn’t bake long enough. It’s obvious they got different daddies. But what else is new? Watch. They’ll probably grow up to be fine as hell. My brothers were homely, too, but now women and men drool over them. (One of my brothers is gay but ask me if I care?)

  There’s a reason why there’s not that many pictures of me in my granny’s scrapbook. I wasn’t no cute baby. In fact, a lot of my relatives told me people just used to bend down, look at me, and say, “She’s sure got a lot of hair, doesn’t she?” Since nobody had any money for braces back then, I had horse teeth all through middle school. I didn’t think my ass was ever going to stop growing but years later it’s turned out to be my best asset. And then there were the zits. There wasn’t enough Clearasil in Thrifty’s that could make those fuckers disappear. It wasn’t until after I finally got my period that I realized all those years I was nothing but a human crossword puzzle with missing pieces. And then it seemed like all at once, something happened and everything on me fit in all the right places.

  But being pretty don’t guarantee you gon’ find a good man to appreciate all you have to offer. Which is why I’m by myself. A lot of them just want a trophy. I ain’t hanging on nobody’s arm like I’m a tennis bracelet. There’s some stuff inside me that deserves to be checked out too. I ain’t no black Barbie. Besides, I’m only thirty. So I think I’ve still got a few good years left to catch. Ain’t no doubt about it, I was wild as hell in my twenties, but I’m all about cruising now. My granny’s been bugging me for years about when I’m gon’ have a baby, since where I come from a husband is just a bonus. She’s got high blood pressure and her cholesterol is off the chart, and I thought she might have a heart attack when I said, all proper, “I am not having any kids, because I don’t want any.” She looked at me like I was joking and then realized I wasn’t. She couldn’t think of a good comeback so she just said, “Thank God I got grandsons,” and walked away. She didn’t speak to me for almost a whole month, and then finally outta the blue she said: “Everythang ain’t for everybody,” and we went to see The Mummy Returns, since we both like scary movies ’cause they don’t scare us, but we sat through it and ate popcorn out the same bag. She fell asleep on my shoulder.

  I’m also a snooper. I like to go through the people I work for’s shit so I know who I’m really working for. People act like they’re one thing and then you find out they’re somebody else. Everything in their house, especially the stuff in drawers and under the mattresses, tells you who they really are and what they might be hiding. And everybody’s hiding something. Sometimes it’s just bullshit and I can’t figure out why they even bothered. I have never stolen a thing, ’cause that would make me a thief. W
hen I first started working here, I started under Miss Betty’s side of the mattress and I found some very interesting shit:

  A book called The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. (It was too deep for me.)

  A juicy love letter from some dude named Parnell “C” dated all the way back to 1974. (Wasn’t Miss Betty married to Mr. Lee already? I will forget I saw this.)

  A .22 with two bullets in it. (But everybody got at least one of these.)

  A box cutter. (In case you ain’t got time to get the gun.)

  A Gladys Knight and the Pips cassette: About Love. (What’s that about?)

  A dried rose (pressed inside some wax paper).

  A black shoestring.

  A man’s blue-and-white pinstriped tie.

  A pair of black stockings. (What happened to that garter?)

  A letter from Louisiana State University telling her she got accepted!

  On Mr. Lee’s side I only found four things: porn videos, Vaseline, a picture of Dorothy Dandridge, and a picture of some old lady who looked like a slave.

  All of this stuff was tame compared with some of the other weird, stupid shit I have come across under other mattresses at other sick folks’ homes that made me scratch my head:

  Easy-Off Oven Cleaner.

  Two sets of dentures.

  Speeding tickets (paid and unpaid).

  A bag of Gummy Bears.

  A bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce.

  FDS feminine hygiene spray can (empty).

  A New York Knicks jersey.

  A gram of cocaine. (I did borrow a little of this but never got a chance to pay it back, ’cause I got let go.)

  Sometimes, when I’m bored, I try on Miss Betty’s jewelry and walk around in it all day. She’s got very good taste in jewelry. I don’t know what’s real and what ain’t, but since I have yet to stumble on a safe, it’s probably fake. Who gives a shit? If it looks good, what difference does it make if it ain’t real? I dig all the artwork in here. It livens up this old-ass house. She could stand to update all this beige and gold décor, though. It reminds me of my granny’s crib. The one my older brother just bought her out in Palmdale.

  If I was Miss Betty, when Mr. Lee passes, I would get the hell out of this dump with that insurance money. She’ll be good for a hundred thousand green ones. That policy’s in a dresser drawer. I been through all their papers and I know all about her family down there in New Orleans—it’s too many of ’em to count, that’s for damn sure.

  I have also sat in that old people’s chair in the living room and read almost all Dexter’s letters that Miss Betty opened, but there’s a shitload of ’em she ain’t read. I don’t blame her. Some of ’em almost longer than the Bible. At least Dexter can spell and sounds like he went to a junior college for a hot minute. My granny gets some from my cousins that just make you crack up. You know they looking at a dictionary or a thesaurus while they writing and some of the shit don’t make no kinda sense. It’s not like they gon’ get on Jeopardy when they get out. But Dexter is intelligent and I like some of the stuff he writes about. You can be smart and stupid at the same time, but stupid is the one that weigh a whole lot more and the one that got their stupid asses locked up. Dexter got the same sob story a whole bunch of ’em got. Everybody innocent. I was set up. My own lawyer didn’t believe me. The justice system is racist and want all brothers behind bars. That last one I do buy.

  Since I don’t make much money doing this kind of work, I had to get a roommate. A roommate I can’t tolerate much longer ’cause I didn’t know she was a real alcoholic until after I saw how much she could put away. Not to mention being country as all hell. She’s from some wooded area in Alabama. A three-hour drive from Birmingham. She drinks whiskey like a man. I met her in nursing school. But she dropped out and became a flight attendant and just got fired ’cause she got written up for being late or hungover too many times. She’s been blowing up my phone since I got here and I been blowing her off ’cause last night we had it out all because her latest boyfriend got to the apartment before she did and we was just sitting on the couch having a civilized conversation while she ran to change clothes.

  “So, what kind of nurse are you?” he asked. He sounded like he’d been to college, so I decided to use my college voice.

  “I’m an LVN.”

  “Interesting. Have you ever considered becoming an RN?”

  Have I ever considered becoming an RN? I couldn’t believe he was even asking me that, but I heard myself say, “I’ve thought about it, but I’m thinking about applying for a position as a traveling nurse. Fortunately, I’ve got six years’ experience, so I’ll see.”

  “Very interesting,” he said. “And how’s that work?” He crossed his legs and was just about to lean back and, I suppose, get comfortable when Tierra came charging outta her bedroom and stood there like she was ready to take off her earrings and put Vaseline on her face and said, “Let’s go,” like she was giving him a direct order or something. He didn’t act like a punk until that very minute.

  “I just need to go to the bathroom first.”

  She didn’t buy it. Me neither.

  “I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said, and he changed his mind and kind of ran after her but not before he turned to me and said, “Nice talking to you, Kim, and good luck in your nursing career. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

  As soon as he was out of range, Tierra shut that door and locked him out, then looked at me with those cheap-ass Betty Boop eyelashes and put all her weight on one of those cheap-ass Payless pumps and put her hands on her hips in that tacky-ass Hervé Léger knockoff and said, “I knew you couldn’t be trusted.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You ain’t have no business talking to my man about yo’ personal shit when I was not in the room.”

  “I was trying to be polite since you’re the one who got here late.”

  “For somebody you just met, you was awful chummy chummy. What the hell was y’all talking about?”

  “He asked me about being a nurse and I just answered his questions.”

  “Yeah, and what if I had got here a half hour later? You’d probably be fucking him. You L.A. hoes all alike. My sister warned me but I didn’t listen. I want your ass out of here by the first.”

  “You can’t put me out, Tierra. Both of our names happen to be on the lease in case you forgot, so you need to get the fuck over yourself.” And I crossed my arms. Dared the bitch to say another word. She stormed her insecure ass on outta there and slammed the door.

  I decide to listen to her voice message: “Kim, this Tierra calling and I just want you to know that you can stay here. All my shit’ll be gone by the time you get home. Sneaky bitch.”

  What?

  I replay it just to make sure I heard right. It says the same exact thing loud and clear. This means she’s breaking the lease and I can’t afford this apartment by myself and I ain’t about to look for no roommate on craigslist.

  I need a nap. I don’t like having too much on my mind, especially when I can’t do a whole lot right then and there to fix it. But if I fall asleep and Mr. Lee wakes up and I don’t hear him and he fall out the damn bed and hurt hisself then this would probably be Endsville for me. And I’ve been on top of things here. That’s funny. But I am not laughing. What I need to do is finish filling out this application for the traveling nurse program because it takes a month for them to let you know if you’ve been accepted. I might be homeless in a few weeks so I decide this might also be a good time to pray. But God can’t pay my rent.

  So I watch The Price Is Right and don’t win, not even so much as a kitchen appliance, some boring furniture, or a trip to Hawaii. I watch two soap operas and laugh all the way through ’em. I give Mr. Lee his lunch and then decide to just leave the real world altogether, so I dig in my gym bag and pull out my Harry Potter Sorcerer’s Stone book. I love all this
wizard shit. I wish I could fly. Sometimes I wish I could disappear and reappear and come back as a giraffe. They can see everything, they can eat the highest leaves, they can run fast, and even though they ain’t the cutest of jungle animals, they ain’t violent. I was just thinking about something. If I get into this traveling nurse’s program, I need to stop talking like I’m ghetto, because I know how. And I cuss like a fucking sailor, but mostly in my head when I’m thinking, like now. So I’m going to try to think and talk like I went to nursing school and I paid attention in English class. I can turn off the ghetto talk on a dime, especially when I’m around professional white folks. Black ones, too. Like my employer, Miss Betty.

  I’m not feeling too Hogwarty. But happy birthday, Harry. Back at you soon. Right now, I have to figure out the most intelligent manner in which to solve my housing dilemma. See how many extra words that took? What I’m worried about is my credit rating. I am never late with my bills and it took me a while to get it up to 720 but that’s because back in my twenties when I was depressed and didn’t know why, instead of getting high like everybody else I went shopping. Fucked up all my credit cards, and then after I got diagnosed and put on meds I started paying ’em off and now I’m back on track. I might see if I can find me a homosexual. They make good roommates. They for damn sure neat and clean and most of ’em can decorate and you ain’t gotta worry about fucking ’em. I’ma give this some serious thought. I know a lot of homosexuals thanks to my brother being gay, so maybe I should ask him if he knows anybody who wants to live with a quiet, sweet, clean, responsible girl. If necessary, I’ll pretend to be a lesbian if it helps. Hell, this problem might already be solved.