Family of Lies

by Mary Monroe

  “Kenneth, you need to talk to your child,” Vera said to me after their latest Saturday shopping spree.

  “My child? You told me you were going to treat her like she was your child,” I chided.

  “Our child,” she said with a smile and rapidly rolling eyeballs. “I have bought our child clothes from the best stores in town. She prefers outfits she picks up in discount stores.”

  “Well, as long as what she wears is clean and has a pleasant smell, what’s the problem?”

  “Kenneth, what’s wrong with you? I’m trying to teach the girl—our child—to have some class. What will our friends think?”

  “They can think whatever they want to think. As long as Sarah’s not wearing something that’s offensive, why should they care?”

  “You’re missing the point, baby. We have an image to maintain. We can’t do that if our only child is running around dressing like a bag lady. She wore some mammy-made polyester dress, with vinyl shoes, to Wilma Finch’s daughter’s wedding last Saturday. I was so horrified and embarrassed when she walked into that church! I knew I should have made her ride in the same limo with me,” Vera told me.

  I laughed.

  “It’s not funny, Kenneth.”

  “And it’s not that serious. We can’t expect Sarah to change overnight,” I insisted.

  “Overnight? She’s been with us for seven years now!”

  “Overnight, seven years, whatever. The bottom line is, we have to let the child be who she is.”

  “The child is no longer a child. She’s a twenty-two-year-old woman. She should be more refined by now. And what about her friends?”

  “So? What about her friends?”

  “What if one of them tries to do something crazy to her? Her friends are the kind of people who like to take advantage of people like her.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by all that, but Sarah is not stupid or blind. She’s got enough sense to know when and if somebody is trying to take advantage of her.”

  “When Sarah’s hoochie-coochie girlfriends go out with her, who do you think is paying for everything? She is! And I’ve seen her hand money to a couple of those moochers more than once!”

  “What’s wrong with her being generous to her friends? So many of them have so little. I’m sure they appreciate anything they can get from Sarah.”

  “You’re damn right they appreciate it! Who wouldn’t? And you don’t have a problem with that? You don’t think they’re taking her kindness and generosity for weakness? As crazy as people are these days, you need to be more concerned about what some of them will do to Sarah if they get desperate enough. She could be kidnapped and held for ransom!”

  “Look, I don’t like where this conversation is going, Vera!” I exclaimed, holding my hand up in the air. I rarely showed my anger to Vera, but she was pushing her luck. “I could say the same thing about you and your cousin and his wife.”

  “Huh? What do you mean by that?”

  “Cash and Collette hang around with some pretty shady people. Are you just as worried about somebody kidnapping them?”

  “That’s different.”

  “No, that’s not different. Let’s not worry about Sarah unless she gives us something to worry about.”

  The conversation was over as far as I was concerned. Vera realized that when I turned and walked out of the room, even though she was still talking.

  CHAPTER 19

  VERA

  THIS THING WITH SARAH WAS REALLY BOTHERING ME, AND I HAD TO do something about it. Most of the people I knew went to bars to drown their sorrows. I either went shopping or to the spa, or I paid a visit to one of my sexy young male friends. Some days I did all of the above—including a visit to one of my favorite bars. Well, this time I was only interested in some young male flesh.

  I didn’t mind being generous when it came to my lovers; therefore, they didn’t mind doing whatever I wanted them to do. And I always made it clear from day one with each one where he stood with me, so I’d never had any “fatal attraction” experiences like another married woman I knew.

  Shirley Biddle and I had similar backgrounds, except she was white. She had married Kenneth’s tax attorney six months after I married Kenneth and we’d been casual friends ever since. We’d even swapped a few lovers. Last year she had attempted to “unload” her twenty-three-year-old Jamaican gardener off on me because he had become possessive and had even begun to stalk her. The last thing I needed was a stalker, so Shirley accused him of stealing from her and made such a fuss he got deported. Anyway, I had already decided to “give” her my latest lover, Andre Gaudeux, as a Christmas gift this year. He was as meek as a lamb, so he wouldn’t cause her any problems. Since I was always looking for new thrills, I had become bored with this boy and was going to “fire” him before the end of the year. Until then, I planned to keep him on my payroll....

  Andre didn’t answer his door when I rang the bell and that pissed me off. Unlike Tony, whom I’d discarded two years ago after he had stopped working out and his belly got bigger than his dick, Andre was the cream of the crop. He was nineteen and very hungry. Hungry enough to do anything I told him to. I liked men who had nothing to offer but themselves. Andre had been working as a cabana boy when I met him on the beach in St. Thomas last summer. Kenneth had taken me down there for our anniversary. While he was floating around on a fishing boat, I was getting my groove back in a very big way. Andre lived in a shack with his blind grandmother and his nine siblings and a goat tied to a tree in the backyard. Other than an amazing body and handsome face, he had nothing but a few cheap shirts, two pairs of pants, one pair of sandals, and a post card with the map of America on it that he carried in his back pocket like it was a rosary. He was just what I needed at the time. I literally scrubbed the ash off his body in my hotel Jacuzzi. I took him to the same tailor that the island politicians went to and had several new outfits made for him, all within a two-week period. And to make sure he wouldn’t run off with his new wardrobe and his pocket full of my money, I booked him on a first-class flight to the States, a day before Kenneth and I returned home. He stayed at the Mark Hopkins in a deluxe suite until I found him a place he liked.

  I really needed to see my boy today. I returned to my car, disappointed and horny as hell. Right after I got in and put the key in the ignition, Andre trotted up and tapped on my window.

  “Haylo, bay-bee,” he greeted in his cute Caribbean accent. He grinned and then patted his bulging crotch. “I got hard as soon as I saw your car.”

  “Where the hell were you?” I demanded. “You’re not supposed to go anywhere without leaving me a voice mail to let me know.”

  “I only went for a ten-minute jog,” he muttered, looking down at his feet. “You told me earlier you had plans for today, remember?”

  “Yeah, well, my plans changed.” I had planned to go out to dinner with Kenneth and that child of his. But she’d balked about going to a French restaurant in Sausalito and insisted on going to some rib joint in Oakland! That’s what had started the latest argument between Kenneth and me.

  I glanced at my watch and opened my car door. “I don’t have a lot of time,” I said as Andre gently took my hand and helped me back out. My knees buckled and I fell against him. “Damn these heels!” I mock complained, holding on to Andre’s arm to keep from falling to the ground. Despite all of the surgeons who worked on my body, there was nothing any of them could do about my arthritis, and it seemed to get a little worse each year. I was still in fairly good shape for a fifty-seven-year-old woman. And until I got too old to get around on my own, I planned to enjoy every single minute while I still could. “I just need a good hard ten- or fifteen-minute fuck to loosen me up a bit. I hope you’re in the mood for it.”

  Andre nodded and steered me into his apartment.

  There were times when he was a little too docile for his own good. One thing I could say about my former boy Tony and the ones in between him and Andre was that they had a little more b
ackbone than Andre. This boy was so submissive I had no idea what he liked in bed after all this time. It was always about me. But from the way he grunted and groaned and humped me all over his bed, I was convinced that he was having as good a time as I was.

  We didn’t waste any time. Andre took me into his bedroom and closed the blinds. By the time he walked over to the bed where I was, I was already on my back. He stretched out next to me. “You seem tense,” he said as he unbuttoned my blouse. At least he was assertive enough to undress me once in a while.

  “Honey, I am tense!” I hollered as I wrapped my fingers around his balls and began to grind myself against him.

  “I will relieve you, m’dear.”

  “Relieve me my ass,” I snickered. “If that’s all I needed, I would have given myself an enema. I want you to fuck me.”

  When I got back home, I was feeling so good, Sarah could have walked in front of me naked and it wouldn’t have bothered me.

  CHAPTER 20

  SARAH

  I DIDN’T THINK MY STEPMOTHER WAS EVER GOING TO ACCEPT ME AND be sincere about it. She was all kissy-poo nice and sweet to me in front of my daddy and other people, but she wasn’t so nice when she and I were alone. I always seemed to do something that irritated Vera. She criticized the way I talked, my friends, what I ate, and the way I dressed. “You have too much money to be looking and acting so black,” she scolded one day. I had come home with a Tupac Shakur T-shirt in one hand and a half-eaten bucket of fried chicken gizzards in the other.

  “Excuse me, but when I look in the mirror, a black woman is the only thing I see,” I quipped, licking grease off my lips.

  “You know what I mean,” she insisted with a hand on her hip and a frown on her face. “When you have money, you can’t afford to be too ethnic. It makes people nervous.”

  I brushed Vera off that time, and from that point on, I brushed her off every other time she said stupid shit to me. I no longer cared if she liked me. I decided that as long as Daddy was not complaining about me, that was all that mattered.

  My life was somewhat boring, but I did everything I could to keep myself busy and out of Vera’s way. I still wasn’t ready to work, so getting a job was not on my agenda yet. Daddy had even offered to hire me as a cashier, but I turned that down. That sounded too boring for me! But I had to admit to Daddy that the real reason I didn’t want to work was because I wanted to enjoy the luxury of lying around in a mansion not having to worry about money a little longer.

  Feeling so out of place and unaccepted by Vera was one of the reasons I became so promiscuous. I went out with men I didn’t even like just so I could get out of the house and away from her for a few hours, or a few days, at a time.

  The following year I dated a lot of guys but none I liked enough to make a commitment to. Finally, I thought I’d found the man of my dreams. Two weeks after my twenty-third birthday, I started going out with this brother named Vincent Bruner. He worked for a company that made garage door openers. I had met him on a bus one day on my way to visit some of my friends in my old neighborhood. He was on his way to an appointment with his parole officer. He had no idea I was a “poor little rich girl” until I rolled up to his apartment in the projects in the Ferrari Daddy had bought for me last month.

  “Girl, why do you be riding on a bus when you got a ride like this?” Vincent asked me, looking at my shiny black car like he wanted to kiss it.

  “Uh, you know how bad parking is in this city,” I said with a shrug. “Besides, I like riding on the bus.”

  “What kind of job you got?”

  “I don’t work. And I still live at home.”

  Vincent reared back and looked me up and down. “Your folks must be real well off, huh?”

  “My daddy is real well off. Uh, he owns the five Lomax Electronic stores,” I confessed with hesitation. I had kept this information from Vincent since I’d met him a month ago because I wanted to see if he’d still like me if I was broke.

  Vincent’s eyes lit up, but he tried to remain calm. All he said was, “No shit?” An hour later he asked me for a “loan” so he could take his mama out to dinner for her birthday. I gave him the money, which he was supposed to pay back a week later. I never heard from him again. Getting screwed like that was the only thing I hated about having money.

  It was easy to see why some people thought having a lot of money was more of a curse than a blessing. Despite what I believed, I continued to be generous when it came to my “friends.” Daddy didn’t seem to mind, but the more I gave to my friends, the more it bothered Vera. And she didn’t hesitate to let me know.

  One day while I was in the living room, she spied on me from behind a bookcase in the hall that led to the kitchen. I had just given a thousand dollars to one of my homegirls so she could pay some bills. Cathy Proctor had practically run out the door as soon as the money landed in her hand. A few seconds later, Vera marched into the room with her hands on her hips. “Sarah, I know it’s none of my business, but you need to be more careful about loaning money to your friends. You’re going to regret it one day,” she warned.

  “They would do the same for me,” I said. I was perched on top of a stool at the bar. “They told me they would.”

  “Ha! People like the friends you have will say anything they think you want to hear as long as it’ll help them get your money. Honey, these damn freeloaders don’t care about you. If you’re not careful, they are going to bleed you dry. Your daddy works too hard for his money for you to keep giving it away. How come you don’t socialize with some of those nice young girls I introduced you to?”

  “I don’t have much in common with those girls,” I answered. I almost laughed in Vera’s face. The girls she had introduced me to had treated me like dog shit on the bottom of their shoes. They knew about my childhood background, so that was reason enough for them to always treat me like an outsider. One girl had even asked if I had been in a gang before I came to live with Daddy. And most of them thought that I knew drug dealers who would sell drugs to me at a discount that I could pass on to them. I had never been in a gang, and the drug dealers I grew up with were all dead or in jail.

  “Well, I’m telling you for your own good; you really need to be more careful about who you associate with!” Vera must have realized how mean she sounded because a few seconds later, she started smiling. Then she gave me a hug. “I don’t mean to sound so harsh,” she said, rubbing my back. “I just want you to be happy.”

  “I am happy,” I declared.

  “I know you don’t know much about fine wine, but let’s have some. It’ll help you relax more than that cat-gut beer you drink.”

  I followed Vera over to the bar and she poured me and herself a glass of her finest red wine. “This is good,” I told her with a burp as we moved to the couch and sat down.

  “I love martinis and cosmopolitans, but this particular wine is my favorite. It’s more expensive than that shit most black folks drink, but it’s worth it. All of my friends back in Houston love it just as much as I do.”

  “Houston must be a cool place.”

  “It is.” Vera reached for a photo album on the end table and placed it on top of the coffee table. “Let me show you some of my friends.”

  I couldn’t think of anything more boring than looking at somebody’s photo album and gawking at people I had never met and probably never would. There were pictures of homely babies, fat old women in outlandish hats and muumuus, and Vera as a teenager riding a bike. How lame was that?! Just as I was about to pour myself another glass of wine, I saw a picture of one of the most handsome black men I’d ever seen before in my life. He looked like a cross between Dwayne “The Rock”Johnson and Will Smith. Vera was in the picture with this hunk of black gold, and his arm was around her waist.

  “Dang! Is this one of your old boyfriends?” I was actually enjoying myself now. But I wasn’t going to let my guard down. Vera was still the same witch I overheard talking trash about me in the kitchen with Cas
h and Collette on a regular basis.

  “That’s my cousin Bo Harper,” Vera said casually. “He’s married to a woman who used to live across the street from my mama’s house.”

  “Does he have any unmarried male relatives?” I laughed.

  Vera laughed too. “Yeah, but most of them are a lot older than he is.”

  I shook my head and let out a loud breath. “Why can’t I meet a man like your cousin Bo? His wife sure is a lucky woman.”

  “She doesn’t think so. The marriage is on the rocks.”

  “Oh that’s too bad,” I said quickly, forcing myself not to sound too excited.

  Vera gave me a sickly look. “The next time we all go to Houston, or if he ever comes out here for a visit, I’ll make sure you meet him.”

  “I hope so.” I sniffed. Boy would I love to wrap my legs around his waist, I thought to myself.

  That night was the beginning of the end of the life I had come to know.

  CHAPTER 21

  VERA

  “BO’S WIFE HAS BEEN THREATENING TO DIVORCE HIM FOR MONTHS. They’ve been having problems for years,” I said quickly, wondering where this conversation was going and what was in it for me. “Poor Bo. That hussy he is married to is the Bride of Satan. She treats my poor cousin like a dog.”

  Sarah couldn’t take her eyes off Bo’s picture. “That sure is cold, Vera. Your cousin looks like a real cool dude.”