by Mary Monroe
“Why do you keep lookin’ toward the door? You expectin’ somebody?” Muh’Dear asked me.
“Uh, I was hoping Rhoda would come,” I muttered. I sloshed the coffee around in the large cup that Muh’Dear had set in front of me. I tried to ignore the platter a few inches from my face that contained a mountain of grits swimming in a pool of butter, scrambled eggs, and a stack of wheat toast on a saucer—each slice slathered with butter, jelly, and enough greasy bacon to bring down a horse. “You know how Rhoda loves your cooking.”
“Well, she ought to show it more! That woman is as thin as a rail. She eats less than a gnat when she comes up in here. And me with my crazy self, in that kitchen sweatin’ over that hot stove and whatnot—just wastin’ my time on a skinny minnie like her! Poor Rhoda. I been tryin’ to put some meat on them hip bones of hers for years. Men like healthy women. Rhoda don’t watch her step and thicken them thighs of hers, she gwine to lose her husband,” Muh’Dear predicted. “Eat your food before it gets cold.”
I bit off a tiny piece of bacon and looked toward the door again.
Rhoda usually accompanied me to the restaurant, and I used her as an excuse to make a quick getaway. But when she couldn’t leave her house, where she ran a licensed childcare center for pre-schoolers, she called the restaurant at a time that we had agreed upon to tell me she had an emergency situation and needed my help. She was five minutes late today. I slid back the sleeve of the red silk blouse that I had on and checked my watch.
“Why do you keep lookin’ at your watch?” Daddy asked, biscuit crumbs decorating his bushy gray beard like confetti. For a man pushing eighty, my father had a lot of energy. He got up every morning at the crack of dawn and walked the four blocks from the house he shared with my mother to the restaurant. My mother got up even earlier, and by the time Daddy made it to the restaurant, she had his breakfast ready. She also had a laundry list of chores for him to do that day and a list of complaints that she wanted him to address. Today, I was on that list of complaints. “Your mama tells me that you been runnin’ all over town tryin’ to find some makeup artist to work for Pee Wee. What’s wrong with you, girl? What Pee Wee need a makeup artist for? He already look like a clown.” Daddy had a serious look on his face, but my mother snickered.
“Manicurist,” I corrected, stabbing one of the seven slices of crispy bacon on my plate with my fork. Despite the fact that I had shed over a hundred pounds, my mother still tried to feed me like I was Hulk Hogan. I had barely touched the feast in front of me. She had also set a coffeepot with enough coffee for eight people next to the platter. Even though I’d been taking my coffee black for months, next to it was a container full of Half n’ Half and sugar.
The Buttercup was already busy, and it was only ten thirty. Construction workers, a few cops, people who were coming off the night shift, men and women in office attire, and a few young people from a nearby business college occupied almost every table and booth. I had left my office at nine thirty. The only way I was going to make it back in time to interview the first candidate who had applied for the manicurist position was if Rhoda rescued me within the next ten minutes. Bless her heart. She would if she could, and that was what I was counting on.
Before I could form my next thought, Hazel Strong, Muh’Dear’s day shift bartender, motioned to me from the bar counter across the room that I had a phone call. “Annette, Rhoda’s on the phone. She say she got an emergency, but she won’t tell me what it is,” Hazel reported in her loud, nasally voice.
“I’ll be right there,” I told her.
Hazel looked disappointed, and I knew that it was because she was dying to know why Rhoda was calling me. Like with my mother and so many other people I knew, collecting and spreading gossip was a form of creative nourishment. It kept their brains and their tongues sharp.
“Where are you gwine, gal? I know you don’t think you gettin’ your sorry tail up out of here leavin’ all that good food on your plate!” Muh’Dear hollered.
“Box it up for me. I have to take this call,” I hollered back, already trotting across the floor to the telephone on the counter next to the cash register. “It’s about time,” I said to Rhoda as soon as I picked up the receiver. “Where the hell are you?” I glanced around and lowered my voice to a whisper. Rhoda knew Hazel well enough not to tell her what the “emergency” was that she was calling me about, so Hazel was trying to eavesdrop. She stood a few inches from me, wiping the same spots on the counter over and over. That was why I was whispering. “You’re supposed to rescue me. I’m sinking like a block of cement in a bowl of quicksand over here.”
“Listen, I’ve got an emergency situation,” Rhoda replied in a tired voice.
“Did you hear what I just said? Rhoda, it’s me. You can cancel that emergency ruse,” I said, still speaking in a low voice because Hazel was still trying to eavesdrop and still wiping the same spots. “Girl, you called in the nick of time. Uh, my mother was well on her way to roasting me like a fatted calf.”
“No, I’m serious. I do have an emergency, so I can’t accommodate you this time.”
I held my breath as I waited for Rhoda to elaborate. She remained ominously silent, and that made me more than a little nervous. “Is something wrong?”
“Big time,” Rhoda sputtered. “And it’s not somethin’ that you are goin’ to want to hear….”
“Well, if it’s something you don’t think I want to hear, do I need to hear it at all? And if it is, is it something that you can tell me in five words or less?” I was no longer whispering, but I kept my voice low.
“I can tell you in three: Jade Marie O’Toole.”
“Oh, dear God no!” I gasped and stumbled. Hazel moved closer to me with her arms outstretched, as if expecting me to fall to the floor. My legs got so weak I almost did fall. Somehow I managed to contain myself by holding on to the counter. I motioned for Hazel to move back. “Rhoda, I’m having a bad enough day already. Please tell me you’re joking, and if you are, this is not funny.”
“What makes you think I’m jokin’?”
The seriousness of Rhoda’s tone scared me. I knew that this was one subject neither she nor I would ever make a joke out of.
Other than cancer and divorce, Jade Marie O’Toole were the other three words in the English language that sent the most shivers up and down my spine. But I had three more words of my own that described Rhoda’s daughter even better: Bride of Satan.
CHAPTER 16
Rhoda’s daughter, Jade, who was going to turn twenty-one this year, had caused almost as much pain and destruction to the people in her orbit as a hurricane.
I was no exception. I had experienced the full force of her wrath.
The year before last, she had tried to take my husband from me by harassing me with threatening phone calls and obscene letters. When that scheme blew up in her face, she moved to Louisiana to live with Rhoda’s parents and to attend college. But Jade cared as much about education as a mule did. She fought with her professors, other girls, her boyfriends, and everybody in between. She promptly flunked out of college and ran off to Cancún, Mexico, with some of her friends on spring break. Down there, that girl had gone hog-happy wild.
Rhoda had never told me the whole story about Jade’s visit to Mexico, but it had to be one for the books. What she shared with me had come out in bits and pieces, and it had given me chicken skin shivers. Jade’s south of the border jaunt had generated a chilling, middle of the night telephone call from the Mexican authorities to Rhoda’s father. He had immediately hopped on a chartered plane and flown down there to rescue Jade, and to straighten out whatever mess she had gotten herself into. Whatever kind of mess he had to bail her out of, it had cost him thousands of dollars and several meetings with an official from the consulate. Jade was never allowed to set foot on Mexican ground again for the rest of her life. Those were all of the details that Rhoda had shared with me, and that was only because I told her I didn’t want to know any more than that. I was
still recovering from my own emotional wounds from my showdown with Jade. She returned to Richland straight from Mexico with twelve pieces of designer luggage and her Mexican fiancé, Marcelo.
Jade was without a doubt the “ugliest” beautiful female I knew. Despite her good looks, she was an offshoot of Godzilla—mean, violent, and mainly concerned about her needs way before anybody else’s. And it didn’t take her fiancé long to figure that out. He’d left her at the altar last year, and to save face, she’d promptly fled to Alabama. According to Rhoda’s regular updates, the girl had driven almost everybody in Alabama crazy with her antics, which included smoking weed, cussing out people in public, a smack-down that involved the wife of one of her new lovers, and even a night in jail for slapping a cab driver because he wouldn’t carry her lazy, doped-up ass from his cab to her doorway after a wild party. Oh, there were some lovely stories about this child.
“What did Jade do now?” I asked, my hand clutching the telephone.
“She’s come back home,” Rhoda said with a heavy sigh.
“When?” I had just talked to Rhoda a couple of hours ago and she had not even mentioned Jade.
There was a short pause before Rhoda responded. “She just stumbled in the front door a few minutes ago.” Rhoda paused again. “With twelve pieces of luggage again. She had to hire two cabs to bring her and all of her shit from the airport.”
“Lord. Well, I guess I won’t be seeing you today, huh?” I was more than a little disappointed. My heart skipped a few beats. Then it started thumping around inside my chest so hard I had to hold my breath and massage the throbbing space below my breasts to ease the discomfort.
“Maybe later. I hope you understand.” Rhoda lowered her voice to a whisper. “It sounds like Jade is back there tearin’ down the house.”
“I do understand.” I let out such a deep and heavy sigh, I felt it all the way to my armpits. “Lord knows you’ve got a mess on your hands now. How long do you think she’s going to stay this time?”
“Only God knows. She had a major falling out with my son the other night, which is what prompted her to hop on a plane and come back here. She claims one of his boyfriends insulted her. He claims she started the mess, and that anything the boyfriend said to her, it was because she had it coming.” I didn’t have to see Rhoda’s face to know that she was thoroughly disgusted. I could hear it in her voice. “Jade resents the fact that her big brother is gay, you know? She always has. You and I know how some black people are when it comes to homosexuality.”
“Tell me about it. Pee Wee told me in no uncertain terms not to interview any men for that manicurist position he wants to fill.”
“I know at least two male manicurists, and neither one of them is gay. You know Beanie Ross, that white boy who works at the mall where we get our nails done sometimes?” Rhoda’s tone took a sharp detour. “He’s one of the biggest womanizers in town.” She seemed relieved to be discussing something other than Jade, and so was I.
“I’ve already talked to Beanie. He didn’t say it in so many words, but what he did say told me enough. He’s afraid to work for a black man in a black neighborhood. He got mugged coming out of Antonosanti’s last month.”
“Antonosanti’s is in the most exclusive white neighborhood in Richland!” Rhoda declared.
“Yeah, I know. But it was a black man who mugged Beanie.”
“Oh well.”
“I’ve got two prospects lined up for today and a maybe for tomorrow.”
“I hope you took my advice.”
“I did. They are both straight-up homely.” I managed a quick laugh and under the circumstances, it felt good. “Marlene, the older one, who also happens to be a retired schoolteacher, she must be God’s homeliest creation since the rhinoceros.”
“Hmmm. That sounds a bit extreme. We don’t want Pee Wee’s customers to take one look at her and run, now do we?”
Rhoda laughed this time and I laughed again some more, too. The more I laughed, the better I felt. But I knew that my euphoria was not going to last long. With Pee Wee’s mess on my hands and now Jade, well, I knew that I wouldn’t be laughing much after I got off of the telephone. As far as Jade was concerned, she was the kind of problem with no easy solution. She was more like an ongoing disease; a person just had to learn to tolerate her. I didn’t like the fact that my mind kept wandering back to Jade while Rhoda and I were discussing a manicurist for Pee Wee.
I redirected my thoughts back to the manicurist position. “Marlene’s not that bad,” I admitted with a chuckle. “And I think she’d make a good employee for Pee Wee. Anyway, you are the one who said it would be too dangerous to hire a pretty woman.”
“And I meant that, too. But I didn’t mean for you to go overboard. However, even if you hired a woman who looks like Moms Mabley, it would be better than you hirin’ a Janet Jackson look-alike. If you hire one of these cute little wenches runnin’ around Richland, you will have trouble from day one. Men and boys will be in and out of that barbershop tryin’ to set up dates so they could get some pussy. Their women will get jealous and might make their men change barbers.”
I was still reeling from the news about Jade, so I could offer Rhoda only a weak sigh before I resumed my end of the conversation. “Well, if I am going to hire anybody, I’d better get a move on now if I want to make it back to my office in time for the interview that I have set up. Where’s Jade now?”
Rhoda moaned first. Then she took a deep, loud breath. “She’s about to take one of her two-hour-long bubble baths,” Rhoda replied, surprising me with a chuckle. “Poor thing. That Alabama sun wreaked havoc on her beautiful complexion. The first thing I noticed when she walked in the door was those dark splotches on her chin. I guess I’ll have to run over to the Grab and Go and get her some Noxzema.”
The fact that Rhoda was rambling off the top of her head concerned me. I knew that I could avoid Jade, but she couldn’t. If it made her feel better to ramble on and on about that soulless daughter of hers like she was some helpless Little Miss Muffet, the least I could do was listen.
“I know my daughter is a real piece of work, but she’s done some good things, wouldn’t you say?” Rhoda inquired. “Even for you.”
I had to clear my throat and smile first, because as odd as it sounded, what Rhoda had just said was true. I could not ignore the fact that had Jade not tormented me on such a brutal level that it had drastically altered my eating habits, I would not be looking so good right now! I’d still be wearing a size 24 and digging my grave with a fork and spoon. I patted my firm waist and said, “That’s true…”
CHAPTER 17
Rhoda was trying to paint such a rosy picture of Jade that I had to interrupt because I was getting sick to my stomach. “I’m sure Jade is still as pretty as ever, though,” I offered. It gave me a bad taste in my mouth to say something complimentary about Jade.
“Oh, and with those lips, those eyes, that nose—she is still such a livin’ doll! Now she looks more like Naomi Campbell than ever before. Just like me.” Rhoda paused and sucked on her teeth. There was a dreamy tone to her voice, and I could almost see the wheels in her head spinning out of control, trying to convince herself that Jade was not the monster she really was. “It’s a damn shame she’s not tall enough to model. If she had a few more inches, I’d take her to New York myself and march her into Eileen Ford’s office, where I know they’d beg her to sign a contract. Don’t you agree?”
“I agree,” I muttered. “Jade is too gorgeous to ignore. She should take advantage of her beauty while she still has time.” Now I was the one rambling.
“I don’t know how many more times I have to tell her that if she wants to look like me when she’s our age, she’s goin’ to have to take better care of herself. The first thing she did when she arrived home was to grab a Snickers bar out of the candy dish. The only difference between stickin’ a loaded gun in the mouth and a candy bar is, the candy bar will do more damage to her waistline!”
Other than the miserable conversation that I’d had with Pee Wee about his “boredom,” this conversation was one of the worst I’d had in years. I couldn’t wait for it to end. But the last thing I would ever do to Rhoda was brush her off. She was always there for me when I needed her, and as long as I could, I would do the same for her.
“Well, at least she didn’t drag home another fiancé with her like she did when she came back from Mexico. You can be thankful for that,” I stated, almost biting the tip of my tongue because this conversation had become so awkward for me. Rhoda was taking a long time to answer and that made me curious. “Or did she?”
“No, she didn’t bring home a fiancé this time. She brought home a husband.” Rhoda chuckled for a few seconds; then she mumbled a slew of profanities under her breath.
I was speechless. The last time I had asked Rhoda about Jade’s love life, which was just last month, she told me that the girl was between boyfriends. Now here she was telling me that she’d found a new boyfriend and married him in less than a month!
For the first time, Pee Wee’s idea about us packing up and moving to another state sounded somewhat attractive. There was no way I was going to be able to avoid regular confrontations with Rhoda’s daughter. Ever since our falling out, Jade went out of her way to antagonize me—even when she was not even in town. Last Christmas, she’d sent me a dime-store greeting card from New Orleans with my name misspelled in the address and postage due.