“Uh-huh, you were playing alright? Am I supposed to believe you knew I was standing out there?”
“Yeah, Mama, playing. I heard you coming down the hall from Roxy’s room. These walls are thinner than you think,” she said as a warning for Nadeen to watch what she said behind her own closed doors.
“You must think I’m stupid.”
“You must think I’m a ho,” Mahalia snapped angrily. In the blink of an eye, Nadeen hauled off and popped her across the face with an open hand.
“I will not be talked to that way in my own house, much less by my own child. I won’t stand for it. You hear me!” Nadeen watched as her daughter massaged her face bitterly, gawking with contempt-filled eyes, which held no tears. “If you want to keep your phone privileges, be mindful of what you say on it and watch your mouth in my house.” Nadeen trembled all over. She’d never been sorrier for anything in her whole life. The anger that caused her to strike Mahalia was misguided. She’d been storing it up for Richard.
“Since you really believed what I said to Trevy, then why don’t you take the phone, Mama?” Mahalia huffed. “You don’t know me any better than you know Daddy.” Nadeen clenched her teeth as she lunged furiously at her daughter like before. Only this time was different. Nadeen froze when Mahalia jutted the opposite side of her face toward her mother’s outstretched hand. “What’s the matter, Mama? I’m just turning the other cheek!” she hissed proudly. When a single tear streamed down the large swollen red welt in the shape of her attacker’s hand, Mahalia scowled. Nadeen understood then she’d made a dreadful mistake. Her daughter wasn’t crying because of the stinging blow. Mahalia was hurt far greater and much deeper than a mere slap could create. She shared her mother’s concerns while dealing with her own issues regarding her father’s deficiency of time and attention. It had become devastatingly evident to Nadeen that she wasn’t the only one in the room missing Richard and the way things used to be.
Nadeen stepped toward Mahalia with her arms open wide, but her efforts were not received in the spirit they were offered. Mahalia stiff-armed Nadeen then turned her face away. She wasn’t ready to forgive her mother’s backlash or reluctance to do what she felt necessary to fix her marriage. Nadeen backed away, feeling sorry for harming Mahalia and worse for allowing her unrest to damage their friendship. She wanted to apologize. She craved reconciliation. She needed forgiveness and a long conversation with her husband.
Nadeen stomped into Richard’s home office, tossing drawers and digging through his files. She didn’t find anything that appeared inappropriate. After duplicating her steps a third time, she noticed the corner of a white card sticking out from beneath the black leather desk pad. Intuition forced her to ease it out with her fingernails. Nadeen felt foolish when she discovered it was simply a business card from a clothing store, Giorgio’s Men’s Boutique. The name Dior Wicker had been written on the bottom in blue ink, but it didn’t raise an alarm because Richard explained how she’d sold him a suit and a couple of neckties. Just as Nadeen made a move to return it, she remembered what Dior said earlier that day about how she fit into Richard’s life.
Giving in to her sixth sense again, Nadeen flipped over the card. Her head wobbled wearily when the numbers written on the back were underlined twice with the words cell phone jotted beneath them. There it is, she thought, hidden in plain view. Since the abbreviated evening church service had concluded more than two hours ago, Richard should have been home by then or at least have called to check on Roxanne’s condition. Seeing as how neither had occurred, Nadeen sat in the leather high-back chair, staring at the telephone.
While punching in the numbers, she imagined saying things she wouldn’t be sorry for or have to repent later on. She’d meant them, all of the vile rants entitled to a wife whose husband had found comfort in another woman’s bed. Nadeen rehearsed a tirade of words in her mind, a wall of them, and each one more putrid than the last.
Fifteen miles away, Dior’s cell phone rang repeatedly. She ignored the annoying summons from the nightstand next to the bed as her evening companion lapped heartily between her thighs until she erupted thunderously in unbridled cataclysmic ecstasy. “Okay, okay,” she muttered, pushing his head away once she’d had enough. “I don’t have nothing left. Go on now, lay down or something.” Dior slid off the moist sheets then scurried into the bathroom. She groaned when the phone began ringing again. “I’ll turn it off in a second!” she hollered from the darkness.
“Someone wants you almost as bad as me,” he replied. “Why don’t I answer it?”
“Because you’re not that crazy,” she teased, returning to the bedroom. Dior tried to steal a peek at the incoming call before shutting it off, but the number wasn’t familiar to her. “Somebody must have the wrong number,” she said dismissively.
“Go ahead and take the call,” he insisted, putting Dior in a prickly spot. She did not want to risk it being another man asking for quality time she didn’t have to spare. She was forced to answer the call in order to throw off the suspicion of juggling lovers in a crowded bed.
Dior grimaced when the ringing continued. Smiling uncomfortably, she picked up the phone. “Hello? Yes, this is Dior. Who’s this?” she asked, frowning at the woman’s ugly tone. “How’d you get this number? What? Oh, it’s like that?”
Although Nadeen worked hard at controlling her emotions, she found herself shouting belligerently while demanding to speak with her husband immediately. She had fallen so far, stooping to the level of the bitter wife snooping through her man’s things in a desperate attempt of grasping at straws. Nadeen held her tongue when she heard rustling noises and whispers in the background.
Dior was boiling hot when she shoved the telephone in his face. “Here, it’s your wife,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs crossed and arms folded angrily.
He put the phone to his ear and then grunted calmly, as if it hadn’t been the first time he’d gotten jammed in the middle of two women. “Yes,” he said. “No, no, no. How should I know? I’m sorry too,” he uttered softly, with a slight grin on his lips. Dior stared at him oddly, wondering what had transpired during the brief phone call. She was almost afraid to ask — almost.
“Tell your wife that type of behavior will not be tolerated. Who she think she is, coming at me like this?”
“An even better question is: Who’s Richard?” Giorgio asked, handing the phone back to Dior. His voice was calm and even. “His wife was really pissed. She sounded rather determined to find her husband,” he added devilishly, then headed for the shower alone.
Dior sat in silence. Giorgio was certainly on to her about Richard, although she would emphatically deny it all the way to her grave. Nadeen thought she’d found the answer to her husband’s extracurricular activities before her theory suffered a major collapse. It was only a matter of time before Dior confronted Richard, making him aware of Nadeen’s errant phone call to the right woman on the wrong night. Richard had explained to Dior earlier how he would be working late at the church to prepare for a very important meeting on the following day. Apparently, he did not have the same talk with his wife. Now Dior held the trump cards. Still, she’d have to play them decisively in order to win the entire pot. Getting Giorgio to disregard that phone call was her first and most immediate move. Sharing a steamy shower in the dark wasn’t a bad way to start cleaning up a hot mess. Actually, it was the perfect place to begin.
Nadeen, on the other hand, was in a world of confusion. Richard wasn’t with Dior as she suspected. To make matters worse, Dior put her boyfriend on the phone to embarrass her. After making mistakes all evening, Nadeen waited by the door to tell Richard what happened with Mahalia and later with Dior. She prayed for enough apologies to go around when her explanations were done.
“Are you all right, Nadeen?” Richard asked the moment he saw her sullen expression. “Is it Roxy? Why didn’t you call me?” He laid several rolls of architect plans on the dining room table then placed both h
ands on her shoulders. “Why didn’t you tell me she wasn’t feeling any better?”
“Roxy’s fine. Just a stomach virus and some companionship issues,” she answered uneasily.
“Maybe you ought to tell me now what you should have hours ago,” he said firmly, figuring something had taken place she wasn’t too happy about or proud of.
Nadeen lowered her head shamefully. “I didn’t call because I can’t remember the last time you answered readily. So, I got my own ideas about catching up with you.”
“Catching up with me?” Richard repeated. “I was at the church. Phillip and the other deacons were there going over those plans for the charter school.” He gestured toward the kitchen table. “We talked about it in the car today. I thought you were listening.” Richard took a seat next to Nadeen on the love seat. “What’s going on? What happened tonight?”
“I thought Mahalia was fooling around with boys and getting interested in all kinds of God-forbidden three-way sex games with some college kid.”
Richard pounced up erratically. “What do you mean, you thought? How did something so ridiculous even get into your head?”
“I heard Mahalia on the phone. She knew I was eavesdropping from the hallway so she started talking dirty, just loud enough so I’d hear it and get all worked up.”
“So it was a bad joke. She got her digs in. You realized what she was doing so it’s all good, right?”
“Wrong, Richard! Way wrong. I overheard our daughter talking about sex and letting boys touch her. I lost it. She said some things. I said some things, then I smacked her.”
Richard was beside himself. Mahalia was a good girl, not one who needed to be punished with vicious blows from her parents. “You smacked Mahalia, where?”
“I slapped her face.”
“What! You didn’t! I leave for a meeting at the church and you’re here beating on our child like she’s some woman in the streets. Where’d this anger come from?”
“From you, Richard!” she spat scornfully. “You caused me to distrust my daughter and then I jumped on her when she stood up for herself. You’re the one who got Roxy playing sick and me on edge with everyone around me. If I had known you weren’t with Dior Wicker, I wouldn’t have had to call her looking for you.”
“Dear God,” Richard grumbled. He stumbled back to the love seat, wearing a wearied expression. “You put your hands on our daughter and accused the same woman of having an affair with me twice in one day then you have the nerve to blame all of this on me — who, might I add, happened to be at the church. If you’d had half a mind to call, you’d have known that.” Richard was on his high horse then, with no plans of stepping down anytime soon. “Please tell me how my doing the Lord’s work caused you to act like you did. Because from where I sit, you’ve got it twisted.”
“Oh, do I? I admit going off half-cocked when I shouldn’t have. I can even admit to snooping in your office to find Dior’s number. But I will not let you put the weight of this family on my shoulders. That’s your burden to carry, Brother Pastor, yours and yours alone. Try staying home sometimes and seeing to the well-being of your children before the cares of the world. They need you, your time and your attention. I can get by with the crumbs you leave me, they can’t. Now, if you’re finished patting yourself on the back and condemning me for my shortcomings, maybe you could look in on the girls.” Nadeen struck out toward the kitchen to put away the plate she was accustomed to setting out for him. “Oh, by the way, when you do talk to that tramp, and I know you will, tell her I’m sorry for interrupting her date. The man lying next to her had reason to be irritated by the misstep I took but he handled the situation like a gentleman. Maybe he’ll get over it like I just did.”
Eighteen
Please, Baby, Please
Bright and early the following morning, Richard pulled another snatch-and-grab before rushing from his bedroom. He dressed quickly and left a trail of smoke down the staircase, through the kitchen, and out of the door. Richard kept trying to convince himself he could handle Nadeen, explain what happened to Dior, and manipulate the outcome. There was no way to predict what Dior would say after she answered the telephone with a graveled voice. Richard didn’t try to guess.
“Hey,” he said, strained.
“Hey, yourself,” she whispered, tired from Giorgio’s extended stay through two a.m. “Who is this?” The question was meant to rattle Richard’s cage. Dior was a veteran at pulling a man’s chain then leading him around by the nose.
“It’s Richard. Are you alone?” His question was plain and simple with no covert underlying meaning. He honestly wanted to know if the man Nadeen mentioned, in an undeniable attempt to rub his face in it, was still there warming Dior’s sheets.
“Why wouldn’t I be alone?” she answered with another question.
“Sorry to wake you. I know we need to talk and I know you like to sleep in on Mondays but . . .”
She groaned testily. “But what, Richard? If you really cared about my beauty sleep, there’d be no buts about it. And I’d be getting this call around ten o’clock instead of” — Dior reached for the digital clock resting next to her bed — “eight nineteen?”
“It couldn’t wait until after my meeting with the building contractors. I didn’t sleep a wink. There’s no chance of maintaining focus without hashing out what happened last night. Nadeen told me she called you while looking for me. That was unacceptable. I recognize it and I want to make it up to you.” There was a long pause on the other end. Richard wondered if she had drifted off to sleep. “Dior, you there?”
“For the time being,” she answered eventually. “Now that you got me up and you seem so determined to get into what your crazy wife did, tell me why I’m still holding this phone.”
“I’m not too far from there. Can I come and visit for a minute?”
Agreeing to see Richard before his meeting, Dior pretended to be more agitated than annoyed. “Man, I guess so. Stop by Starbucks and bring me something sweet. Hurry up.” Dior ended the phone call without another word between them. Richard was clueless. The young woman he’d planned to train had just shortened his leash and yanked on it for good measure. In addition, Richard was glad to fetch her coffee and then drag in with his tail between his legs. Dior had him right where she wanted him: in a precarious predicament and scratching at her door to get in.
Seven minutes later, Richard rang the bell. A million scenarios danced around in his head but only one appealed to him. He wanted things back the way they were, before Nadeen contacted his mistress. He’d worked hard formulating a tasty setup, a secret piece on the side with all the trimmings. As he waited for Dior to answer the door, Richard submitted an unthinkable prayer request. “God, I know it’s wrong for me to be here. I don’t even know how to fix my mouth to ask but I need this woman in my life. Please help me salvage this. In your son, Jesus,’ name, amen.” Richard felt like a drug addict standing on the crack house steps, preparing to give over the last of his rent money for one more ten-dollar hit. There wasn’t any reason to continue with the empty self-talk he’d begun spouting to himself every time he drove home with a guilty stone around his neck. Those days had passed him by. He was in it now, waist deep.
Dior opened the door ever so slightly. She wasn’t certain about letting him back in. Richard could barely lift his eyes from the cement porch. Dressed in navy slacks and a soft brown blazer so he’d be comfortably business casual at the meeting, he was all dressed up with no place to go. “We have to do this right here?” he asked sullenly. “What about your nosy neighbors?”
“I don’t give a —” she said, catching herself. Dior had more respect for Richard’s position as a pastor than he did. “I don’t have time to be concerned about my neighbors this morning because of what went down last night. See, my phone kept ringing. There was this woman on the other end, a very loud woman who was bananas about finding her husband. It doesn’t even matter how she came across my cell phone number. The fact is, she d
id.” Richard hated being talked to like a chump. However, Dior had him literally on the outside looking in. He stared at her through the crease in the door, wrapped in a flannel housecoat he didn’t know she owned. “You told me you had her in check,” Dior continued. “I told you what would happen if you weren’t up to task. I don’t stand for men bringing drama up in here. I can’t afford to. That’s why we discussed the rules up front, which leads me to my next point, the remedy for breaking rule number two. Since you let your married life seep into mine, I’ll expect a gift or cash in the amount of five hundred dollars. That’s if you expect me to carry on with this. Weakness on your end almost shamed the hell out of me last night and it’ll cost you today.” Dior saw the question in his eyes then tackled it before he mustered the nerve to ask it outright. “After your wife jumped on my chest, my brother started trippin’. He listened to her yelling about this and that, then he got all up in my business, asking if I was into kicking it with married men now. You have no idea how that felt. Should’ve seen the look on his face when he asked me who Richard was and why his wife thought he could be cocked up in my bed.”
“Your brother?”
“Yeah, Dooney. I told you I had a twin brother. He came by to fix that rack in the guest closet. It keeps dumping my winter clothes on the floor. You almost met him the other night when he rolled by to see about it. He said he saw your car, noticed the lights were off upstairs. Said he decided against killing my groove. Now how am I gonna look confessing that I was getting my freak on with you?” Richard bought the persuasive explanation she’d dropped at his feet. Dior could have told him it was Santa Claus making a surprise spring visit. Richard would have believed it because he wanted to keep his fantasy alive. Sharing her with another lover wasn’t part of it. Accepting lies for shades of truth had become an essential component. Nadeen accepted Richard’s fabrications and he later swallowed Dior’s baited deceit in one big gulp. He wasn’t any closer to manipulating those circumstances than Nadeen was to stopping him from sneaking off and satisfying his earthly lusts. From the small rented house across town, Dior was practically running the Allamay mansion by the seat of her panties. Control was merely a by-product of giving Richard access to them as often as she saw fit. He was whipped and practically begging to pay for more.
Sinful Too Page 15