She Who Shops

by Joanne Skerrett

  Then Weslee realized she had forgotten to get Sherry’s number after they had limped off to separate cars.

  Darn, she thought. Guess I’ll just have to go to that church next Sunday.

  Chapter 11

  That night, Weslee felt as if she would never walk again. Her lower body felt as if someone had yanked out both her legs and banged them over and over again against a brick wall and then shoved them back into the sockets of her pelvis. She had limped her way out of the car into the apartment building and after a long shower had taken to her bed.

  She kept the phone near the bed so that she wouldn’t have to move in case it rang. She had left Duncan a message on his cell, telling him her finish time. She had hoped he would be so excited for her that he would call right back.

  I just hope he hasn’t gone into one of his moods, she thought.

  She had called her sister again as soon as she had gotten home from the race. Even before she made it to the shower.

  “You’re crazy,” was what Terry had said to her after congratulating her. “I don’t know what would possess you to do that to yourself,” she had said jokingly.

  It was Sunday, so her parents were having dinner over at Terry’s house. Her mother had talked to her quickly. She was too preoccupied with her two grandkids, Kasey and Mark, to bother with Weslee.

  Weslee didn’t mind. She, too, couldn’t help but be captivated by the three-year-old twins when she was around them.

  Her father, however, was so proud. He wanted her to send him her medal so he could show it to his friends at his lodge.

  “So you get to run the Boston Marathon next,” he had said, the pride evident in his voice. “You know, I always knew you were going to do big things. I always wanted to have a boy, but when we first took you home from the hospital, I said that’s it for me. This one’s gonna make me proud.”

  “And what about me, Dad?” she heard Terry say in the background.

  Weslee had laughed. Her father always said things like that to her. It made her so happy just to make him proud. He believed in hard work and achieving. Whenever she or Terry had complained about anything while they were growing up, he had given them a lecture about how he moved to this country in 1963 with a degree in accounting, leaving a government job and his well-off parents behind to drive a taxi on the South Side and sleep at the YMCA for four years before he got a break, working as a mail-room clerk for LaSalle Bank and then working his way up from there to the accounting department. It hadn’t been easy for him; why should it be easy for them?

  That’s why she and Terry never griped too much about homework, studying, sports, going to church every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday, getting into Northwestern. They just did it. They used to daydream out loud to each other about leaving home and leaving Chicago. Weslee would dream about moving to New York and becoming a stockbroker or an investment banker, making a ton of money, going to fancy parties, marrying a rich, handsome man and living in a big house in the suburbs. Terry’s dream was always to move to Milwaukee with Troy Brumant, the boy next door, and have plenty of kids. Terry’s dream had come true right out of college.

  “So, how’s that fine, rich man of yours?” Terry asked.

  “He’s fine. He’s with his family today. I haven’t heard from him yet.”

  Weslee didn’t want to betray how badly she felt about that fact.

  “Girl, this is a big day for you. Why isn’t he there rubbing your feet?”

  Trust Terry to make the obvious so painfully obvious.

  “Well, he’s got his family thing. They don’t get along that well, so I don’t think he wants to tick them off.” She heard herself and didn’t like the way she was sounding.

  “Nice of you to make excuses for a grown man,” Terry said.

  “I’m sure he’s coming. He’s probably just tied up now.”

  “Hmm. What time is it?”

  “It’s eight forty-five,” Weslee answered.

  “Well, I need to go put the kids to bed. They’re up too late as it is. But you know your mother, she’ll keep ’em up all night if she has to.”

  “Fine. I’ll see you guys in a couple weeks. Tell Mom I’ll bake the pie.”

  When Weslee hung up the phone, she looked at the clock on her lonely bedroom wall. It was almost nine. Duncan hadn’t called. She called his cell again. It went straight to voice mail. She reached for another Tylenol. At least if these things don’t get rid of the pain, they should put me to sleep, she thought.

  Two hours later, she was still awake. She was reading a textbook—half reading it and half looking at the phone.

  It never rang.

  He did call the very next morning, full of apologies. His family gathering had gotten loud and rowdy, and he just couldn’t get away. She was still disappointed, but she didn’t want to seem spoiled so she took his excuse lightly, telling him the details of the race.

  In typical Duncan fashion, he wanted to make it up to her. This time it was a weekend trip to the Berkshires—another place she had read about but had never been. She was so excited.

  Chapter 12

  Weslee packed, or prepacked. It was only Wednesday. But she wanted to be sure that she was bringing all the right things on her weekend trip with Duncan. She packed some hiking gear, a nice dress, just in case, and a couple of sexy underthings. She would definitely need those.

  Lana sat on her living room couch, her spiky-heeled boots on Weslee’s coffee table.

  “Wes, I wish you’d come out dancing with us tonight,” she said, flipping the channels on the television.

  “No way. I’m not going into any more smoky, stinky clubs. I don’t know how you do it, Lana.”

  “You’re no fun anymore. Since Duncan started paying a little attention to you . . .”

  “What?” Weslee said coming out of the room, a sweater dangling from her hand.

  “Well, you never want to do anything fun anymore,” Lana said, not taking her eyes away from the TV screen.

  Weslee sighed. What she wanted to say was: I never wanted to go to those clubs. I just have an excuse not to go now.

  “It’s not just Duncan,” Weslee said. “I’ve got to get this place cleaned up, plus finish up that Statistics project before Thanksgiving break. I really don’t have time—”

  Lana raised a hand. “I’ve heard it before, OK?”

  The phone rang. It was Sherry.

  Weslee felt Lana’s eyes on her as she agreed to have coffee with the other woman.

  “Who’s Sherry?” she asked, her eyes narrowing as Weslee hung up the phone.

  “It’s the girl I met at the marathon. Remember I told you about her?”

  “Oh, the Jesus freak?”

  “She really isn’t, you know,” Weslee said. “She’s devout, but she’s totally normal.”

  “And she’s a journalist?”

  “Yup.”

  Lana sniffed. “I don’t trust journalists.”

  Weslee laughed. “Lana, really, it’s not like you’re Carly Fiorina or Donna Dubinsky.”

  Lana looked at her blankly.

  How could she not recognize the names of two of the highest-profile women in American business? Weslee sighed.

  “Where’s she from?”

  “Why?”

  “I just wanna know. Is she fat?”

  “No, she’s not fat. She’s an athlete. And she’s West Indian.”

  “So, she’s ugly?”

  “Lana, why do you have to be so shallow? It’s so childish.”

  Lana laughed. “OK, Ms. Mature Adult. I’m gonna go now. I’m meeting the rest of the girls at the Rack.”

  Weslee felt relieved that she would not be meeting the rest of the group from their class at the raucous bar-dance club-pool hall. The place was one of the city’s biggest meat markets. The one time she went, she had vowed never to go again. Women were wandering around half-naked as men stared and some even groped at them. Weslee had never been so disgusted.

  “Too bad you won�
��t get to see us dancing on the table.” Lana winked as she closed the door behind her.

  Weslee continued to pack for her trip to the Berkshires with Duncan. It was still hard for her to believe she and Duncan were spending so much time together. He made her feel like a princess. She was falling hard, and it had gotten to the point where she couldn’t stop herself anymore.

  With Lana gone from her apartment, she suddenly felt more hopeful and freer to revel in all the feelings that she had for Duncan. Weslee knew that a little familial jealousy was involved, so she tried not to take offense when Lana would roll her eyes every time Duncan’s name came up.

  But now she really wanted to talk to somebody else about this man who was turning her world upside down. She called Sherry.

  An hour later she was in Sherry’s car, driving to a part of the city she had never seen before.

  “Wow, so this is Dorchester?”

  Sherry laughed. “You say it like it’s another country.”

  More like another city, she thought. The old houses close together, the faces of color all over the neighborhood, and the small storefronts reminded her of some neighborhoods in South Side Chicago. This was nothing like the sanitized version of the city that she got from her perch on Commonwealth Avenue.

  “Yes, this is the real Boston. I couldn’t live anywhere else,” Sherry said.

  Sherry Charles was one of those people who loved being deep inside the city, with its noise, crime, litter, and everything else. Her family had been part of the 1980s wave of Jamaicans, Bajans, Grenadians, and other Islanders who had left economically declining Caribbean countries for the promise of a job, a home, and an education in Ronald Reagan’s America. Many of them had found those things were not so easy to come by. Some had returned to their homelands, discouraged that it took more than just one menial job to get from point A to point B in this promised land. Others stayed, grudgingly putting aside their college educations from back home, to take on cleaning jobs, retail work, construction, and trades to feed their families. They worked hard. So hard that the Americans derided their work ethic: All West Indians have eight jobs, had been the running joke. But they kept on working. Now they made up more than a third of the city’s black population, owning most of the houses in the inner city and building a growing middle class right in the heart of Boston.

  They stopped into a café in a crowded square teeming with young Cape Verdean mothers, schoolchildren, idle teenagers, and men and women running errands.

  “This is Uphams Corner,” Sherry announced as she pulled her Toyota into a parking space on the street.

  “Wow. This looks a bit like Ninety-fifth Street.”

  “Uh-uh,” Sherry said. “I’ve been to Ninety-fifth Street—it’s much nicer.”

  They both laughed.

  One of the newspapers Sherry had worked for was the Chicago Sun-Times. She had been a crime reporter, and as she told Weslee, “I saw under the underbelly of that city.”

  The tiny restaurant could not have fit in Boston’s Back Bay. The staff was too friendly and familiar with the patrons and with each other. They hurled jokes back and forth from the kitchen and traded insults jokingly as they served the customers. Weslee, for a minute, tried to picture Lana in a place like this, and she had to smile at the image. She could hear the boom boom boom of the cars driving by on Columbia Road—just like the South Side. Weslee felt right at home.

  They decided on coffee and bread pudding with rum sauce.

  Weslee laughed a lot. Loudly and easily. Sherry was funny, outspoken, self-effacing, and honest to a fault. She reminded Weslee of her old friend Ann Marie when they were both young and carefree and laughed at everything and everybody, sometimes for no reason at all but to laugh.

  “So, you met this man at a party on Oak Bluffs?” she asked Weslee curiously. “That Vineyard crowd has a lot of issues. Be careful.”

  “What do you mean? Like class issues?”

  Sherry nodded, sipping her coffee. “Not all of them, mind you. I did a story on that a few years ago, and some of those people are just weird. They’d say the most innocuous thing and then they’d be like, ‘I don’t want my name in the paper. My friends would just ostracize me.’ They’re just plain strange, some of them.”

  “Well, Duncan’s really not like that. I mean, at first I thought he was, you know, into the ‘Who’s your family, and where did you go to school thing.’ But we’re so close. I think if he had a problem with me not being from money, things wouldn’t have gone this far.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Sherry said. “Have you met anyone in his family yet?”

  “Well, I know Lana. But I knew her before I met him.”

  She nodded. “He sounds like a real catch, girl. Lucky you.” Sherry said this with no guile whatsoever.

  “I know. I really am lucky.” Weslee hesitated. “You know what, Sherry? I was thinking that maybe I should ask him to come home with me for Thanksgiving, you know, to meet my parents.”

  Sherry pursed her lips. “Wes, you probably should let him take the lead on that one. From the little I know about men, I think they like to be in control of the pacing of things. If you ask, it might freak him out.”

  It was what Weslee already knew, but she was disappointed anyway.

  They talked for hours about Sherry’s family. She had three brothers, all married. Her mother had died of cancer a few years before, and her father had remarried, but they were still close. Her entire family lived within ten minutes of each other.

  “You are nothing like Lana,” Weslee found herself saying after two hours had passed and there had not been a single disagreement or put-down that left Weslee cringing.

  “I have to meet this Lana you’re always talking about. She sounds like a real character.”

  “Oh, she is. And you’ll get to meet her soon,” Weslee said.

  “Uh-oh. That sounded like a warning.” Sherry grinned.

  “It was.”

  For the first time since she’d landed in Boston, Weslee felt at home in her skin. She was wearing her new Kors sweater, but Sherry did not even seem to notice it, nor had she complimented her on it. Lana had let out a high-pitched squeal the first time Weslee had worn the gray wooly thing to class. Sherry was also oblivious to the new knee-high brown Costume National boots and the new Tiffany necklace with the intertwined hearts. But once Weslee had gotten over the shock of this sartorial snub she began to relax. This was like the old days, she thought, when she could be her old self who didn’t care too much about appearances. And she was having a good old girlfriend time.

  “Man, I haven’t been in the hood in a while. This is like homecoming!” Weslee laughed, looking outside the café window.

  “You and Lana have never come down here before?” Sherry was incredulous.

  “I don’t think Lana even knows this place exists.”

  Sherry shook her head and took another sip of coffee thoughtfully, and Weslee wondered whether she was being judged. But she brushed the thought away.

  As they rose to leave, it occurred to Welsee that not once had Sherry complained about anything in the tiny eatery. With Lana it was always something: the food was too cold or too hot; the silverware was dirty; the service too slow; the napkins too worn. It had gotten to the point where Weslee herself was beginning to notice those things in restaurants, too. But her increasingly critical eye had not picked up on any of those slips at this little hole-in-the-wall. Maybe she’d been too busy making a real friend.

  Chapter 13

  The semester was winding down toward the Thanksgiving holiday, and everyone was restless. People were comparing airline deals as they made plans to go home for the holiday. Weslee tried to concentrate as the Information Systems professor explained system query language, but it was difficult to stay focused.

  For one thing, she was exhausted. Her schedule at HealthyLife was taking its toll. She still hadn’t told Duncan that she had taken a part-time job. The great thing about being a trainer was t
hat she found she was in better shape for her early morning runs. But she was still tired most of the time. It was all becoming too much. There was dinner tomorrow evening with Lana and Sherry, their first meeting, and she felt as nervous as if she were bringing a man home to meet her parents. Then there was the trip with Duncan on the weekend.

  She was trying to change the way she thought about Duncan—the permanent, together-forever way. She knew it was soon, and Sherry had warned her that she should slow down a bit, but he was making it so hard. She looked down at her cell phone on her desk. On the display screen was the SOS message he had sent her just minutes ago. “I’m in a meeting, but I’m seeing you naked. Help!” the message said. She had wanted to laugh out loud in class when she read it. That was Duncan. He e-mailed and called all day long through his busy day.

  Her cell phone buzzed again. It was another message from him. “Hey, can I come over for dinner tonight? I’ll pick something up.”

  “Ms. Dunster.” The professor was talking to her. “Maybe you could give us a brief summary of what we just discussed?”

  Weslee’s heart dropped, but thankfully she had done the reading. Based on her flimsy memories of the textbook, she bluffed her way through what she knew about SQL for about three minutes, trying to sound as confident and authoritative as she could. Mercifully, the professor didn’t throw her out of the class for her halfhearted efforts. She noticed Lana smirking at her from across the room, and she rolled her eyes in response.

  It all paid off that night. Duncan came over with Chinese from P.F. Chang’s and a bottle of wine at exactly 8:00 P.M.

  “I can’t wait for the weekend,” she said as they ate at her tiny dining room table.

  “I’m glad you’re excited. You’re going to love Williamstown. We’re supposed to get snow this weekend, so it’s going to be real beautiful.”

  “Snow. Oh, that sounds so romantic!” She was ecstatic. Maybe they’d just spend the whole weekend inside the inn, looking out on snow-covered hills and mountains.