Never Trust a Stranger

by Mary Monroe

  All I needed to do was find a man who wanted to marry me.

  I couldn’t wait to see where my “relationship” with Calvin was going—if it was going anywhere at all. I still couldn’t determine if he was as into me as I was into him. For all I knew, he could have been the type of man who came off looking like he was interested in a woman whether he was or not. I’d met a few others who’d seemed too good to be true. They had led me on and lied about how much they “liked” me, but never called me again.

  I recalled my first meeting with Calvin in the coffee shop last Saturday, the day before the Super Bowl. I hoped that by replaying part of our conversation in my head, I’d get a better idea of where his head was. One, if he was only interested in a sexual encounter, the sooner I knew that, the better. Two, if he wanted to develop a relationship with me, the sooner I knew that, the better too. Running in and out of hotel rooms with men passing through town was still exciting, but from my past experiences, I knew that it was just a matter of time before I got bored with that activity.

  The truth of the matter was, I had been looking for my soul mate since I was a teenager. I didn’t want to waste too much more of my time in relationships that had no future. I joined the sex club Joan introduced me to mainly because I was sick of going on dates with men who not only bored me to death and spent very little money on me but also left me sexually unfulfilled. As a member of Discreet Encounters, fun and sex were only a mouse click away.

  I still wasn’t sure Calvin even planned to see me again for another coffee break, or anything else. From the way he had eyeballed me in the coffee shop, like he couldn’t wait to get his hands on me, I thought I almost had him in the bag, so to speak. But I wasn’t so sure of that by the time we got up to leave. He gave me a hug, a quick peck on the cheek, and a pat on my shoulder. Then he was gone. He’d rushed out of the coffee shop as if it was on fire.

  I’d felt so slighted and unattractive, I couldn’t wait to be on my way. Normally, when I drove on Highway I-880, which was busy as hell all the time, I stayed in the fast lane. Like almost every other motorist in the Bay Area, I was always anxious to get to my destination. Even when that place was the gloomy house I shared with my nosy, meddlesome stepmother. I knew that Bertha would be sitting by the door waiting on me like a spider, so I stayed in the slow lane all the way back to South Bay City.

  Just as I had predicted, Bertha was standing in the doorway in one of her outlandish, floor-length dusters, wiping her hands on her apron when I parked in the driveway. I had taken my time getting out of my Jetta. And by the time I stumbled up onto the porch, Bertha had moved to the living room and sat down on the couch. She was fanning her face with the tail of her apron when I entered the room.

  “I thought you were going shopping at the mall to look for some lamps?” she’d said, looking at my empty hands with her eyebrows raised.

  “Um, I did, but I didn’t see any lamps or anything else I liked enough to buy.” Along with being as manipulative and nosy as she was, Bertha was one of the most gullible women I knew. I had been telling her tall tales since I was a child, and she had bought everything I said hook, line, and sinker. I’d even created a fictitious invalid named Liza Mae Ford. This unfortunate woman, one of my former classmates who’d been injured in an auto accident, had no family, so she asked me to come to her house to help her out on an as-needed basis. It was the most creative story I’d ever come up with. Joan even got some mileage out of it too. Bertha and Reed never pressured us to meet “Liza Mae,” so we continued to use her as one of our excuses when we needed to get out of the house for a few hours. Bogus trips to the mall were good-enough excuses, but how many trips to the mall could a normal woman make in a week and come home with one or two items, or no purchases at all? We also used legitimate reasons to be away from home, such as movies and having lunch or drinks with somebody.

  “Where else did you go? To check up on that woman in the wheelchair?” Bertha had asked with her brow furrowed. She was the only person I knew who had jet-black hair on her head, which was dyed, of course, and gray eyebrows.

  “Not today. I just went to visit her two days ago, and Joan went to help her out two nights in a row last week, so Liza Mae’s doing great.”

  “Oh, I was just asking because you were gone such a long time. . . .”

  From the look on Bertha’s face, I knew she was not going to let up on this subject until I told her where else I had been. I was thirty-two-years old, but the way she kept tabs on me, you would have thought I was still a girl. Almost every time that I returned from being out, she had to know where I’d been, who I’d been with, and what we had done.

  “I, uh, I met a friend for coffee.” I’d moved slowly toward the staircase so I could go upstairs and hole up in my bedroom.

  Of all the subjects my stepmother and I discussed, the one I avoided as much as I could was men. It was no secret that she didn’t want me to put romance ahead of her in my life. Her fear was that I’d abandon her for a man. It was also no secret that her forty-four-year-old twins, Libby and Marshall, had no desire to move her into their homes and take care of her, so it was easy for me to understand why she had put so much of the burden on me. She and Daddy, that is. I blamed him for the predicament I was in just as much as I blamed her.

  I could still picture the hopeless look on his face as he lay dying when he made me promise that I would take care of Bertha. Incredibly, at the tender age of fourteen, I’d agreed to that monumental promise. And it was one that was getting harder and harder for me to keep.

  “Who?” Bertha had asked, rising from the couch with a grimace on her heavily lined face. She stood in the middle of the living-room floor for a few seconds, wringing her gnarled hands. Before I knew it, she started following me as I headed upstairs. “Do I know this friend?”

  “No, you’ve never met him.”

  “Him? Him who?”

  “His name is Calvin Ramsey. He’s a truck driver, and he lives in San Jose.”

  I couldn’t believe I was revealing so much information about a man to Bertha. I usually didn’t anymore, unless I’d been drinking. And I couldn’t believe I had the nerve to be talking about a man I wasn’t even sure I’d hear from again, let alone see. But there was something about that truck driver that had me acting like a love-struck teenager. Maybe he didn’t want to have a relationship with me, but maybe he did. No matter what happened or didn’t happen between us, I planned to play it cool and take things slowly. I didn’t want Calvin to think that I was too aggressive or desperate. However, even as levelheaded as I was, I had developed a mild obsession about this man. I was afraid that it would get even worse and I’d lose my perspective and start acting like a fool, just as some of the women Joan and I pitied. When that thought entered my mind, I almost wished that Calvin had never sent that first message to my club in-box.

  “Oh.” Bertha had followed me into my room. “Um, I hope you don’t let him take advantage of you the way some of your other boyfriends did. . . .”

  Her comment had startled me. With an incredulous look on my face, I whirled around so fast and hard, the bones in my neck made a cracking noise.

  “He’s just a friend, Bertha. And, for your information, I don’t let men take advantage of me. I don’t know why you come up with these crazy opinions. Besides, whatever I do is my business. After all these years, you ought to know that.”

  Bertha had looked so sad and small standing there blinking and rubbing her chest. I felt sorry for her. And that was not easy, because she was one of the sources of my aggravation.

  It had been almost nineteen years since Daddy married Bertha Mays, Mama’s best friend. He had told everybody that his romantic relationship with Bertha had not started until after Mama passed, but I knew better. I used to see them getting busy while my mother was upstairs knocking on death’s door.

  Once Mama was gone, Bertha sopped Daddy up like she was a sponge. Before I knew it, they were married and Daddy and I had moved into Berth
a’s big, fancy house in the same neighborhood I had grown up in.

  In a way, I was glad that Daddy and I had Bertha, for his sake more than mine. But even back then, I already had plans for my future. I wanted to do something meaningful. Mama and Bertha had taught at the same elementary school I had attended. My plan was to either teach or become a nurse. I couldn’t decide which profession was more honorable, so it didn’t matter which one I pursued. Somewhere along the line I hoped to meet and marry my soul mate, have several children, and live happily ever after.

  Well, things didn’t work out in my favor. It didn’t take long for me to realize that “happily ever after” was something that happened only in fairy tales. Shortly after Daddy married Bertha, he was diagnosed with liver cancer. It was so aggressive, he died within a few months. But that was not the worst part. Before Daddy died, Bertha assured him that she would continue to take care of me. I had expected that, since I had no other family to speak of and because Bertha was a caring woman. She went out of her way to make other people happy. What I had not been prepared for was my being the main person Bertha counted on to take care of her until she died. And, according to her doctor, she had decades longer to live.

  Bertha was so afraid of growing old alone or in a nursing home, she clung to me like lint on a cheap bedspread. Her own children spent very little time with her, and when they did they treated her like shit. They were nice to her only when they needed money from her, and that was several times a month.

  When I was in my teens, Bertha would often track me and my dates down and join us. When boys came to visit me at the house, she’d sit in the same room with us and dominate the conversation. She’d even ruined one promising relationship by sending an anonymous note to the boy’s mother, claiming I slept around, that I’d given another boy an STD, and all kinds of other shit. None of it was true. When I mentioned it to her, she insisted that a jealous female had sent the note. To this day I was convinced that she was the jealous female.

  So here I was now, still living under Bertha’s thumb. My dream to become a teacher or a nurse was still just a dream. On top of all that, I was not even in a serious relationship with a man and hadn’t been for years. And it was all because of my commitment to Bertha. Most of the men I’d been with didn’t stay with me long once they found out she was part of the equation.

  I had a feeling things were finally going to go my way, and all because of Calvin Ramsey.

  “Where did you meet this Calvin Ramsey,” Bertha had asked, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Huh? Oh, I met him at the mall,” I’d lied.

  If Bertha ever found out I had joined an online sex club, she would probably have a heart attack. A few years ago, if somebody had told me that I would fall in love with a man I met through a sex club, I probably would have had a heart attack myself.

  Chapter 8

  Lola

  “LOLA MAE, YOU PICKED UP A MAN AT THE MALL? HAVE YOU lost your mind, girl?” Bertha had asked, looking quite disturbed by now. From the grimace on her face, I thought she was about to have a seizure. “It was bad enough when you were picking up men in bars. Now I can worry about you day and night. I sure hope I don’t read about you in the newspaper, missing like those three other young, black women who folks are still talking about.”

  “Aren’t you overreacting?”

  “No, I’m not overreacting,” she said gently and with tears in her eyes. “What in the world were you thinking? What’s the point of you watching Dr. Phil and Oprah three or four times every week and not paying attention to what they say about picking up strangers in public?”

  “I didn’t ‘pick up’ anybody, Bertha. A nice man asked me for directions to Macy’s today and then he asked me to have coffee with him.”

  “I am surprised to hear that after all you’ve been taught, you let a strange man pick you up in a predator’s playground like a mall,” Bertha had said, giving me an incredulous look and shaking her head. “That’s as bad as plucking somebody out of one of those Internet chitchat rooms. Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

  One thing was for sure: If I eventually developed a relationship with Calvin, or any other man I met online, I would rather tell Bertha that I’d met him on the street. Most of her generation would never embrace today’s technology. She was the only person I knew who used the computer only to Google coupons and recipes.

  “He was shopping for some curtains for his house.” One thing I had learned over the years about lying was that the more “innocent” you made a situation sound, the more believable it was.

  “He has his own house, or does he live with his mama and sleep on her couch?”

  “It’s his house and he lives alone. Um, a few years ago, his wife ran off with another man. His mama passed several years ago,” I’d said, easily recalling every piece of information Calvin had told me.

  “How many children does he have?”

  “None yet. His wife didn’t want any.” The words were rolling off my tongue like pebbles. I was glad Calvin had told me as much about himself as he had. “And he goes to church.”

  “So?”

  “I thought you wanted me to find a church man.”

  “I did for a while. That was before I realized that the church is where a lot of women find Satan. . . .”

  Bertha’s comments never ceased to amaze me. The ones that had just popped out of her mouth caused a sharp pain to shoot through my chest. She had been married twice, so I knew she had to have a man herself. However, she had not dated any other men since Daddy died. She was in her late sixties, but there were several old dudes in her church and in our own neighborhood who had attempted to woo her. She could have grown old with one of them! But she was not interested. It seemed as if the only person she wanted to grow old with was me.

  I rolled my eyes. Before I could respond, Bertha clapped her hands and gave me a curious smile. “Good news! I thawed out the last of those chitlins you brought home from work last week. We’ll have a nice dinner. Complete with turnip greens and yams. And you can tell me more about this Calvin man.”

  “That’s nice, Bertha,” I’d muttered, flopping down on my bed. “I’ll make the corn bread.”

  “Pffft!” she responded, waving her arms in the air. “You don’t have to worry about that! Guess who’s coming to dinner?” Before I could guess, Bertha announced, “Libby is coming to dinner, and she’s going to bring a pan of corn bread.”

  I gulped and then held my breath. I didn’t breathe again until Bertha left my room, which was a few seconds later. The last thing I’d wanted to do on a Saturday evening was have dinner with a bitch like Libby.

  That was last week, and it had been a painful dinner with Libby sitting directly across the table from me, grazing like a cow, guzzling beer straight out of the can, and complaining about us having chitlins for the fourth time in less than a month. The only good thing about that dinner was that Bertha had not mentioned what I’d told her about the man I’d met in the mall and joined for coffee.

  Here I was today, sitting on my bed scolding myself for jumping the gun with Calvin. I hadn’t heard a word from him, and after all I’d told Bertha last Saturday, I felt like a damn fool now. She had not mentioned his name since. If she never brought him up again, I wouldn’t either, unless I heard from him.

  I removed my cell phone from my purse and hit speed dial for Joan’s number. She answered right away. “Hey, girl. I need to talk,” I began.

  “Uh-oh. You finally heard from your truck driver and he told you he’s not interested after all?”

  “No, I haven’t heard from him.”

  “Now that you’ve had a little time to think about what we discussed today, do you still think Calvin seemed as interested in you in person as he did in his e-mails?”

  “Well, the more I think about how nice and attentive he was in the coffee shop, the more I think he is interested in seeing me again. He listened very patiently and with a lot of attention while I rambled on about TV shows and shopping—th
ings that would bore the average man.”

  “Then I wonder what the problem is with him.”

  “What makes you think there’s a problem?”

  “There is a reason why he hasn’t contacted you again. I mean, he knows he doesn’t have to commit to anything, other than the sex, so something else must be up.”

  I silently agreed with Joan, but I took my time responding. “Maybe I’m wrong and he’s just not interested!” I snapped, not meaning to come off sounding so blunt.

  “Not interested in sleeping with you?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell if sex was even on his mind.”

  “Girl, the man joined Discreet Encounters, so sex is definitely on his mind. He could get busy with a woman every night of the week if he wanted to.”

  “I know that, but . . . well, he gave me the impression that having sex with me was not a priority. When I told him I wanted to see him again, he said, ‘I’ll make sure that happens,’ but he didn’t sound that eager. I’ve gained a few pounds since I took that picture I posted on the club’s website. Maybe he thought I was too big. . . .”

  “Lola, you’re a size 8. If any man thinks you’re too big he’s crazy, and you do not need to be fooling around with a maniac.” Joan laughed first. I laughed a second later.

  “If Reed’s not being too obnoxious, I might come over after Bertha goes to bed tonight so we can continue discussing this.”

  “Not tonight,” Joan said quickly. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. “I have a date and I’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”

  “Oh? Who with? You didn’t mention anything about having a date tonight when we were having drinks today.” I felt slighted, but I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.

  “Remember DrFeelGood?”

  “Oh yes. The plastic surgeon from Palm Beach who has all those celebrity patients. After your first date with him, you couldn’t stop talking about him.”