by B. M. Hardin
Yes, Mama had a small life insurance policy as well but we’d used it to remodel the house.
The house was old and needed a ton of upgrades in order for it to be suitable to live in and raise a family.
The payments weren’t all that high, so Keymar and I thought that using the extra money to remodel the house was a good idea.
Keymar had a great job driving for a local company and made more than enough money to take care of the house payments and every other expense that we had.
Who knew that he was going to pass away so soon?
The bad part was that we had been in the middle of switching life insurance policies and since the process had never been officially completed, I wasn’t able to collect on either policy when Keymar died.
So now, the house payments and everything else were my responsibilities.
The house payments weren’t all that much but they were enough; especially when you barely had enough coming in.
But I was trying my best, even when my best just didn’t seem good enough.
With the house, money and my parents on my mind, I recalled the last words that Mama had said to me.
“Envy, I had you when I was just a young girl. I had no idea how to be a mother. I was just following around a man in a uniform like I was some little puppy dog. Trying my best to get out of the projects and be better than my folks thought that I would be. Had I had any sense, I surely wouldn’t have named you Envy. That’s one of the seven deadly sins you know. I don’t know what I was thinking. All I knew was that I had a beautiful, precious baby girl that I thought the world of. You grew up to be such a beautiful woman and I’m so proud of you baby. You are going to have an amazing life and an amazing earthly experience. But believe me, Mama will be waiting on you on the other side,” Mama had said.
Minutes later, she took her last breath and closed her eyes.
She’d said a mouthful, and had left a hell of a lot to live up to, but I was a fighter.
And just like she’d fought breast cancer for almost ten years, I was here to win.
And I just couldn’t give up now.
That night, after I cut my maid uniform into a thousand tiny pieces, I looked out at the stars as I laid restless in my worn out queen-sized bed.
I couldn’t help but feel disappointed and maybe even defeated. It seemed as though I was always finding myself between a rock and a hard place.
But something just had to give.
After hours of staring at the sky and finally feeling sleepy, I headed to the window to close the blinds but…
“Ahh!” I screamed at the pair of eyes staring at me.
With my hand on my chest, instead of running away, I took a closer look.
It was my neighbor Rodney.
He’d scared the hell out of me!
And the scariest part of all was that even though he knew that I saw him, he didn’t run.
Instead he grinned and then walked away, slowly, as though stalking or peeping through my window wasn’t a crime.
I was sick of his ass!
That was the last straw!
The perverted comments, I could handle.
The disrespectful looks, I could deal with.
But peeping through my window was just too damn far!
I tried to stay out of his marriage and not rat his inappropriate ass out to his wife constantly but enough was enough.
Even though I knew that she heard him, maybe it would actually sink in if she heard it from me.
I checked the time to see that it was a little before midnight but I didn’t care.
I was going over there.
Getting myself together, I headed down the hallway.
Tia was standing there, watching me, awaiting an explanation for my yells.
I briefly told her and explained to her that if I wasn’t back in ten minutes to call the police.
Tia was a little thuggish at heart; so I knew that if they tried anything, the police would be the least of their problems.
Heading next door I wasn’t at all nervous.
If anything I was pissed off and after the kind of day I’d had, Rodney had picked the wrong time to get on my bad side.
I banged on the front door and instead of Rodney coming to the door, his wife answered it instead.
His wife hardly ever spoke to me and I only assumed that it was because she knew her husband had a thing for me.
But that was her problem.
“Where’s Rodney? You tell your husband that the next time I catch his peeping ass in my window, his ass is going to jail!”
His wife didn’t say a word.
She simply looked at me as though she didn’t believe me.
Rodney appeared and I wanted to push his wife out of the way so that I could smack him in his face.
“If you ever look in my window again, your ass is going to jail. Do you understand me?” I said as harsh as I could.
His wife turned to face him.
“What? You already know I want her. Hell, you want her too,” Rodney said to her.
What?
What the hell kind of sick shit is going on over here?
I waited for her to say something to him but she didn’t.
“Unless you’re going to bring your sexy ass in here and go to bed with us, I suggest you go on back home,” Rodney finally said.
I was completely and utterly disgusted!
People today were just plain ole’ crazy and it was just my luck that I had a pair of lunatics as neighbors.
But I could get crazy too and I had to make sure that both of them knew that I meant business.
“Don’t be surprise if you get a not so friendly visit from the police tomorrow. I just need to make sure that something is on file; just in case you pull something like that again and you end up losing an eye. If you think I’m playing…try me. Stay the hell away from me, my house and my bedroom window. Now you freaks enjoy your night,” I said and hurriedly walked away.
Wow, this has been one hell of a day!
The next morning, I woke up with a major headache.
I assumed that it was from having such an awful day the day before with the hotel and the nasty neighbors’ next door but I was going to have to shake it off and get started with my day.
I had things to do.
I headed to the room where my sister was sleeping and picked up her laptop.
After secretly connecting to the neighbors Wi-Fi, I headed to the site to file my unemployment.
I wasn’t sure as to whether I was supposed to put that I had been fired or that I’d quit.
Both selections were pretty much valid considering the whole ordeal, but I went with the one that was more than likely going to rule in my favor.
I was fired…but I put laid off.
Doesn’t really matter that it wasn’t exactly the correct term but for Carmen’s sake, she had better cooperate or she was surely going to wish that she had.
I needed every little bit of money that I could get in order to keep a roof over my baby’s head until I could do better and I would sing like a canary if she tried to deny me of what was rightfully mine.
She didn’t want these problems and that was the truth.
I was as sweet as apple pie, but if I was pushed to the edge, I didn’t mind reaching out and touching somebody, if you get my drift.
Mama used to say that it was a big sibling thing.
I wasn’t sure and I didn’t care what they called it. All I knew was that if any of them had a problem, I went running and talking was the last thing that I was coming to do.
Closing the computer, I got myself together and headed out to get a few other things done.
I lived in the city, and where I couldn’t walk, I rode the bus.
I had a car, but it needed a new transmission.
It had been broken for quite some time so I wouldn’t be surprised if it needed something else by now.
So, it was either my two feet or public transportation.
In all honesty, unless the weather was bad, I didn’t mind walking; it kept everything tight and just right.
My daughter had taken me from an eight to an eighteen, well maybe a twenty, and I carried every bit of the extra weight in my hips.
My body was full of curves, speed bumps, and everything else but I loved me some me!
I was well proportioned in all of the right places.
From the front you would have thought that I had an ass the size of Texas… but I didn’t.
I had just enough junk in my trunk.
But it was more than enough.
The top half of my body was rather small.
Small breasts, small arms and I didn’t have a gut or even a baby-pouch.
I was thick with it, definitely a big girl, but I was in shape though.
And baby there was nothing like curves that stayed in place or a plus-sized woman who could walk a runway with confidence beside a woman that was a size two and still look just as good because everything was firm and didn’t jiggle.
Yes, I was that woman and I absolutely loved the skin that I was in.
Curves and all, I looked good naked…and really, that was all that really mattered.
I headed up the street wearing sunglasses.
It was barely 9:00 a.m. but the sun was on its A-game. It sat high and shined bright, causing me to immediately forget about looking cute and I proceeded to pull my head full of curls into a ponytail.
But I walked on.
Nothing was going to stop me from trying to get things done.
Finally, I reached the bus stop.
The bus was running late, as usual, but I tried not to become frustrated.
I had more important things to worry about.
I especially had to make sure that I went by the police station. The whole incident still had me extremely uncomfortable.
It was bad enough that Rodney made passes at me but to know that his wife knew about it and that she wanted to be a part of some crazy sex orgy that included the three of us was just disturbing.
It all just made me sick to my stomach.
“Envy?”
I looked up to see that it was Carmen who had interrupted my thoughts.
She had the top down on her black and chromed Mercedes convertible and I must say…she looked like a million bucks.
Unintentionally, I started to wonder if she had once been a whore-maid herself, or if she still was.
I wondered how many times she’d given herself to the hotel guests in order to afford such an expensive car.
I was sure that she had.
Or maybe she simply collected a fee from selling others.
Whether it was one way or the other, we both knew that a hotel management position didn’t pay that damn much; but she wasn’t going to add me to the group of women that she made money off of.
She was sadly mistaken.
I just stood there, staring at her as she stared at me.
“Can we talk?”
“I heard you loud and clear yesterday. There’s nothing for us to talk about.”
“Why are you making this so difficult? I’m trying to help you Envy. Look at you, you need the money,” she said, almost sincere.
Seriously?
This woman was really trying my patience.
She was about two seconds from a throat punch and she didn’t even know it.
Why was it so hard for her to understand that my precious ruby didn’t come with a price tag?
It was hard enough, for me, to give it up for free.
There was no way in hell that I would be able to try and sell it.
I had only been with one man, one time, other than Keymar.
I felt so dirty and guilty that I started to cry while the other man was on top of me.
Keymar had been my first and my only…until that night with the other guy of course.
Keymar was the only man I’d ever loved, or even dated for that matter.
As I stated, we’d met in high school and had been joined at the hip ever since.
When he died, we were only three months away from our wedding day.
We really had no excuse as to why we’d taken so long to tie the knot.
We would often say that there was no rush and that we had our whole lives to live and that our best days were ahead of us.
Boy, were we wrong.
But even once he was dead and gone, I still felt extremely loyal to him. I still felt as though I was in a relationship with him although he was no longer with me.
I didn’t want to feel that way, but I did.
Even to this day, I did.
Anyway, I tried to force myself to move on.
I tried to force myself to date and move on with my life but it wasn’t easy.
But that night, I forced myself to keep going so I allowed my date to baby step me through the whole sex thing, but I couldn’t wait for it to come to an end.
And that night, I vowed to never put myself in that situation again.
I wasn’t giving it up, to anyone, until I was ready.
And after three years, I was still unsure as to if I was really ready.
Sex with a man or even finding a man were usually the furthest things from my mind.
Sure, I had my lonely nights, and there were plenty of times that I wanted to be touched…inside and out.
But for the most part, I didn’t have time to dream or worry about a feeling that could easily be taken care of with my fingers.
I was too busy worrying about how to keep my head above water.
Shaking away my thoughts and before I even had a chance to respond to Carmen, the bus turned the corner and in order for them to pull up, Carmen had to pull off.
Glancing in her rearview mirror and without a single word, Carmen sped off without so much as looking back in my direction.
I rolled my eyes and stepped onto the bus.
I didn’t need her, her help or her offer.
I had options.
After spending hours signing up for benefits, stopping at a few staffing companies, and by the police station, I decided that it was time to head back to my side of town.
It was Wednesday, which was the hotel’s payday, so I decided to stop by on my way home.
The hotel wasn’t one that had hundreds of different locations all over the world, but it was one that well-known, locally and nationally.
It had been founded by a pretty wealthy family, and it was over one hundred years old.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure why they’d never decided to branch out, expand, or start a chain of hotels all over the place.
The hotel was very popular and very successful.
But come to think of it, I’d recently discovered that it was a hotel of many secrets, and I was sure that the secret activities had something to do with keeping things simple.
I guess the one location made sense.
It made it easier to keep things on the hush.
I was almost certain that since I was no longer an employee that maybe I was supposed to let them mail my check to me, but I couldn’t wait for all of that.
I was already stressing over how I was going to make ends meet and I needed my funds in my hand so that I could accurately calculate everything.
With this check, the small and last three day check that I would receive next week, Horizon’s monthly check and the little assistance that I did get approved for, I figured that I could probably make it for a month or two but after that, I would absolutely have to have a job.
The staffing agencies from earlier promised to submit me to a few open positions, but because of my short list of experience, I was only promised possible call backs.
But I was hopeful.
Walking into the hotel, immediately, I noticed things that I hadn’t noticed before.
I noticed that there were a few maids whom I’d never seen pick up a broom or even push a cart for that matter.
I could only assume that they were a
part of the executive group of maids as Carmen had called them.
Watching one of the maids that looked out of place, I noticed a married man twisting off his wedding band and then he placed it into his back pocket as he followed the maid towards Carmen’s office; instead of heading down the hall to a room or to the lobby elevator.
It’s amazing what you see when you’re actually looking.
I even saw that some of the maids were wearing diamonds, real ones, on their ears, necks and their wrists.
Have you ever known a maid to own diamonds?
Nope…me either.
I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed all of these things before.
How could I have not been paying attention?
And then again, I was always good about minding my own business and protecting my own secrets.
Hiding things seemed to work better when you stayed to yourself.
After standing around for another minute or so, I headed towards Carmen’s office.
I was surprised to find that the gentleman and the maid were nowhere in sight once I’d entered.
I hadn’t seen them come back out.
Where did they go?
“I’m here for my check,” I said without bothering to greet Carmen first.
“What check?”
What the hell did she mean what check?
I needed my money and now was not the time to be playing around with my funds.
“Look, we can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” I said to her.
She sat back in her chair and smiled.
“Unless you want the police to know about the secret floor, the maid-whores and this little Hush Hotel that you are running, I suggest you give me my money.”
“You couldn’t prove it even if you tried,” Carmen said confidently.
“You wanna bet?” I asked her pulling out my cell phone.
Carmen glared at me.
I could tell that she didn’t know whether to believe me or whether she should try to call my bluff but after a while she cleared her throat, reached in her desk and handed me my check.
Bitch.
“It’s such a shame. I really liked you too,” she said and then lowered her head and pretended to be looking at her paperwork.
The funny thing was that I’d been quite fond of her as well.
Carmen and I had shared good conversations, a few drinks, laughs and even a couple of meals since I’d been working for the hotel.