Minutes later, he received a call from Lacette. “I’m going to Baltimore tomorrow for the transplant. I know you’ll want to go with me, but you’ve lost so much time from work since I came from the hospital, that I . . . Why don’t you come over when I get back home. Daddy will drive me to Baltimore and back.”
He appreciated her concern for him. He hadn’t worked a full day since she was released from Frederick Memorial. “All right. Call me when you get home. I’ll spend the night at your place in case you need me for anything.”
When he learned that Lacette wouldn’t come home until Friday, he made plans to finish landscaping her property by the time she returned, and to have a little celebration with her at her home that night. However, Kellie had other plans for him.
She telephoned him at noon Friday. “I can be free tonight, and I don’t know when I can manage it again. Meet me at the corner of Third and Market Streets at seven o’clock and figure out somewhere for us to go. Somewhere nice and somewhere out of Frederick.”
“I can’t make it tonight,” he said.
“Oh, yes you can. If you don’t, you can’t even imagine how sorry you’ll be.”
“Your threats don’t scare me, but the sooner I get this over with, the better.”
He’d have to fix it up with Lacette somehow. After telling Marshall that something had come up that he couldn’t get out of, he headed for his rendezvous with Kellie. Rain pouring in torrents nearly obscured his vision, but she was clearly visible at the bus stop. She hopped in, and he drove without speaking until he reached a motel just outside of Braddock Heights.
“I’ll register,” he told her. “Wait here, unless you don’t mind being recognized.”
“I’ll wait here.” Douglas registered, stepped over to the water cooler and took the Viagra, and went back to the van for Kellie.
“My, my,” she taunted. “A gentleman if it kills you.”
He unlocked the door, pulled off his raincoat and turned on the television. She walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t be so glum. It isn’t as if you were going to your execution. I’ll—”
He cut her off. “The hell you say. I’d rather stick my hand in fire.”
“Not for long, you won’t.” She pulled her sweater over her head and unzipped her jeans. “I know how to make a man forget everything, including his name.”
He looked at her naked breasts, large and firm, and prayed that the pill would work and that he’d soon feel something.
“Come on and get busy,” she said and offered him one of her breasts. No man liked the sweet taste of a nipple better than he did, but all he felt was revulsion. Thank God it was beginning to work. She moved to sit on his lap, but he stood up, foiling her attempt to turn the affair into an intimate one.
“You can take a horse to water, Kellie, but you can’t make him drink. We’re not making love here. This is unadulterated sex. You wanted to be screwed, and that is what I’m going to do. Screw you. That and nothing else. Period.”
“Not even a kiss?”
“Definitely not that. Get in the bed.” She stripped off her bikini panties, threw back the covers and slid between the sheets.
He undressed and joined her, and immediately she attempted to lure him into foreplay. When he disallowed it, she tried to fondle him, but he gripped both of her hands and held them over her head. She rolled on to her back, and he mounted her, hating himself because the Viagra had made him hard, and he needed relief. He took care not to hurt her and plunged in, only to find her moist and ready. He used all the skill at his command to bring her to orgasm and then, to his eternal joy, he could not find release, but became flaccid. He separated himself from her and sat on the side of the bed. Suddenly his stomach heaved, and he raced to the bathroom to regurgitate, and barely made it. He retched until pains shot through his belly.
I’ve got to get myself together. Right now, I don’t have the energy to start the motor of that van. He ran cold water in the basin, washed his face, gargled and wet the back of his neck. When he walked back into the room, she had dressed and was sitting in a chair with her knees crossed. He didn’t apologize, because he didn’t feel like it. He dressed as quickly as he could, aware that she ogled him without any evident shame.
He didn’t speak until he took her to the corner at which he had picked her up earlier that evening. “This settles my debt to you.” She got out, and he drove home.
He went to Lacette’s house the next morning before he went to the hotel. When she didn’t answer the door, he telephoned her. “This is Douglas. I’m sorry about last night. How are you?”
“If you were interested in my health, you wouldn’t have spent last evening making love to my sister.”
“What?”
“No point in denying it. She told me the precise spot on your belly where you have that scar. Good-bye.”
Stunned, he thought first to confront Kellie. But instead, he telephoned Marshall.
“I’m coming in to the hotel right now, Douglas. We can talk then. This won’t do for the telephone.”
“I went to Kellie and attempted to blackmail her into donating that bone marrow to Lacette.” Douglas told Marshall the remainder of the saga in detail, including his bout of regurgitation. “And because I only kept my end of the bargain and didn’t make love to her, she told Lacette, who thinks I’m the worst man alive.”
“Yes, I know, and she embellished it, because Lacette told me about it last night as soon as Kellie called her. I believe you. It’s just the kind of thing Kellie would do, but don’t worry. I’ll take care of Lacette.”
“Look,” he said. “I’m not going to Lacette on my knees. She should have waited to find out what I had to say. But no. She hung up.”
“Don’t make the mistake of being as foolish as she is.”
Marshall drove into town around noon that same Saturday and telephoned Kellie. “Either meet me in the lounge of the Belle Époque in an hour, or I’ll be at your apartment in twenty minutes.”
He stood when she walked across the lounge toward him, but refused her attempt to kiss his cheek, his daughters’ normal greeting. “Let’s go in here.” He gestured toward the coffee shop. “How could you sink so low as to blackmail your sister’s fiancé into going to bed with you? I knew there was something fishy when you suddenly got religion and decided to save your sister’s life.”
She hung her head, obviously unable to look at him. “And then you had the crassness to call Lacette and tell her that Douglas made love to you. If you call what went on between you lovemaking, I pity you. He told me the entire story beginning with his meeting you at City Hall, his attempt to blackmail you and your response, which was to blackmail him. You must have felt pretty cheap when he was so disgusted at the end of it that he vomited. So you got even by telling Lacette. I am going to tell her the truth, even though I know it will hurt her to learn that you saved her life for a price.”
He stood, dropped a ten dollar bill on the table and looked down at her. “Is there anything that you wouldn’t do? Anything at all?” She didn’t answer, and he walked out, got into his car and headed for Lacette’s house. How had this daughter whom he’d prayed with, preached to, talked with, and loved unconditionally become so amoral?
He worked hard at controlling his impatience with Lacette for having accepted Kellie’s word without question. He didn’t ring her bell, but banged on the front door and felt good doing it.
“Who is it?”
“Your father.”
She opened the door teary eyed and looking as if a judge had just given her a death sentence.
“You deserve to be miserable,” he told her. “If you had allowed Douglas to explain—”
She interrupted. “There was nothing he could tell me.”
“There was, and don’t interrupt your father again, miss.” He took her hand and walked with her into the living room.
“Let this be the last time you judge a person and sentence him without gi
ving him a chance to defend himself.” He told her Douglas’s story and watched her shut her eyes tight as the tears drained down her face. “You should know better than to trust Kellie in matters such as this. She’ll do and say whatever it takes to get what she wants. You’ll have to call Douglas if you want to continue your relationship with him, because he is not going to call you.
“I know it hurts you that Kellie didn’t help you out of love, but this episode should make you secure in Douglas’s love for you. That he would do what he did, as much as he detests Kellie, is all the proof you need.” He put both arms around her, the child of his heart, and said a brief prayer. “Now, don’t worry. You and Douglas will be fine, and this may be the turning point in Kellie’s life. I’ll be in touch.”
In her mind’s eye, Lacette could see Douglas’s face, its expression serious and distant as when she first met him. What if he turned the tables and refused to listen to her? I can’t telephone him. I have to see him, to be with him when we talk.
Reluctant to shower because she was still groggy and feared she might lose her balance, she ran a tub of warm water, sat on the edge of it and took a bath, all the while praying that Douglas would listen to her. After dressing, she decided to call a taxi rather than risk driving. Shivers raced through her when she remembered that she would have to ring him from the building’s entrance and speak with him over the intercom, and her finger shook as she rang the bell.
“Rawlins. Who is it?”
“Lacette.” Fear and anxiety unsettled her to the extent that she leaned against the wall and couldn’t say more. The half minute that it took him to reply seemed like hours.
“I’ll be right down.” She clung to the door for support, all that she had experienced during the past few days devouring her strength, robbing her of her already diminished energy.
When he opened the door, she must have appeared washed out for he pulled her into his arms. “Lacette! For heaven’s sake! You should be in bed.” He braced his foot against the door, lifted her and carried her to his apartment.
“This is a dangerous thing you’ve done. I want you to lie down this minute.”
“Please, I have to tell you how sorry I am that I didn’t listen to you, how much I appreciate the sacrifice you made to save my life. I’m so sorry and so ashamed that I let Kellie sway me. Can you forgive me?”
He stuck his hands in the pockets of his trousers and looked hard at her. “That was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. It made me sick to my stomach.”
“I know. Daddy told me.”
“You stay here with me until you’re stronger.”
She had to hear him say the words. “Douglas.” She grasped his arm. “Do you forgive me?”
“I need your trust, Lacette. If you don’t trust me, let’s drop it right here, and we can be friends, nothing more. Loving a person can be dangerous. You open yourself to them, expose yourself in every way, and for that, there has to be trust and understanding.”
“I do trust you. I’m so used to being taken in by Kellie. I didn’t stop to recall the person I know you to be. I just had a knee jerk reaction to Kellie’s words, and I am ashamed of it. Tell me that you forgive me.”
“You only had to ask. I love you, and that ought to be very clear to both of us now.”
“And I love you. Oh, how I love you!”
The feel of his arms around her and of his mouth gentle on her lips was almost more than she could bear.
“Daddy, can I maybe go over and see Lacette?”
“She’s right here, son.”
After the unsettling talk with her father, Kellie boarded the city bus a block from the hotel and headed home to the place she shared with Hal. She had wanted to spend a little time with her mother, to be with someone who would wrap her in their arms and comfort her, someone who would sympathize with her. But she didn’t dare stay away from home long enough to visit her mother for fear of arousing Hal’s suspicion and anger.
“I ought to leave him, but if he called me, I’d probably go right back to him.”
“Where you been?” he asked when she walked in the door. “I thought you said you were going to meet your old man at the hotel. What the hell took you so long?”
“Daddy got upset and walked out of the coffee shop, so I had to take the bus home.”
He shelled a peanut and threw it into his mouth. “Yeah? Well, what did he get so upset abut?”
She hadn’t prepared for that question, and he loomed over her menacingly, as she stammered, “’Cause I’m not like Lacette and never will be.”
He went to the refrigerator, got two bottles of beer, took them to the living room, sat down on the sofa and turned on the television. “I’m going out, so I wanna eat early.”
Hurriedly she put sweet potatoes in the oven to bake, filled the pressure cooker with collards and fatback along with a quart of water, put a ring of smoked sausage in a frying pan and covered it so that it would cook slowly.
“It’ll be ready in about forty-five minutes.” He didn’t answer.
After dinner, he gazed at her for a long time, so long that she imagined the evil forming in his mind. “I don’t know what you’re up to while I’m out,” he said, “so I’m gonna take care of you before I leave here.”
Take care of her. How dare he! She gritted her teeth and pretended not to hear him, but he walked up behind her, clamped his big hands on her breasts and pulled her against him until she could feel his bulging sex against her buttocks. She stiffened and immediately hoped he hadn’t noticed, but he had.
“Not a bad idea. Let’s do it this way, for a change. Virgin field. You oughta be nice and tight.” He stripped her and pressed himself into her, with one hand clamped over her mouth to muffle her screams of pain. “Not bad,” he said when he’d relieved himself. “Not bad at all. I’ll finish that when I get back.” Then, he went into the kitchen for a paper towel to wipe the blood from himself.
She waited until he left, went to the bathroom, washed up and tried without success to find something to ease the pain. “I hate him,” she screamed at the top of her voice. “I hate him. I despise him.” She leaned her jerking body against the bathroom door, crying as she never had before.
What had she done to herself? It wasn’t as if he didn’t know the kind of family she came from. She deserved better, a man who would appreciate her background, beauty and grace. But he didn’t give a damn about any of it. Oh, she despised him when he slurped whatever was in his cup, ate spaghetti with long strings of it hanging from the sides of his mouth, and belched at the table as loudly as he could. Uncouth and uneducated. Why had she tolerated him?
She’d swear she was leaving him but then, he’d grab her, get his lips around her nipples and his calloused fingers between her legs, teasing and promising. On the floor, against the wall, wherever he caught her, he’d plow his massive penis into her and within minutes send her rollicking and screaming into ecstasy. She would close her eyes and pretend that he was refined and elegant Douglas Rawlins, biting her lips to refrain from calling out Douglas’s name.
Hours later, she would swear to herself again that she was leaving Hal, and then she’d remember how he felt inside of her and her resolve would vanish like a puff of smoke in a windstorm. But that was before tonight when she thought she would die of the pain he inflicted on her.
She drew herself up, put her clothes in the same suitcases in which she’d brought them, phoned for a taxi and waited, while marbles rattled in her belly and tremors shook her body. Lord, please don’t let him come back here until I’m gone. She didn’t relax until the taxi stopped in front of the parsonage. She opened the door with her own key, dropped her suitcases and looked around. And to think she had once hated the place.
“Who is it?” Cynthia called.
“It’s me, Kellie, Mama. Can I stay here with you till I find a place?”
Cynthia stumbled halfway down the stairs. “You’ve left him? For good?”
“Yes, ma’am.�
�
“Thank God. But I’m leaving here day after tomorrow. We’re closing the parsonage, but you can come on up to your old room. We’ll figure something out.”
Not quite the warmth she needed, but you couldn’t expect a fifty-five-year-old woman to change without reason. “Thanks.” She took the suitcases to her room, closed the door and sat on the bed that remained as she’d left it. “My Lord. What was I thinking?” she said aloud. She didn’t know how long she sat there before she heard a knock on her door.
“Come on in, Mama.”
“This is your father. Your mother called me. May I come in, or do you want to come downstairs?”
“Come on in.”
“All right. Did he hit you?”
“No, sir. It was worse than that, but I can’t tell you.”
“Worse than hitting you? I ought to have a piece of him anyway. Did he injure you?”
“I . . . uh . . . I’m not sure. I’ll go to the doctor, Monday and . . . and see if he did.”
“You’d better tell me you’ve left him for good.”
“I have. I’m not going back to him. Not ever.”
“The Lord answers prayers. I’m moving into my house, Monday. I’ve only refurbished the master bedroom, so you can fix up your own room. Your mother’s apartment is too small for the two of you. Anyway, I’ll be glad to have you with me. One thing.” He shook his finger at her. “Hal Fayson is not to put his foot on my property, and I am going to tell him that to his face. If he does, he will be arrested.”
She shrugged both shoulders. “I don’t care what you do to him.”
“Can I speak with you before you leave, Marshall?” Cynthia asked him.
“Sure. What about?”
“Uh . . . About us.”
“I’ve told you, Cynthia, that I do not intend to get a divorce or to give you one.”
“I know that. I . . . uh . . .” She looked at her daughter, and Kellie could see that her mother wanted privacy, but she also knew that it was no use, that her father would not budge from his position.
Whatever It Takes Page 29