by B. M. Hardin
I was enjoying our newfound relationship and I was hoping that it was a permanent situation.
“Hello doll,” Josephine chimed from one of the rocking chairs on the front porch.
Sonni waved and smiled.
I took a seat in the empty chair and took a deep breath.
“So, what do I owe the pleasure of this visit,” I asked them both.
“We just wanted to come down since we were both free today. You’re just leaving the hotel I can see,” Josephine said.
I didn’t comment, out of fear that she would want to ask more questions about my day at the hotel.
I really wasn’t in the mood to be interrogated.
“Are you still moving out of the house? I was wondering if the kids and I could have it,” Josephine replied after seeing that I wasn’t going to say anything.
Sonni and I both looked at her.
I guess we both caught on to the fact that she hadn’t mentioned that her husband Grant was coming with them.
Grant was the definition of cool, calm, and collected. He was a man of a few words; the complete opposite of Josephine. She was always running off with her mouth, and he was really quiet. But we all knew that he really loved Josephine and that he would do anything in the world to keep her happy.
But obviously he wasn’t doing enough.
They’d been together since their teen years as well and had married as soon as they were old enough to.
He had been around so long that he was like the brother that none of us ever had.
“Um, what about Grant?” I asked her.
Josephine turned her focus to the cars passing by.
But she knew that she didn’t have a choice but to answer my question.
“We’re getting a divorce,” she said.
I guess it wasn’t all that of a surprised to me, but I had to play my position.
“Why?”
“Oh, I can answer that question. It’s because she’s in love with my husband,” Sonni said.
Aw, hell!
*******************************************
Chapter FIVE
Josephine and I both stared at Sonni, waiting to see what she would say next.
“Isn’t that right Josephine? Aren’t you in love with my husband? Aren’t you having sex with my husband? I guess sisters aren’t all they are made out to be huh?” Sonni asked and then giggled, just a little as if something was funny.
Josephine looked like a deer in headlights.
I knew that she didn’t have the slightest idea as to what she was supposed to say, so she started to cry instead.
Sonni on the other hand, looked as though if she blinked twice, Josephine was going to croak over and die.
“Do you love my husband Josephine?” Sonni asked.
“Sonni maybe now isn’t the time to---” I started to say but she cut me off.
“No, Envy, now is the perfect time,” Sonni said pointing a finger in my direction.
I hushed, although I had a bad feeling that things were about to get out of hand.
I wondered where Horizon and Silas were finally noticing that his car wasn’t in the driveway.
“Yes, I love him. I always have,” Josephine admitted.
Damn…wrong answer.
Sonni looked at her for a few seconds as if she was trying to find the words to say or as though she was trying to keep herself from punching Josephine in the back of her head.
Either way, I was waiting for her words or actions, like old folks were waiting on the Rapture.
Finally, Sonni opened her mouth to take me out of my misery.
“Good. It’s good that you love him…because I don’t,” she said.
Wait…
What?
I was definitely not expecting that!
What did she mean that she didn’t love her husband?
Josephine stopped crying and looked at Sonni confused.
We both waited for her to explain.
“I’ve never loved him. I don’t even think I love my kids…at least not like a mother should. I only married him because I didn’t want to be alone. Everyone always had something to say about me being alone, or the fact that I was a loner and I guess I started to believe them and started to believe that something was wrong with me. So, I got married and had kids like a normal person, when the truth is…I’m not normal. I’ve never loved them, any of them. Not like most people love. Not like I should. I don’t know why. I just don’t,” Sonni said.
I looked at her in disbelief.
To hear her say those words made me extremely heartbroken.
Sonni had always been weird as I said, but to say that she didn’t love her husband or even her kids just didn’t make sense to me.
Who wouldn’t love their own kids?
“I can’t explain why I feel the way that I do. It’s just the way that I am. I don’t even love you guys the way that I’m supposed to. Not like y’all probably love me. I think the only person that I have ever truly loved was Mama. Not Daddy…just Mama. I ask myself why, but I just don’t know. I’ve known for years that I needed to see someone about it but I never did. I know that something wasn’t right with me, but I never tried to get help. Maybe it’s who I am. I don’t know if it’s a psychological thing, or a result of a repressed trauma. I just don’t know. I just know that I have felt this way for as long as I can remember. So, Josephine, if you love him, you can have him…when I die,” Sonni said.
I thought she was being sarcastic at first, but the look on her face told me that she wasn’t.
“I have cancer,” Sonni said and removed the wig from her head.
She was completely bald!
What?
No…she was going to die too?
I was sick and tired of people dying in my life.
Come on now!
“I’ve had it for a while and I don’t have long left to live. So, I would appreciate it if I could have my husband, to myself, so that I don’t have to face death alone. After I’m gone, he’s all yours. Just make sure you take care of my kids too. Maybe you can love them in a way that I never could,” Sonni said and placed her wig back on her head.
Josephine was crying so loud that I thought that the neighbors were going to come outside.
I was crying too, but of course Sonni wasn’t.
She didn’t look sad at all.
Something was really wrong with her, internally.
I’d always seen it.
I’d always known it.
But at this point it didn’t matter whether she loved us back or not because we loved her even if she didn’t love us; although Josephine had a funny way of showing it, with the whole sleeping with her husband and all.
Josephine made the first move and hugged Sonni and I followed.
Josephine and I cried as we hugged her.
Sonni just sat there for a while and finally she told us that everything was going to be okay.
My biggest regret was that I didn’t show her that I loved her more. I just accepted her for the way that she was and hadn’t tried to get through to her.
But I wished that I had.
But from this day forward, I was going to overdose her with love, whether she was able to give it back to me in return or not.
That was the least that I could do.
***
After Sonni’s big news, for some reason, I wanted to get out of my parent’s house more than ever.
It no longer felt like home.
The house only seemed to remind me of death.
Being that Silas had some friends in real estate, after looking for only two weeks, we found our dream home.
It was my three days off from the hotel, so we were making the big move.
Sure, maybe we should have waited for the actual marriage, but it was soon to come.
I just needed a new home.
A new and fresh start.
And Silas agreed.
Our new home was gorgeous and we would def
initely need to have more kids to fill up some of the space.
It wasn’t like Carmen’s; but still it was an amazing home.
Horizon seemed to love it and I could see Silas and I living there for many years to come.
I even imagined us, sitting on the front porch, smelling like Bengay, peeling potatoes and watching out grandchildren playing in the yard.
That vision was everything to me.
“I love you,” Silas said with a smile.
Instead of responding, I kissed him.
No, now, he definitely wasn’t a perfect man, but I knew without a shout of doubt that he loved me.
I’d seen his temper a time or two and I was sure that if ever pushed to that point, he might come down with the whoop a bitch’s ass syndrome, but he vowed never to put his hands on me and I believed him; a good seventy-five percent.
Like I said, I could see it in there, somewhere.
But honestly, I would never give him a reason too; which is why I needed to hurry up and get away from the hotel.
If he found out the truth about what I did there, I was sure that it was going to take grace, and maybe a little bit of mace to get his big ass off of me.
So, I was working day and night to find out anything that I could.
I’d been prying about Silas and Carmen’s past.
He’d said that when he met her she was already working at the hotel and he said that he’d given her a good bit of money in their divorce, so he wasn’t sure why she still worked there.
I guess some of her money probably came from him but I was sure that whatever it was that he’d given her was nowhere near what she’d made from the hotel.
But he made it clear that she didn’t have anything when he met her so her riches had to have come after the divorce; whether his money was included in that or not.
He’d said that she had been an average girl and didn’t seem to be all about money which was part of the reason why he’d initially pursued her.
So, timeline wise, she must have gotten into the dirty hotel business around what, ten or eleven years ago.
Maybe she had used some of the divorce money to go into business with the “they” that she’d mentioned.
Anything was possible and I was taking every detail that I could back to Detective Wiley.
I was going to get them what they needed even if it killed me.
I continued to go through the boxes as Silas and Horizon headed out to pick up our food.
There was so much to do and so little time to do it.
I headed to the kitchen to start unpacking silverware and plates for us to use once they got back.
I noticed that a box named Silas was on the counter so I carried it to our bedroom.
Now, initially, I wasn’t going to be nosey, I really wasn’t.
But if curiosity really killed the cat…then consider this cat dead!
I looked into the box.
Just to find that it was a whole bunch of nothing; lots of papers and miscellaneous things, but nothing useful.
I wasn’t looking for anything particularly, but something in me was just a tad bit curious about a few things concerning Silas.
But the box seemed to be a dead end.
It was nothing there so it seemed.
Receipts and miscellaneous papers; basically stuff that he should have thrown away a long time ago.
Just as I started to close the box, a vanilla colored paper caught my eye.
I picked it up from under the papers and stared at it.
It was the obituary of Silas’s wife and daughter from their double funeral.
Aww, he’d had their funerals together, at the same time.
It was a sweet gesture; but in a weird, sorrowful way.
I had to stare at the photo because the woman was almost identical to Carmen.
I mean, yes they were sisters and all, but they could have passed for twins.
That had to be confusing.
The little girl had been a mixture of the both Silas and her mother.
But how weird was this:
They’d actually named her after Carmen.
Why on earth would they do that?
Why on earth would you steal your sister’s husband, and then name your child after her?
Talk about a slap in the face!
And I thought my family was all twisted and confused.
Then again, maybe the sister missed Carmen so much that she’d named her daughter after her as a way of trying to regain Carmen’s love.
An apologetic gesture?
Maybe.
But obviously, her gesture hadn’t worked.
I stared at it a little while longer and just as I was about to put it back into the box, there it was, staring me right in my face.
I looked at it.
I was confused.
What was I really looking at?
The sound of the beeping noise, alerting me that the front door had been opened, forced me to place the obituary back into the box and to sit the box in the corner with the rest of his things.
But I hadn’t forgotten what I’d saw.
The date on the obituary said that Silas’s wife and daughter had died…only a month before he met me, but he’d told me that they had been dead for over a year.
Why had he lied about something like that?
***
“Did you ever get to see your niece?” I asked Carmen bluntly.
She looked at me as though I had no right to ask her that question.
I couldn’t believe that I was only two weeks away from my contract being up.
I’d waited a whole year, and some change, and I was so ready.
But in order for things to go as planned, I had to find out anything, everything that I could.
According to the detective, I wouldn’t be able to leave until the job was done, so I was all over Carmen like she was my main squeeze.
“I only saw her twice,” Carmen said.
“Did you know that her name was Carmen too?” I asked her.
She looked disturbed.
“Who cares? Envy, leave the dead, rotting and stinking…wherever they hell are.”
Who says that?
I couldn’t believe that a hate so strong actually existed.
But obviously, what Silas and her sister had done had hurt her to the core, so for now, I wouldn’t try to reopen those wounds.
At least not right now.
“Have you seen or heard from Silas?” Carmen asked and immediately I shook my head no.
I’d told Silas that I had been getting a lot of shade from Carmen at work about our relationship, so I’d asked him to never try to pop up for a visit and to limit his calls while I was at work.
He didn’t like it, but I told him to trust me on it and he promised that he would.
I couldn’t risk him making things sour between Carmen and I again.
“You still love him don’t you?” I asked her.
I had been dying to hear the answer to this question.
“What you call love, I call hate,” Carmen answered.
No, what she called hate, I called obsession; but I kept my thoughts to myself.
I knew the truth.
She could deny it if she wanted to.
“So, will you ever leave the hotel?”
“What’s with all the questions Envy?”
“I’m just making conversation.”
Carmen looked at me.
“Just like you, I’m under a contract. Only mine isn’t as simple as yours,” was all she said and she walked away from me.
Hmm…so, then what was it?
Later that evening, I sat looking at Silas.
“What are you looking at?”
I didn’t say a word.
I hadn’t mentioned the obituary yet, but I was about to.
“Remember we said no more lies, right?”
Silas looked at me nervously.
I could immediately tell that he was uncomfortab
le.
“When did your wife and daughter die?” I asked him.
He looked guilty.
“A month before I met you.”
“Why did you lie?”
“Because I didn’t want to scare you off. Who would want to talk to a man who had just buried his wife and child? But I had to say something to you. I just had to. It was something about you.”
I shook my head and before I could stop myself, I smacked him.
Sure, I had a few lies and secrets in my back pocket, but at least they weren’t constantly being exposed.
“I’m sorry. I haven’t lied to you since that day that we vowed that we wouldn’t. I’d already told that little white lie so I figured that there wasn’t any need revisiting it. Please try to understand,” Silas begged but I turned my back to him.
He always seemed to have the perfect answer for everything.
But it was all too perfect if you ask me.
Silas tugged at the bottom of my dress.
I refused to look at him, so in one swift motion he flipped me over onto my back.
“Look at me. I’m sorry,” he said.
I rolled my eyes at him.
I felt his hand go underneath my dress and he began to tug at my thong.
He placed his other hand below and ripped the thong at its sides.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
I was trying my best to keep my attitude but Silas, and his fingers, weren’t making it easy.
In my opinion it was such a stupid lie.
Who lies about when someone dies?
I guess maybe he didn’t think that things would go this far, or maybe he didn’t think that I would ever find out, but whether it was one reason or the other, it was just plain ole’ stupid.
“I’m sorry,” Silas said again just before placing his mouth on me.
He knew that I was infatuated with his tongue and that by licking my secret spot was the way to my heart.
I closed my eyes and swarmed as if I wanted him to stop but he knew that I didn’t.
It wasn’t long after the first few licks that I was begging him to give me just a little bit of pound action.
He entered me quickly and from that moment on, everything else was pretty much a blur.
As I prepared to release my creams of delight, I made up my mind to go ahead and forgive him.
But this was the last time.