“So how many more fittings today?” Isabella asked as Beverly stepped down from the podium.
“We have her two sisters for the bridesmaid dresses,” Mama explained. “Evelyn just went into the dressing room, and Charmaine is on her way. Unfortunately the matron of honor won’t be coming. We’ll have to reschedule her.”
Evelyn exited the dressing room in her bridesmaid gown and stepped up onto the podium as Beverly went in to change. Beverly walked out a few minutes later in jeans and a blue-and-white-striped top just as Charmaine parted the curtains and blew into the fitting room wearing a black form-hugging skirt slit up to the thigh.
Beverly always thought of Charmaine as a force of nature. One didn’t just see Charmaine or hear her talk. You felt her, breathed her, experienced her. Beverly suspected that today would be no exception as Charmaine placed her hands on her hips and struck a pose in the entryway, à la Dorothy Dandridge or Marilyn Monroe.
“I’m here, ladies!”
Chapter 2
Beverly pointed at her watch in mock indignation. “And late as usual, I might add.”
“Sorry about that.”
“At least you’re here,” Mama said. “Now I can get going. Will my girls be all right?”
“Go on to the florist, Mama,” Beverly said as she handed her gown to Isabella. “We promise to behave.”
“You promise to behave,” Charmaine said, smiling slyly, her brown eyes twinkling beneath her short curly hairdo. “Just kidding, Ma.”
Beverly and Evelyn laughed as Mama picked up her shoulder bag from the coffee table and headed for the doorway. “Don’t forget, after you all leave here, you need to go the hotel to finalize the menu with the chef.” Mama shook her head and pinched Beverly’s cheek playfully. “All this last-minute stuff. I swear, you better not change your mind again, girl.”
Beverly smiled, a little embarrassed, as Mama blew kisses to Charmaine and Evelyn and waved good-bye.
“Don’t you dare say a word,” Beverly said, narrowing her eyes and pointing to both of her sisters as soon as Mama left the shop. She knew what was coming from them, especially Charmaine—relentless teasing about breaking off two previous engagements—and she was having none of it if she could help it.
Charmaine smiled thinly. “I guess I can behave myself for one afternoon, since this is a special day for you. But you have to let me see your dress.”
Beverly took Charmaine to the rack and showed her the gown that Isabella had just hung up.
“Nice! Put it on so I can see it on you,” Charmaine said.
Beverly shook her head. “It’s a lot of trouble getting in and out of that thing. You should have been here on time if you wanted to see it on me.”
“It’s not my fault I’m late,” Charmaine protested. “Blame that silly-ass girlfriend of yours.”
“What happened with Valerie and Otis?” Beverly asked as she and Charmaine sat on the couch and watched Isabella pin Evelyn’s gown at the waist.
Charmaine sat next to Beverly and kicked off her black stilettos. “She called just as I was going out the door and said they argued last night. He shoved her and walked out.”
“You mean he put his hands on her?” Beverly asked.
Charmaine nodded. “She said she fell back and hit the wall hard enough to bruise her arm.”
Beverly gasped.
Evelyn frowned.
Even Isabella got in on it, shaking her head with stern disapproval.
Beverly knew that Otis had a hot temper, but Valerie had always said it came out only in yelling fits. “That’s just wrong. He’s never touched her like that before.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Evelyn said. “All you know is what she tells you.”
“I think she would have told me if he had hurt her,” Beverly said.
Evelyn looked doubtful. “You never really know what goes on in a relationship behind closed doors. Trust me.”
Beverly figured that Evelyn was speaking from her experience as a psychologist, and she supposed she couldn’t argue with that. “You’re probably right,” Beverly said. “She could be too ashamed to tell me if he’s been smacking her around.”
“It could be shame,” Evelyn said. “Or it could be something else entirely. There’s all sorts of reasons someone might not tell you about something like that.”
“I told her, be glad that sucker is gone,” Charmaine said. “Hope he stays gone.”
“They should try therapy,” Evelyn suggested.
“You would think that,” Charmaine said, waving her hand in Evelyn’s direction. “But some relationships aren’t worth trying to fix. He’s a lost cause, if you ask me. Once they put their hands on you in anger, that’s it.”
“I agree,” Beverly said.
“Still, I think she’s going to go back to him,” Charmaine said.
“I should hope not,” Beverly said. “Why do you say that?”
“I couldn’t get out of the house ’cause she was crying so hard on the phone,” Charmaine said. “Talking about how she was over forty and not married. And how she wants the hubby and the picket fence, just like me and you, Evelyn.” Charmaine made quotation marks in the air with her fingers. “I reminded her that I’m definitely no role model when it comes to wedded bliss. I’m on my fourth marriage mainly ’cause I don’t take a lot of crap off these crazy brothers out here. I might put up with it for a while, but if you keep screwing up, I’m going to kick your ass to the curb.” Charmaine snapped her fingers to make her point.
“Kevin and I are not perfect, either,” Evelyn said. “We have our share of problems.”
“Most of us would kill to have your problems, Evelyn,” Charmaine said. “Your husband is a lawyer. You live in that big fat house. You lead a charmed life, sister.”
Evelyn shrugged. “Honestly, we’re just like everyone else. We have our ups and downs and we have to work hard to keep things together.”
“Still, you and Kevin have a great relationship,” Beverly said. “Of course you have ups and downs, but you manage to work things out. That’s why you’ve been married for more than twenty years. You two are my role models for marriage.”
Evelyn smiled.
“By the way, is this your Fendi here?” Charmaine lifted the designer bag sitting on the table.
Evelyn nodded, and Charmaine carefully placed the bag back down. “Uh-huh. I am so damn jealous. How much that set you back?”
Evelyn seemed to squirm on the podium, and Beverly knew what was coming. Evelyn hated it when Charmaine got to comparing their lifestyles. In any comparison that involved money, their oldest sister would always come out on top. Charmaine would get pissed, and Evelyn would feel defensive.
“Enough,” Evelyn said.
“What’s enough?” Charmaine persisted. “Five hundred?”
“Charm,” Beverly said, nudging her middle sister in an attempt to warm the chill building rapidly in the air. If what she knew about Fendi was true, the bag had probably cost twice that, and Beverly didn’t want her sisters squabbling on the day of her bridal fitting. “It looks like Evelyn is about done. Why don’t you get into your dress?”
All was quiet as Charmaine gave the designer bag one last lingering glance and left for the dressing room. Beverly gave herself an imaginary pat on the back for handling that so well. Their mother would have been proud.
She wished she could smooth things over for her friend. No doubt Valerie was miserable now. But if Otis was smacking her around, it was good that he had left. Hopefully he would stay gone. Beverly was so thankful that Julian didn’t have a bad temper. Compared to Julian, she was the one with the temper.
She remembered the time about ten years back when she had come within an inch of slashing her then-boyfriend Vernon’s convertible top because she caught him cheating on her. The only thing that stopped her as she crept up to Vernon’s car in the middle of the night was that she had accidentally locked her shoulder bag—the one with the knife needed to do the dirty deed—in
side her car.
She had done a lot of growing up in the years since that awful night, and it was downright embarrassing to think that she had ever let a man mess with her head like that. She liked excitement in a relationship as much as the next woman, but some of the stunts men pulled were absolute deal breakers, and cheating and hitting were at the top of the list.
It had taken her a while to get it right, to put it all together, and watching the relationship between Evelyn and Kevin had probably helped more than anything. They had been married so long, they must be doing something right. They had a kind of give-and-take that Beverly had come to admire. When one was down, the other one lifted. When one came up short, the other filled in. They completed each other the way the right pair of shoes completed a great outfit. With Julian, Beverly knew she had finally found someone she could have that kind of relationship with.
Chapter 3
Charmaine removed the pot roast from the double oven, and the kitchen filled with the aroma of cloves as she carefully placed the pan on the stovetop. As soon as she had come in from the fitting and meeting with the chef, she kicked off her heels and got busy in the kitchen. For the past year, she had been in a Martha Stewart or B. Smith mode. She had always enjoyed doing things around the house when she had the time, and when she and Tyrone got hitched a year ago she had turned into a regular homebody, as Tyrone often teased her.
Maybe it was because she had finally found herself a decent man, or perhaps it was that her sons, Kenny and Russell, now ages fourteen and nine, were growing up and didn’t need as much of her time. Whatever the reason, Charmaine had bid a permanent farewell to Betty Crocker, her constant companion of the past several years, and all the tuna casserole mixes. Instead, she was popping roasts and pies made from scratch in and out of the oven faster than her little family could sit at the table. And loving every minute of it. The only bad thing about the incessant fussing around the kitchen, as far as Charmaine could see, was that all the delicious food was starting to build up around her hips.
She had just added potatoes and carrots to the roast and popped it back into the oven when Tyrone, Kenny, and Russell came in from shooting hoops on a nearby basketball court. They headed straight for the Gatorade she had chilling in the freezer, then perched themselves on stools at the kitchen bar, sweaty bodies, dingy caps, and all. There was a time when she would have made a real stink about a bunch of funky males hanging out in her kitchen and shooed them off to shower and change. But this was the new Charmaine—sweet, patient, and tolerant with her guys.
“Smells real good, honey,” Tyrone said. “What’s cooking?”
“Your favorite, baby. Pot roast.”
Kenny lowered the bottle of Gatorade from his lips. “Can we get that sweet potato dish with apples and marshmallows that you made last week to go with it?”
“It’s already got white potatoes in it,” Charmaine said.
Kenny pouted and Russell joined in. Even though Kenny was growing faster than she could clothe him and at six feet he was a couple of inches taller than Tyrone, Kenny was still only fourteen, and at times like this he looked even younger despite his height. Russell adored his older half brother and was at a stage where he always followed along with him.
“The sweet potatoes are good,” Tyrone said. “You should whip up a bunch.”
“They are off the chain!” Kenny said. “My new favorite dish.”
“Mine too,” Russell added.
Charmaine realized what was going on and was ashamed that Tyrone had picked up on it first. Although Tyrone and Kenny got along, she sometimes sensed a bit of jealousy on Kenny’s part. After all, for the first several years of his life Kenny had had his mama all to himself. Then he became a big brother to Russell, and for a while was kind of the man of the house.
Now there was a real man in the house, and on top of that, Kenny also had a new older stepsister—Tiffany, Tyrone’s fourteen-year-old daughter, who lived in Oakland, California, and visited for two weeks over the summer and a week at Christmas. Tiffany was only a few months older, but suddenly Kenny had all these other older people in his life and he wanted to assert some authority. If Charmaine was making Tyrone’s favorite for dinner, Kenny would insist on his favorite too.
Shame on her for not sensing what was happening before Tyrone did, Charmaine thought. But Tyrone’s compassion was one of a million things that had attracted her to this handsome butterscotch-complexioned babe.
She reached across the bar and squeezed Kenny’s and Russell’s cheeks playfully. “One off-the-chain sweet-potato dish coming up, then.” She removed her red KitchenAid mixer from a base cabinet, then went to the bin in the refrigerator for the sweet potatoes. Kenny and Russell drained their Gatorade and left to go take showers.
“How did the fitting go?” Tyrone asked. “Or whatever it was you went to.”
“The fitting and a meeting with the chef. Beverly looks real happy, but her friend Valerie had a big fight with her fiancé last night and she was fit to be tied. She called me just before I left and bawled almost nonstop for a half hour.”
“Makes you glad we went to the justice of the peace, huh?”
Charmaine smiled and nodded. “And Evelyn was showing off a hot new Fendi bag. Those things start at, like, five hundred, I think.”
Tyrone raised his eyebrows. “Five hundred what?”
“Dollars.”
“Damn. Well, Kevin is a lawyer, she’s a psychologist. That’s how them rich folks do.”
“Lucky for them,” Charmaine said with sarcasm.
“You jealous? You’re a secretary, I’m just an electrician.”
“What do you mean, just an electrician. I’m proud of you. And proud to be married to you. I don’t need no Fendi bags.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Okay, so I’m lying about that part. I mean, I really am happier since meeting you. That much is true. But I would still kill for a fucking Fendi.”
He laughed.
“What time does Tiffany’s flight get in from Oakland tomorrow evening?” Charmaine asked.
“About four.”
“What you got planned for her stay?” Charmaine leaned over the sink and ran water into a large pot. “Anything special?” She knew that the days would be a marathon of nonstop activity, with Tyrone trying to fit fifty-two weeks into his daughter’s two-week visit. Last summer, their first together, was full of shopping sprees and amusement parks, the beach and bowling. For fourteen days straight they barely stopped, and Tyrone must have spent a few thousand dollars, most of it on clothes, shoes, and bags for Tiffany.
The problem wasn’t the nonstop pace or all the dollars he spent when Tiffany visited. Tyrone made decent enough money and was certainly entitled to spend some of it on his daughter. And Charmaine believed firmly that girls needed their fathers in their lives. She admired Tyrone for not shirking his responsibility the way too many fathers did.
The real problem was that Tyrone treated Tiffany as if she were visiting royalty, catering to her every wish and whim. Like a lot of absentee fathers, he missed his child. He was also filled with guilt about not being with her year-round. Instead of treating her like a daughter, with all the love and discipline that should mean, he treated her like a little princess. The result was a child who thought she was entitled to special treatment. And who could blame her? Any kid would lap that up.
Charmaine remembered how she had come home late from work one day last summer drop-dead tired as usual, and Tiffany indignantly asked her why she hadn’t done the laundry. The girl had been visiting only a few days, but apparently she needed a special pair of jeans that she had worn on the flight. Never mind that Tiffany brought at least six pairs of jeans with her. She needed that particular pair, she explained, and she needed them first thing in the morning.
Charmaine had almost choked on her tongue. She gathered all of the girl’s dirty clothes from a pile on the floor in her bedroom, dumped them in her skinny arms, and showed her to the laund
ry room in the basement. She calmly but firmly asked Tiffany whether she needed help working the washer and dryer. Instead of responding, Tiffany had thrown her clothes on the floor and run crying to her daddy.
Charmaine was sure Tyrone would straighten Tiffany out and make her do her own laundry or tell her to wait patiently until Charmaine was ready to do it. Instead, her new husband came riding to his daughter’s rescue like some knight in shining armor and did the laundry himself. At that very moment.
That was when Charmaine realized that the honeymoon had officially ended. Over the next few hours, you could have sliced the chill in the air with a kitchen knife.
The one saving grace was that Charmaine didn’t have to deal with this nonsense year-round. When she did have to put up with it, she tried to keep her nerves steady. She picked her battles carefully and let the rest slide. She knew that her life would get back to normal after Tiffany’s visit and that Tyrone would go back to being his usual sweet self.
“I think we’ll take it a little easier this time,” Tyrone said. “And not be on the go around the clock. We can spend some days just kicking around the house relaxing, watching videos or something.”
Charmaine smiled thinly. He’d said that before Tiffany’s last visit at Christmas, and they still ended up going and spending nonstop for an entire week. Tiffany would bat her big hazel eyes at her daddy and get him to do and buy whatever she wanted. And what she wanted was the latest of everything, from clothes to gadgets. Still, Tyrone was a good man, and they had a great relationship as husband and wife for forty-nine weeks out of the year. Charmaine wasn’t going to let a few weeks ruin that.
“Sounds good,” she said as she gathered the other ingredients while the sweet potatoes boiled. “I’ll get some grocery shopping done when you go to the airport to pick her up. I can rent a couple of videos then. Anything in particular you think she’ll want to see?”
Taking the last swig from his Gatorade bottle, he stood up and stretched his lean and muscular self. Whenever he did that, he looked good enough to eat. If she weren’t cooking, she would have devoured him then and there.
Sisters and Husbands Page 2