What the hell was I supposed to do with that?
Slowly my right hand balled into a tight fist and came up and over the table. I leaned forward a bit so that our fists kissed—I mean, bumped—and then they were gone. Will threw a “Take care man” over his shoulder as they strolled through the door.
Merriwether Beacon—hmm, I mused as I sat back down and looked suspiciously around me. I wonder how many more of her kind are out there?
Eleven
It was Saturday morning, barely eight o’clock, and I was up. Little Eric was in the living room, watching MTV, and Jay Z was so loud, I thought that if I opened my eyes he would be rapping right over me.
I pulled the pillow over my head and told myself I was not really going to get up, walk out into the living room, and crack my child over his head with the remote.
“Eric!” I yelled at the top of my lungs so loud that my ears began to hurt.
He didn’t answer. I knew he heard me but ignored me just the same. “Eric!” I yelled again as I sat up in bed and placed my feet on the cold linoleum floor.
The sun was bright and there were already children in the play-ground below my window. The weather report called for temperatures in the high eighties. I sighed and looked at the broken air conditioner sitting in the window across the room.
I stood up and stretched. I had so much to do. The clothes needed to be washed, the kitchen floor needed to be scrubbed and waxed, and the refrigerator was desperately in need of a good cleaning-out and defrosting.
But none of that could happen until I’d had a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and my Saturday morning free of MTV. So I charged like a bull out of my bedroom and into the living room, where I stood glaring at Eric’s neck, hoping he would feel the darts my eyes were throwing there. But he was oblivious.
“Eric!”
My son jumped and whipped his head around on his long thick neck and grinned. “Hey, Mom.”
I released a heavy sigh before I spoke again. “Turn that mess down. Don’t you have any consideration?” I asked, knowing full well he didn’t.
“Sorry,” he said, and the volume on the television dropped two levels.
“Is that room of yours clean?” I asked as I walked into the kitchen.
There was a bowl sitting on the card table that served as a dining table. The bowl was half filled with cloudy milk, where four lone Cheerios floated at the top.
I snatched up bowl and all and deposited it into the sink.
“I asked a question, boy.”
He mumbled something.
“What?”
“I said I’m going to get to it in a minute.”
I gritted my teeth and felt for my pack of cigarettes on top of the refrigerator. Finding them, I flipped the top open and peered in.
I knew I had eight cigarettes left in the pack before I went to sleep; now there were five.
“You been stealing my cigarettes?”
“No, Mother.”
I knew he had. I wasn’t crazy. I loved him, but I’d sure been counting the days until I put his narrow ass on the bus to be rid of him for the summer.
I hurriedly slipped a cigarette between my lips. Leaning over the stove, I lit it on the burner, singeing my eyelashes. “Shit,” I mumbled as I batted my eyes with my hands.
I wanted a cup of coffee so bad, but I had none in the house. I didn’t have much of anything in the house. I would have to go food shopping today too.
I smoked for a while as I looked around the apartment and wondered why I didn’t hear the tornado that had come through and wrecked my place last night.
With that thought, the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Geneva, it’s Nadine.”
I twisted my face up and thought that I really needed to pay the extra five dollars a month for Caller ID.
“Oh, hello, Nadine,” I barely responded through gritted teeth.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for days now,” she sang in her birdlike soprano.
“Yeah, I been real busy,” I said and took a long drag of my cigarette.
“Well, you haven’t been to a meeting in almost a month.”
Like I didn’t know that. “Yeah, it’s been about that long.”
“Well, when do you think you’ll be coming back?”
“I really couldn’t say right now.”
“Well, in order for the program to work, you have to work the program, Geneva.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“Have you at least been keeping up with the point system?”
“Uh-huh,” I said as I used my index finger to remove a piece of tobacco from the tip of my tongue.
“Well, that’s good.” Nadine sounded relieved. “So, can I look for you at the afternoon meeting today?”
“Sure.” She could look for me, but I wouldn’t be there.
“Oh, goody! Can’t wait to see you, Geneva!”
“Same here,” I said and hung up the phone.
I was going to have to change my number.
I looked down at my gut hanging over the waistband of the boxer shorts I slept in and was immediately angry and disgusted with myself.
“Turn that mess off and help me clean this place up,” I yelled at Eric as I snubbed the cigarette out into the green glass ashtray.
Well, I had to take it out on someone, didn’t I?
Eric just kept bopping his head and snapping his fingers, so I jumped up and marched over to the coffee table and grabbed the remote and clicked the television off.
“Get up and start cleaning, boy!”
Eric made a face and slowly lifted himself from the couch. “Dang. When I get rich, I’m gonna have a maid to do all of this!”
“And I want the bathroom spotless!” I yelled at his back as I began to remove the week’s debris from the coffee table.
In no time, Eric was back on the couch, surfing through channels.
I looked at him like he had four heads. “What are you doing?”
“What? I straightened up the room.”
“You did, that quick?” I laughed and looked at the closed door of the bedroom.
“Yep,” he spouted and tried to look around me.
“What about the bathroom?”
“I just cleaned it last week. How dirty could it really be?”
I felt the blood boiling in my head, and my heart began to run a race in my chest.
“Get your behind up and clean that goddamn bathroom before I put these size-tens up your ass!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
Eric gave me a bored look and got up and headed toward the bathroom. He mumbled as he went and I had to remind him who was boss and say, “Don’t get your teeth knocked out, boy!”
The phone rang before I could say much more.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Geneva.” A voice came across the phone line in disconnected syllables.
“H-hello?”
“It’s Noah.”
“Noah?”
“The one and only.”
“Hey, how was your trip?”
“Very interesting,” he said.
“Where are you now?” I asked as I swung the refrigerator door open to see what was inside. Nothing.
“I’m on my way home from the airport. How’s Little Eric? I got his messages about his upcoming performance. Did I miss it? I’m all turned around with the dates.”
“No, you didn’t miss it. He’s going to be so thrilled that you’ll be able to be there.”
Noah sighed. “Oh, good. So, catch me up. What did I miss?”
“Oh, plenty!” I laughed, eased down into one of the kitchen chairs, and prepared myself to dish the dirt. “Chevy borrowed money from Crystal to get a boob job.”
“Get the hell out of here!”
“Noah, I am dead serious!”
“Ms. Drama is always up to her tricks.”
“She sure is.”
“Well, I guess I’ll get to see her new additions up close and pe
rsonal when I get home.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“I meant to call her while I was in London, but you know Zhan had me tied up for the entire time.”
“Literally?” I laughed.
“Only some of the time!”
“Well, you wouldn’t have been able to reach her anyway.”
“Don’t tell me her phone is cut off again.”
“Yep.”
“That child is so trifling!”
“But yet you still trust her with your home and your fish. I see you still haven’t learned your lesson.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Remember the last time you went away and left her in charge? Didn’t she almost burn down the house?”
“Yeah, but, see, I went on after that and got that sprinkler system installed.”
“That damn Chevy, always costing us money.” I laughed and stood up again to look in the refrigerator.
“Baby, wasn’t nothing in there the first time you looked,” Noah said.
“What? How do you know I’m looking in the fridge?”
“Well, you ain’t chomping in my ear, so either you looking for something to chomp on or there ain’t nothing there!”
“Fuck you, Noah.”
“Wouldn’t you love to.”
We laughed until the signal went dead.
Twelve
I was still laughing when my taxi pulled up to my three-story brownstone on Stuyvesant Avenue in Brooklyn. I could see, even before I even stepped out of the cab, a week’s worth of mail spilling out the brass mail slot of my mahogany door and the browning petals of my potted yellow and white petunias.
“Shit.”
Hadn’t I asked Chevy to take care of this for me? Water the plants, collect the mail, and feed the fish. Was it so fucking hard to do?
I shuddered at what I would find floating at the top of the fish tank.
Geneva was right. Chevy was like some type of high-maintenance, unruly stepchild. Always between jobs, apartments, and only God knew how many men.
“Keep the change,” I said as I shoved a fifty-dollar bill at the turban-wearing cab driver.
I stepped out onto the sidewalk, barely skirting a little girl on her roller skates. “Hello, Mr. Noah!” She beamed and waved at me as she struggled down the sidewalk.
“Hey, baby. You be careful now.”
Stevie Wonder was blaring from my open parlor-floor windows. And as angry as I was, I found my head bopping to the music as I fumbled for my keys.
I slowly opened the door and was met by the pungent scent of marijuana.
Stevie was louder inside, and I could hear Chevy singing off-key to Sir Duke. I walked into the entry hall and dropped my suitcase to the floor. Turning right and into the parlor, I expected to be greeted by my reflection in the nine-foot pier mirror on the wall, but instead my eyes collided with Chevy, who was spinning awkwardly toward me, one hand gripped tightly around a forty-ounce bottle of Old English beer while the other clung to a lit joint.
“What the hell are you doing?” I screamed over the music as I watched beer splatter across the shiny wood of my parquet floors.
As I surveyed the room, I saw that she’d practically turned my home into her very own walk-in closet. There were pieces of her clothing everywhere. A bra across the arm of the sofa, a pair of gym shorts on the ottoman, and a mountain of sandals and stilettos piled in the corner of the room.
Chevy stumbled over to the wall and pressed her shoulder against it to steady herself as she waited for the world to stop spinning. I marched over to the stereo and pressed the off switch.
“Hey, Noah! You’re back!” she screamed as if the music was still blaring.
“Yes, I am. And you’re high.”
I looked around for something to clean up the mess Chevy had made on the floor, but there was nothing available that I was willing to sacrifice.
“You know I don’t allow drugs in my house,” I said tightly.
“Suuuuuureee you don’t. Where the hell do you think I got it from?”
I balled my fists and pressed them into my hips and said, “You went into my private stash?”
Chevy just grinned wickedly and held the joint up to my face.
There was never any shame in Ms. Drama’s game. I walked toward her and plucked the joint from her pinched fingers, put it to my lips, and puffed.
Passing it back to her, I walked through the cream-colored living room and into the family room to examine the damage.
The family room was intact, thank God, and the soft sage-colored walls and large, inviting silk floor pillows reminded me that I was severely jet lagged and needed sleep.
I walked over to the fish tank, and the colorful tropical fish rushed the glass, pleading with their eyes for me to feed them.
“They’re starving!” I yelled at Chevy, who was in the midst of a drunken Electric Slide.
“How can you tell?” She burped and then turned the forty up to her lips. “I fed them,” she whined after she burped again and took another puff of the joint.
“Liar.”
“They’re still alive, aren’t they?”
“Barely,” I said and gave her the finger.
Chevy, finally exhausted, plopped down onto the living room couch and threw her legs over the ottoman.
I spied her clothing everywhere and said, “Chevy, did you move in or something?”
“No,” Chevy sang back to me as she pulled herself up from the couch and strutted up the stairs toward the bedrooms.
I followed her, ready to give her the best piece of my mind, but she ran into the bathroom and locked the door. I could hear her giggling madly.
“You really shouldn’t do drugs if you can’t handle it,” I screamed through the locked door. “You gotta come out sometime.”
In my room now. My sanctuary. No television here. Just my king-size sleigh bed, a wine-colored comfortable chair with matching ottoman. Nightstands piled high with books. Wall fountain. “Ahhh.”
All I wanted was to get a shower, some Thai food, a glass of chardonnay, and some sleep.
I stripped down to my boxers and walked down the hall to the extra bedroom, where my treadmill, a small library, and a pull-out sofa were. But as I walked in, it seemed that the room’s contents had grown to include three large suitcases, a duffle bag, dozens of boxes of shoes, and black Hefty bags bulging with clothes.
I was heated and charged back out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. I’d have to get her out of here in less than thirty days or before she started receiving mail. After that, the law would see her as a tenant and I’d have to evict her, and that could take six months or more.
“Bitch, you did move in!” I said as I banged heavily on the door. “Chevanese Cambridge, you better open this goddamn door now!”
I could break it down, but I’d just had these new oak doors hung two months ago.
“Chevy!” I screamed again. “I ain’t playing with you, girl. Don’t let me have to get a locksmith, ’cause I will!”
Nothing.
“I want you out of here tomorrow!”
Still nothing.
I panicked. Maybe she’d fallen and hit her head on the toilet and was bleeding to death. “Chevy?” I gave the door a gentle rat-a-tat-tat.
I pressed my ear against the door and listened.
Snoring.
Was I hearing right?
I dropped down onto my knees and peered through the one-inch space between the door and the floor. Chevy was seated on the floor, her back resting against the tub, the joint burned down to a roach and resting alongside the half-empty beer bottle.
Her legs were stretched wide open and, good God, she wasn’t wearing any drawers. Damn. I just couldn’t seem to get away from pussy.
Thirteen
Where are you, at the gym?” I asked Crystal as I haphazardly cradled the phone between my face and my shoulder.
“Naw, girl, I could not get with that waiting-o
n-line-for-a-machine shit, so I just bought me a treadmill. Didn’t I tell you?”
“Nope.”
“Oh. Well, I called to invite you over for a girls’ thing tonight. I meant to mention it at work yesterday, but I got so busy I forgot to. I know you don’t have any hot plans. Or do you?”
“Maybe. Let me just go get my planner out and see,” I said as I snatched up the TV Guide and loudly flipped through the pages. “Oh dear, it looks like I was suppose to have dinner with Denzel Washington this evening. Well, it would be the third time this week. I guess I could cancel for you,” I said in my best Elizabeth Taylor voice.
“Yeah, well, you do that.” Crystal laughed. “Let’s say about eight.”
“That should be fine.”
“Um, do you know where Little Eric is?”
“He said he was going to play basketball, why?”
“Where?”
“The court right downstairs.”
“Really?”
“Why?”
“Well, you ain’t heard it from me, but I saw him headed over to the park.”
“What park?”
“Central Park.”
“When was this?” I asked, already feeling my good mood changing for the worse.
“Just a few minutes before I called. In fact, seeing him is what reminded me to call you.”
“Was he by himself?”
“No, he had some little light-skinned chick with him who had on a pair of shorts that was so small her butt cheeks was playing peek-a-boo.”
I sucked air and bit down hard on the inside of my cheeks.
“Geneva?”
“His ass was supposed to be keeping an eye on the damn laundry!” I screamed. “I gotta go,” I barked and slammed the phone down.
I grabbed my keys off the kitchen table. Too angry to wait for the elevator, I took the stairs two at a time down to the basement of the tenement where the laundry room was.
It was Saturday, the big wash and dry day, and the laundry room stayed packed until at least four or five in the afternoon. If you had sense, you didn’t leave your clothes, not even for a minute, because you could return and find them removed from the washer or the dryer and thrown onto the floor or, worse yet, gone.
I walked into the laundry room and came face-to-face with at least twenty other women who practically mirrored myself. Rags tied around their heads, breasts swaying lazily beneath the yellowed and thin material of the old clothes they wore.
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