by Mary Monroe
“Sondra, gal, with all that nappy-ass hair on your head, your brown skin, and your big ass, if you even think you can pass for white, you ain’t foolin’ nobody but yourself!” Daddy had had too much to drink. “Look at your sister Annette. She black as hell and she happy. Ain’t you, baby?” He smiled, giving me an insightful look.
Muh’Dear cleared her throat and draped her arm around my shoulder.
“I am happy,” I admitted. And I was.
Lillimae and her husband Freddie Lee had reconciled. He had moved back into Lillimae’s house. I didn’t know why I was so surprised that he was so good-looking. Especially when I had almost married a man just as handsome myself. As a matter of fact, Freddie Lee resembled Jerome. He had the same light skin and curly hair, but he had a dimple in his left cheek that made him look even cuter. Lillimae’s two preteen sons, Wally and Ernest, seemed bored and took off running out the back door as soon as they had stuffed their mouths with wedding cake.
What was touching about the ceremony was, after the preacher had pronounced Amos and Helga man and wife, they also jumped over a broom, like the slaves used to do when they were married. Of course, Muh’Dear had to whisper in my ear about that. “I done seen everything now. A half-white man and his all-white woman, doin’ one of the blackest things in the world.” Muh’Dear covered her mouth when I gave her an exasperated look.
I borrowed Lillimae’s car after the reception so I could be alone for a little while. I didn’t want Muh’Dear, or anybody else, to know where I was going. I drove straight to Hanley, the rural Miami district where I had been born.
I couldn’t see the road for the tears in my eyes as I eased the car down the hill to see the shack we’d been living in when Daddy left. It was gone. A tree, leaning so far to the left it looked like it was about to break in two, now occupied the spot where our old house had stood.
Waist-high weeds covered the backyard where I used to play. There was nothing left to indicate that I had ever been to this place before. A squirrel was peeping from behind a tree and ran when I tried to lure him out in the open. I had had a squirrel for a pet when I was a child, but this one wanted nothing to do with me. After a few more minutes, I returned to the car and sped back up the hill. Looking in the rearview mirror, I saw a blanket of dust rising up so high, it completely blocked my view. That dust was symbolic. It blocked out a past that I needed to forget. But I couldn’t. My past had shaped my future and was the reason I had risen so high myself.
Too emotional to return to Lillimae’s house right away, I headed in the opposite direction. Before long I found myself in another rural part of Miami. Atwater was where Rhoda had lived with her husband and children. I parked the car on the road and looked to the clearing where Rhoda’s former house still stood. An elderly white man was on the front porch in a rocking chair. I didn’t want to see any more than this, particularly the inside of the house or the back porch. The back porch was where I’d watched Rhoda nurse her child, even after he was dead.
Inside of this house was the bathroom where Rhoda had electrocuted the white girl who had threatened her family. I don’t know why I had to see the two places that had played such major roles in my life, but I’m glad I did. Even though sadness overwhelmed me, I felt calmer than I’d felt in years.
My bittersweet visit to Miami ended with a hog butchering and us having a picnic in Lillimae’s backyard the day after my brother’s wedding. Daddy seemed happy just to have all of his children and Muh’Dear together with him for the first time.
It was the best year of my life.
CHAPTER 70
D
addy was as excited about my pregnancy as Muh’Dear was. He and Lillimae hopped on a plane during the middle of my last month, planning to be present for the birth.
I was surprised and pleased when Sondra and Amos started calling me once a week from Germany. Apparently it was a lot easier for them to talk to me from a distance than it was to my face. I learned during lengthy telephone conversations with them that Amos and his German wife were planning to buy a house in Munich and that Sondra had met the man of her dreams. She airmailed me her wedding pictures. I was shocked to see that her groom was a pitch-black, flat-faced lawyer from Uganda. “Ain’t no tellin’ what our kids are goin’ to look like,” she confessed. It pleased me to hear that she had put her obsession about living as a white woman behind her.
The last week of my pregnancy was the hardest. I was as clumsy as an ox. Lillimae took care of the house as well as she took care of Daddy and me. I never felt so loved in my life.
With Daddy snoozing noisily on my living room couch and me piled on the love seat facing him one evening, Lillimae waddled around the room in a flowered muumuu, dusting and straightening up furniture.
“Annette, I am so pleased everything worked out the way it did. If I hadn’t met you, I probably wouldn’t have gotten back with Freddie Lee. And poor Daddy.” She paused and looked over at Daddy with his head back and his mouth stretched open. “He’s so happy. Everything is complete now.” Lillimae sighed, fanned her face with a dust rag, and looked at me.
“It sure is,” I mumbled, crossing my swollen ankles.
I still felt that something important was not where it was supposed to be in my life even though that something lived right next door to me. As close as Pee Wee and I were, there was something keeping a wedge between us. Me.
My daughter was born one night in the middle of that December. My labor had started earlier in the afternoon, right in the middle of Jade’s birthday party in the dining room at Antonosanti’s.
“It’s a sign. Us havin’ daughters on the same day,” Rhoda decided. She had come to the hospital later than evening. Muh’Dear, Daddy and Lillimae, and Scary Mary all grinning like they’d won a jackpot, were in the room with me when Rhoda arrived. It was truly one of the happiest moments of my life. The people I loved most in the world were all with me at the same time. Pee Wee was the only one missing. I knew that if he had known that I was in the hospital having a baby, wild horses couldn’t have kept him away. As long as I had known Pee Wee and as close as we were, I wasn’t sure where I stood with him. I didn’t know what this new development in my life was going to mean to my friendship with Pee Wee.
Because of my age and weight, delivering a baby was not easy for me. After my daughter had decided it was time for her to make her debut, she also decided to change her position in my body, turning herself almost upside down. I had to be cut open. My doctor insisted that I spend another few days in the hospital.
The day after I’d given birth, I opened my eyes to see Lillimae standing over my hospital bed, smoothing my hair back off my face with a damp facecloth. “Don’t you worry about havin’ a scar on your belly, Annette. The doctor had to cut me open for both my babies.” Lillimae stood up straight, patted her belly, and sighed. “My husband says my scar is the biggest ‘smile’ he ever seen on me. I hope you’ll look at your scar the same way and I hope you don’t wait too long to share this blessed event with that baby’s daddy.”
Two days after I delivered my daughter, Pee Wee walked quietly into my room with a huge potted plant. I was propped up in bed, trying to season a baked potato. Daddy, Muh’Dear, Lillimae, Scary Mary, and all five of her prostitutes had just left and I was so exhausted I couldn’t even see straight. It took me a moment to realize that it was Pee Wee I was looking at. The Price Is Right was on the television facing my bed. Pee Wee turned the television off and gave me a stern look.
“Girl, why didn’t you tell me you was pregnant?” he asked in a hoarse voice, setting the plant on the windowsill. Then he slid his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a get-well card and dropped it on the nightstand. “I call your house lookin’ for you and your daddy tells me you at the hospital havin’ a baby.”
“I’ve been meaning to…” I set the tray with what was left of my lunch on the table next to the bed. “Uh…all this medication got me all doped up…I thought I called you yesterday to te
ll you.”
Pee Wee walked up close to the bed and for a moment he just stared at me as my face burned. In the clumsiest move I ever saw him make, he leaned over the bed and kissed me on my forehead with homosexual indifference. It was hard to believe that this was the same man who spent almost as much time in my bed as I did. The father of my child.
“To tell me what?”
“About the baby,” I whimpered.
He nodded and pursed his lips. “Did you just find out you was pregnant yesterday?”
I didn’t answer. I just blinked.
“I called you yesterday, girl. Like I said, your daddy picks up the telephone and tells me you at the hospital havin’ a baby.”
With a look on his face I could not interpret, Pee Wee moved until his back hit the wall. With a deep sigh, he turned and moved to the side so that he was now in front of the window.
“So do this mean you and Jerome goin’ to try and make a go of it after all?” he asked, talking with his back me.
“Uh…I don’t think so.” I was stunned. Pee Wee thought that Jerome had fathered my baby! Rhoda, Lillimae, and Muh’Dear were the only ones who knew the truth and I had not decided on what I was going to tell everybody else. But I knew I couldn’t pass my daughter off on Jerome. Once the news got to him, he would have denied it anyway, so I’d be right back where I started. Pee Wee had been the only man I’d slept with since Jerome. It sounded like he didn’t think that, though. If he had asked, I would have told him right then and there that he was my baby’s father.
“Pee Wee, you should leave now. They’ll be bringing the baby in for me to feed in a few minutes.” My breasts felt like bricks as I struggled to rearrange my bloated body. I looked like I was still pregnant.
Pee Wee sighed as he moved toward me. “I can’t wait to see your little girl,” he said dryly, patting my shoulder. “Uncle Pee Wee is goin’ to spoil her rotten.”
“I already know that,” I said sadly.
“And I know she is goin’ to be a heart-breaker. Just like her mama.” He bit his bottom lip and blinked. “I can’t wait to see what she looks like,” he said on his way out.
I was grateful that Charlotte looked just like me. I believed that I could keep the identity of her father a secret for the rest of my life, if I had to.
Muh’Dear was the proudest new grandmother in town. “And I just love the name Charlotte. That was my mama’s name, you know. She didn’t live long enough to enjoy a grandchild,” Muh’Dear told me.
Recalling that mysterious dream I’d had made me feel even better. I now knew that both my children were in good hands, the dead one and the one I held in my arms.
Two days after I returned to my house, Lillimae had to leave Ohio to go back to work and look after her own children. But Daddy decided to stay on in Ohio indefinitely. Muh’Dear had insisted that he stay with her in the house that she had shared with Daddy King—sleeping in a separate room, though. It was a blessing to see them on friendly terms. It was one of the many things I had prayed for.
Rhoda spent a lot of her free time at my house, fussing over Charlotte.
“We’ve been tryin’ for another child before Otis and I get too old,” she told me. “Otis has always wanted another boy to replace David. He took our son’s death harder than I did and still hasn’t got over it.”
“You think about your little boy a lot, don’t you?”
“I think about a lot of things, but my children are the most important things in my life. I would die for them. Poor Jade hasn’t been the same since P. died. She doesn’t want to sleep over with any of her other little friends and I don’t want her to. Just thinkin’ about my daughter bein’ in Jean’s house with that Vinnie just makes my blood boil.”
“Well, at least that’s one more child molester nobody won’t ever have to worry about again,” I said thoughtfully, holding my own child closer to me so tight she squirmed and moaned.
“That’s for sure. Vinnie’ll get along just fine down in that inferno with old Buttwright,” Rhoda hissed.
I had often wondered what child molesters thought of one another. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter anymore. They would all end up in the same fiery hell and that’s all that mattered.
“Nobody’s sorry that old Mr. Antonosanti killed him.” I sighed. It was the look on Rhoda’s face that sent my mind into a whirl of confusion. I had to wonder just what really happened to Vinnie. It had appeared to be an open-and-shut case. They’d found Vinnie dead and Mr. Antonosanti had promptly confessed to killing him. It all seemed too neat and convenient. If Rhoda was involved, I didn’t want to know. But if her confessions about her killing Mr. Boatwright, her grandmother, that cop, and that white girl were true, and if Rhoda thought for one minute that Vinnie had also touched her daughter, it all made sense.
“Annette, why are you suddenly lookin’ so serious?” Rhoda asked, hugging her chest. She had on a baggy sweater. Even if she’d still had breasts, that sweater would have concealed them. It occurred to me that most of the tops Rhoda wore since her return to Ohio were baggy. I had wondered why. I wouldn’t have to wonder about that anymore.
“Uh…I was just thinking about how happy having Charlotte has made me. I guess it’s not fair for me to keep all this happiness to myself. I have to tell Pee Wee that Charlotte is his daughter,” I said. With a laugh I added, “He worked hard for her.”
“I’ve been tellin’ you that all along. Haven’t I?”
I put all the other thoughts I had just had out of my mind. None of it seemed to matter anymore now.
CHAPTER 71
A
s soon as Rhoda left my house, I called up Pee Wee. He had been to the house several times since I’d come from the hospital. Like a typical man, he had purchased a lot of things that Charlotte couldn’t appreciate for years. In addition to rattles, bibs, and pacifiers, he had spent a fortune on huge dolls that could walk and talk, a tea set, roller skates, and a play station. Like everybody else, he agreed that Charlotte looked a lot like me. So far, nobody but me had noticed that she had Pee Wee’s eyes.
“I need you to get over here right now,” I said sternly.
I heard him take a deep breath before he responded. “Uh-oh. Uh, shit. Ain’t no tellin’ what you goin’ to confess this time. I think I should have me a few drinks before I come over there. Girl, you be comin’ up with some deep shit.”
“I don’t want you drunk when I tell you…what I have to tell you.”
“Please don’t tell me you got a fatal disease—”
“Charlotte is your daughter.”
There was a moment of silence that seemed to go on forever.
I heard Pee Wee suck in his breath and cough to clear his throat, choking on air. “What did you say?” he wheezed.
“You heard me.”
Pee Wee laughed. “I—you, why in the world do you keep so many things a secret? Do you like fuckin’ with my blood pressure? How do I know you ain’t just clownin’ me?”
“I know you didn’t believe that stuff I told you about Rhoda killing all those people. And I don’t know if you believed all that stuff I told you and everybody else about Mr. Boatwright. If you don’t want to believe me this time, well, there’s nothing more for me to say to you tonight. What I told you about Rhoda killing those people, what I said about Mr. Boatwright raping me, and what I am telling you now about Charlotte, is all true.”
“What about Jerome?”
“What about Jerome?” I hissed.
“Every time he slid out of your house, I seen him. And I know y’all wasn’t in your bedroom playin’ cards.”
“I broke up with Jerome more than a year ago. I don’t know about your mama, but mine didn’t carry me in her belly but nine months. Why don’t you do the math?”
I heard Pee Wee mumbling under his breath, then I heard a loud gasp. “Holy shit.”
“I’m getting off this phone now. If you decide this is too much for you, that’s fine. I can raise my child alone. And w
e sure don’t need your money, so you don’t even have to worry about me putting the Man on you.”
“Let me get in some clothes and come over there,” he said evenly.
“I don’t like your tone of voice and if you come over here and clown me, you…you are going to get what Jerome got.”
“Now you gettin’ all mad and I ain’t even there yet. I’m comin’ over there so you can tell me this to my face.”
Pee Wee didn’t come over right away like I expected him to. It was an hour before he pounded on my door. In his hand was the biggest bouquet of roses I had ever seen.
“Ain’t you never seen a proud new father before?” he asked.
Pee Wee looked in my eyes the way no man had ever done before. I could feel his love for me. I broke down and cried like a baby.
It was all clear to me now. After all I’d been through with other men, the best one for me had been right up under my nose all along.
I wasn’t prepared for what Pee Wee did a few minutes later. He spirited Charlotte and me to Muh’Dear’s house.
Over dinner in front of my daddy, my mother, Rhoda, and the ever-present Scary Mary, with Charlotte on his lap, Pee Wee turned to me with a broad smile and tears in his eyes. “Girl, if we don’t hurry up and get married, we goin’ to have to find a church that’s wheelchair accessible. I found another gray hair on my head this mornin’,” he said petulantly.
“Whenever you’re ready,” I said, grinning from ear to ear. I meant every word I said. Because I was ready now myself.
It was so ironic that both Jerome and Pee Wee had proposed to me over dinner with Muh’Dear as a witness. It had to mean something.
“And if you run off and leave this girl, I’m goin’ to hunt you down myself,” Muh’Dear said sternly. “Some men have to go through hell before they figure out how good they already had it.” Muh’Dear looked at Daddy.
Daddy’s eyes got wide and he said quickly, “I ain’t gwine nowhere. I’m stayin’ rightcheer…where I belong.”