by Mary Monroe
My obese secretary, Sister Beulah, barged into my office a few minutes after my conversation with Rachel. She took one look at the tortured expression on my face and stopped in her tracks. “Son, I heard you yelling at somebody a few moments ago, and you don’t look well. What’s the matter?”
I glared at the elderly woman, whom Mother had practically forced me to hire, and slammed my fist down on my desk. “What the fuck! Don’t you worry about it! It’s none of your damn business!” I blasted. “Don’t you have work to do?” I had been snapping at Sister Beulah a lot lately. I was sorry that I had begun to take out my frustrations on her.
Sister Beulah’s brows furrowed, and her mouth dropped open. She placed her hands on her ample hips and blinked hard a few times. Next thing I knew, she stomped up closer to my desk. She was glaring at me even harder than I was glaring at her. “Seth Garrett, who do you think you’re talking to? I’m old enough to be your mama, boy.”
“Boy? How big do boys grow where you come from? I’m a man who happens to be the one who signs your paychecks. Now, if you want to continue working for me, you’d better stay in your place.”
In all the years I had known Sister Beulah, I had never seen a more horrified look on her face.
“Why, you mannish, ungrateful scalawag, you!” she yelled, seething with anger. “You can’t talk to me like that! I used to change your funky diapers! I used to burp you. I used to—”
“I’ll be saying you used to work for me if you don’t watch your step, lady.”
Sister Beulah shook her finger in my face. “Harrumph! I’ve had just about enough of you sassing me, when all I’m trying to do is help you. I don’t have to put up with this mess!”
“No, you don’t have to put up with this mess.”
“And I won’t. I’ll be out of here in five minutes.”
“What? I was going to suspend you for only a few days,” I said, wobbling up out of my seat. “You can’t just up and quit.”
“You just watch me!” Sister Beulah had already started moving toward the door, stomping like she was trying to put out a fire, and breathing through her mouth so hard, I was surprised she didn’t spit out a few sparks.
I followed her to the reception area. “Let’s talk this over after we both cool off. I’m having a bad day, and you know I didn’t mean what I just said.”
“Well, I meant what I just said!” She stopped by the side of her desk. “Just let me get my pocketbook, my rubber plant, my Tupperware bowl with the red beans and rice you won’t be eating for lunch today, and my shawl, and I’ll be on my way. You know where to send my last paycheck. And if you know what’s good for you, it better not be late or short, or you’ll hear from my attorney!” Sister Beulah grabbed her hideous black and yellow polka-dot shawl off the coatrack behind her desk and wrapped it around her shoulders. Had this not been such a serious situation, I would have laughed, because she looked like a gigantic bumblebee.
“Sister Beulah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you,” I said, attempting to put my hands on her shoulders. My face was so close to hers, the stench of her sour breath made my eyes water.
“You’ve done just that one time too many,” she barked, slapping my hands away. She snatched open the top side drawer of her desk and removed her bamboo purse and a few other personal items. She looked at me with so much contempt in her eyes, I flinched. “And let me tell you one more thing, young man. From now on, you’d better watch how you treat people. One of these days, you are going to piss off the wrong person, and they are going to teach your black ass a lesson you’ll never forget!”
I couldn’t remember the last time I had been insulted so severely, but I was prepared to grovel as much as necessary to keep my secretary. “Sister Beulah, have a heart. I’m begging you not to leave like this! Is it a raise you want? Is that what’s really ruffling your tail feathers? I’m sure we can work something out. We still need you!”
“Well, I don’t need you or your money. I never did. You knew that from day one. I was helping out as a favor to you and your mama.”
“Sister Beulah, I’ve known you since I was a little boy. I care about you, and I worry about you—”
“You don’t need to worry about me. I was just fine before I came to work for you, and I’ll be fine after I’m gone.”
“Okay. I’m trying to be reasonable.”
“Reasonable? Boy, you don’t know the meaning of that word. Not to me or anybody else. I am not blind. I know what you’ve been up to with that gal that you lock yourself up with in your office. . . .” A mysterious look crossed Sister Beulah’s face, and that was another concern.
“If you’re talking about Darla Woodson, that’s none of your business.”
“No, it’s not. But I will tell you this much. If you think you need to worry about somebody, that somebody should be yourself and . . . Rachel.”
“What about Rachel?”
“You think all I do is sit out here and type letters and answer the phone? You think the people who call here for you don’t tell me more than they should when I answer your phone? And the same goes for the people who come up in here to see you. Like that Darla woman! Don’t you know by now that most secretaries know just about everything there is to know about their bosses? Even their personal life . . .”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You ever wonder what Darla and I talk about when she’s out here with me, waiting for you to finish a call or come out of a meeting?”
“Anything that Darla discusses with you in this office is confidential. Do I make myself clear?”
“Nigger, please! The only thing ‘confidential’ to me is my stretch-marked booty! You just better pray I don’t get mad enough to blab your ‘confidential’ business.”
“You will not discuss my personal business. Do you understand?”
“I’ll discuss whatever I want to. If you don’t like it . . . sue me. Now, you have a nice day, if you can, boy.”
I was so stunned, I couldn’t say another word or move a muscle. I stood rooted to the same spot as my angry former secretary offered me a sinister laugh before she angrily marched out the front door.
Chapter 15
Rachel
I SPENT MY WHOLE LUNCH HOUR SITTING IN THE BREAK ROOM IGNORING the ham sandwich on the Styrofoam plate in front of me as I read a few pages of the latest issue of Black Enterprise. If somebody had come in and asked me what I’d just read, I could not have told them. My mind was on Seth and why he had changed his mind about marrying me.
I was glad to see my desk telephone message-waiting light blinking when I returned to my office. My hand trembled as I retrieved my messages. The first one was from Mama. I interrupted her rant in mid-sentence because no matter what she was whining about this time, it could wait. The second message was from Lucy. She so sounded frantic, I called her back immediately.
“What’s up?” I began. “How come you didn’t attend the staff meeting this morning?” Lucy was our head librarian, and she rarely missed a staff meeting.
“I had a doctor’s appointment. Do you know that motherfucker I’ve been dating gave me an STD?”
“That good-looking Greyhound bus driver you’ve been seeing infected you? With what?”
“Herpes!”
“Oh, my God. I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“You’re sorry. Honey, the person who is going to be sorry is Gary Franklin!”
“Have you told him yet?”
“I just found out this morning, and he won’t be back from his bus run to San Jose until tonight. Oh, when I see that son of a bitch, he’s going to regret the day he met me!” Lucy snarled. “I’m not coming in to work at all today. Can you meet me at Dino’s Restaurant when you get off work? I’m going to get drunk as hell.”
“I can meet you, but I can’t stay long. Seth is coming over to talk to me about something this evening.”
“Then why don’t we get together after you’ve talked to Seth? I’m going
to need a couple of hours to vent. I can round up Paulette and Patrice, if they’re available, and we can meet at your place or mine.”
“That sounds fine, but I’m not in the mood for any of Patrice’s stupid comments to me tonight.”
“You don’t have to worry about her messing with you tonight. All I have to do is give her one of my ‘Don’t you go there’ looks and that’ll shut her shut up.”
“Is that why she never says anything stupid to you or about you?”
“She has no reason to. A fat, clumsy ox like me with my plain-Jane self . . . I’m no threat to her. But you’re everything she’s not—petite, smart, and beautiful. She’s always been jealous of you.”
“If she’s jealous of me, why does she come around me and even call me up from time to time?”
“Now, that’s a question I can’t answer. She’s not a mean person, but I would never let my guard down with her if I wore your shoes. I think . . .” Lucy paused.
“Think what?”
“She used to have the hots for Seth real bad. It took her a long time to realize he wasn’t interested in her, so she got over him.”
“If she got ‘over him,’ why do you think she has some resentment toward me?”
“She’s a woman, and that’s what we do. I got over my ex-husband, but I still can’t stand the bitch who took him from me.” Lucy laughed.
I laughed too. “Well, I hope Patrice finds herself a man soon. And I hope she has gotten over Seth, because I’m not about to let another woman have him.” I laughed again. But it was a hollow laugh. I refused to believe that Seth was not going to marry me, unless he gave me a valid reason as to why he had made that decision. “Anyway, if you want to bring her along, I don’t care. I’ll call you after Seth leaves my apartment.”
Seth arrived at six thirty. He entered my living room, dragging his feet like he was on the way to his own execution.
What he had told me on the telephone earlier had not sunk in yet, so I was still able to be cordial to him. “Baby, you look like hell,” I told him. “Can I fix you a drink?”
He held up his hand and shook his head. “Don’t bother. I won’t be staying but a few minutes.” He shuffled slowly across the floor to the couch, where he plopped down with a groan.
“Seth, what’s the matter?” I demanded. I stood in front of him with my arms folded. “Were you serious about calling off the wedding?”
“Rachel, I think you need to sit down to hear what I have to say.” He patted a spot on the couch next to him. When I attempted to ease down into his lap, he pushed me to the side and put his head in his hands and moaned. “I hate to do this to you.”
“I have a feeling I’m going to hate whatever it is you’re going to do to me, too.”
“I’m not ready for marriage!” I could not believe how blunt he sounded.
“Oh.” I let out a heavy sigh and looked at the wall for a few seconds. From the corner of my eye, I could see him staring at me with a blank expression on his face. I turned sharply to look at him. “After all this time, you just now decided that you’re not ready for marriage?”
“Well . . . ,” he sniffed. Then he nodded. “It’s been on my mind for some time now.”
“Seth, if it’s been on your mind for ‘some time,’ why didn’t you say something before now? Why did you let me go on thinking everything was okay? And here I was, out looking for a dress to get married in!”
“Rachel, I’m sorry.” He shook his head. I had never seen such a look of anguish on his face. “I wasn’t being fair to myself by keeping you in the dark.”
“Fair to yourself? What about you not being fair to me?”
“I thought maybe my feelings would change . . . but . . . but they haven’t! I can’t marry you, and that’s final.”
I pressed my lips together and rubbed the back of my neck. It felt like every muscle in my body from the chest up was aching, like I’d been run over by a bus. And in a way I guessed I had been thrown under a bus. I wanted to crawl into bed and stay there until this was over. It had to be a nightmare, and I couldn’t wait to wake up. But when I looked at Seth again and saw the serious look on his face, I knew it was not a nightmare.
I could feel the blood rushing up to my face, the same way it had that day I caught my ex-boyfriend Jeffrey in bed with another woman before I moved from Alabama. I was not about to bust up one of my cute lamps upside Seth’s head the way I had with Jeffrey.
“Seth, I advise you to vacate the premises,” I said abruptly. “I need to be alone right now.” It did me no good to attempt to maintain my normal tone of voice. I sounded as squeaky as Minnie Mouse.
He stood up so fast, he stumbled. Had he not grabbed on to the back of the easy chair facing the couch, he would have fallen. “I . . . I still care about you . . . uh . . . Rachel,” he blubbered, blinking hard.
I shot him a hot look and nodded. “Sure you do. Now, if you don’t get up out of my place, I am not going to be responsible for my actions,” I warned.
“You’re not going to do anything stupid to yourself when I leave, I hope.”
“If I do anything stupid, it won’t be to myself. If you don’t get your ass out of here while you still can, you’ll find out.”
Seth began to move toward the door, walking backward. I was surprised at how calm he appeared to be while I was falling apart inside a piece at a time. “Rachel, are you going to be all right?”
“Good-bye, Seth,” I said, rising. I rushed over to the door and flung it open. “And good luck.” As soon as he crossed the threshold, I slammed the door so hard and fast, it hit his butt.
He must have flown down the stairs from my second-floor apartment to his car, because a few seconds later, he started his motor and drove off like a bat out of hell. I sat back down on the couch and stared at the wall until the telephone rang an hour later.
“Hey, girl.” It was Lucy.
“I’m glad you called,” I croaked.
“You free for company now? Paulette and Patrice told me to pick them up on my way over.”
“Come on over,” I managed to say. “I’ll be here.”
Chapter 16
Rachel
TWENTY MINUTES LATER PATRICE, LUCY, AND PAULETTE ARRIVED. After we had all sat down in my living room, I poured each of us a glass of wine. We immediately started roasting Lucy’s boyfriend for giving her herpes.
The telephone rang again, and I motioned for everybody to get silent. I leaped up and darted across the floor to the end table. I lifted the telephone with a shaky hand. This time it was Mama on the other end of the line.
“Hi, baby,” she began.
“Mama, I can’t talk right now. I have company.”
“I just wanted to know if you and Seth had picked a date for the wedding yet—and one y’all going to stick to this time. Shoot! Your aunt Hattie keeps bugging me about it. Since you and Seth keep fiddling around with the date, she can’t determine when to start saving enough money to buy y’all a real nice wedding gift,” Mama said.
I had a hard time trying to decide what words I wanted to use. I didn’t say anything until Mama finished her last rambling sentence and paused to clear her throat. “Mama, Seth and I won’t be getting married.” Not only did she let out a piercing yelp, but so did my three friends. “He called it off.”
“Say what? Why did Seth call off the wedding? What did you do to him, gal?” Mama hollered.
“I didn’t do anything to him, Mama. He came by here a little while ago and told me he was not ready for marriage.”
With another loud yelp, Lucy rose but fell back onto the couch a few seconds later, fanning her face with her hand. Patrice and Paulette came over and stood next to me with stunned looks on their faces.
“Is that all he told you?” Mama paused, and I heard her mumbling to somebody on her end. Then she said in a loud voice to whoever that person was, “Seth said what?” A few moments passed, and then she cussed under her breath. “Rachel, Janet is standing behind me,
eavesdropping on my call, like she always does when somebody uses the phone in this house. She just told me that when y’all was down here last year, she heard Seth on the telephone telling somebody he wasn’t going to marry you, because your family had mental problems. Did you know he felt that way?”
What I had just heard made absolutely no sense to me, and I didn’t believe it for one second. The man had stayed with me long after he had met Janet and Ernest. “Mama, that’s not the reason he broke up with me.”
“But Janet just told me she heard—”
“Seth didn’t care about our family’s mental situation.”
“Girl, use your head for something other than a hat rack. Didn’t you just hear what I told you that Janet told me?”
“And you believe her? Janet’s been hearing voices for years, Mama. What about the time she told you a demon told her to set your laundry on fire? And what about that time she claims the dog who lives in the trailer across the street from you told her to cut off all her hair?”
“She was having episodes when she said all that.”
“What makes you think she’s not having an ‘episode’ this time?”
“But why would she say something like that about Seth?”
“Because right after she heard you say, ‘Seth called off the wedding, ’ a few minutes ago, she took it and ran with it. Seth didn’t change his mind about marrying me because of her and Ernest.”
“They ain’t the only ones in our family with mental afflictions. Even your late daddy must have had some mental problems to fool around with another man’s wife.”
“I know that, Mama. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to my company. I’ll call you back tomorrow.”
By the time I got off the telephone, all three of my friends had surrounded me.
“Girl, you let me go on and on about my problem, when we should have been discussing yours!” Lucy boomed. “How come you didn’t tell us Seth broke off the engagement?”
“I was going to,” I muttered. I returned to the couch, but everybody else stood in the middle of the floor, looking at me.