Every Woman's Dream (7 page)

Chapter 12

Joan

I
COULDN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT WHAT
L
OLA HAD SAID A FEW MIN
utes ago about us getting caught. I knew we'd eventually stop writing to those old men, but it never occurred to me that we'd “get caught.” I pushed those words, and what she had told me about Libby bringing the mail into the house, to the back of my mind. I was convinced that as long as we were careful, we had nothing to worry about. To keep myself busy so I wouldn't have time to worry about Libby or anything else related to our activity, I decided to go on about my day. In other words, it was business as usual. I treated myself to a spa treatment and a very expensive lunch. I ate caviar for the first time in my life.

The following Monday, Lola received a letter from one of her pals that contained eight hundred dollars, all in hundred-dollar bills. I asked myself over and over if these old dudes' brains had become pickled due to age. It was easy for me to see why so many old people ended up being victims. I was glad that most of the money came in money orders or checks. Later that same week, six more letters arrived—three for Lola and three for me. Each one contained
cash
!

When we received checks and money orders, we cashed them at a different location each time. The reason for that was because the bank tellers and the clerks who worked in convenience stores were just as nosy as everybody else. Sooner or later, some of them would start keeping track of two black teenagers cashing checks several times a month and blab enough for some meddlesome investigator to get involved. That was one chance we could not afford to take.

I kept my money in a cigar box, which I hid under a pile of junk in our garage. There was so much junk in there already, Elmo and Mama had to park their cars in our driveway. The only time anybody went into the garage was to store more junk, or to get rid of something else to make room for more.

By the first week in June, I had so much cash in my cigar box, I had to secure it with thick rubber bands to keep it shut. By the first week in July, I had
two
cigar boxes full of money! Even though Mama never asked about the bank account she had opened for me, I was still too afraid to deposit more than ten or twenty bucks at a time, which was what I earned babysitting and running errands for people.

I didn't like the fact that Lola and I couldn't use our money the way we wanted to. We still had no choice but to continue doing our spending on the down-low. We wore our most expensive outfits when just the two of us were together. We ate meals in expensive restaurants instead of the pizza parlors and rib joints we used to eat in. Every week we spent two to three hundred dollars each on spa treatments, manicures, pedicures, and trips to the beauty shop. On a Monday, the week after the Fourth of July, Lola accompanied me to a surgeon's office in San Jose. I had an early-morning appointment for him to remove a hairy mole from the side of my left boob. It was minor outpatient surgery and didn't take long. I paid the doctor two thousand dollars in cash. He told me I had to wear a special bra for two weeks. I wanted to wear a different one every day, so I needed to buy
fourteen.
The cost was forty dollars for each one. I didn't have much cash left in my wallet after paying the surgeon, so Lola paid the five hundred and sixty dollars, plus tax. She also paid another hundred dollars to cover the prescription for the pain pills the doctor thought I might need. On the way home, she treated me to a lobster and filet mignon lunch with all the trimmings. That was another couple of hundred bucks. We were almost living the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

By the time we returned to school in September, I was very comfortable with our routine. I even wrote some of my love letters in Mr. Dowling's history class. I sat in the last seat in the last row, where nobody could see what I was doing. At home I composed letters in my room on my laptop. And I was always careful, or so I thought. One Saturday morning, ten minutes after Too Sweet had rolled out of her bed and left the room, I scrambled out of mine and padded over to my desk. I plopped down into the new desk chair I had purchased a few days ago and turned on my computer. I started a “thank you” letter to a man who had just sent me another cashier's check. I was so preoccupied that I didn't hear the door open.

“Joan, what in the world are you up to this time?”

I whirled around so fast, I felt a crick in my neck. Too Sweet was standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. “I thought you were downstairs eating breakfast,” I wailed, minimizing the screen on my computer at the same time.

“I wish I was. Elmo burnt the grits and had to start a new pot,” she told me with a frown as she rubbed her nose. She pursed her lips, turned her head slightly to the side, and looked at me from the corner of her eye. “Joan, I hope you ain't messing around with some married man.”

“Who me? Why would you say that?”

“I seen the top of that letter you trying to hide. You started it with a ‘Dearest something or other' and that ain't the normal way kids talk.” There was a suspicious look on her face that was so extreme it looked like it had been tattooed on. I blinked and my mind raced to come up with something that would make her back off. She was as gullible as my pen pals, so I didn't have to use much brain energy.

“Please promise me you won't tell,” I began speaking in a feeble voice and blinking even harder. “I don't want to get Lola in trouble.”

Too Sweet did a double take and folded her arms. I knew she thought she was about to get a real juicy piece of news that she could spread. “Oh? Is Lola the one fooling around with a married man? Humph! The way she was raised, I ain't surprised. Whose husband is it? How come you writing a letter for her?”

“Her computer is in the shop for repairs, so she couldn't write a letter to the man herself to tell him she wanted to break up because she found out he's married,” I explained.

“Why is she calling him ‘dearest' if she's breaking up with him? A low-down, funky dog who's cheating on his wife needs to be called anything but dearest. What's wrong with Lola?”

“She still has feelings for him, see. She told me what to say in the letter.”

“Do say!” Too Sweet rolled her neck and placed her ashy hands on her hips. “How come she couldn't tell him to his face? And if her computer is broke, how come she couldn't handwrite him a letter?”

“I don't know. I guess she's too upset.”

“Or too lazy. So she makes you do her dirty work.” Too Sweet gave me a woeful look. “You poor thing. I had a feeling Lola was taking advantage of you. I hope you don't let none of her bad habits rub off on you. A girl like her, who grew up in a house with her daddy's girlfriend and mama living there at the same time, must come up with all kinds of devilment to lead girls like you into.”

“I won't let Lola do that to me,” I mumbled. I wondered what my cousin would say if she knew that I was doing most of the “leading.”

“Do I know the man?”

“What man?”

“That hound from hell Lola's involved with!” Too Sweet said sharply.

“No, you don't know him. He just moved here last month from San Francisco.”

“Oomph, oomph, oomph. So he's from
Frisco
? That figures! No wonder he's such a freak. But that ain't no excuse. He's new in town and he's already acting a fool—with a
teenager.
His wife ought to peel his dick with a dull knife.”

“Uh-huh,” I agreed as I turned off my computer. I rose and stretched. I was glad to see Too Sweet walking back toward the door. “I'll finish this letter tomorrow. I'm getting real hungry.”

“Well, let's just hope Elmo don't burn another batch of them grits.”

As soon as Too Sweet was out of the room, I locked the door and scurried back to my computer and finished typing the letter I had started. I sealed it in an envelope I had already addressed. This particular man was so antsy, if I didn't reply to one of his letters within the same week, he mailed a new one each day until he heard from me. He had been bugging me for a telephone number so he could finally hear the voice of the “sweet woman” he hoped to marry someday. I wanted to mail the letter as soon as I could to thank him for the money. I couldn't take a chance on him sending an avalanche of letters again in the same week. Some mailmen were just as nosy as bank employees and the people who cashed checks at convenience stores. I didn't want the man who delivered the mail to Lola's house to get suspicious about a pile of letters from the same man in the same week. My goal was to keep everybody at bay so Lola and I could keep the cash flowing a little while longer.

Chapter 13

Lola

T
WO DAYS AFTER THE LAST TIME
I'
D TALKED TO
J
OAN
, I
TROTTED
over to the convenience store a few blocks from school to cash a three-hundred-dollar cashier's check I'd received from one of my pen pals.

I was on my way into the store, and a woman I hadn't seen since I was twelve, and thought I'd never see again, was on her way out: Shirelle Odom. I still cared about Shirelle and I still thought of her as my other mother. Her niece, Mariel Odom, had been one of my closest friends, but after Shirelle severed ties with my family, so did Mariel and everybody else in their family.

“Lola, is that you?” Shirelle hollered, grabbing my arm. “You're so grown-up and pretty!”

“Shirelle?” She no longer resembled the woman I used to know who had always worn a long blond weave and enough makeup for two women. Her hair was black and short now and the only makeup on her face was some lip gloss and a little face powder. She was about twenty pounds heavier and in her middle forties now, but she was still a very attractive woman with her big, shiny black eyes and high cheekbones. “I am so happy to see you!” We moved out of the doorway and she gave me a big hug. “Do you live around here now?”

“Um, no. I was just in town visiting my folks,” she said quietly. “I live in San Francisco with my husband.”

“Oh, you're married now.”

She nodded. “I wasn't going to wait forever on your daddy to marry me, and I knew he wouldn't as long as your mama was alive. I, uh, I heard she died and he married Bertha Mays.”

“Yeah, he did. He died about three years ago.”

“I heard that too. I would have come to his funeral, but I was in Mexico with my husband at the time.”

Seeing Shirelle gave me a warm feeling. She had been more like family to me than Bertha, and I hoped she wanted to resume our relationship as much as I did. “I'd love to meet your husband. Where did you meet him? Do I know him?”

Shirelle blew out some air and gave me a pitiful look. When she shook her head, I no longer felt the warm feeling I'd experienced a few seconds before. “No. Um, you don't know him. His name is Harold Ledford and he's from San Diego. He's an architect and we have two little boys already, thirteen months apart.” She paused and gave me a guarded look. “Only a few people know I met him on the Internet.”

“You met your husband on the Internet? Did you meet him in a chat room?”

“Heavens no! It was nothing that tacky. I met him three years ago on a Christian dating site. We got married four months later. He's a deacon in the church we belong to. He's one of the sweetest and most decent men I've ever known.”

I was impressed. But I was shocked to hear that Shirelle, a woman who had grown up in the hood and fooled around with so many other women's husbands, had actually found one for herself on the Internet. “When can I meet him, your husband?”

Shirelle held up her hand, looked toward the street, then back at me. The way she started blinking and shifting her weight from one foot to the other told me she was nervous and anxious to be on her way. “Lola, I'm sorry, but I don't think that'd be a good idea. My husband doesn't know that I shacked up with your daddy in the same house where you and your mama lived at the same time. I don't want him to know what kind of woman I was back then, so it's best if you and I stay out of one another's lives. I'm very happy and I want to stay happy.”

“I understand,” I said glumly. I was so disappointed; I thought my heart was going to stop beating. “Well, it was nice to see you again. Can we have lunch or something before you go back to Frisco? We can go someplace where nobody will see us.”

Shirelle glanced toward the street again. She gave me a pitiful look and shook her head. “I'm leaving to go back home in a couple of hours. I hate to rush off now, but I'm supposed to meet my cousin at her house in a few minutes so we can have a few margaritas. I only came here to pick up a bottle of tequila.” She faked a smile and held up a brown bag with a bottle in it and waved it in my face.

“I'm listed in the telephone book if you ever want to call me sometime,” I told her.

“That's good to know. I just might do that. Um, I'm glad we ran into one another. You take care of yourself, sugar. Have a blessed day!” She gave me another hug before she rushed out the door. She sprinted to the parking lot and got into a shiny black Town Car and sped off like a bat out of hell.

Right after I cashed my check and got back outside, I pulled out my cell phone and called Joan. She answered right away.

“I just ran into my other mother,” I told her, my voice cracking as I walked toward my house.

“Shirelle? Where?” she squealed.

“She was coming out of the convenience store on Grant Street. Guess what? She's married to an architect. They have two little boys and she says she's very happy.”

“No shit? A hoochie like Shirelle caught herself an architect? I'd sure like to know how she managed to pull that off! Let's invite her to go have pizza or something. My treat. I'm dying to hear what-all she's been up to.”

“Joan, she met her husband on an Internet dating site. He's in the Church, so she doesn't want him to find out about her past. Because of that, she told me we shouldn't keep in touch with one another.”

“Oh, well. It is what it is, I guess. So she found a husband in an online lonely hearts' club, huh?”

“I wouldn't call the site she met her husband on a ‘lonely hearts club.' She met him on a Christian dating site.”

“Well, at the end of the day, all of the clubs on the Internet and in magazines are for people looking for love.” Joan snickered. “And money. Gotta run! Talk to you later.”

“Later,” I mumbled, clicking my phone off and sliding it back into my purse.

It made me sad to know that Shirelle didn't want to have a relationship with me again, so I decided to put her out of my mind and forget about her. But I knew that if she ever changed her mind, I'd be eager to have her back in my life. In the meantime, I decided to focus on the “club” that I belonged to now.

 

The following Monday after school, Joan rented a small public-storage unit to hide some of the things we'd purchased. We made eight trips by bus and cab to the unit, carrying two shopping bags each that contained clothes, perfume, CDs, books, and other small items. We did it over a five-day period so nobody would notice. An hour after the last trip on the fifth day, we went shopping again and had to make another trip to the storage unit the same day. At the rate we were buying things, we were going to run out of space real soon.

“We're going to need a much bigger place if we keep shopping so much,” I told Joan a week after she'd rented the storage unit. It was a Tuesday evening and hotter than usual for early October. We had both scored A's on a math test that morning and had decided to celebrate with a nice dinner at Angelo's Grotto, a very expensive Italian restaurant not far from downtown San Jose. “Between the two of us, we can easily afford an apartment. And it has to be one located in a neighborhood across town so we won't run into anybody we know.”

“Let me think about that,” she said. “We don't need to get too carried away.”

I tilted my head to the side and sucked on my teeth. “‘Carried away'?
Duh?
Don't you think it's a little late for you to be saying that? How much more ‘carried away' can we get?”

Joan huffed and gave me an impatient look. “I know that, so don't even go there. We have enough to worry about. We don't know what might happen if we get into this
too
deep.” The silence that followed was spooky.

After almost half a minute, I exhaled and locked eyes with Joan. “Is there something you're not telling me?”

“No,” she replied with a shrug. “It's all good.”

Joan's cousin Larry had recently moved in with her family while his apartment was being painted. He'd let her borrow his ten-year-old minivan to drive to the restaurant.

“Just thought I'd ask.” I sniffed and pursed my lips. “I've been thinking.... If we had an apartment, one with a garage, you or I could buy a decent vehicle. I'm tired of cruising around in your cousin's hooptie. And you had the nerve to park that jalopy right next to a brand-new Jaguar! I'd love to cruise around in a brand-new Mazda or a Jetta.”

Joan took a bite of the garlic bread we had ordered to go along with our steak and lobster dinners. “Be serious, girl. Hiding our new clothes and other stuff is one thing. How would you or I explain a new car while we're still in school and unemployed? Even if we hid it somewhere, sooner or later somebody would see us in it and want to know who it belongs to. Forget about either one of us getting a car.” Joan snorted, gave me a dismissive wave, and shifted in her seat. It was time to change the subject. “By the way, are you still sneaking Bobby Hayes into your house after Bertha goes to bed?”

My eyes rolled back in my head. “He came over last night. He was so hot he couldn't even wait for me to take off my panties. He ripped them off,” I recounted, swooning. “Bertha came downstairs to get a glass of milk and almost caught us getting busy on the living-room couch. Thank God we'd finished our business in time.” I giggled and slid my tongue across my bottom lip.

“I thought you said, once she went to bed, she slept like a corpse.”

“She usually does. But every now and then she'll get back up and wander down to the kitchen for a snack or something to drink. I really like Bobby and I'm going to do everything I can to hold on to him. The last boyfriend I had kicked me to the curb after one date because he couldn't deal with Bertha.”

A very cute Italian waiter delivered our main courses, but the smell of all that spicy food was very potent. Joan rubbed her nose and excused herself before she made a mad dash to the ladies' room. When she returned about ten minutes later, I folded my arms and looked at her with both eyebrows raised. “I was just about to come check on you. I thought you might have fallen into the toilet.”

“Don't worry about me.” Joan collapsed back into her chair and drank from her water glass. “I'm fine.” She lifted a napkin and wiped her mouth.

“You don't look fine. You've been acting weird and looking sick lately. Right now you look pretty bad—dark circles around your red puffy eyes and all. What's up?” I asked, spearing one of the asparagus spears on my plate with my fork.

Joan took a deep breath first and then she started talking again with a grimace on her face. “There's something I need to tell you. I've been putting it off, but I can't do that any longer. You and everybody else will know soon, anyway. It's the reason I don't think we should rent an apartment or buy a car.” She sighed. “I don't know what's going to happen to me in the near future. . . .”

“Oh no!” I said in a hoarse whisper. “Please don't tell me you're dying too! I've lost my parents and I don't think I could go on if I lost you too. Do you have a health issue that—”

Joan interrupted me by holding up her hand. “No, I don't have any health issues. Well, in a way I do.”

“Joan, stop beating around the bush and tell me what the hell is going on.”

She took another deep breath and wiped her mouth again before she continued. “We have enough on our plate already, so we don't need to complicate things. How long do you think we could keep the news about us renting an apartment hidden from the big mouths?”

“Joan, you're talking in all kinds of circles. Exactly what is this ‘something' you're holding back that me and everybody else is going to find out soon, anyway? And how does it involve us getting an apartment or a car?” I narrowed my eyes and looked at her with my lips pressed together. I beckoned with my hand for her to continue.

“You know I don't believe in abortion, right?”

My eyes got big and my face froze. “Did I miss something? How did we get from talking about us getting an apartment and cars to the subject of abortion? Is one of your sisters pregnant again?”

She shook her head. “I wish,” she replied, just above a whisper.

“Speak up and get to the point.” I glanced at my watch, then back at Joan, with a distasteful look on my face now. “I'd like to finish eating and get up out of this place before midnight.”

Joan snorted, coughed to clear her throat, and sat up straighter in her chair. She placed her hands, palms down, on top of the table, as if she was about to participate in a séance. “Remember that going-away party I went to back in July that my hairdresser hosted for a young dentist she went to high school with?”

“Uh-huh. The one who started his practice last year. He was going away to participate in some program to assist some dentists in Haiti for a few weeks, right?”

Joan nodded. “Reed Riley. And it was Martinique, not Haiti.”

“I saw his picture in the paper the other day about some charity function he helped sponsor. Hmmm. Not only is he impressing a lot of folks, he's cute. Too bad you didn't get a chance to get to know him, if you know what I mean.”

“I did. . . .”

“Oh? I thought he left the country the day after that party.”

“He did. We really hit it off and I went home with him after the party. We were drunk, so I don't have to tell you what happened when we got to his place.”

I sagged back in my seat and muttered some gibberish under my breath. Then I looked at Joan with my eyes squinted. “No, you don't have to tell me. I'm just ticked off because you hadn't told me before now. So, are you telling me that you slept with that man?”