Second Sunday (21 page)

“Husband? Not for long. Ain’t that right, Oscar?” Queenie said smugly.

Oscar bowed his head and stared at his feet, not able to utter one word.

Queenie bent down and stuck her face right in his. “You better TELL her, Oscar Lee Thomas.”

“Yeah, Oscar Lee Thomas.
Tell
me,” Mozelle said, again amazing herself with the coolness in her voice.

By now everybody in the club was gearing up for a fight. The DJ had cut the music off so they could all hear better, and those
who’d been dancing had cleared the floor to allow unobstructed views. The silence hung heavy until Oscar managed to croak
out, “Uhhh, Queenie, there ain’t nothing to tell.”

“What?”

“There ain’t nothing to tell. I ain’t leaving Mozelle after six babies and more than forty years.”

Queenie stood frozen a few seconds, processing his words, then sprung to life with a roar. Sweating and huffing and puffing,
she loomed over Oscar, howling, “Nothing to tell? NOTHING TO TELL? OLD fool, what you mean there ain’t nothing to TELL!”

Oscar raised his hands, but before he could explain, Queenie yanked him up by the collar onto his feet. She cocked a big meaty
fist covered with mood rings, hauled off, and punched him in the mouth, knocking him sprawling across the floor. He lay there
on his back for a moment, then started scuttling around in his pink leisure suit trying to get back up. But with those heavy,
four-inch platforms on his shoes, he could barely even lift his skinny little legs.

Queenie grabbed Oscar by the ankles to drag him around the room, intent on doing some real damage to his suit. She started
swishing him back and forth like she was sweeping the floor, until some old Cougars pried him loose. But Queenie wasn’t through.
Blowing air out of her nose like a riled-up bull, she growled, “You kiss my big yellow behind, Oscar Thomas. I thought you
was in love with me, always coming to me, telling me that your wife cut off relations with you ever since she gone through
the change. Now, Miss Mozelle don’t hardly look like no uptight, no-relations woman. You ain’t nothin’ but a little black
Raisinet-looking, no-good lyin’ dawg.”

Oscar was still struggling to get up. He looked over at Mozelle for help, but she just stood there, amused. That made Oscar
spitting mad—and only spit came out when he tried to give her the tongue-lashing she deserved. His teeth were locked, and
he couldn’t open his mouth.

Apparently that cement glue he had used had dripped down through his dentures and stuck his top and bottom teeth together.
All he could do was writhe on the ground on his back, humiliated to the point of tears, unable to call for help because his
mouth was glued shut.

“What you got to say for yourself?” Queenie demanded, then answered, “Nothin’. Because there ain’t jack you
can
say.”

Watching Oscar flail around enraged Queenie even more, and she aimed a hard kick at one side of his narrow behind. Then she
snatched at Christmas so hard, it felt like his arm would pop out of its socket, telling him, “Christmas, take me home.” When
he hesitated, not yet willing to abandon his plans for Mozelle, Queenie barked, “Now, Christmas, before I knock you down on
the floor with Oscar and put my nasty shoe all over your high-priced Mack Daddy suit.”

Oscar kept squirming on the floor, sweating and drooling, until it finally occurred to the bartender that he couldn’t get
up. He dragged Oscar to his feet, then propped him against the bar, where he leaned back breathing hard, pointing to his teeth,
and gesturing with his head as if he were trying to say something. That’s when Old Daddy, who had been standing off to the
side sipping his scotch, recognized Oscar’s predicament. Lifting Oscar’s head to examine it more closely, he asked, “Oscar
Lee, did you put some cement glue on your teeth?”

Oscar nodded vigorously, looking ready to cry, as Old Daddy shook his head in exasperation. “You dummy,” he said, then turned
to Mozelle. “Babygirl, take this fool to the hospital ’fore he kill his self sweating and spitting, trying to open his mouth.”

Mozelle started to refuse, but Old Daddy just raised up his hand. “Little girl, I don’t care what you might be feeling ’bout
now. You got to take this here fool to the hospital. Oscar don’t need to be like this. It ain’t safe. You hear me, Mozelle?”

Mozelle sighed and agreed. Oscar, she realized now, had always been a pain. How she had stood him all these years was a mystery.
And it was nothing short of an act of God that she had not tried to kill his mean self in his sleep.

Oscar looked around for someone to drive him to the hospital and was relieved when he saw Louise Williams. He got out his
keys and jangled them at her, hoping she’d understand his message. But Mozelle grabbed Oscar by his arm and steered him outside
to where her car was parked.

“EEEhhhh.”

“Shut up, Oscar, and get your butt in this car.”

His eyes opened wide. Mozelle had
never
mouthed off like that before.

She opened the back door and told him, “Get in.” When Oscar looked at her like she was crazy for putting him in the backseat
like a child, Mozelle just put her hands on her hips. “You better get your tail in this car or I’m leaving you right here,”
she said.

Oscar raised his hand to slap her, but Mozelle didn’t even flinch. She just drew back her fist and hissed, “I wish you would,
Oscar Lee.”

Grunting in outrage, he crawled into the backseat, and Louise let herself in the passenger door. But when Mozelle got into
the driver’s seat and started up the car, Oscar sat up straight in terror.

Mozelle peeked at Oscar in the rearview mirror as she asked, “Louise, what is the fastest way to get to Homer G. Phillips?
Isn’t that the best place in town for some triflin’ craziness like this?”

“Umm-hmm,” Louise said.

“EEEhhhhhhhhhheeeehhhhhhh!!!!” Oscar shrieked. “Killer Phillips” was the black hospital in North St. Louis, where folks took
you when you were shot, beat up, cut up, or all three. Despite its nickname, Homer G. Phillips provided fine medical care,
especially to the poor, but Oscar didn’t want to chance it. He kept banging on the backseat, demanding to be taken somewhere
else, until Mozelle had finally had enough. She didn’t even turn around when she said, “I told you to shut up. They got some
good emergency doctors over there—best in the city—especially on a Friday night when some fools like yourself out gluing they
dentures together.”

Mozelle pulled up to the emergency entrance, where she helped Oscar out of the car, then gave Louise the keys to find a parking
space. When they reached the intake desk Mozelle asked the young nurse, “Babygirl, please point me to where I need to go,
so that I can get this old pimp-daddy fool’s mouth fixed.”

“Ma’am, I can start your paperwork, but he’ll have to wait. We’ve had a couple of gunshot wounds and two stabbings came in
over the past hour. Anybody with something that won’t kill him has to wait.”

Mozelle sighed impatiently and said, “Oh, alright.”

Louise came in just as they were finishing up the paperwork and helped Mozelle lead Oscar to the waiting area. She could tell
that Oscar’s mouth and jaw were aching pretty bad—he was sweating heavily and his skin had a grayish cast. As soon as they
guided him to a comfortable-looking couch, Oscar snatched his arm out of Mozelle’s hand and plopped himself down like an insolent
child.

Mozelle took a chair next to Louise and picked up an old issue of
Ebony
magazine. She flipped through the pages, but couldn’t concentrate because of Oscar’s constant grunting and squirming.

“Will you be still and stop acting like a spoiled brat?” Mozelle snapped at him. “You gone make yourself feel worse than you
already do, carrying on like that. You’d think, Oscar, that
I
did something to
you.
All of this is your fault. If you’d been acting like a man with some sense, you wouldn’t be sitting up in here mad, with
your mouth glued shut, and looking like a fool.”

Oscar leaned back and closed his eyes, pretending like he was dozing off, so he didn’t have to listen to what Mozelle was
saying. But Mozelle didn’t buy his act.

“Open your eyes and look at me,” she demanded. “You ain’t ’sleep. This time you gone listen to me good, Oscar Lee Thomas.
And I am going to talk as long as I want to, because there ain’t nothing your little Sammy Davis, Jr.–looking self can do
about it.”

Oscar’s eyes popped wide open. He knew that behind his back people said he looked like a St. Louis version of Sammy Davis,
Jr., but it came as a big surprise that Mozelle was one of them.

Mozelle didn’t pay Oscar any mind, just kept talking. She had kept so much bottled up inside her all these years that nothing
was going to shut her up now.

“You know something?” she told Oscar. “Almost the whole time we been married, all you’ve done is find fault with me. You say
all kinds of mean things, like, ‘Mozelle, this here food ain’t hot enough, and it taste nasty—cook it over’; ‘Mozelle, you
didn’t dress the children right’; ‘Mozelle, I know you ain’t wearing that dress with me, looking all cheap’; ‘Mozelle, you
need to clean out this refrigerator’; ‘Mozelle, you waste your time, always reading all those books when you ought to be out
in that garden picking greens for my dinner’; ‘Mozelle, you ain’t got no discipline.’ Mozelle, Mozelle, Mozelle. Negro, that’s
all your old hatefulacting self knew how to do—criticize, complain, be mean, and call my name until I couldn’t stand to hear
your voice no more . . .

“And for some reason I just kept taking it, forgiving you, loving you, and hoping the day would finally come when you’d see
just how good and smart a woman I am. But what did you do, Oscar? You lay up with a sloppy-tailed heifer. And you know what?
If I were a different kind of woman and didn’t know Jesus, I’d walk over to your chair and knock the living daylights out
of your old, tired, silly-looking, Superfly butt, just the same way Queenie did.”

Louise put her magazine up to her face so that Oscar couldn’t see her laughing. She’d had a hard enough time keeping her face
straight back at the club when Oscar was scrambling on the floor with his shoes too big, his legs too skinny, and his teeth
stuck together with cement glue. But
this
? This was priceless. She hadn’t known Mozelle had it in her to talk to Oscar like that.

And it was making Oscar furious. It was so clear that he didn’t think Mozelle had any right to tell him how she felt, even
after six children and forty years. Still, it startled Louise when Oscar tried again to smack Mozelle in the mouth.

And again, Mozelle froze him in his tracks, this time with an icy glare hard enough to pierce holes in Oscar. For a moment
he stood still, like he was in suspended animation, before he backed up to his seat and sat down.

“You did right for a change, Oscar Lee,” Mozelle said. “Because if you had put your hands on me, the only thing that would
have saved you is an angel of the Lord.”

Scared as he was of the new Mozelle, being a man Oscar had to save face. He balled up his right fist and shook it at her.

“If you don’t want to have to use cement glue to keep your hand attached to your arm, I’d suggest that you not try that again,”
Mozelle warned. Then she closed her eyes, silently thanking the Lord for giving her the courage to at last recognize who Oscar
truly was. And who he truly wasn’t—a decent husband. She picked up her purse and turned to Louise. “I’m ready to go.”

“But Mozelle, what about Oscar?”

“What
about
Oscar?”

“I mean, he still needs someone with him, to help him with the doctor.”

“Maybe so, but it won’t be me. I’ll explain what happened and tell the nurse we are leaving.”

As Mozelle walked to the door, Louise just sat there for a moment, in shock that Mozelle would actually abandon Oscar. All
these years Mozelle had let him get away with murder, and now he had used up his last reprieve. But then, Louis had told her,
many a day, that the worst thing you could do to people you kept hurting by doing wrong was to keep on acting a fool with
them. Louis said those types could go on for what looked like forever, but that then one day they would snap and that was
it. You had “tore your draws” with them, and they were through. Watching Mozelle walk out of that waiting room without so
much as a backward glance, Louise knew that Oscar had “tore his draws” with her once and for all.

Mozelle had gotten all the way out in the hall when she realized that Louise wasn’t with her. “I’m leaving, Louise,” she called
out. “Now, if you want to sit with Oscar, that’s fine by me. But I am leaving.”

Louise jumped up. The last thing she wanted to do was sit anywhere with Oscar Lee Thomas.

Once they got in the car, Mozelle sped home like she was on a raceway. She pulled up in front of the house, then hopped out
of the car so fast, she had to dash back and get Louise and lock it up. Then she ran into the house, heading straight for
her bedroom. When Louise caught up with her, Mozelle was pulling open drawers and throwing Oscar’s stuff into the middle of
the floor.

“Louise,” she said, making her jump to attention. “Can you help me with the chests?”

Louise followed Mozelle to one of the spare bedrooms, and together they pushed two big cedar chests into her room. When Mozelle
opened them, Louise was surprised to find that they were empty, except for some tissue paper in the bottom. She had expected
to find them full of the “old-timey” clothes Oscar wore before he turned into Mack Daddy.

“I gave them to Rev. Wilson for that young man who just joined the church,” Mozelle said, answering Louise’s unspoken question.
“You know the one I’m talking about, right?”

Louise nodded. The young man had been to Vietnam and was on drugs for years before he went cold turkey and decided to put
his life back together. He was about the only person she knew who was slight enough to wear Oscar Lee’s clothes.

“That young man was turning his life over to Christ, and he needed to know that somebody cared enough to give him a helping
hand. And here is Oscar Lee running around looking like a broke-down Superfly and don’t have a clue as to what real hardship
is. That boy couldn’t save his best friend in combat—all Oscar couldn’t save was the right kind of time for me.”