Authors: Anita Doreen Diggs

The Other Side Of the Game (17 page)

BOOK: The Other Side Of the Game

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Girlfriend looked a mess! Before I could fully digest the swollen eyes, disheveled clothes, and tearstained face, she stomped past me. “I never want to see or speak to Phil again as long as I live!”

I couldn't have been more shocked if Saundra had said she was going to become a hooker, working the streets near the river on Eleventh Avenue. “This is the first time you've ever complained about Phil,” I said, pushing her into my living room. “What on earth did you two fight about?”

“Please don't ask,” she answered miserably, falling onto my red leather couch like it didn't cost me over two grand. “I had to leave and there is nowhere else for me to go.”

To my horror, she covered her face with both hands and burst into sobs that were so heartrending I would have given up all my jewelry to make her stop. Instead, I sat down beside her, pulled her head onto my chest, and cried with her. What had Phil done to my sister? My head started throbbing as I searched my mental Rolodex for the name of a gangster-type dude who had spent some time with me two years ago. What the hell was his name? His face was still clear in my memory: Light-skin, high cheekbones, and eyes that never conveyed an emotion. He gave me five thousand dollars in cash and an emerald necklace when he split. A dangerous motherfucka. Just what I needed to take Phil down if he had made the mistake of beating up Saundra.

She was rocking back and forth. The way she was holding her stomach filled me with rage. “What the fuck did Phil do to you, Saundra? I'll kill the sonofabitch.”

Saundra looked into my eyes for a moment. “He didn't hurt me physically if that is what you're thinking. I swear it. He didn't lay a hand on me and that worthless bastard is definitely not worth you going to jail for. I just need to lie down.”

“Okay, let's get some sleep, sweetie, and we can talk in the morning,” I told her quietly. “Nick is in my bed but I'm going in there and put his ass out.”

“Which one is Nick?” She sniffled.

“The one with the huge trust fund.” I put an arm around her shoulder.

She pulled away from me and hunched over, holding her stomach again. “It doesn't matter. Let him stay. I'll be fine out here.”

“Where is Yero? Did he drive you here? Do you want me to call him?”

“Fuck him,” she spat. “I'm not marrying anybody. He probably has secrets I don't know about, too. I hate all men. Every last one of them.”

My heart almost stopped beating. Saundra calling Phil a worthless bastard? Fuck Yero? What in Sam's hell was going on?

“Saundra . . .”

“Stop talking. Leave me alone.”

Saundra lay down with her back to me. Her shoulders shook, so I knew that she was still weeping.

Chapter 31

PHIL

S
aundra was gone.

As soon as I saw her standing in the doorway, my brain froze. As if in slow motion, I saw Saundra's shock turn to disbelief, then revulsion. I felt my own hands sliding blue jeans over my feet and up my legs. I felt the soft, nubby carpet under my feet as I ran downstairs and then the pain of the graveled driveway. My elbow kept moving back and forth like somebody had it on a string and it took me a minute to realize that Pastor Hoffman was pulling on it. Saundra's cab disappeared into the night and then the fuzziness disappeared. The whole thing became enormously plain.

I had lost her forever.

My Saundra . . .

Pastor Hoffman watched as a now fully dressed Hugo removed my elbow from his grasp and led me firmly back inside my own home.

“I'm so sorry,” he kept saying as I collapsed on the living room sofa. “It'll be all right. You'll see . . .”

But it wasn't going to be all right, and when Hugo said it for a third time, I told him to shut the fuck up. My skull began to split from the inside and I clutched one of the pillows as though it was the key to maintaining my sanity. My eyes closed and then something cold and wet was pressed against my lips. It was Hugo . . . trying to get me to drink something. I slapped it out of his hands. “Get the hell outta my goddamn house. I ain't had nothin' but problems since I met your motherfuckin' Puerto Rican ass!”

That was a lie.

The problem started in the first grade. At age six I had a crush on Willie, a little redheaded boy who could jump hopscotch as well as any boy on our block. When I kissed Willie on the mouth, Dad was furious but Mom told him that he was just being ridiculous. We were just kids doing silly kid things.

Things were pretty cool until seventh grade when a boy named Ernest moved to Dayton from a small town in Virginia. It took me a couple of weeks to work up the courage but I finally confessed my feelings for him. He beat the living shit out of me and told his parents. I lied my ass off when Dad confronted me. It was my word against Ernest's and, since Dad couldn't prove anything, he let it go. But he watched every move I made after that. Mom did, too.

In high school, my speed and build made me the football team's star quarterback. The fact that I never asked my dates for any poontang earned me a reputation as “Dayton's perfect gentleman.” Dad was real suspicious of that reputation. His solution? He took me to a whorehouse and left me in a raggedy-ass room with an ugly-assed old woman that I wouldn't have touched for any amount of money in the world. In fact, I reached into my pocket and gave her every cent I had. All she had to do was assure my father that I was straight and one hell of a stud.

That stunt bought me two years of peace and a genuinely warm friendship developed between me and Dad. I adored him and reveled in the pride he felt about my grades and the legendary moves that I made on the football field.

On the night of my high school graduation, all hell broke loose.

Young, drunk, and careless. That is the only way to explain why I got caught in the backseat of a car with my tongue halfway down the throat of a guy I had been seeing on the quiet for about six months.

Dad caught me and told me to get out of Dayton and keep going. He didn't care where or how. But if I ever set foot on his property again to say good-bye to Mama, get my clothes . . . anything. . . he would blow my brains out and turn himself in to the cops.

So I left home wearing a suit underneath my liquor stained cap and gown with only twenty dollars in my pocket. My lover bought me a bus ticket to New York.

Dayton, Ohio, had not prepared me for hustling through a series of odd jobs in Times Square or the flophouse that was the only place a minimum wage slave like me could afford to stay in. The only good thing about that period of my life was the freedom to date any guy who appealed to me without worrying about Dad's eagle eye.

I called Mama a couple of times but she hung up every time she heard my voice.

“Phil, don't cry.” Hugo was kneeling on the floor with his head on my stomach. Cry? I touched my face. It was wet. My chest was heaving. “Hugo, go on home. I need to be by myself.” The voice didn't sound like mine. It sounded heavy, raspy.

“No,” he said. “You might do something crazy.”

So we cried together until the sun came up.

Chapter 32

EVELYN

S
ince I was doing the four
P.M.
to midnight shift as a favor for someone else, I was still in bed when Mama, who was dressed for work, peeked into my bedroom. “Honey, Phil is downstairs. Is he sick or something? He don't look too good.”

Phil? He was supposed to be on eight
A.M.
to four
P.M.
today. I looked at the clock. It was eight-thirty. “Maybe he has a cold or something. Don't worry about it.”

She kissed me on the cheek and left.

I yawned and took a moment to brush my teeth and run a wet cloth over my face before going down to the kitchen. I expected to find him boiling water for tea or something. Instead, he was pacing back and forth, mumbling to himself. He looked at me and then down at the floor.

“Good morning, sweetie,” I said with a smile. I reached forward to hug him and he stepped back like I had leprosy.

“Sit down, Evelyn. We need to talk.”

It had been thirty-two years since I'd felt this type of burning in my stomach. Back then, the fire that licked at my guts was caused by the tear-filled eyes of a camp counselor as she took my hands and told me that my father was dead but I had to be brave for my mother's sake. From the expression on Phil's face, I knew that the bad news had something to do with Saundra. I gripped the edge of the table for strength.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“Well, I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?” He tried to smile but couldn't.

Making any type of decision was simply impossible. Not with Phil's puffy bloodshot eyes shifting from side to side. Not when his shoulders were slumped forward so far that he was almost toppling over. Not with his hands shaking like those of a thirty year alcoholic in need of a drink.

I felt woozy.

Phil sighed and looked away. “It's like this . . . um . . . Josephine is never going to come through with her share of the money so . . . um . . . so I'm going to give it to you. It doesn't mean we're business partners and it's not a loan. It's a gift. Okay?”

On any other day, I would have been clicking my heels in the air but the air was loaded with something else. Something tragic. It made me mute.

Phil cleared his throat. “That's the good news. But . . . um . . . look here, Evelyn . . . the bad news . . . well . . . It's about you and me . . . Well, I'm sorry but . . . um . . . we have to break up.”

I was thunderstruck. “What?”

“Evelyn, what I've done to you is wrong.”

What had he done? What was he talking about?

I tried to stand up but my legs wouldn't support me and so I dropped back down in the chair. “Phil, what is going on?”

“Evelyn, I feel awful about all this.”

A vein in my temple began to throb. “Awful about what?”

“About not telling you a long time ago that I don't want to get married.”

He wasn't giving me any options. “This doesn't make sense, Phil. How do you know that I want to break up over this?”

There was no answer and that only meant one thing. “There's someone else. Right?”

He sighed heavily. “Yes, there is. I'm really sorry, Evelyn.”

There was no feeling anywhere in my body. “How long have you been seeing her?”

“A long, long time.”

My fingers sprung loose from the edge of the table and flew to my pockets. Where the hell was my gun? It wasn't there. Because I was still in my bathrobe. I jumped up from the table and headed upstairs to my bedroom to get it and put every single bullet right through his lying, cheating heart.

Phil grabbed me on the landing. “Evelyn, calm down. It's not like you think. Please let me explain.”

I struggled against his strong grip. “Let me go!”

“Evelyn, it's not another woman.”

“But you just said . . .”

“I said it was someone else. I didn't say it was a woman.”

My frenzied thrashing gave way to absolute and utter shock. “WHAT?”

He released me and used his body to block my climb upstairs. “Evelyn, you know how it is in the department. I had to lie. I still have to. You know that. Believe me, if I did anything else for a living, things would have been different. All this sneaking and hiding and deceiving everybody would never have happened.”

Phil was blocking the path to the gun but we had a drawer full of knives in the kitchen. I took off and when I turned to face him again, it was with a butcher knife in my hand. He just stood there looking sad but I knew he wasn't going to let me hurt him. We were at an impasse.

“Gay? How long have you been gay?”

“All my life,” he said simply.

“So I was just a beard?”

He took a step toward me. “Evelyn, you're smart, funny, beautiful, kind. You're the most wonderful woman on earth.”

If this son of a bitch ended with “and any man would be lucky to have you” I would lunge at him with the knife and somehow, even though he was stronger, manage to plunge it right through his heart.

“Shut the fuck up, Phil! How could you do this to me for six whole years? And how did you manage to sneak away to meet men when you were always at work or with Saundra or over here?”

He looked startled. “Sneak away to meet men?”

“Yes. Or did you order them by mail?”

“Oh, no! I haven't been cruising men . . . I . . . it's just one person. . .”

I didn't want to hear the details. “I don't believe you could do something so brutal and nasty to me. Why me? Why did you pick me to be your beard?”

He opened his mouth to answer and then shut it.

“How could you be so cruel to another human being, Phil?”

“I'm sorry, Evelyn. I don't know what else to say.”

I threw the knife and it hit him in the face before clattering to the floor.

“Get out, Phil. Get out and don't ever speak to me again.”

“Evelyn . . .” He stopped a moment, took a deep breath, and the rest of the words rushed out. “Would you do one last thing for me?”

No, this motherfucker did not just ask me to do him a favor. I stopped breathing and just stared at him.

“Would you please help Saundra through this? Not for me. I don't deserve anything. Please do it for her?”

Saundra!

“You mean she didn't know?”

He blinked. “She does now. Saundra walked in on us last night and ran away. I'm sure she is at Asha's house.”

“Walked in? You mean that . . .”

“Yes,” he said simply. “Hugo and I were having sex. It was the first time in my house. I swear it. She was supposed to spend the night with Yero. I don't know why . . .”

Hugo!

“STOP!” I screamed. “JUST STOP!

“You're right. It's too much to ask.” He turned to leave.

That's when I snatched up the microwave, ran up behind him and used it to club him right in the back of the head.

BOOK: The Other Side Of the Game

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