One House Over Read online

  Also by Mary Monroe

  The Lonely Heart, Deadly Heart Series

  Every Woman’s Dream

  Never Trust a Stranger

  The Devil You Know

  The God Series

  God Don’t Like Ugly

  God Still Don’t Like Ugly

  God Don’t Play

  God Ain’t Blind

  God Ain’t Through Yet

  God Don’t Make No Mistakes

  Mama Ruby Series

  Mama Ruby

  The Upper Room

  Lost Daughters

  Gonna Lay Down My Burdens

  Red Light Wives

  In Sheep’s Clothing

  Deliver Me From Evil

  She Had It Coming

  The Company We Keep

  Family of Lies

  Bad Blood

  “Nightmare in Paradise” in Borrow Trouble

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.

  One House Over

  MARY MONROE

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  The Neighbors - Book 1

  Chapter 1 - Joyce

  Chapter 2 - Odell

  Chapter 3 - Odell

  Chapter 4 - Joyce

  Chapter 5 - Odell

  Chapter 6 - Odell

  Chapter 7 - Joyce

  Chapter 8 - Odell

  Chapter 9 - Joyce

  Chapter 10 - Odell

  Chapter 11 - Joyce

  Chapter 12 - Odell

  Chapter 13 - Joyce

  Chapter 14 - Odell

  Chapter 15 - Joyce

  Chapter 16 - Odell

  Chapter 17 - Odell

  Chapter 18 - Odell

  Chapter 19 - Joyce

  Chapter 20 - Odell

  Chapter 21 - Joyce

  Chapter 22 - Odell

  Chapter 23 - Odell

  Chapter 24 - Joyce

  Chapter 25 - Odell

  Chapter 26 - Joyce

  Chapter 27 - Odell

  Chapter 28 - Joyce

  Chapter 29 - Joyce

  Chapter 30 - Odell

  Chapter 31 - Joyce

  Chapter 32 - Odell

  Chapter 33 - Odell

  Chapter 34 - Joyce

  Chapter 35 - Odell

  Chapter 36 - Joyce

  Chapter 37 - Joyce

  Chapter 38 - Odell

  Chapter 39 - Odell

  Chapter 40 - Joyce

  Chapter 41 - Odell

  Chapter 42 - Odell

  Chapter 43 - Odell

  Chapter 44 - Joyce

  Chapter 45 - Joyce

  Chapter 46 - Odell

  Chapter 47 - Odell

  Chapter 48 - Joyce

  Chapter 49 - Odell

  Chapter 50 - Odell

  ONE HOUSE OVER

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  DAFINA BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Mary Monroe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2017955113

  Dafina and the Dafina logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-1611-8

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: April 2018

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1613-2

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-1613-2

  Kensington Electronic Edition: April 2018

  This book is dedicated to Sheila Sims, Maria Felice Sanchez, and the awesome Deimentrius Clay who owns Lady Esther’s, my favorite restaurant in Oakland, California.

  Acknowledgments

  I am so blessed to be a member of the Kensington Books family. Selena James is an awesome editor and a great friend. Thank you, Selena! Thanks to Steven Zacharius, Adam Zacharius, Karen Auberach, Lulu Martinez, the wonderful crew in the sales department, and everyone else at Kensington for working so hard for me.

  Thanks to Lauretta Pierce for maintaining my website and sharing so many wonderful stories with me.

  Thanks to the fabulous book clubs, bookstores, libraries, my readers, and the magazine and radio interviewers for supporting me for so many years.

  I have one of the best literary agents on the planet, Andrew Stuart. Thank you, Andrew, for representing me with so much vigor.

  The Neighbors

  Book 1

  Chapter 1

  Joyce

  June 1934

  OTHER THAN MY PARENTS, I WAS THE ONLY OTHER PERSON AT THE supper table Sunday evening. But there was enough food for twice as many people. We’d spent the first five minutes raving about Mama’s fried chicken, how much we had enjoyed Reverend Jessup’s sermon a few hours ago, and other mundane things. When Daddy cleared his throat and looked at me with his jaw twitching, I knew the conversation was about to turn toward my spinsterhood.

  “I hired a new stock boy the other day and I told him all about you. He is just itching to get acquainted. This one is a real nice, young, single man,” Daddy said, looking at me from the corner of his eye.

  I froze because I knew where this conversation was going: my “old maid” status. The last “real nice, young, single man” Daddy had hired to work in our store and tried to dump off on me was a fifty-five-year-old, tobacco-chewing, widowed grandfather named Buddy Armstrong. There had been several others before him. Each one had grandkids and health problems. Daddy was eighty-two, so to him anybody under sixty was “young.” He and Mama had tried to have children for thirty years before she gave birth to me thirty years ago, when she was forty-eight. But I hadn’t waited this long to settle for a husband who’d probably become disabled or die of old age before he could give me the children I desperately wanted.

  I was tempted to stay quiet and keep my eyes on the ads for scarves in the new Sears and Roebuck catalog that I had set next to my plate. But I knew that if I didn’t say something on the subject within the next few seconds, Daddy would harp on it until I did. Mama would join in, and they wouldn’t stop until they’d run out of things to say. And then they would start all over again. I took a deep breath and braced myself. “Daddy, I work as a teacher’s aide. What do I have in common with a stock boy?”

  Daddy raised both of his thick gray eyebrows and looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. “Humph! Y’all both single! That’s what y’all got in common!” he growled.

  “I can find somebody on my own!” I boomed. I never raised my voice unless I was really upset, like I was now.

  Daddy shook his head. “Since you thirty now and still ain’t got no husband—or even a boyfriend—it don’t look like you having much luck finding somebody on your own, girl.”

  “Mac is right, Joyce. It’s high time for you to start socializing again. It’s a shame the way you letting life pass you by,” Mama threw in. They were both looking at me so hard, it made me more uncomfortable than I already was. I squirmed in my seat and cleared my throat.

  “Anyway, he said he can’t wait to meet you. He is so worldly and sharp, he’ll be a good person for you to conversate with.”

  “I hope you didn’t say ‘conversate’ in front of this new guy. That’s a wor
d somebody made up,” I scolded. “The correct word is converse.”

  Daddy gave me a pensive look and scratched his neck. “Hmmm. Well, somebody ‘made up’ all the words in every language, eh?”

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “What difference do it make which one I used as long as he knew what I meant?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then I’ll say conversate if I want to, and you can say converse. It’s still English, and this is the only language I know— and it’s too complicated for me to be trying to speak it correct this late in the game. Shoot.” My Daddy. He was a real piece of work. He winked at me before he bit off a huge chunk of cornbread and started chewing so hard his ears wiggled. He swallowed and started talking again with his eyes narrowed. “I got a notion to invite him to eat supper with us one evening. He is a strapping man, so he’d appreciate a good home-cooked meal. I even told him how good you can cook, Joyce. . . .”

  My parents had become obsessed with helping me find a husband. My love life—or lack of a love life—was a frequent subject in our house. One night I dreamed that they’d lined up men in our front yard and made me parade back and forth in front of them so they could inspect me. But even in a dream nobody wanted to marry me.

  “What’s wrong with this one? Other than him being just a stock boy?” I mumbled as I rolled my eyes.

  “Why come you think something is wrong with him?” Daddy laughed but so far, nobody had said something funny enough to make me laugh. If anything, I wanted to cry.

  “Because he wants to meet me,” I said with my voice cracking. My self-esteem had sunk so low, and I felt so unworthy, I didn’t know if I’d want a man who would settle for me. “He’s probably homelier and sicklier than Buddy Armstrong.” I did laugh this time.

  “I met him and I sure didn’t see nothing wrong with him,” Mama piped in. She drank some lemonade and let out a mild burp before she continued. “He ain’t nowhere near homely.”

  “Or sickly,” Daddy added with a snort.

  “And he’s right sporty and handsome!” Mama sounded like a giddy schoolgirl. I was surprised to see such a hopeful look on her face. Despite all the wrinkles, liver spots, and about fifty pounds of extra weight, she was still attractive. She had big brown eyes and a smile that made her moon face look years younger. Unlike Daddy, who had only half of his teeth left, she still had all of hers. They were so nice and white, people often asked if they were real. She was the same pecan shade of brown as me and Daddy. But I had his small, sad black eyes and narrow face. He’d been completely bald since he was fifty and last week on my thirtieth birthday he’d predicted that if I had any hair left by the time I turned forty, it would probably all be gray. I’d found my first few strands of gray hair the next morning. “I know you’ll like this one,” Mama assured me with a wink. She reared back in her wobbly chair and raked her thick fingers through her thin gray hair. “You ain’t getting no younger, so you ain’t got much time left,” she reminded.

  “So you keep telling me,” I snapped.

  Mama sucked on her teeth and gave me a dismissive wave. “He got slaphappy when we told him about you. I bet he been beating the women off with a stick all his life.”

  Mama’s taste in potential husbands for me was just as pathetic as Daddy’s. But her last comment really got my attention because it sounded like a contradiction. “Why would a ‘sporty and handsome’ man get ‘slaphappy’ about meeting a new woman—especially if he’s already beating them off with a stick?” I wanted to know.

  Daddy gave me an annoyed look. “Don’t worry about a little detail like that. And don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. You ain’t been out on a date since last year, and I know that must be painful. Shoot. When I was young, and before I married your mama, I never went longer than a week without courting somebody. At the rate you going, you ain’t never going to get married.”

  I’d celebrated my thirtieth birthday eight days ago, but I felt more like a woman three times my age. Most of the adult females I knew were already married. My twenty-five-year-old cousin Louise had been married and divorced twice and was already engaged again. “I guess marriage wasn’t meant for me,” I whined. I suddenly lost my appetite, so I pushed my plate to the side.

  “You ain’t even touched them pinto beans on your plate, and you ate only half of your supper yesterday,” Mama complained. “How do you expect to get a man if you ain’t got enough meat on your bones? You already look like a lamppost, and you know colored men like thick women. Besides, a gal six feet tall like you need to eat twice as much as a shorter woman so there’s enough food to fill out all your places.”

  “It ain’t about how much I weigh,” I said defensively. “Last year I weighed twenty pounds more than I do now, and it didn’t make a difference. But . . . I wish I could shrink down to a normal height.” I laughed, but I was serious. For a colored woman, being too tall was almost as bad as being too dark and homely. I wasn’t as dark or homely as some of the women I knew, but I was the tallest and the only one my age still single.

  “Well, look at it this way, baby girl. You ain’t no Kewpie doll and you may be too lanky for anybody to want to marry you, but at least you got your health. A lot of women don’t even have that.” Daddy squeezed my hand and smiled. “And you real smart.”

  I was thankful that I was healthy and smart, but those things didn’t do a damn thing for my overactive sex drive. If a man didn’t make love to me soon, I was going to go crazy. And the way I’d been fantasizing about going up to a stranger in a beer garden or on the street and asking him to go to bed with me, maybe I had already lost my mind. “Can I be excused? I have a headache,” I muttered, rubbing the back of my head.

  “You said the same thing when we was having supper yesterday,” Mama reminded.

  “I had a headache then, too,” I moaned. I rose up out of my chair so fast, I almost knocked it over. With my head hanging low, I shuffled around the corner and down the hall to my bedroom. I’d been born in the same room, and the way my life was going, I had a feeling I’d die in it too.

  Branson was a typical small town in the southern part of Alabama. It was known for its cotton and sugarcane fields and beautiful scenery. Fruit and pecan trees, and flowers of every type and color decorated most of the residents’ front and back yards. But things were just as gloomy here as the rest of the South.

  Our little city had only about twenty thousand people and most of them were white. Two of our four banks had crashed right after the Great Depression started almost five years ago. But a few people had been smart enough to pull their money out just in time. Our post office shared the same building with the police department across the street from our segregated cemetery.

  Jim Crow, the rigid system that the white folks had created to establish a different set of rules for them and us, was strictly enforced. Basically, what it meant was that white people could do whatever they wanted, and we couldn’t eat where they ate, sleep or socialize with them, or even sass them. Anybody crazy enough to violate the rules could expect anything from a severe beating to dying at the hands of a lynch mob. A lot of our neighbors and friends worked for wealthy white folks in the best neighborhoods, but all of the colored residents lived on the south side. And it was segregated too. The poor people lived in the lower section near the swamps and the dirt roads. The ones with decent incomes, like my family, lived in the upper section.

  The quiet, well-tended street we lived on was lined with magnolia and dogwood trees on both sides. Each house had a neat lawn, and some had picket fences. The brown-shingled house with tar paper roofing and a wraparound front porch we owned had three bedrooms. The walls were thin, so when Mama and Daddy started talking again after I’d bolted from the supper table, I could hear them. And, I didn’t like what they were saying.

  “Poor Joyce. I just ball up inside when I think about how fast our baby is going to waste. I’m going to keep praying for her to find somebody before it’s too late,” Mama grumbled
. “With her strong back she’d be a good workhorse and keep a clean house and do whatever else she’ll need to do to keep a husband happy. And I’d hate to see them breeding hips she got on her never turn out no babies.” Mama let out a loud, painful-sounding groan. “What’s even worse is, I would hate to leave this world knowing she was going to grow old alone.”

  “I’m going to keep praying for her to get married too. But that might be asking for too much. I done almost put a notion like that out of my mind. This late in the game, the most we can expect is to fix her up with somebody who’ll court her for a while, so she can have a little fun before she get too much older,” Daddy grunted. “Maybe we ain’t been praying hard enough, huh?”

  “We been praying hard enough, but that ain’t the problem,” Mama snapped.

  “Oh? Then what is it?”

  “The problem is this girl is too doggone picky!” Mama shouted.

  “Sure enough,” Daddy agreed.

  I couldn’t believe my ears! My parents were trying to fix me up with a stock boy, not a businessman, and they thought I was being too picky. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. A lot of ridiculous things had been said to and about me. Being “too picky” was one of the worst because it couldn’t have been further from the truth.

  I had no idea how my folks had come to such an off-the-wall conclusion. I couldn’t imagine what made them think I was too picky. I’d given up my virginity when I was fourteen to Marvin Galardy, the homeliest boy in the neighborhood. And that was only because he was the only one interested in having sex with me at the time.

  I was so deep in thought, I didn’t hear Daddy knocking on my door, so he let himself in. “You done gone deaf, too?” he grumbled.