Family of Lies Read online

  I shook my head. “Not anymore. I want you to resign from your job immediately.”

  “Lady, I need my job! You can’t—What if I don’t quit? What are you going to do about it?”

  “If you turn down my offer and return to work on Monday, I’m going to storm that damn store and beat the dog shit out of you in front of Kenneth and all your coworkers. Us both being pregnant won’t stop me! How long do you think you’d have that job then?!”

  “You wouldn’t do something like that!”

  “Try me, bitch,” I said in a smooth voice. “From what I’ve heard, you won’t be missed.” According to the report I’d received from my investigator, this heifer spent more time sitting at her desk reading tabloids and filing her nails while the other clerical employees did most of the work she was getting paid to do! Ow! This shit was really hurting me. Kenneth was going to pay through the ass for this one!

  Lois unfolded her arms and gave me an incredulous look. “But I can’t just leave my job without giving notice. I don’t want to leave Kenneth in a lurch.”

  I gave her a hot look. “You let me worry about Kenneth,” I told her. “I’m sure the employment agency can send somebody to replace you right away. There are a lot of folks out of work these days.” I would make damn sure of one thing: The next secretary that agency sent to work for my husband’s electronic equipment and supplies main store was going to be either a man or a fifty-year-old frump with a face like a baboon and a hump on her back. I should have known better than to allow my husband to hire a young pretty woman to be his secretary. Especially since I already knew how weak he was when it came to pretty women. But he’d felt sorry for Lois. He had told me how she had started crying halfway through the interview. As a matter of fact, by the time Kenneth had finished telling me how she had dropped out of high school in her junior year so she could get a job and help her mother pay the bills, I was almost in tears myself that day! According to her, her father had owned a janitorial service. He’d had an affair with his secretary and got her pregnant. He’d sold his business, divorced Lois’s mother, and left town with the mistress. Now here was his daughter doing the same thing to me that her father’s mistress had done to her mother. Well this case was going to have a totally different outcome. I was going to make sure of that.

  “How is your mother, Mrs. Lilly Mae Cooper, these days?” I asked, looking at Lois out of the corner of my eye. “I know everything there is to know about her too.”

  “My mama is doing just fine,” Lois snapped. “Why? She ain’t got nothing to do with this.”

  I shrugged. “I just thought I’d ask. Is she still waiting tables in that chicken shack where two people got shot last month?”

  “Yeah, she is,” she muttered, looking at the floor.

  “Does she still belong to that sanctified church on Third Street?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. So do I. So what?”

  “Your mother is a big shot in that church and the pastor’s wife’s best friend. I’m sure the congregation won’t look at her the same way when they hear her daughter’s caught up in a scandal with a married businessman. Especially after your daddy left you and her and took off with his secretary. It must have been hard on her raising you by herself. Her having such limited skills, if she loses that chicken shack job, a woman her age will have a hell of a time finding something else.”

  “Don’t you worry about me and my mama. I’ll get on welfare if I have to.”

  I rolled my eyes. She would come up with something like that. Why young black women were still falling back on the welfare system in this day and age was beyond me. My mother, my three sisters, and almost every other one of my female relatives had fallen into that same trap. Before I was even old enough to have babies, I vowed that I would not become a welfare queen. As a matter of fact, after three abortions, I vowed that I would never have any kids anyway. To this day, nobody knew that I had my tubes tied right after my third and last abortion fifteen years ago when I was nineteen.

  “Have you told your mother you’re pregnant?”

  Lois gave me a sharp look. Her eyeballs looked like they wanted to pop out of the sockets. “I didn’t want her to know until I knew what Kenneth was going to do,” she bleated, sounding like she had a sob trapped in her throat.

  “Well, now that you know what Kenneth is going to do, or not going to do I should say, you can tell her. But this is what you’re going to tell her.” I looked around again and leaned my head closer to hers. “You tell her that somebody slipped something into your drink at a party that knocked you out and when you woke up, you were naked. Do some serious whooping and hollering when you tell her, and make sure you tell her you already asked the Lord to forgive you.”

  Lois stared at me in slack-jawed amazement. “Woman, what is all this gibberish coming out of your mouth? Nobody would say some off-the-wall shit like that—especially me. Are you crazy?”

  “No, I’m not crazy. But you’d be crazy to pass up the offer I’m prepared to make. Now, do you want to hear what it is or not?”

  “Go ahead,” Lois said with her lips trembling.

  Shaking my finger in her face, I told her, “You tell your mother that somebody, uh, took advantage of you while you were passed out.”

  She gave me a helpless look as I glanced at my watch. “Go on. I’m listening.”

  “I will pay you twice your salary for this month just to give you some cushion. Then, from next month until your child turns eighteen, I will support you. I am not sure of the amount yet, but it will be more than adequate. My attorney will send you a cashier’s check on the first of every month until you have your baby. After you have your baby, I will double the amount. I will cover all of your medical expenses, as well as your baby’s after it’s born. If you get another job or get married or if I die unexpectedly before the child turns eighteen, the payments will continue. If you ever tell anybody about this arrangement, even your mother, it’s over. I won’t give you another plugged nickel.” I paused and sucked in some more of the stale air—which seemed to get worse by the minute. “I’ll drag your name through the mud so hard nobody else in this city will hire you. San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in. If you have to get by with only a welfare check, you won’t be happy. You and that baby will always have to live with your mother in that one-bedroom apartment in that crime-infested neighborhood. I’m sure she won’t like that. And once she passes, you’ll be on shit creek in a sinking boat. Girl, you’d be a damn fool if you turn down what I’m offering you.”

  “What all do you want me to do?”

  “After you resign, you are to have no contact whatsoever with my husband. If you see him on the street, whether he’s alone or with me or someone else, you will not acknowledge him. Is that clear?”

  “Now you look, Vera. I don’t know what you think I am—”

  “No, you look.” I shook my finger in her face again. “I do know what you are. You are a scheming little whore who fucked my husband and didn’t have enough sense to protect yourself.”

  “Kenneth didn’t protect himself either. Don’t you put all the blame on me!”

  “Like I said, you let me worry about Kenneth. I know him a whole lot better than you. And for the record, you’re not the first woman he’s cheated with.”

  “You already told me that. So?”

  “So, don’t you think he’s told them the same lies he’s told you? We’ve been married for eleven years and he’s had numerous affairs. And he’s still with me. Does that sound like a man you can expect to have a future with? Out of the thousands of women who get involved with married men every year, only a few end up with the husband.”

  “Well, this year I just might be one of those few women!” Lois hissed. “Kenneth is in love with me.” Her words stung my ears like a bee.

  “Balls! Get real, Lois! Kenneth loves me too! And I’m his wife! He tells me all the time that I’m a wife and a half, so compared to you, that makes me thr
ee times the woman you are!”

  For a man as educated as Kenneth was, he did some of the dumbest shit a man could ever do. I glanced at my watch again and started tapping my fingers on top of the table. I wanted this bitch to know just how impatient I was. I prayed that Johnny Watson, my twenty-two-year-old trainer and my current lover, wouldn’t get impatient himself and leave before I got to his apartment across town near Coit Tower. I really needed to see him. Not only was he a very thorough and expensive personal trainer, but he was also a very thorough and expensive lover and I pampered him like he was a prince. He worked hard for his money and so did I. It had taken me too long to land a rich husband and I wanted to keep him. And Kenneth was the best kind of rich husband; he was twenty years older than me and had a bad heart and a few other health issues. He could drop dead any minute and that was what I’d been counting on since the day I married him. There had been a few close calls, but each time he had recovered. But the way things had been going lately, I knew that it was just a matter of time before I’d be a very wealthy young widow.

  I was not about to let some little ghetto bitch ruin my life!

  “Do we have a deal or not?” I asked, still tapping my fingers impatiently on the tabletop.

  Lois took her time responding to my final question, but I already knew what her answer was going to be. “Yes, ma’am. We have a deal.”

  CHAPTER 1

  VERA

  Sixteen years later

  I COULDN’T BELIEVE HOW MANY YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE I’D MET WITH Lois Cooper that Saturday morning in a Denny’s. I can still see her face in my mind and how frightened she looked by the end of our meeting.

  We had both kept our end of the bargain. I made sure she got paid on time every month. And just to prove that I had a heart, each year I gave her a ten percent “cost of living” increase. Just like she was getting paid to do a job. As far as I was concerned, her staying the hell out of my husband’s life and not letting him know about that baby was her job and I was her employer. She never returned to work for my husband after our meeting. And since she had not communicated with him, he had no idea why she had up and quit, leaving him in a lurch. I will never forget how baffled he had looked that evening when he came home all those years ago. Not a day goes by that I don’t replay that conversation in my head.

  “Uh, one of the secretaries called up personnel this morning and told them she was not coming back to work,” Kenneth announced. He had come home later than usual this particular day. But I was used to that. He had been spending up to twelve hours a day at the store, several times a week for years. I wondered how much of that time was spent with other women. Even though he had a great team of loyal and competent employees who could run the place without him, his office at his main store had become his second home. He even kept a couple of suits, fresh underwear, and some toiletries in the closet behind his desk.

  “Which secretary was it?” I’d asked dumbly. “That white girl with the red cornrows, I hope.”

  “No, it was not Amber. She’s a single mom who is taking care of two toddlers and her disabled older brother. She’s not going anywhere anytime soon. And she loves her job.” Kenneth hesitated for a few seconds. There was a strange look on his face when he continued. “It was Lois in the main office.”

  “Hmmm. Isn’t she the one you hired because her mother needed help paying her bills? She just up and quit? No explanation?”

  Kenneth scratched the side of his face and shook his head. “No explanation whatsoever. I had a feeling something like this might happen.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The girl was not that sophisticated and she couldn’t get along with too many folks, especially the women. Every time I looked up, somebody was in my office with complaints about her doing or saying one offensive thing or another. She was always late for work and she made a lot of personal telephone calls. None of my immediate staff liked her.”

  You liked her enough to screw her, I wanted to point out.

  I didn’t want to remind Kenneth that he had fired his previous secretary because she had always come to work late—if she showed up at all—and she argued with him and everybody else. He had put up with Lois’s behavior and probably would have continued to do so if I hadn’t stepped in. So in a way, by me getting rid of her, I had also done him a favor—in more ways than one. Had he known she was pregnant with his baby, we would be having a totally different conversation.

  “I feel sorry for the girl. The poor little thing. She’s had a hard life and I really wanted to help her.”

  “You sure did help her.” I couldn’t help myself. Those words just slipped out of my mouth on their own.

  “I’m sorry?” Kenneth sucked on his teeth for a few moments and gave me a curious look.

  “You did help her. You gave her a job,” I said quickly. “Honey, you’ve helped a lot of people over the years. Everybody loves you for giving so much back to the community. But you’re not the Wizard of Oz or a witch doctor, sweetie. You can’t solve everybody’s problems. Lois is a grown woman and she’s going to do what she wants to do. I think it was pretty tacky for her to quit without giving proper notice, though. Some people are so inconsiderate! Tsk, tsk, tsk. I don’t know what this world is coming to.”

  “Yeah. I won’t argue with you about that. She resigned over the phone and that’s about as tacky as a person can be—especially in this case. She told the bookkeeper to mail her last paycheck to a post office box,” Kenneth croaked.

  “And she’s such a pretty young thing,” I allowed. “But she’s also as ghetto as oxtail stew and fried chicken on the same plate. You know how those girls like her are. Most of them have one man coming in the front door and one going out the back door at the same time. I’m sure she attracted a lot of admirers, so maybe she met somebody . . .”

  “Maybe she did meet somebody,” Kenneth grunted. “Oh well. I hope everything is all right with her regardless of why she quit.” A sad look appeared on his face and he shook his head, blinking hard as if to hold back a tear or two. Apparently he had loved that heifer, and her mysterious disappearance had really upset him. But I had no sympathy for her or him. “I’ll miss her,” he admitted, his voice cracking.

  “I’m sure you will miss her,” I said, too low for him to hear. And then I gave him a hug. “Now come to bed so I can give you something that’ll take your mind off your troubles.”

  We had made love that night and I forgot all about Lois Cooper and her baby.

  Now, sixteen years later, my marriage was stronger than ever. Not only was I looking forward to the new millennium coming up in a few days, but I was also looking forward to the day Lois’s child turned eighteen. I had no idea what the child’s name was or if it was a girl or a boy. But none of that mattered to me anyway. All I cared about was that in three more years I’d be off the hook.

  And that child would no longer be part of my life!

  I was in such a good mood I practically raped Kenneth that night.

  CHAPTER 2

  KENNETH

  I HAD EVERYTHING A MAN COULD WANT. I OWNED LOMAX ELECTRONICS, which consisted of five of the most successful electronic equipment and supplies stores in the state of California. I owned a vacation cabin in the wine country; a spacious condo in downtown Frisco; and a beautiful mansion with a full-service bar in the living room, eight bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a six-car garage.

  I had a beautiful wife, a loyal and dependable staff, lots of friends, and a prestigious position in my community. But that still was not enough. I loved pretty young women. I was a dirty old man and I would probably be one until I was a dead old man.

  Of all the dozens of affairs I’d had since my marriage to Vera, Lois Cooper was the only one who had really meant something to me. She was the one I still thought about from time to time.

  I was convinced that Vera didn’t know I was a serial cheater because she had never given me a reason to think otherwise. One night during my affair with Lois,
I had called out Lois’s name while I was making love to Vera. And since she didn’t respond to that, I didn’t know what to think. Either I was married to a damn fool who didn’t care what I did or said, or she was deaf and hadn’t heard my slipup.

  I had done it again a few minutes ago, called out another woman’s name while I was making love to Vera. She had not responded to it this time either so I played it off. “Oh, baby, that was so good,” I told her, rubbing the side of her hip. Being a businessman in what had become a hostile environment, I had to do a lot of damage control, so I was good at it. “If God made a better woman, he kept her for himself.” I rolled over onto my back, which was aching like I had fallen off a horse. The rest of my body parts were giving me some discomfort as well. Vera was already on her back. I reached over and squeezed one of her recently surgically enhanced breasts, a prize that had cost me over seven thousand dollars this time. I was huffing and puffing and wheezing as if I’d just been injured.

  “Now don’t you get too excited and overexert yourself. You’re seventy years old now and you can’t be humping like a bull the way you used to,” Vera scolded.

  “A lot of men my age can no longer hump period,” I quipped.

  “I don’t care about other men. You know what Dr. Cortez told you about too much strenuous activity after that heart attack last May. And don’t forget to take your pills tonight.”

  Despite Vera’s exasperation with me, there was a smile on her face. How a woman could smile after her husband had called her by another woman’s name during a moment of intimacy was a mystery to me. I promised myself to be more careful in the future, but that was a promise I had originally made to myself years ago and I was still committing the same offense! Being a man was hard. There were so many ways for us to fuck up, and that’s why it was important for a man like me to have such a patient and understanding woman like my Vera. Oh, she was vain and extravagant, among other things. But I ignored her flaws because she was a prize I would always treasure.