One House Over Page 21

  Joyce snickered. “Odell, get a grip. I don’t think we have to worry about anything that serious.”

  “Well, the bottom line is, jealousy can be a dangerous emotion,” I insisted.

  “They don’t feel that way now. She even said they want to be more like us. A compliment like that goes a long way with me. Anyway, I told her about the cookout before we went shopping. Besides that, I had already told Mama we were having them over for the holiday so I have to go through with it—whether I want to or not. I’m going to try and not let petty things like her getting a lot of attention from men bother me too much. And, I don’t think she really meant to imply that I’m homely.” Joyce exhaled and shook her head. “Besides, we can’t overlook the fact that they let us have drinks on the house.”

  “No, we can’t, and I’m glad you feel the way you do because I feel the same way. I’m still feeling a little guilty about the way I treated them on Friday when they asked me to give them a ride home. But we have to keep in mind that Yvonne and Milton is involved in a shady, illegal business which makes them criminals. If we do get closer to them anyway, we should always feed them with long-handled spoons.”

  It rained all day Tuesday so nobody in our neighborhood had a backyard cookout. But we invited Yvonne and Milton to have supper with us that evening and it turned out to be very pleasant. The only thing was, while Yvonne and Joyce was in the kitchen doing the dishes after we’d eaten the ribs we’d cooked in the oven, Milton asked me for another loan.

  “Just a dollar,” he whispered, looking toward the doorway. “And please don’t tell Joyce because she’ll tell Yvonne and I don’t want her to know I ain’t managing my money right.”

  “I advise you to start managing your money right, man. It don’t look good for a man your age to be so irresponsible. And I don’t want you to get too dependent on me.”

  “Oh, you ain’t got to worry about that. I know when to quit.” There was a glint in his eye when he grabbed the dollar bill out of my hand.

  I knew it wouldn’t be long before he hit me up again. But I was not going to let him get too carried away. I knew when to quit too. Even if it ended our friendship.

  Chapter 39

  Odell

  AFTER THE FOURTH OF JULY, ME AND JOYCE GOT REAL BUSY. Wednesday evening, I cut the grass in our front and back yards, pruned our pecan tree, and hand-washed the car. She washed two loads of clothes and hung them on the line in our backyard, and she got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed our kitchen floor. After we’d finished our chores and ate supper, we visited a white couple we’d been friends with for several years. We hadn’t seen Yvonne and Milton since they’d eaten dinner with us on Tuesday. But they had people beating a path to their house almost nonstop the rest of the week. Thursday evening Willie Frank pulled up in his pickup truck with several other white folks riding shotgun in the back, including an elderly man they hauled into the house in a wheelbarrow. It seemed like every time Willie Frank visited, so did Aunt Mattie and one or two of her prostitutes. Milton had made a few comments on this subject during dinner on Tuesday. According to him, Willie Frank felt more comfortable in a colored neighborhood when he wanted to spend his money on a colored woman. “Our house is much more fun than Aunt Mattie’s poon palace for Willie Frank to get his ashes hauled. Me and Yvonne treat our guests like friends, not tricks,” Milton had said at the same time he was chomping on Joyce’s world-beating hush puppies. Later that night when we was alone, Joyce asked me, “What does ‘get his ashes hauled’ mean?” I giggled and poked her crotch. When I told her that the phrase meant doing “the big nasty,” she pinched my hand. “I figured it had something to do with intercourse!” she snapped.

  On Thursday when her parents returned from their retreat, we had supper with them. Friday evening I picked Daddy up and we went fishing for a couple of hours and I spent the night at his house. I was so anxious to see Betty Jean and the boys again, I left there after breakfast on Saturday morning.

  “I wish you had come over here last night like you usually do on Fridays,” Betty Jean said when I entered her house a few minutes past ten a.m. “The boys spent the night with Alline, so you and me could have had a real nice quiet evening.”

  “I would have come last night, but . . . you know,” I said with a hangdog expression on my face that I had been using a lot lately. “Something came up.” I had no trouble coming up with a good excuse to tell Betty Jean when I disappointed her. The one I used the most was “something came up” and that was good enough. She rarely asked me for more details, so I rarely told her. She made it easy for me to keep living two lives. It was one of the reasons I still didn’t feel too guilty about what I was doing. I was giving Joyce everything I said I would: love and devotion. I had promised her that I would never leave her, and that was one promise I planned to keep. But I had not promised her that I would be faithful. Whenever it felt like guilt was creeping up on me, I looked at the situation from that angle. I was also giving Betty Jean everything I’d promised her: my love and security. I had all the bases covered.

  I glanced around the living room, pleased to see it looking so neat and smelling so good. I did a double-take when I noticed a huge picnic basket on the coffee table. There was a folded red-and-white-checked tablecloth on top of it. “What’s with this picnic basket?” I lifted the lid and peeped in. My breath caught in my throat when I saw what was inside: several pieces of fried chicken wrapped in wax paper, baked beans, a bowl of potato salad, six bottles of root beer pop, and half a dozen biscuits. I had not been on a picnic since Joyce and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary last year. She had packed a basket with exactly the same items that day, even down to a red-and-white-checked tablecloth for us to sit on. I didn’t believe in bad omens, but this coincidence made me shiver.

  I was so caught up in my thoughts, Betty Jean had to pinch my arm to get my attention. “I hate it when you shut down on me like that,” she complained.

  “I didn’t do no such thing.”

  “Yes, you did just now. You been doing it more and more lately.”

  “If I did, I didn’t mean to. What was we talking about?”

  “I was talking about the carnival.”

  “What carnival?”

  “See there. You didn’t hear a word I said so you must have shut down”

  “Okay, maybe I did. I’ll try not to do it again.”

  “I hope you don’t because when you get that glazed look in your eyes, I get worried.”

  “Honey, you ain’t got a damn thing to worry about. I love you to death and I’m going to continue doing everything possible to keep you and the boys happy.”

  “Good. Now, like I was saying, you said we’d go to the carnival when it came through here. Well, it came yesterday and me and the boys been itching to go. They’ll be home in a little while.”

  “I didn’t bring enough money for no carnival. Them rides ain’t as cheap as they used to be.”

  “We ain’t got to ride on everything,” Betty Jean said. “And I made this picnic basket so we ain’t even got to spend no money on hot dogs and candy and whatnot.”

  “I had planned for us to go on a long drive and do some fishing and maybe find a blackberry patch so we can pick enough berries for a few pies.”

  “Oh, all right. I don’t want to go fishing or blackberry picking. We can just take a drive and go on a picnic. But I know it won’t be as much fun as the carnival.”

  The pout on Betty Jean’s face was getting to me, but this was one time I couldn’t let her have her way. “Look, I know we’d have a lot of fun at the carnival and I’d love to go, but we can’t do that because . . . because it’s in Lexington this year and that’s too close to home,” I said.

  “Whose home?”

  “Mine. Them carnival people changed their route this year. It was supposed to be in Butler County.”

  “So? It’ll take almost a whole hour to drive from here to Lexington, but I don’t mind. And you know how much the boy
s like to ride around in that car.”

  I glanced toward the door. I didn’t want the boys to bust in and hear what I was about to say to Betty Jean. When I turned back around to face her, I could tell from the tight look on her face that she already knew what I was going to say. But I said it anyway. “We can’t go to that carnival, period. Lexington is only five miles from Branson where I live with my wife. Everybody I know will be at that carnival at some point. With our luck, if we show up there today, half of them will too. Come to think of it, any other day it would be the same thing.”

  “Joyce might even be there, huh?” Betty Jean folded her arms and gave me a look that was so hot, my face felt like I’d stuck it in an oven.

  “I doubt that, but people who know her will be. Them students from her school, and her daddy is like a kid when it come to carnivals, so he’ll probably be there every day as long as it’s in town.”

  “I’m getting kind of tired of having to sneak around with you, Odell. It ain’t fair to me and the boys and . . . it ain’t fair to Joyce.”

  “You let me worry about Joyce. Me and you been doing all right since we met and that’s because we don’t go to certain places. There is more than enough places in Hartville and other towns where we can go and not worry about running into nobody I know.”

  “What would you do if we ever run into somebody you know?”

  “I ain’t sure. I never think about it.”

  “How come?”

  “I ain’t thought about that on account of if ain’t going to happen. Now let’s go get the boys so we can be on our way. After we have our picnic, we’ll take a nice long drive. If anybody is still hungry after that, we’ll stop off at Po’ Sister’s Kitchen for supper.”

  Just as I expected, after our picnic and a long drive to Mobile and back, everybody was hungry again. As usual, there was a long line of hungry people in front of Po’ Sister’s Kitchen when we got there.

  Like Betty Jean always did whenever we ate at this restaurant, she approached the counter and told somebody to send her sister out so we wouldn’t have to wait in line. Alline was too busy this time, but she sent a waitress to take care of us. She seated us at a table in the middle of the floor.

  “Daddy, I don’t like them itty-bitty hush puppies they always give us,” Jesse whined before he even sat down.

  “And I don’t like them chicken feet y’all ordered for us the last time,” Daniel complained, pulling out a chair next to me.

  “I’m ordering burgers for y’all this time,” Betty Jean said, fanning her face with the menu. She and I ordered the buttermilk catfish with fries and a pitcher of grape Kool-Aid. “Odell, this place is really busy today. You sure you want to stay here? We still might have to wait awhile for them to bring us our food.”

  “I don’t mind staying at all. I can’t think of no other place I’d rather be.”

  Right after I said that, Joyce’s face flashed in my mind. Everything I did and said now was so routine, I didn’t feel as guilty as I used to.

  After we put in our orders, the boys got restless. “Jesse, if you don’t stop kicking your brother, I’m going to go outside and get a switch,” I warned. I lowered my voice when I noticed the people at some of the tables close to ours looking at us. “Leon, stop trying to catch that fly and be still before I get a switch for you, too!” Despite my sons’ unruly behavior, I was in my element. I squeezed Betty Jean’s hand and stared into her eyes. “Baby, this is one of the best days we ever had. It don’t get no better than this.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to leave tomorrow,” she said in a low voice with a pout.

  “I wish I didn’t have to neither. But, you know how it is.” I leaned over and kissed her so long, it seemed like every other customer in the place was gawking at us when I pulled away.

  Chapter 40

  Joyce

  SATURDAY EVENING I GOT BORED AND DECIDED TO VISIT MAMA and Daddy. I had visited them twice in the last two days and each time I had to listen to complaints about everything in their lives from the greasy food they had eaten at the retreat they’d attended a few days ago to their warnings about me and Odell getting too involved with “them bootleggers” next door.

  Within seconds after I entered my parents’ living room, I regretted it. “You look like hell,” Daddy boomed from the easy chair he occupied facing the couch where Mama sat with her knitting items in her lap.

  “Sure enough,” she agreed. “What’s the matter?”

  I let out an exasperated breath. I didn’t sit down because I knew this was going to be a very short visit. I stood in front of the door with my hands on my hips. “Nothing is the matter with me,” I snapped.

  “If your face was any longer, it’d be dragging this floor. Is you and Odell having problems?” Daddy asked with a snort, looking at me from the corner of his suspicious eye.

  “Odell and I are doing just fine. The way people keep hinting at us having problems is getting on my nerves.”

  “Why do they think y’all having problems?” Mama asked, giving me a weary look. “I hope you ain’t been mistreating that man after all the fuss you made to marry him. And who is it that’s doing the hinting?”

  “That’s not important. But one woman had the nerve to ask me one night if Odell had left me. My husband is never going to leave me!” I insisted. “We haven’t had one single argument since we got married. He promised that we’d stay together until we died.”

  “Whatever you doing, you better keep doing it so Odell won’t have no reason to take off,” Mama advised, wagging a finger in my direction.

  “Amen to that,” Daddy added. “I hope you coming to church with us tomorrow. You and Odell ain’t been in a while, and Reverend Jessup done asked several times why come that is. I’m sure that if I asked him to, he’d be happy to drop by your house for supper one evening to give you and Odell some spiritual guidance.”

  I agreed to go to church with Mama and Daddy tomorrow. Not because I wanted to go, but because I didn’t want Reverend Jessup to pay us a visit. We already had enough on our plate, so a meddlesome preacher was the last thing we needed.

  When I got back home, I did a few chores, listened to the radio for about an hour, and finished reading the book that I had started reading three days ago. The days seemed so much longer when Odell was gone. I couldn’t wait for him to come home from his daddy’s house. I thought about calling up my coworker Patsy and asking her to drive me out to Lonnie’s house so I could surprise Odell. He hated surprises as much as I did, so that idea didn’t stay on my mind long. I went to sleep on the living room couch, and that’s where I stayed all night.

  I still had not seen Yvonne since she’d eaten supper with us on Tuesday. But this afternoon when I got home from church, she was sitting on her front porch steps crying.

  “Lord! Yvonne, what’s the matter?” I asked as I ran up to her and put my arms around her shoulder. The hurtful things she’d previously said to me didn’t even cross my mind. She didn’t look like the wild woman I had begun to think she was. She looked like a woman in pain. And nobody knew better than me what that felt like.

  “Oh, Joyce! It’s a mess!” she said, choking on a sob. She sniffled and wiped her nose with the sleeve of her bright red blouse, which I was pleased to see was not as low-cut as some of her others. “Today is my baby girl’s birthday. My babies’ birthdays is always depressing for me, so when I got up this morning, the first thing I did was take a drink. Willie Frank drove me to my aunt and uncle’s house to visit my babies this morning. But when Aunt Nadine smelled alcohol on my breath, she wouldn’t even let me in the house, and told me that it would be better if I stopped coming around at all. She said she’ll continue to bring them to see me when she could, but not too often.”

  “Please tell me you’re kidding! Your aunt doesn’t want you to see your own children?”

  Yvonne shook her head, sniffled some more, and then words squirted out of her mouth like spit. “I wouldn’t kid about something this
serious.”

  “Why? And why do you let her get away with that?”

  “See, my kids don’t know I’m their real mama.”

  My whole body tensed up. “What? Who do they think you are all this time?”

  “They think I’m their cousin. When my aunt and uncle took them in, my youngest was still in diapers and my oldest had just learned to talk. Aunt Nadine told my babies that their real mama took off with a musician, and got killed in a beer garden brawl somewhere up north.”

  “My Lord. Let’s go in my house,” I suggested, shaking my head and rubbing her back at the same time. She trailed behind me like a sheep that had lost its way.

  When we got to my living room, I waved her to the couch and then I skittered to the kitchen. I returned with two glasses of elderberry wine and handed the biggest one to her.

  “This ain’t nothing like the stuff you and Milton serve, but it’s just as good.” I sat down next to her. We drank at the same time, and then I draped my arm around her shoulder. “I couldn’t imagine what it’d be like if I had kids and somebody else was raising them. That would be bad enough. But I couldn’t go on if I had some and they thought I was dead. What do they call you?”

  “Cousin Yvonne.”

  “Will you ever tell them who you really are?”

  Yvonne nodded. “I will when they get grown. I promised Aunt Nadine and Uncle Sherman that I wouldn’t do so until then.”

  “That’s a long time from now. Why would your folks not want your own kids to know who you really are?”

  “She’s sanctified. And her husband is even worse. He’s a deacon in the church they go to and the holiest man I know. He don’t even allow my aunt to wear pants or make-up. They believe people that drink and party don’t deserve to raise kids.”

  “I know a lot of folks in Branson that drink and party, but they still have their kids with them and they seem to be doing all right.”