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  “I’m fine, sugar pie.” I gave Joyce a quick peck on her forehead and tickled her chin.

  “Then why is that strange look on your face all of a sudden?”

  “I was just thinking about the wedding,” I muttered. “We had a roomful of guests, but I can’t get over the fact that we didn’t get nary a gift.”

  Joyce laughed. “Since we didn’t send out invitations and people just showed up, I’m not surprised. We did everything so fast, they probably didn’t have time to go out and buy us something.”

  “Another thing I can’t get over is that so many people came.”

  “That was probably because they couldn’t believe a man like you was marrying a woman like me,” she said with a heavy sigh.

  “Baby, how many more times do I have to tell you that you are the only woman I want? I don’t know why you are so hard on yourself.”

  I felt Joyce’s body stiffen. “Odell, I know I’m ugly—”

  “You hush up!” I cut her off so fast, she shuddered and geared up like she was going to jump off the bed and fly out the window. “Don’t you never let me hear you say something like that about yourself again!”

  “Well, maybe I’m not that ugly,” she mumbled.

  “Come with me!” I yelled. I grabbed Joyce by her arm and pulled her up off the bed and ushered her into the bathroom. I put my hands on her shoulders and held her in place in front of the mirror. “Look at yourself. There ain’t nobody in the world that thinks your face is ugly except you. Did you stay stupid shit like that to your other men friends?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Well nothing. If you did, no wonder they didn’t hang around with you for too long. The shit you say would make most men begin to think the same thing if you keep putting that idea in their heads. You been your own worst enemy and that’s why you been by yourself so long.”

  “Odell, I couldn’t hold on to a man even when I didn’t put myself down in front of them!” Joyce griped. “I just wasn’t the woman they wanted to be with too long.”

  “Well, I’m going to be with you until the day I die and I’m getting sick of trying to convince you of that. If you was half as ugly and undesirable as you seem to think, I wouldn’t have asked you out in the first place. Now promise me you will stop all that crazy talk about the way you look. The last thing our child need to grow up listening to is his or her mama putting herself down so much.”

  “You don’t have to be so mean about it. I feel bad enough,” Joyce pouted. “I can’t help the way I feel about myself. I’ve felt this way all my life.”

  “Your opinion of yourself is the only thing that’s ugly about you,” I fired back. “Now, if you want to keep looking at yourself that way, you go right ahead. But do me a favor and keep them ridiculous comments to yourself. I done told you over and over how beautiful you look to me. So it don’t matter what you really look like to yourself or nobody else anyway. Shit.”

  Joyce giggled. “All right. You made your point. Now can we go back to bed?”

  I lifted her up off the floor, carried her back to bed, and we made love some more.

  Chapter 15

  Joyce

  I NEVER THOUGHT THAT IT WAS POSSIBLE FOR A WOMAN TO BE AS happy as I was. Each day was better than the last. Odell gave me so much attention and he was so affectionate, I didn’t care if I looked like a baboon. He still made me feel beautiful, and that was all that mattered. My happiness must have been contagious, because people who used to look like they were constipated or disgusted when they were around me smiled and cracked jokes now. Even the birds that perched on my bedroom windowsill chirped louder and longer than before. My life was almost too good to be true. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have sworn that somebody had paid a visit to one of the hoodoo women out by the swamps on my behalf. I knew that was unlikely. For one thing, I only knew a few people who dabbled in foolishness like that. Aunt Mattie was one of those people. During our wedding reception, I had noticed her in the hall outside the bathroom taking to Odell. When I’d asked him about it, he’d told me that she had been complaining because she didn’t get any of the meatballs and deviled duck eggs that Mosella had brought. If they’d been discussing hoodoo, I didn’t want to know. I scolded myself for even letting a thought like that enter my mind. Especially since Odell and I were too scientific to believe in any kind of black magic.

  What I did believe in was that God had answered my prayers and with Him, I didn’t need anybody else to help me. My life was moving so fast now, I could barely keep up with it. And I didn’t want it to slow down.

  I finally knew what it felt like to have some real self-esteem. At the rate mine was growing, by the time my baby arrived I’d be as confident as the most beautiful women in town. Now that I felt better about myself, I took more pride in the way I looked. But I’d gained twenty pounds since I got pregnant, and it didn’t look good on me. My body was still slim and as straight up and down as a rod, but with a big bump in the middle. What I couldn’t understand was why with all my height, most of the extra weight had settled mainly in three places. I had expected my stomach to swell, but not my neck and face, too. My legs and arms still looked like beanpoles, though. None of that bothered Odell. He still couldn’t keep his hands off me. The only other thing on me that had gotten much bigger was my head. Odell had me thinking my shit didn’t stink. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for him.

  Mama and Daddy had told us that we could stay with them as long as we wanted. Odell didn’t care, but I did. I was anxious to move into my own house so I could fix it up the way I wanted, especially the nursery. When we got back from our honeymoon the Tuesday after our wedding, we went to that tacky boardinghouse where he’d been living and packed all his stuff. Odell didn’t have much, so we only had to make one trip.

  Summer school was in session and I worked every day even though we had only half as many students during the summer months. And even less since the Depression started. I planned to work as long as I could before I had to take maternity leave. I loved my job even though the Mahoney Street Elementary School building was shabby. Everybody got nervous during tornado season because we knew that a strong enough wind could blow the building down, like it had done to so many other places over the years.

  The only other elementary school for colored kids in Branson was actually a church and didn’t even have indoor plumbing. When somebody had to go, they used the outhouse a few hundred feet behind the church, or ducked behind the nearest bush. It was no wonder they couldn’t keep good teachers on the staff for more than a year or two, and they’d never had a principal. I was lucky. The same teachers and principal who had been employed when Mahoney hired me more than ten years ago were still on the payroll. Another thing I loved about my job was the convenient location. It was close enough for me to walk when I felt like it. But most of the time, especially on rainy days, I rode with Patsy Boykin in her five-year-old DeSoto, or one of the other aides. Patsy and I had graduated the same year, but she’d gotten married right away and already had five kids. She was the closest thing I’d ever had to a best friend. When she wasn’t too busy or tired, I’d badger her to pick me up so we could go shopping or to a restaurant. I wouldn’t have to do that now because I wanted to spend as much time as possible with Odell.

  With my nest egg and Odell’s new salary, we could afford a place in the same nice, quiet neighborhood where I had grown up. All of the homes were attractive and well tended, which was the reason my folks had never wanted to move. The problem was, the only house available was two blocks from Mama and Daddy. It sat on a corner next to another nice house. As much as I loved my parents, they had been smothering me all my life. I knew that if I lived close to them, they’d drop in on us whenever they felt like it, which would probably be every day of the week.

  The first night Odell spent in my bedroom with me, Mama must have barged in every five minutes, even after we’d gone to bed and for the most mundane reasons. She wanted to know if we needed more
pillows. She wanted to make sure we’d cracked open a window so the room wouldn’t get too stuffy, and so on. I knew that if Mama visited me too often in my house, it’d drive me crazy. Another bad thing about the location of the vacant house was that some of the grumpiest elderly people in town lived on the same block. But after spending two weeks with my parents, we decided to move into that vacant house anyway. There were ways to get around my parents’ interference: We wouldn’t answer the door when we didn’t want to be bothered. That’s what Mama did when she didn’t want to entertain company.

  We didn’t have to spend too much of our money on things for our house. We took all we could from the store: cookware, linen, dishes, food, and a few other necessary household items. We picked up a few nice pieces of new furniture from a discount store, but everything else came from a secondhand store.

  After living with my parents most of my life, I knew that living close to any senior citizen would not be a cakewalk. I was prepared for all kinds of bullshit from Clarabelle Copeland and her husband, Henry, the eighty-something-year-old couple that lived right next door to the house we’d moved into. They didn’t waste any time getting on our nerves. Two days after we moved in, Clarabelle cussed at me for spitting on the sidewalk in front of her house. The next day, Henry stuck his head out their living room window and cussed me out when Patsy dropped me off after work. The problem was, the loud muffler on her car had woken them up from their naps. Each time we did something they didn’t like, we apologized and promised we wouldn’t do it again. Other than that, everything else was perfect.

  As far as I was concerned, nothing could go wrong for me and Odell. We couldn’t have been happier if we’d died and gone to heaven.

  Chapter 16

  Odell

  SOME DAYS I ACTUALLY PINCHED MYSELF TO MAKE SURE I WASN’T dreaming. Each day I loved Joyce a little bit more. I made love to her two or three times a day, three or four times a week. I joined the same church she and most of the other colored folks on our side of town belonged to, and I did everything else I thought she wanted me to do. We spent hours at a time with my in-laws drinking tea and discussing all kinds of mundane subjects. Things like that bored the hell out of me, but I went along with it because I didn’t want to ruffle nobody’s feathers. I had a damn good thing going and if I played my cards right, it would get even better.

  I looked forward to going to work each day, especially now that I was the one in charge and my in-laws didn’t come in too often. The fly in the ointment—or two flies I should say—was Buddy and Sadie. They was slow, unpleasant to some of our customers, and they complained all the time. What they enjoyed doing the most was running their mouths and blabbing other folks’ business. I’d made it clear to them that I didn’t like that kind of foolishness, so they didn’t do it as much when I was around. But they were dependable and didn’t mind doing other things around the store. We didn’t have a cleaning person or a janitor, so Buddy and Sadie took care of things like dusting, sweeping, and mopping after hours—and only because Mac had promised they’d get paid time and a half when they worked past their shifts. Being as slow as they were and because they got paid by the hour, they made almost as much when they did a few hours overtime as they made doing regular time. Since part of my previous job had included some light “housekeeping” and other miscellaneous chores, I continued to do those things too. Not because I wanted to, but to show Buddy and Sadie—and the MacPhersons—that I was still eager to do some of the same unpleasant chores they had to do.

  No matter how much grunt work I performed, I knew that Buddy and Sadie didn’t like the fact that Mac and Millie had made me the new boss, and I could understand why. I’d only been an employee for a few weeks and they’d both been working at MacPherson’s a lot longer, but were still in the same positions. That was bad enough. I could tell from their whispering, eyeball rolling, and the hostile looks I got when I told them to do something that they didn’t like taking orders from a man young enough to be their son. As long as they continued to do their jobs, I didn’t care what else they did. I tried to keep at least two stock boys on the payroll, but they came and went for a lot of different reasons. The teenage boy that me and Mac had hired to take over my old job had lasted only two days. Other than those minor things, everything was good.

  On the first weekend in our new home, Joyce and I gave a cookout in our backyard that Saturday afternoon and invited two dozen of our friends, which included people from church, Joyce’s school, and customers who shopped at the store. Everybody had a great time. When it ended, the Copelands came over and complained for ten minutes straight about all the noise we’d made and the smoke. Joyce and I promised them that we wouldn’t give another cookout for a while and when we did, we’d be more considerate.

  “Let’s be patient. Them old fools can’t live too much longer, and then we can do whatever we want on our own property,” I told Joyce after the crotchety old couple left.

  “Odell! That’s a mean thing to say,” she laughed. “But I hope you’re right.” We both laughed.

  I loved spending time with Joyce. She was the most pleasant and kindhearted person I ever met. She tried to accommodate everybody. One Friday evening she was excited about a tent revival she had been looking forward to for weeks. She canceled just so she could babysit one of her coworkers’ three kids. The oldest one was eight and the youngest was five, but they cussed like grown folks and acted like wild savages. That didn’t bother Joyce at all. She still fawned over them like they was little angels. “There is no such thing as a bad child, just bad behavior.” That was what she told me when I offered to break a switch off the pecan tree in our front yard for her to use on them little devils for sneaking into our elderberry wine. I knew she was going to be a good mother to our children, and that was one of the reasons I wanted us to have several.

  Joyce had opened up a whole new world for me. She worked with some nice, intelligent people that I enjoyed socializing with because being around them made me want to be smarter. She and her friends read books and magazines and newspapers on a regular basis, so I started doing that too. I thought it would help me speak more proper. But English was such a complicated language, not only was it a struggle for me to understand most of what I was reading, it wasn’t helping me improve my sorry grammar. I was going to keep trying, though, because I wanted my wife to be as proud of me as I was of her.

  It was such a joy to wake up each morning with this wonderful woman in my arms. Some mornings I gazed at her as she slept. She looked so serene, and I was going to make sure she stayed that way. On top of all the other things I loved about my wife, she liked to party as much as I did. When we wanted to let our hair down, we picked up a bottle and sat on our front porch with a few of our friends. We wanted to avoid the rowdy jook joints. Especially after a man shot off a gun in one of the ones we used to go to.

  Joyce even went fishing with me whenever I wanted to go. But she got tired of that real fast. She didn’t like baiting hooks and waiting for hours at a time for the fish to bite. She didn’t complain when I went by myself, which was what I liked to do on weekends and some weekday evenings after I closed the store at five p.m.

  When we had our next backyard barbecue, a week after the last one, it was just me and Joyce. Ten minutes after I fired up the grill, the Copelands came hobbling out to their back porch, looking like they wanted to cuss out the world. “Oh shit!” I said through clenched teeth. Joyce bowed her head and snickered.

  “I hope y’all don’t be out here too long with all that damn smoke drifting over here,” Mr. Copeland wheezed. The scowl on his face was so extreme, it looked like he’d been sucking on lemons all day.

  “We got asthma,” Mrs. Copeland added, looking just as bitter.

  “We won’t be long and I’m sorry about the smoke,” I told them.

  “Y’all want a couple of plates?” Joyce asked. “Me and Odell can’t eat a whole slab of ribs by ourselves.”

  “Yup. I wish y’all had
offered us a plate that last time, too,” Mrs. Copeland snipped. “Just cut it up when it get done and bring it on over here.”

  As soon as they went back inside, I looked at Joyce and shook my head. “Baby, you must be a saint. I can’t figure out any other way you can stand to be nice to them mean old fools. I wish I could figure out what I did to deserve you.”

  “Just keep being yourself, Odell. That was all you did, and that’s all you’ll ever have to do for me.”

  There was no end to my pleasure.

  Even with all I had, every now and then I thought about what I didn’t have. Like the petite, beautiful wife I’d been dreaming about all my life. I didn’t let myself think about that woman too often because it was too late, and it didn’t really matter that much now anyway. If anybody had asked, I would have told them that life had blessed me enough to keep me satisfied for the rest of my life.

  But I was wrong.

  If I had not decided to drive the fifty miles to Hartville that Sunday afternoon the first week in August, or if Joyce had rode shotgun with me, I never would have met the sweet young thing who would send me on a detour I never saw coming.

  Chapter 17

  Odell

  I DIDN’T KNOW NOBODY IN HARTVILLE. I’D BEEN THERE ONLY A FEW times when I was a kid. They had more sugarcane fields than most of the other little towns, so when we would drive through it, Daddy would stop and me and him would sneak into a cane field and grab as many stalks as we could carry. We did the same thing during watermelon season.

  Hartville was even smaller than Branson, but I’d heard that they had a lot of colored churches and just as many jook joints, bars, and beer gardens, so there was something for everybody to do. They also had some good fishing holes that me and Daddy used to go to.

  As much as I enjoyed Joyce’s company, I needed a little space now and then. She felt the same way, so whenever she wanted to go shopping or out to lunch by herself, I didn’t make a fuss the way some husbands did. But whenever I was away from her, she was on my mind. That was why I never stayed away from her too long.