Fool and Her Honey (9781622860791) Read online

  That Saturday night Dina agreed to keep my baby while I went out on my first date in three years, with high expectations of making a love connection. I tugged on a pair of denim-looking leggings and a stretchy green one-shouldered top that was long enough to cover my behind and was adorned with large yellow and turquoise butterflies on the front. My eye shadow and lip gloss matched the hues in my shirt, and I flatironed my hair so that it framed my face. Posing in the mirror, I gave myself two thumbs-up; I looked good and was ready.

  We’d decided to meet at Myst, a nightclub out in Scottsdale, since it would provide a mixed crowd, drinks, and hopefully a good time even if he didn’t work out, since Candis was coming with me for safety reasons. We’d been at the club for more than an hour, with me scanning every dude in my line of vision, wondering if he was Equanto. In the meantime, I danced with a couple of guys, but I was distracted, scared I was going to miss him. I couldn’t dance like I really wanted to, because I didn’t want to be sweaty and stank by the time Equanto got there. That is, if he wasn’t standing me up.

  Candis looked like she was having the time of her life, accepting drinks from all kinds of dudes, hoochie dancing—bending over, rubbing her booty all in guys’ crotches—then blowing them off like nothing had ever happened when the song changed. I envied her freedom of expression, her confidence, and how guys just flocked to her. She had on a super minidress that flared out at the waist but fell just an inch below her cheeks.

  At one point, she started doing some fast-paced dance that looked like a mix between Chicago stepping and the Hustle, which called for a few quick spins. Every time Candis did a spin, her dress flew up to her waist and showed off her perfectly round, incredibly toned ass, complete with a strip of thong up the middle. She knew it and didn’t care. That girl danced like she owned the place, while guys stood all around with a hand cupped over their mouth, muffling their “Gah-dahm!” while their other hand molested their crotches.

  “Whew!” she huffed with a smile when the song ended and the DJ played something much slower. She made her way back to where I sat, and dudes started coming out of the woodwork like roaches with more drinks, requests for dances, and slips of paper with phone numbers scribbled on them, which she discarded.

  While she sat chatting with someone to whom she’d decided to give two minutes of her attention, Equanto called.

  “Yo, where you at?” he said.

  I told him where to find me and described my outfit, and a minute later I saw an acceptable-looking man come strolling to the table.

  “W’sup?” he said with a head bob, rubbing his hand across his face, looking back and forth between me and Candis.

  “Humph,” Candis grunted, rolling her eyes away in instant disapproval. “I’ll be back.” At that she was back out on the dance floor.

  “Hey,” I greeted with a slight smile, taking note of his features, which reminded me of Usher’s.

  He pulled up a chair beside me, leaned back, and scanned the club. “So what’s up?”

  “Nothing much. Been getting my dance on while I was waiting for you to get here.” I glanced at my watch to send the nonverbal message that I didn’t appreciate him taking so long to show up.

  “Yeah. Sorry ’bout that. I had got a li’l caught up with something,” he answered while he thumbed a text message into his phone. Silence hovered between us for about two minutes, with me sipping my drink and him preoccupied with his phone. When he was done, he spoke again. “So stand up. Lemme see what you look like.” He lustfully bit down on his bottom lip and glanced down at a huge chunk of my butt that spilled over the sides of my seat.

  I pondered for a few seconds if I should attempt Candis’s level of confidence by proudly strutting my stuff or if I should ask him if he was crazy for approaching me like that. I took an even lower road. “My feet hurt a little bit,” I lied. “I don’t feel like standing up.”

  “Oh, a’ight. Well, I’m ’bout to go dance, then.”

  “Wow. Not even gonna offer to buy me a drink first,” I said to his back, loud enough for him to hear as he hadn’t gotten too far away. He didn’t even turn around. He headed to the bar first, leaned over to the bartender, and was served a bottle of beer. He took a swallow, then sat on the edge of a bar stool, bobbing his head, watching females, and licking his lips. Another minute passed before some big-booty chick approached him and led him to the floor. While the girl shook and gyrated, Equanto did slow, fluid movements, keeping time with the rhythm but not putting forth much effort.

  “Where’s your date?” Candis asked, plopping down beside me, out of breath.

  “He’s out there with some random chick. I’m ready to go. Come on.”

  “So it’s not a love connection, huh?”

  “Nope.” Grabbing my keys and purse, I ducked out without letting him know I was leaving. He probably didn’t give a damn, anyway.

  Equanto didn’t call me until three days later.

  “What happened to you the other night?”

  “You mean, you noticed that I’d left?”

  “I came back to the table with a drink for you, and you were gone,” he commented.

  “Really?” I said sarcastically. “So what’d you do with it? Give it to the same chick you gave your attention to when you were supposed to be with me?”

  “See, it won’t even like that. You said your feet were hurting, and after paying twenty dollars to get in, I did wanna dance at least one time.”

  He had a good point; I did say that.

  “Then I come back to talk to you, and you dipped on a brother. Didn’t say you were leaving or nothing.”

  “Right.”

  “So maybe that wasn’t a good place for us to meet, but look, I am tryin’a see you again.”

  After a little convincing, I agreed to dinner, even though I had to pick him up, since his car was allegedly in the shop. Then I ended up paying for our meals because he’d “accidently” left his wallet at home. I was so desperate for male attention, and some was better than none—even if I had to pay almost every time we went out. It had been a mess of a relationship ever since but I had always tried to convince myself and others that it wasn’t that bad.

  It seemed like the whole world was against us from the start, primarily because Equanto couldn’t seem to keep a job. It seemed like by the time he was on a job long enough to get a check with his name printed on it, he found something about the job that was so difficult to put up with that he just had to quit.

  “It’s too hot to be out there every day, cutting grass!”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna do all that for no minimum wage.”

  “They want to start too early in the morning, and I’m not a morning person.”

  “I’m tryin’a work in my destiny, and this ain’t it.”

  “Last time I went to church, the preacher said he seen albums with my name on it.”

  “I’m wasting my life making another man rich.”

  “My boss be trippin’, and he ain’t gonna be talking to me like that.” He tagged that on to every main reason as the secondary reason why he just couldn’t work another day.

  In the meantime, he had moved in with me, because his sister had put him out for no reason, or so he said. It was initially just supposed to be for a few nights—and on the couch—until he got himself together, but one night turned into the next, which turned into a week, then a month, and so on. During that time, he transitioned from the couch to my bedroom, and when I looked up, I had a live-in lover. It was shackin’, as my momma called it, but I kept lying to myself, calling it “spending the night,” but even my three-year-old knew better than that.

  “Is Equanto coming home?” Linwood asked me one evening, when Equanto hadn’t come in after work. Linwood was used to playing video games with him every night after dinner, and it was now almost his bath and bedtime.

  “This is not his home, baby,” I answered. “He’s just spending the night here for a little while.”

  “Oh. I
thought he lived here with us.”

  Hell, who was I fooling? He did live there with us, and I was pissed off that I hadn’t heard from him all evening and had no idea where he was. I felt like he owed me an explanation out of respect.

  It was after eleven when he stuck his key in the lock and twisted the knob. The first thing I saw was a bouquet of mixed flowers, which immediately broke my angry spell. Equanto had never brought me flowers before.

  “I’m sorry I’m late. They was offering extra hours, and I had to get that overtime.”

  “You couldn’t call me?”

  “My phone was dead, babe,” he said, offering the blacked-out, nonresponsive device as proof. The job he was currently working, a car detailing gig, paid him under the table, so he dug into his pocket and pulled out a small wad of folded bills and handed them to me. “Here’s some money for letting me stay with you.”

  That completely caught me by surprise. Equanto would pick up a few groceries here and there or pay for dinner if we went out, but he’d never put money in my hand before. That kinda made him an official tenant, except he wasn’t on my lease. And I couldn’t even front. When he wasn’t working, he saved me a few dollars by keeping Linwood while I worked, instead of me having to take him to day care.

  “Don’t worry about li’l man. He can stay here with me,” he’d said. Anybody with a kid knew that someone who was willing to keep your kid for free was a plus. Then he didn’t mind cooking on top of that, although the meals were fairly simple: spaghetti, hot dogs and fries, fried chicken with boxed mashed potatoes and canned green beans. He got no complaints from me, and I found myself making excuses for his lack of employment to Candis and Dina.

  “It works better for us this way, ’cause I don’t have to pay child care. And he does the laundry and stuff.”

  “So he’s the damn woman in the relationship,” Candis observed.

  “Only if you think about it in terms of traditional gender roles, but this is not the nineteen fifties anymore,” I argued, defending myself.

  “Well, get his ass an apron, then,” Candis replied.

  “It’s just what works for us.”

  “But the Bible says a man who doesn’t work doesn’t eat.” Dina was always trying to put a church spin on stuff, but I had an answer.

  “It also says in Proverbs thirty-one, which is supposed to be about the perfect woman or something like that, that she goes to work and makes her man proud of her.”

  “When have you ever read that!” Dina exclaimed. “I gotta Bible right here in my purse.”

  “Turn to it.” I challenged. She did, and after reading all that stuff that the woman did, spinning wool and planting vineyards and selling linen and whatnot, there wasn’t a whole lot she could say about me working.

  “But you ain’t married to him,” Candis shot back. She always had something negative to say. “It would be one thing if he was your husband, but ain’t no way in the world I would carry a grown-ass man on my back.”

  Now, there wasn’t a whole lot I could say about that. Regardless, what did my stupid ass do? Shortly after that conversation with the girls, I proposed to him after we’d finished making love.

  “E, I’m not comfortable living like this,” I said.

  “Like what, baby?” He was still lying on me, breathing softly in my ear.

  “You living here, lying up in my bed every night, and we’re not married. Especially in front of my son.”

  “So what’re you saying? You want me to get out your house?”

  “No. I want to get married.”

  Equanto grunted, “I don’t know about all that.” He lifted his weight and slid to his side of the bed.

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause.”

  I waited for him to say more, but nothing else followed.

  “Because what? We’re already living like we’re married. I need to put the right kind of relationship example in front of my son . . . and I love you.”

  Even if he was still going to say no to marriage right now, I did expect him to say that he loved me too. He didn’t say it.

  “I don’t know about all that, Celeste.” He turned his back to me and dozed off, while I lay there disappointed, hurt, and spilling tears on my pillow.

  It seemed like things just really went downhill from there. I was used to him not keeping a job and being home most of the time, but it started to turn into extreme laziness, and I got impatient and angry. I’d come home from work, and he’d be sitting on my couch with the damn Wii remote in his hand, playing some stupid game, telling me what level he’d made it to and some new cheat code he’d discovered. On top of that, the house looked like a hurricane had come through, even though I’d straighten up every night, before I went to bed. Our bed wouldn’t be made, and no kind of meal had been cooked. My baby was surviving off what I called the C food group—cereal, crackers, cheese puffs, chips, cookies, and Coolie drinks, all of which he could get for himself. Coming home to a lazy unemployed man was like getting off of one job and going straight to another. Except the one at home was twice as hard.

  “You gonna have to go, Equanto,” I asserted one day, when I’d just reached my limit, coming home to find three other men in my house, around my baby, drinking beer and playing dominoes.

  “Why? Go where?”

  “I don’t care where you go, but you gonna have to get outta my house.”

  “Oh, so now it’s your house by yourself?”

  “Hell, yeah! You don’t pay rent or nothing else around here!”

  “Yeah, but I do other stuff,” he argued.

  “Like what?” With my hands planted on my hips, I looked around the room. The trash hadn’t been taken out, dishes were in the sink, which was a mystery, because nothing had been cooked. And beer cans were strewn on the floor, and the house smelled like stank feet, sweaty underarms, and musty balls.

  “I keep Linwood for you, and I cook and stuff sometimes.”

  “That ain’t cutting it no more, E. You gonna have to get a job or get out my house.”

  “Well, you gonna have to take Linwood to day care so I can go fill out some applications.”

  “That ain’t no problem!” I snapped, but actually it was. I had long withdrawn him from the center he’d been enrolled in, comfortable to some degree with him staying home with Equanto. I’d have to call them to see if they had room and then reregister him if they did. If not, I’d have to go day-care shopping, which was time consuming. Not to mention, the expense that I’d gotten used to not having to pay. Oh well. I was doing things on my own before I met Equanto, and I could sure as hell carry on without him now.

  By the time we went to bed that night, he had calmed down and wanted to talk.

  “Baby, I am gonna look for a job tomorrow, but don’t put me out of your and li’l man’s lives. I know I can do better, but y’all like my family now. He’s like my son.”

  “And what am I like, since you don’t want to get married? Am I like your wife, or am I like your ‘something to do till something better comes along?’”

  “You know it ain’t even like that.”

  “What I do know is, you don’t love me, you don’t want to marry me, you can’t keep a job, you’re not contributing anything to this household, and now you’re letting your friends come up in here and sit on my furniture, watch my TV, eat up my food, inhale my air-conditioning, and run up my electric bill. And I’m supposed to be okay with that? You must be out of your mind!”

  “I didn’t think it was gonna bother you like that, babe.”

  “Whatever, E.”

  “And I been thinking about what you said about us living like we married and stuff, but I was raised in church and I know it ain’t right. I was gonna ask you to marry me, but I was too ashamed, because I didn’t have a ring to give you.”

  What? I was at a loss for words.

  “I do love you, babe. I’m just trying to get myself together so I can be the man I need to be for you.”

 
; He said some more stuff that was pleasing to my ears, and in no time the panties were off and the legs were spread. Before the month was out, we went down to the justice of the peace and tied the knot, even though he was still unemployed, unmotivated, and un everything else that I wanted my husband to be. Including unloving.

  My life had been hell on earth ever since, and Candis knew it. So why in the world would she want to jump up and marry a dude she met on freaking Facebook?

  Chapter 24

  Dina

  As soon as Celeste closed the door behind Candis, we started up. “Do you think she’s serious?” I asked with my brows lifted so high, it made my head hurt.

  Celeste just stood at the door, one hand still on the doorknob and the other on her hip. “I sure hope not.”

  “I don’t know, Celeste.” I forked more lasagna in my mouth. “If she is, what are we going to do?”

  “What can we do? Hopefully, that man will show his ass before this gets out of hand. Candis is too old to be acting this stupid.”

  “It’s already out of hand if she is talking about marrying him,” I replied, throwing up a hand and letting it come down on the table. “Don’t you think so?”

  “Kind of, but not really. With that bubble gum ring she got, maybe it’s just a pretend engagement. You know, wishful thinking, a promise ring.” Celeste meandered back to the living room, grabbed the remote from her coffee table, and took a seat. “He hasn’t put a real ring on it.”

  “Did you hear her say he mailed her the ring?”

  “Mailed it?” Celeste jerked her head toward me so fast, it was a miracle her neck didn’t snap.

  “She said he didn’t have the money to come out here, but he didn’t want her walking around with nothing on her hand, so he mailed it.”

  Celeste shook her head. “That doesn’t even make good sense.”

  “Nothing about this whole thing makes any sense at all. I can’t believe she is being so desperate. She needs to take her time and spend some time with him in person, not online.”