Fool and Her Honey (9781622860791) Read online

  It was only four in the morning when my body decided I’d had enough sleep. Although I tried to go back to sleep so I wouldn’t be bombarded with my thoughts, the sandman had apparently finished his rounds and wasn’t working a second shift. Although fully awake, I tossed and turned, and Bertrand began to stir.

  “What’s wrong, babe?” he mumbled.

  “I can’t sleep.” I guess his interpretation of that was I was horny, because he grabbed my hand and placed it on his groin. I hid my sigh, and I was really going to try to get my mind together to have sex, but I couldn’t do it, knowing what I knew. I withdrew my hand after only a few seconds of fondling.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “We need to talk,” I began. That was the only thing I could come up with.

  Bertrand sighed a sleepy sigh first, then replied, “About what?”

  Without notice, I reached for the lamp on the nightstand and clicked the light on, blinding both of us momentarily.

  “You need to turn on the light?” he asked, wincing.

  “Yeah, because I need to see your face, and I’m going to need your full attention.”

  I waited for him to pull his hand away from his eyes, and though he had them scrunched into narrow slits, he looked at me. “What is it?”

  A sigh preceded my next actions, which were pulling myself out of bed, walking over to the chest of drawers that held his clothes, opening the third one from the top, and pulling out the pair of panties that were not mine.

  “Why are these in your drawer?” I asked, holding them up with just a pinch of my nails.

  “What is it?” he huffed, his voice still heavy with sleep.

  I flung the panties at him, and they landed on his chest. Bertrand glanced down at them, then casually picked them up.

  “They yours, babe,” he said with crinkled brows.

  “If they were mine, I wouldn’t be asking you about them.” I paused, studying his face. He looked both confused and upset. “So whose are they?”

  “What do you mean? You’re the only woman that lives here. They gotta be yours.”

  “But they are not, and they are in your drawer. So whose are they?” I asked again.

  “Babe, you waking me up in the middle of the night to ask me about some underwear?” He sighed and let his eyes scan the ceiling, as if the answer would be found imprinted above his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” I insisted. “They didn’t just appear there by themselves.”

  “They probably been there for I don’t know how long,” he said. “I haven’t been through those drawers to clean stuff out of them.”

  “So you’re trying to tell me these are Miranda’s stank drawers,” I said, referencing the woman he’d dated before we started dating. I instantly regretted giving him a possible answer. “What are you doing? Holding on to them for old times’ sake?”

  “No, I’m not holding on to them,” he said, defending himself.

  “So what are they doing here? Still. We’ve been together for a whole year now, and you mean to tell me that you at no point in time saw those nasty panties in your drawer, in the bedroom where you and your future wife sleep, and you haven’t thought enough to throw them out?”

  “I just told you, I haven’t been through those drawers. I don’t know all of what is in there.”

  “So you didn’t think enough of me to clean up your old mess before I moved in here with you?”

  “Not really. I had no idea they were there,” he said.

  I wasn’t appeased.

  “Those things are as old as dirt.”

  This felt like some cheating Cameron garbage all over again. But suppose he was telling the truth? Maybe they were old and were just some leftovers, but still I shouldn’t have found them. I didn’t know what to say at that point, not knowing if I should accept his story or not.

  “Babe. I promise you, it’s nothing.” He threw the covers off his body while grabbing the underwear and put them in a small wastebasket across the room.

  “Don’t you think you need to be taking that mess outside?” My hands were on my hips as I shot invisible daggers from my eyes.

  Bertrand sighed loudly but didn’t say a word. He pulled on a pair of shorts that were draped across the chaise, grabbed the panties from the trash, and left the bedroom, me trailing just a few feet behind him. I followed him to the back door, and seconds after he stepped outside, I heard the rumbling of the trash receptacle. When Bertrand came back in, I was still standing there with my arms folded across my chest. He walked past me, back into our bedroom, removed his shorts, and got back in bed without saying a single word.

  I stood just inside our bedroom with my arms still folded, but with nothing to say, staring at him. After a full minute went by, he rolled to my side of the bed and turned out the light, leaving me standing in the dark.

  “You coming back to bed?” he asked, as if nothing had happened.

  That made me angry. He acted like it should have been over, but I wasn’t ready for it to be over.

  “How do you expect me just to jump right back in the bed with you when you’ve been saving some woman’s drawers for a souvenir!” I blurted.

  “I wasn’t saving them, Dina,” he said calmly as he rolled over and punched his pillow for comfort. “I told you, I didn’t realize they were there. They are outside in the trash now. That’s it. It’s over. It’s done.”

  “How do you think it’s done? I find some wench’s underwear in your drawer, and just because you put them outside, it’s over? All she’s gonna do is give you another pair.”

  “Dina, you’re being ridiculous.”

  “Oh, so if you find some boxers over in my drawers that don’t belong to you, you’re going to be okay with that?” I argued. “That’s not going to be an issue for you?”

  “Babe, what’s really wrong?”

  “What do you mean, what’s wrong?” I fired back. “You don’t see nothing wrong with you having them here in the first place?”

  “Of course I do,” he responded. “But they are gone now, and that’s the most I can do about it. If I had known they were in there earlier, I would have thrown them out. I didn’t know. Now they’re gone. Can we go back to sleep now? Because I have to be up for work in just a couple of hours.”

  I wanted to say something more, but what could be said? He was right. The issue was resolved for the most part. But only if I chose to believe what he’d just told me, as I had no way of knowing how long those panties had been there, since I’d never actually gone through his drawers before. I couldn’t even say what prompted me to go through his drawers this time. Just curiosity, I guess. Now that I seemed to have found and opened Pandora’s box, I didn’t know what to do.

  Chapter 14

  Celeste

  At long last, I was able to start work again. It was only at the grocery store, but something was better than nothing, and I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. It was different from my receptionist job, where I got to sit on my butt all day, manage my personal life between my tasks, answer my cell and text messages if I needed or wanted to, and even catch up on some reading when it was slow. Being a cashier didn’t afford me any of that. I was on my feet for the entire shift, scanning food and collecting money. Even when it was slow, we had to do what was called re-shop, which meant putting back any groceries that customers had left at the register for one reason or another. With all this extra weight on me, by the time I got off from a six- or seven-hour shift, I was dog tired, my feet ached, and I didn’t feel like dealing with any of Equanto’s craziness.

  Every day it was the same old thing. Either we were arguing about money, him keeping a job, and his disappearing acts, or we weren’t speaking at all. It wasn’t a good environment for my kids to be in, and I would often wish I had somewhere else to go. Anywhere. One of the things that kept me holding on, though, was that I didn’t want to be judged by my friends, who’d never thought very much of Equanto in the fir
st place. One thing that no one wanted to hear was, “I told you so.” And every couple had to deal with drama at some point in their marriage, so really, what E and I were going through was probably no different than anyone else’s marriage.

  Luckily, I was able to get a morning shift, so the kids were in school while I worked, and I generally got home forty-five minutes before they did. A lot of times, I’d just sit out in the car instead of going inside the house, because it was the only place between work and home where I could find peace and could have a moment to myself. Some days I’d listen to music, other days I made phone calls, and then some days I sat in total silence, wondering why I’d done this to myself and praying for a way out that wouldn’t embarrass me. It was in those silent sessions that I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing down my face once they started.

  The simple fact of the matter was my husband didn’t love me. He never had. I was mad at myself for accepting him into my life by marrying him, then tying him to me forever by getting pregnant twice. I guess I was looking for love at any cost but never recognized that love existed in our relationship only on my side. Even though I was the mother of his children, it was obvious that he had no love for me, and that broke my heart every day. Equanto was forever putting me down and calling me names, and I tried to act like it didn’t bother me, but in all honesty, it tore at my soul every single time.

  I felt like I worked hard for my family and at taking care of my children. The boys were clean, well fed—even if it meant exposing my entire life story to the people at the food stamp office—healthy, and smart. I cooked practically every day and kept the house tidy. Even with Equanto constantly hurling insults at me and hurting my feelings whenever he felt like it, my legs were always open to him whenever he wanted a little nooky. The few times I did turn him down, he went on a verbal tirade.

  “Whatchu mean, you don’t feel like it? You better be glad somebody wants your fat ass. Who you think gone want you but me? I can’t even hardly look at you. Cut the damn light off ’fore you give me nightmares.”

  His words cut like a knife, and I must have cried that whole night the first time he said that. Mostly because I believed it. Didn’t nobody else want me, else I wouldn’t have ended up with his ass. My phone wasn’t ringing off the hook with relationship choices when I met Equanto. That was why I was on the love chat line in the first place, looking for someone to love me. And maybe someone would have if I didn’t like to eat so much and my butt—and various other parts of me—wasn’t so big.

  I knew that my weight was one thing that I had complete control over. All I had to do was start making some healthy eating choices and, instead of sitting in this car every day for almost an hour, take a walk around the block a few times. It would be a start. I just wasn’t motivated to do it. I tried a couple of times, but as soon as Equanto got to cussin’ and calling me fat and creating drama, I knew where to get a little piece of sunshine, and many times it came with the name Little Debbie, Tastykake, or Edy’s on it since I was now working at the grocery store.

  In my rearview mirror, I could see the boys getting off the school bus and racing each other to the car. They’d come to expect me to be sitting there, waiting. After the first week or two of finding me there, they just started getting inside the car and sitting with me. Even on the days when there wasn’t enough gas in the car to run the air-conditioning and it was just as hot as LL Cool J said he was in his “Rock the Bells” lyrics.

  “Hey, Mom!” they greeted one at a time.

  “Hey, babies. Tell me about your school day,” I requested and got ready to listen to each one of them share every detail of what they had experienced in the last eight hours. I made sure to listen intently, even on the days when a splitting headache made me wish they didn’t have so much to say. I wanted my boys to know that what they had to say and share was important to me.

  This particular day, once they got in the car, instead of sitting there, I cranked it up and pulled out of the lot.

  “Where are we going, Mom?” Linwood asked.

  “I’m taking you boys to get ice cream cones.”

  “Yea!” they cheered.

  It had been a while since I’d been able to treat the boys to much of anything, and today was just as good a day as any, since I’d just gotten paid. I could have used my food stamp card just as easily to buy ice cream at the grocery store, but a change of scenery would do us all some good.

  We’d gotten our cones and taken a seat at a table in the dining room of the restaurant when my youngest boy, Jerrod, hit me with question that felt like a brick slamming against my head.

  “Mommy, does Daddy love you?”

  “Yeah,” I said without hesitation, but it didn’t even sound right coming out of my mouth. “What made you ask that?”

  “Because he always be mean to you, and I thought when you love somebody, you supposed to treat them nice.”

  “Well, you are,” I confirmed.

  “Daddy don’t never be nice to you. I don’t think he love you,” Jerrod declared.

  “Nice like what? What do you think he should be doing?”

  “Like kissing you and hugging you and giving you flowers and, like, some lollipops or something.”

  “Is that what you’re going to do when you get a girlfriend?” I asked, embarrassed that my baby had recognized that my and Equanto’s marriage was dysfunctional, to say the least.

  “Yep! I’m not going to be nothing like Daddy. I’m going to give my girlfriend Now-Laters and fruit snacks,” he announced.

  “You better not be kissing her,” I teased.

  “I’m just gonna kiss her on the cheek, ’cause you supposed to wait ’til you married before you kiss someone on the lips,” Jerrod replied.

  His brothers laughed at him, not that they knew any better.

  “You and Daddy don’t never kiss,” Quincy added.

  “Just because you don’t see us kissing, that doesn’t mean we don’t kiss,” I said.

  “How about holding hands?” Jerrod asked.

  “We really are too busy to hold hands, Jerrod.”

  “I’ma hold my girlfriend’s hand too.”

  “You sure got a lot of girlfriend plans. How old do you plan on being when you get this girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know.” Jerrod shrugged as he licked his cone. “I think about twenty-seven.”

  He made me laugh. “Oh, okay.”

  “Do you love Daddy?” he asked next.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Oh. I’m glad I asked, ’cause I didn’t know. Y’all don’t act like it.”

  Ouch.

  Chapter 15

  Dina

  I don’t care who you are, where you come from, and how good you can work your goody box. If you are a woman who’s ever been in a relationship, you’ve been cheated on. And what I want to know is, why is it that heffas think that just because ten years passed by, you’ve forgotten all about the time they slept with your man, and then they wanna be grinnin’ in your face like the two of you are best friends? I wanted to punch Vanisha Yarborough dead in the jaw when I saw her earlier today. I was stopping by the grocery store to pick up a cup of yogurt on my way to church, and she spotted me from across the parking lot.

  “Dina!” she called.

  I looked up and saw her getting out of her car, but I didn’t have my glasses on to readily identify her, not that that would have made a whole lot of difference. Since I’d done some of everybody’s hair in Laveen, I was thinking she could have been some potential business, which I needed desperately, so I waited the few seconds it took for her to come into focus.

  “Dammit!” I mumbled under my breath once I realized who it was.

  “Girl, how you doing?” She grinned, showing every tooth she had, and a few that she didn’t.

  “Hey, Vanisha.” I gave a half smile, like I’d let bygones be bygones, but just like that, I felt disdain bubbling in my stomach, wanting to turn into spit and be hurled out of my mouth
toward her. The Christian part of me fought against it and won. Even if I wasn’t a Christian, I didn’t think I could ever spit in somebody’s face.

  “You look good!” she commented, circling me with her eyes. I refrained from rolling mine.

  “Thanks.”

  “So what’re you doing now? How’s Cameron?”

  I didn’t care that Cameron and I were no longer together, but I still couldn’t appreciate what the two of them did behind my back, and practically in my face.

  “I have no idea.” I shrugged. “Look, I’m in a bit of a rush. I’m trying to get to church on time,” I said, digging in my purse for nothing in particular, but it made me look busy and in a rush.

  “Oh, okay! Don’t let me hold you, then! Look me up on Facebook so we can catch up!” She backed away from me, then headed toward another store in the strip mall.

  “All right, girl. Take care,” I said for the sake of being cordial. If only I had the boldness and brashness to cuss her out. It didn’t matter that her offenses were a decade old.

  Seeing Vanisha wrecked my morning mood. As soon as you purpose in your heart that you’re going to have a good day, no matter what, here comes the devil with some foolishness to make you regret getting out of bed at all. I made my way through the store and paid for my items, wishing again that I’d had the boldness to cuss Vanisha out. Getting back in my car, I tried to refocus on having a great day, but my mind had a mind of its own and traveled back ten years, to when I was young, dumb, naive, and so in love with Cameron, I didn’t believe he had a fault anywhere in his being. And like a blinded fool, I ignored what was right in front of me.

  Vanisha and I had been friends all through high school, with me envying her style, her smile, and her charismatic personality. I didn’t know how we got to be friends, because she was one of those fast-tailed girls who’d made a name for herself by having sex with various boys after school, and sometimes during school, when she skipped classes. I, on the other hand, wasn’t interested in having sex with anybody, but I found her taboo adventures interesting and exciting.