malicious or insensitive. At least, not on purpose. She was sophisticated and mature when it benefited her, but she was still young enough to use her youth as an excuse when she crossed the wrong line.
Rhoda read the note in silence. There was an amused look on her face when she looked up. “I know you aren’t takin’ this seriously.” She laughed in a way that sounded like it was coming from some place other than my living room. Like a hollow cave or some place equally bleak.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I asked, gently pushing Jade slightly to the side.
“Girl, this is about as serious as a chain letter I received last month that said I was goin’ to have nine years of bad luck if I broke the chain,” Rhoda said, hands on her hips. “I threw it in the trash and that’s just where this belongs.”
Rhoda lifted an eyebrow and winked at me as she ripped the note and the envelope into tiny pieces. Then she waltzed across the floor to a wastepaper basket next to my entertainment center, and let the pieces fall in with the rest of the trash. Strutting back across the floor rubbing the palms of her hands along the sides of her jeans, she gave me a triumphant look. “Now. That’s the end of that,” she said, folding her arms. “What did you do with that snake?”
I turned to Jade and dipped my head, as if offering her a cue to speak again. She ran with it.
“Oh, I took care of that myself,” Jade told Rhoda, sounding excited. “I put it back in the same box that it came in, and then I had the maintenance man take it to the Dumpster.” Jade eased up from my lap. “Auntie, why don’t you come to Cleveland with us? After we finish shopping, we can go have a real nice lunch at that deli on Superior that you like so much. You can eat all the fried chicken, liver, greens, ribs, oxtails, corn bread, black-eyed peas, and all the rest of that stuff you like to eat so much—as much as you want. My treat.”
Eating was the last thing on my mind. As a matter of fact, just hearing Jade name all the items on that soul food smorgasbord made me nauseated. I had to hold my breath for a moment to keep from throwing up.
“I don’t think so,” I said firmly, shaking my head and my hand. “I have a lot to do around the house before Pee Wee and Charlotte come home tomorrow,” I stated, wobbling up from the sofa.
“Well, can we bring you something back?” Rhoda asked.
“I’m fine now. You all go on,” I said, nodding toward the door. “Thanks for coming over here and I am sorry it had to be for something so foolish.”
“Are you sure you’re all right now? You want to spend the night with us? We should be back home before dinner,” Rhoda said, her arm around Jade’s shoulder.
“I’m fine. Just call me when you get back home,” I said, easing them out the door.
The note had shaken me up, but after a few hours and a long nap I felt fine. Pee Wee and Charlotte weren’t due home for another day so I still had plenty of time to do the laundry and clean the house.
Around four that afternoon, the telephone rang. Expecting to hear either Rhoda or Jade on the phone, I answered in a cheerful voice.
“Hello, bitch!” It was a woman’s voice.
My heart must have skipped two beats. I got so light-headed, I had to lean against the kitchen wall. The same way I had leaned against it when Pee Wee had talked dirty to me on the telephone a few hours earlier. A low, disguised whisper made it impossible for me to recognize the harsh voice. There was no noise in the background. Just the raspy breathing of a person who obviously needed to get a life, and stay out of mine.
“Who is this?” I asked, my hand trembling. “Are you the same one who sent me that snake, and that nasty note?”
“You’re damn right I am the same person who sent you that blacksnake and the note, and you can expect a lot more from me before I get through with your big, sloppy black ass!”
There was so much contempt in the voice on the other end of the line, it made me flinch. Even so, I tried to sound pleasant. I felt that it would be to my advantage to do as little as possible to provoke my tormentor. “What do you want? What did I do to you?”
“You’ll find out soon enough!”
Before I could say another word, the line went dead. Tears that I couldn’t hold back formed in my eyes, blurring my vision. For a moment the black telephone cord looked like the fake plastic blacksnake that I had received on my birthday. I gasped and threw the telephone to the floor.
I checked all the windows and doors again. I even went down to my basement to make sure all of the windows were closed and locked there, too. I stumbled upstairs to the master bedroom and grabbed the baseball bat that Pee Wee kept on the floor by his side of the bed. My hands were shaking so hard I could barely hold the bat, let alone use it if I had to.
I left all of the lights on in the house, and I rushed out the front door like a bat flying out of hell. The house that I loved so much and had spent so many memorable moments in, not all of them good, was the last place on earth where I wanted to be alone right now.
CHAPTER 7
“Auntie, are you all right?” Jade’s voice woke me up. She tapped on the dusty window on the driver’s side of my two-year-old Mazda.
After Rhoda had received her nice new SUV, I had dropped hints all over the place, hoping my mother, who now had more money than she could spend, would get me one, too. She ended up getting me the sofa instead and then reminded me about all the times when she and I had walked five miles each way to get to and from the Florida shacks we once occupied, and told me how I should be grateful that at least I had a vehicle, period. I still longed for one, but every time I saw Rhoda’s chic SUV I knew that if I really wanted something better I could get it myself. Gifts to myself from myself didn’t have the same effect as gifts I received from somebody else, though. It did a lot for me to know that other people cared about my feelings.
That was why it was no big deal for me to sit in my car in front of Rhoda’s house all that time waiting for her to come home so that I could talk to her again. Besides, I felt safer in my locked car on the street than I had felt in my locked house. I looked at my watch and trembled when I realized I’d been sitting in front of Rhoda’s house for over three hours, asleep for the last two.
“Auntie, what’s the matter? You look like you saw a ghost,” Jade said, squinting her eyes to see me better.
I rolled down the window and unlocked my door, happy to see Jade and Rhoda, even with the horrified looks on their faces.
“What is goin’ on, woman? How long have you been sittin’ out here?” Rhoda asked, opening my door.
I had not bothered to ring the bell on Rhoda’s front door, even though I knew her husband was in the house. His Thunderbird, along with several other vehicles, occupied the driveway.
Rhoda’s handsome Jamaican husband, Otis, was from a well-to-do family. He was my husband’s closest friend, and I’d known Otis almost as long as I’d known Rhoda and Pee Wee. But I’d always been careful of what I said to and around him. I had never gotten over the fact that he’d been the first and only male to come between me and Rhoda back when we were in high school, when I first realized how important Rhoda was to me. I used to be very possessive of her time, but over the years I had learned to compromise. I saw Rhoda when it was convenient for her. Even if it meant I had to sit in my car on the street for hours at a time.
“Uh, I just got here,” I lied. “I was so tired, but I didn’t mean to go to sleep. I just…just closed my eyes for a few minutes.” I yawned, then forced myself to smile. I had slept with my head against the steering wheel. Now my forehead was so numb it felt like I had lost the top part of my head. “I guess I was more exhausted than I thought.”
Rhoda had parked her SUV on the street in front of her house. She and Jade had shopping bags from some of the most expensive stores in Cleveland.
“Why didn’t