he’d told me that Mr. Bob was good for. For every date Clyde arranged for me, I agreed to give him a third of everything I earned.
“How’d it go?” he asked, giving me a mysterious look, a toothpick dangling from his lip, a baseball cap turned sideways on his head. He looked nothing like he did when I’d first met him. His GQ look was gone. He had on a denim jacket and denim pants, and a T-shirt. I could smell marijuana smoke on his breath, despite the huge wad of gum on which he was chewing.
“Just like you said it would. I didn’t have to do much of anything after he got drunk.” I looked toward my house, annoyed to see my ten-year-old daughter, Juliet, and my babysitter peeping out the window.
“See there. I told you. On a dull night, all he’ll ever want to do is lick your pussy.”
“Well, tonight was a dull night,” I said, sighing.
“Why that old dog.” Clyde laughed, making a slurping noise with his tongue. “That old peckerwood ain’t got no shame.”
It embarrassed me to think about what Mr. Bob had done to me. For five minutes I’d sat splayed on a plush red sofa, watching his head bob up and down between my legs. “Yeah, that was all he did,” I mumbled, my face burning. My husband, Joe, was the only other man who had ever touched me in such an intimate way on such an intimate part of my body. I couldn’t help thinking about him while I was with Mr. Bob. As hard as it was for me to believe, I missed Joe. If he had returned to me that night, I would have accepted him with open arms. And open legs, too, for that matter.
Clyde leaned back and narrowed his eyes. “Now where’s the rest of my money?” he asked, cracking his gum.
“I thought we agreed on you getting a third?” I wailed, my eyes still on my house.
“We did. What you gave me ain’t no third of what Mr. Bob gave you,” Clyde grumbled, his lips snapping brutally over each word.
I turned to face Clyde. The angry look on his face made me nervous. “How do you know what Mr. Bob gave me?”
Clyde removed his cap and scratched the side of his face and shook his head. I didn’t have to ask to know that he’d spoken to Mr. Bob after I’d left Mr. Bob’s house.
“If you think for one minute you goin’ to play me, you better get out of this business right now. You came to me, girl, I didn’t come to you.”
I handed Clyde another hundred dollar bill.
My date tonight was with a grumpy old man in Pacific Heights. According to Clyde, this old goat had more old money than he’d ever be able to spend in his lifetime. He sent for a woman a few times a month just so he wouldn’t forget what fucking felt like. He called himself Prince Harry. He had a wife who was just as old as he was, and the last thing she wanted to do was fuck.
“Dude’s wife goes to bed at the same time every night. And once her head hits her pillow, she could sleep through the eye of a hurricane,” Clyde told me. “But that don’t mean you can go out there and act like you ain’t got no class. Be a lady.”
Unlike Mr. Bob, and the impotent man from Philly, old Prince Harry had as much stamina as a teenager. His body resembled a prune, and his breath smelled like a hog trough. He was so disgusting that I was having second thoughts already about going on any more dates. But another date with Mr. Bob the same night made me change my mind. And if that wasn’t enough to seal my fate, Clyde let me keep the five hundred dollars that Prince Harry had paid me.
“I seen that sucker naked at the gym, so I know what a trauma it was to do him. You deserve to keep every penny…this time,” Clyde told me with a mysterious gleam in his eyes. “Now give me some sugar.” Clyde hauled off and kissed me so hard I trembled. I knew then that Clyde Brooks was a man who knew how to work a woman’s mind.
Like with that first date, and with any others I planned to go on, I wanted everything to be over with as soon as possible. I wanted my life to be back to normal, the way it was before Joe left. If I had known that night that my life would never be the same again, I probably would have cut myself off from Clyde right then and there.
But I didn’t.
Chapter 5
LULA HAWKINS
As mad as I was with Larry, I still had feelings for him. One of my problems was that I loved too hard and I suffered because of that. Because everybody I loved eventually deserted me.
Mama was the first.
I don’t remember much about Mama’s family. I hadn’t seen them since I was six. My grandfather was a huge, red-faced, wild-haired, fire-breathing preacher of whom everybody was afraid. When he preached his sermons, the older sisters danced out of their shoes and fainted. The church even shook. Other kids were afraid of him, but I just laughed and hid when he yelled at me for misbehaving. Because as fierce as he was, he was also a gentle and loving man. I would end up being sorry that I had not appreciated him when I had a chance.
My grandmother was a petite, attractive, but overbearing woman who was always telling Mama how she was going to go to the devil and take me with her if she didn’t “get right.” There were other relatives on my mother’s side, just as judgmental and sanctified as my grandparents, but they all stopped coming around because Mama embarrassed her family by fooling around with married men.
Mama was only sixteen when she had me, but she had been fooling around with my daddy since she was fifteen, and that’s something her folks reminded me of every day. We lived with her parents and half a dozen other relatives in an old house in Barberton, Mississippi. Barberton was a sleepy little farm town known for its cotton fields, fishing creeks, churches, juke joints, and peanut patches. People had to drive all the way to Biloxi, fifty miles away, when they wanted to experience the “big city” life.
My grandparents’ house on Pipe Street looked like a wide, sad face at the front from the outside. The windows had shades that were always half drawn, looking like half-closed eyes, and the front door looked like a grim mouth. There was a big peach tree with a crooked trunk in the front yard shading two lawn chairs. That’s where Mama and I could be found most of the time, sipping from glasses of lemonade (half of hers was vodka) as we basked in the sun.
I could play with the other kids in the neighborhood, but I didn’t do that much because I got tired of defending my mama’s name. Which was Maxine and not “that slut” or “that tramp” like the other kids called her. The thing about all that was my mother was not the only “shameless hussy” (another name the people called her behind her back) in our neighborhood. But most of the other loose women tried to hide what they did. My mother didn’t.
For Mama, life was all about having a good time, and she did that in three shifts. She would leave me alone with my grandparents for days at a time. Then she’d stagger into the house looking like she’d been mauled by a grizzly bear.
“Lula Mae, don’t you be lookin’ at me like you crazy, girl. I’m young. I’m goin’ to enjoy myself while I can. Help Mama to bed, baby.”
When Mama was home, she spent most of her time in the bedroom she shared with me, lounging up under one of Grandma’s goose-down quilts or getting dressed to go back out again. I got used to her shenanigans fast. Some nights I’d even help her put on her makeup then I’d lie awake most of the night waiting for her to come home.
When my mother’s behavior got to be too much for her family and their constant put-downs got to be too much for her, Mama found us an apartment across town on St. James Street next door to a convenience store.
“Now we can worry about your whorin’ behind day and night,” my grandmother said, crying hard as Mama ran around our bedroom, snatching our clothes out of drawers. As much as Mama and I irritated my grandparents, they didn’t want us to leave.
“Y’all ain’t got to worry about me and Lula Mae. I’ll be takin’ care of myself and my child by myself from now,” my mother shot back, adjusting one of the many headbands she wore to