women and a white girl reporting to her! She’d never supervised anyone but her children. Then, when she’d been made a loan officer, and later head of the whole loan department, she’d been as astonished as any of them. Mr. Feeney, the branch manager, had liked her—they got on real well and up to his retirement, she’d been his assistant branch manager. When he’d retired, well, she’d hadn’t been surprised at anything except her reluctance to tell Clinton the good news.
Only one woman, Mr. Feeney’s old secretary, Anne, seemed to resent her. Now she was branch manager, with two dozen people, including Anne and Michelle, reporting to her! She coped with Anne and depended on Michelle. Thank God it hadn’t changed their friendship: Michelle wasn’t the least bit jealous. Michelle liked being a loan officer and didn’t want to put in any hours after three o’clock. Not, of course, that Jada wanted to—she just had to. The bank was paying her about half what they had paid Mr. Feeney, but they still wanted blood. Two months ago they’d sent some management consultants through to see if there was some way they could “reduce overhead through more efficient paperwork flow-through and staff utilization.” What it really meant was finding a way to fire a couple more people, though Jada’s branch had larger deposits and transactions than any other branch of its size in the county.
Of course, everyone had been shaken up. They all needed their paychecks—except for maybe Michelle—as bad as Jada did. Sometimes Jada had to shake her head at the way men managed things. They gave lip service to the idea that human resources (never “people”) would perform better if their morale was high, but then the sons-of-bitches were always doing things that lowered morale.
The report had come back two weeks ago and—thank the Lord—the branch had been given what television movie critics might have called a big thumbs up. But Jada had been left with frightened, resentful employees. To combat that she instituted a weekly meeting to get and implement the staff’s suggestions for improvements. The problem was, there were very few real ways to improve, while everybody wanted to use the meeting to showboat. Well, at least the men did. They all had to repeat old ideas over and over as if they were new and their own. The women had to talk every single damn thing to death.
This evening’s meeting had been so stupid, a waste of time. Why was it that a person alone could make a decision in ten minutes, but an organization of ten people could take two hours to come to no decisions at all?
Jada sighed as she turned the Volvo into the driveway. She could see the unweeded dahlia bed by the streetlight. Her mother, a great gardener, would be ashamed. At the very last minute she saw Kevon’s bike lying on the blacktop near the garage door. She swerved and braked. God-double-damn it! Goddamn, Goddamn, Goddamn! So much for not taking the Lord’s name in vain. Jada stormed out of the car into the cold, jerked the bike up, and leaned it against the side of the garage. She opened the door (Why hadn’t Clinton fixed the automatic door opener? The man was useless as handles on a glove!) and then put the bike away, pulled the car into the garage, got out, closed the garage door, and stamped across the lawn.
It was bedlam inside. Clinton was lying on the great room sofa. He gave her a look that said “I do help around the house,” when all he’d managed to do in the last week was put a towel in the hamper once. Now he was talking on the phone while Shavonne was eating cookies and watching TV. Both were forbidden to her preteen daughter before homework and a chapter of reading. Meanwhile Kevon, Jada realized with a shock, wasn’t anywhere to be found. At least the baby was sleeping, unless Clinton had left her lying in the driveway, too.
“Where’s your brother?” she asked Shavonne.
“I don’t know,” Shavonne murmured, without taking her eyes off the screen. “Are we going to eat soon?”
“You haven’t had dinner yet?” Jada shot a murderous look at Clinton and went to the refrigerator. She took out the milk, grabbed a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, took out the last can of tuna, and decided to add the leftover string beans. There were plenty of’em—why did she bother with green vegetables at all?
In nineteen minutes the table was cleared and set, the television off, Shavonne washed, Kevon was found in his room, and the casserole was being dished out to the four of them. Life took on order and she could see even Clinton was marginally grateful. That sense of order, and the children, were the only reasons he hung around. But his lapses were getting worse and worse. She would have to talk to him.
Jada looked across the table at her husband. He averted his eyes. His skin gleamed and his hair, in a new cut, was in a handsome fade. For a month this new crisis had been hanging over her head. She should talk to him tonight. Confront him. But she was so tired. I’m the real casualty in this family, Jada thought. She knew that, despite her incredible fatigue tonight, she still had to put Shavonne and Kevon to bed, check in on Sherrilee, as well as confront her husband and demand his decision, a decision he didn’t want to make and she didn’t want to hear.
Jada began to spoon what was left of the casserole into a plastic refrigerator bowl. The limp, twice-cooked green beans—certainly a misnomer, because they were no longer anything even close to green—lay there before her. They looked worse than dead—used up and wasted.
Somehow the sight of them made her inexpressibly sad.
In which two people achieve orgasm and boots are made for walking
When Frank Russo walked into the master bedroom a little before eleven that night, Michelle, her hair down, lay across their bed in her satin nightgown, her breasts bursting out of the white foam of lace at the straps, reading. She looked up from the page as Frank caught sight of her. He grinned, then tried to play nonchalant. As if. She smiled to herself, then waited. She knew the scent of her perfume, the one she wore on nights like this and that he still bought her every Christmas, was wafting toward him. She didn’t say a word—she only smiled and glanced at the fabric of his trousers, right below his belt buckle. She wondered, not for the first time, if she’d trained him like one of those Russian dogs that salivated when a bell rang. Would her perfume give him an erection anytime he smelled it?
Frank sat down on the bed beside her, his eyes taking her in. “What you been up to?” he asked, his voice husky and intimate. “Painting the garage?”
For a moment Michelle opened her mouth to protest. Then she closed it again. She wouldn’t laugh. Instead she shook her head slowly, letting her hair cascade over her shoulders, lowering her eyes demurely back to her book. “Uh-uh,” she said, her voice slow. “But I did change the oil in the Lexus,” she drawled.
“Good girl,” he said, and casually began to unbuckle his belt. “While you’re at it, my truck could use a tune-up.” It was only then that she allowed herself to laugh and put the book down. Then she took Frank’s hand and held it to her soft, wide-open mouth. She licked his palm.
Frank couldn’t play cool any longer and groaned, then stripped off his shirt and undershirt, and lastly pulled off his jeans and boxers in a single movement. Michelle tried to keep his hand against her mouth the whole time, promising him everything with her eyes, but once in bed he pulled up the blanket as soon as he could and turned his back to her, curving his body into his sleep position. “God, I’m bushed,” he said, and lay there quietly, ready for sleep.
“Frank!” Michelle wailed, and then he had to laugh and turn to her, his arms open, his flesh hard.
Making love with Frank, after all this time together, was still great. Maybe, Michelle thought, it was because they knew each other so well but could still surprise each other. Their lovemaking ranged from very sweet to wildly athletic humping. From tiny, subtle movements, just the right word, the right tone of voice, to something wild that felt like sex with a stranger. Yet what Michelle loved was that it was always, in the end, safe with Frank.
There was the night he had come home with a Gap box. He wouldn’t let her touch it until the children were asleep. “Later,”