the girls rapidly nod their heads.
Luscious’s response forces the loose smile on Campbell’s face to fall away. The girls twist their mouths and give each other the I-told-you-she-was-mean look.
“Maybe?” Campbell questions, and her bottom lip drops in disappointment.
The corners of Luscious’s mouth tremble, and a light not often seen dances in her eyes, and Campbell knows she’s kidding and happily exclaims, “Yeah, you will!” and all of them break down with laughter.
More furniture sails past them, and then the black Hefty bags heavy with clothes and shoes.
“No, we don’t need any help, Campbell,” Millie says sarcastically as she makes her hundredth trip past them. “Yours neither, Rita,” she slings at Luscious.
“Good thing for you!” Luscious yells back at Millie. “Your mama always gotta be starting with someone,” she says to Campbell, and rolls her eyes.
“Here, Campbell, go on over to the store and get me a bag of potato chips, a Pepsi cola, and some Now and Laters,” she says, and stuffs a dollar into her hand.
The girls give Luscious a quick look and then drop their eyes to their sneakers.
Luscious considers them for a moment and pulls another dollar from her bosom. “Get your little friends something too.”
* * *
They move into a brownstone on Bainbridge Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The house is old and leans to one side, but Millie don’t seem to mind that or the fact that all three fireplaces are sealed.
“They don’t even work no more,” Fred says. But Millie doesn’t care; she likes them, working or not. She’s content with just looking at them and admiring the intricately carved wooden mantels. Those mantels will help to occupy her thoughts, and she can forget that Fred cheats and hardly ever reaches for her anymore at night.
She will keep those mantels dust free and glowing and won’t even complain when Fred measures the floors for wall-to-wall carpeting. “It’ll save on the heating bill,” he says.
Campbell waves bye-bye to the beautiful design in the wood floors and looks up at the twelve-foot-high ceilings and wonders about what’s living in the cobwebs that occupy all the corners above her head and if her new room is far enough away to block out the sound of her mother’s weeping.
* * *
When they purchased the house, they inherited the tenant, Clyde Walker, a squat man with red-brown skin and bulging eyes.
Fred advised him that he would have to go up on his rent by fifteen dollars.
“Well, I ain’t about to pay no more than I been paying. Been paying too much already. Floors squeak, pipes leak, had pneumonia every winter I been here. Drafty, oil burner work when it want to. Cold water freezing, hot water cold. I ain’t paying no more than I been paying.”
“So I guess you’ll be leaving, then,” Fred said real quiet-like before reaching into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulling out his pack of Winstons.
“Guess so,” Clyde Walker said just as quietly, and closed his door.
A week later he was gone.
Campbell was more than happy for that. She had encountered him a few times sitting out on the front stoop, his back resting against the step, his hands working at something deep inside the pockets of his pants, his mouth toiling away at the red-and-white-striped peppermints he constantly sucked on.
“Hello, pretty girl,” he would say, but his words were oil slick, and something about the sound of his voice and the way he looked at her made Campbell’s skin crawl.
Yes, she was more than happy to see him lumbering down the sidewalk, suitcase in one hand, overcoat in the other, goodbye and so long sailing over his shoulder.
Good riddance!
Two weeks after that, Clarence Simon rang the bell and inquired about the sign Millie had placed in the front window: Apartment for Rent.
Millie showed it to him, moving through the small space, pointing out things like the women that showed the prizes on The Price Is Right: “And here we have . . .” “The bathroom is over to the left . . .” “The rug was just shampooed and the windows cleaned . . .” She spoke softly as she glided through the house with her practiced smile. “Already furnished, but still plenty of room for anything you might have,” she said as she admired Clarence’s long lean body and dark, neat suit.
“Two hundred a month, including light and gas,” she said, and her eyes dropped to his well-manicured nails and the black snakeskin briefcase with the gold embossed letters that gleamed right below the handle.
“This is fine,” Clarence replied as he counted out one month’s rent and one month’s security.
He moved in the following Saturday, him and his friend.
Clarence Simon and Awed Johnson. Roommates.
Fred peeked through the curtains again. “He tell you he was going to share the place with someone?”
Millie wrung her hands nervously and paced at her husband’s heels. “No, but I—”
“Did you even ask?”
“No, I didn’t think to—”
“Shit, Millie, can’t you even handle business right?”
Fred never took his eyes off Clarence and Awed. He stayed at that window until every last box, suitcase, and lamp was off the sidewalk and in his house.
“Two men. I don’t know,” Fred said when he finally turned around to look at his wife.
Clarence’s friend—his roommate, Awed—was barely five feet tall, with midnight skin and a broad chest. Dagger tattoos dripping blood graced his left and right biceps. A shag of hair hung at his chin, and he would plait it into four braids, clasping the ends with multicolored rubber bands.
Campbell thought he was handsome, in a jailhouse sort of way, even with the fishhook scar that started at the top of his right ear and ended in a curve just above his cheekbone.
“You make sure you stay away from him. Both of them,” Fred warned her before throwing Millie a nasty look. “They mess up one time, and they’re on the street,” he said.
Awed claimed to work construction, but he seemed to be home more often than he was at work. From what Campbell could tell, he spent most of his days chain-smoking, drinking beer, and blasting his Rick James albums.
You could hear everything through the heating vents. Everything.
Clarence, on the other hand, toiled away as a paralegal for a number of prestigious downtown law firms.
“Well, you know, at Lieberman, Hertz, and Fitz, we don’t have to . . .” “At Lieberman, Katz, and Jacobson, we always . . .” “I may have to look for another job because Lieb, Howard, and Cole . . .”
Clarence changed jobs regularly. Six times in the first three months they’d known him.
“Mrs. Loring. Mrs. L.—hellloooooo!” he’d sung through the door one day. “I picked you up a little something. Just a little gift, you know, to celebrate . . . celebrate the house and, well . . . you’ve been such great landlords. A little housewarming-slash-appreciation gift, I guess.” Clarence had a tendency to babble. He shoved a small red-and-white-striped box at Millie.
“Oh,” she exclaimed as she looked down at the words Junior’s Most Fabulous Cheesecake. “Oh,” she said again, and then smiled with delight. “You really shouldn’t have gone to so much—”
“Oh, it was no trouble at all. It’s a strawberry cheesecake, my favorite. My, do you like cheesecake? Strawberries? Stupid, stupid me, I really should have checked with you first, shouldn’t I? I mean,