The Company We Keep. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ that thing?” Nicole snapped.

      “No way,” Chris snapped back, shaking his head so hard his ears wiggled.

      “Well, tell your daddy to buy you another one,” Nicole suggested, rubbing her chest.

      Nicole had chest pains almost every time she thought about that man. Seeing him in the flesh was enough to make her sick. Chris opened his mouth to speak again, but a loud knock on the living room door made him hold his breath. Nicole braced herself and held her breath, too.

      CHAPTER 3

      “Ask who it is before you open that door,” she ordered, knowing damn well who it was. She slid into the tiny bathroom next to her bedroom and threw on a long, loose terry cloth robe. It was one of several she owned that had seen better days. The belt was missing and the one pocket below the waist had a hole large enough for her foot.

      “It’s Daddy,” Chris announced from the living room, which smelled of fried food coming from the kitchen and floral scents coming from the bathroom.

      Gregory Mason, dressed in dark brown corduroy from head to toe, reluctantly entered the living room with the grim look of a pallbearer on his handsome, dimple-cheeked face. He shook his head in disgust and smoothed back his thinning, wavy black hair. He and Nicole were the same age, but Greg looked at least five years older. That was because he had frowned so much the last few years that the frown lines on his forehead and the sides of his mouth had become permanent. Looking around the room, shaking his head, he rubbed the beaked nose that he had inherited from his Jewish grandfather on his mother’s side. Then he sniffed and coughed as if he’d just stumbled into a room full of cow dung.

      “Hey, Dad,” Chris offered, more interested in his misplaced toy than his father’s presence. Chris was used to seeing his daddy look and act like the giant booger he was. Greg had started exhibiting this rude behavior before he moved out.

      But Chris loved his daddy as much as he loved his mama and wanted to spend time with him whenever he could. Unfortunately, they were not together that often because Greg had his own agenda and it did not include babysitting his own son when there were a lot more important things he could be doing.

      Gregory Mason was an angry black man and had been for years. He blamed the source of his rage on the black woman. She had contributed to his downfall and had been an ongoing thorn in his side for years. An ass-kissing, female Uncle Tom of a black woman had beaten him out of a managerial position at Southwest Airlines where he worked as a personnel rep. His own mama had physically abused him and then dumped him off on his grandmother when he was thirteen for her to finish raising. And that old hag had beat the shit out of him more than his mother. When his mother came to visit, she and her mother took turns beating his ass for one thing or another—masturbating, torturing animals, and trying to look under girls’ dresses. As far as he was concerned, his only crime was just being a boy and doing what all his male friends did. All three of his sisters were bitches on wheels, and the one six-year-old daughter he had, whom Nicole didn’t know about, was already walking around with an attitude, rotating her little neck and rolling her eyes. Black women were more trouble than they were worth. No wonder they couldn’t keep their men out of the white woman’s bed. But he wasn’t into white women, thank God. They’d gotten so big for their britches lately that, as far as he was concerned, Asian women were the only ones worth a man’s time anymore. Shit.

      Nicole let out a heavy sigh from the bathroom, leaning toward the slightly ajar door so she could hear and see what was going on in the living room.

      “Hey, chief! How’re you doing?” Greg yelled, coughing some more. He rolled his eyes at Nicole as she exited the bathroom and strutted into the living room, straightening magazines on the coffee table and rearranging chairs as she moved. “Don’t you ever cook anything but cabbage, greens, and neck bones? This place smells like an outhouse, as usual,” he said with a sneer.

      “Hello, Greg,” Nicole said, sounding as cordial as her temper would allow. She wanted to stomp his smug face into the ground for the way he had disrespected her residence and the way he was looking at her. From the look of contempt on his face and the way he treated her these days, you would have thought that it had been she, not he, who had ruined their marriage by sleeping with every Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Filipino woman in the area. He was now married to a Korean woman, and they had a two-year-old daughter who Greg treated like gold. “From the looks of things, seems like it’s time for you to replace your toupee,” Nicole remarked, talking out the side of her mouth. She knew damn well that all the hair on Greg’s head was his. But he should have known better than to insult her because she was the one person who knew what button to push to piss him off. She knew that his hair was and had always been a sensitive issue with him. Just like hers was with her, thanks to him. He knew from his premature receding hairline, and the bald spots on the back of his head, that he’d be completely bald by the time he turned forty, just like his father and all the men on his father’s side. He ignored her comment.

      Greg smoothed back his hair with his hand again. He blinked hard and chewed on his bottom lip to keep from saying something else to Nicole that would set her off. He had come to believe that black women were like land mines, just waiting to explode and destroy or disfigure their men. Was it any wonder that there were so many black men walking around with no balls?

      “You ready to go, chief?” Greg asked his son, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and sliding his hands in and out of his pockets. He wanted to leave. There was no doubt in Nicole’s mind that this was the last place he wanted to be. And it was the last place she wanted him to be, too.

      “Almost, Daddy. I have to find my Transformer first,” Chris replied.

      Nicole was glad she still had a slight buzz. Had she not been so mellow, there was no telling what else she might have said, or done, to Greg. To keep from saying or doing something crazy anyway, she went to the bedroom to look for Chris’s toy. “You’re two hours late,” she told Greg, talking with her back to him.

      “Kim Loo had a few errands for me,” he responded, entering the bedroom like it was still his. He didn’t even try to hide his exasperation. Neither did Nicole.

      “As usual,” Nicole replied. “The new wifey needs you to play houseboy, so your son comes last.”

      “I am surprised you can find anything in this mess,” Greg remarked, looking around with disgust at the messy room. With the tips of two fingers, he lifted a week-old newspaper from the nightstand next to an empty pizza box. He shook his head and mumbled profanities.

      “And while we are on the subject of being late, you are two months late with the support payments,” Nicole reminded him, with her arms folded.

      “I found it!” Chris yelled from the living room, grabbing his bulging Spider-Man backpack from the coat hook by the door.

      “Good. Let’s get up out of here!” Greg hollered, purposely ignoring Nicole’s last comment. He shook his head some more, waved his hands in the air, and spun around so fast he almost fell trying to get back to the living room in a hurry. He wasted no time opening the front door. But before he could usher his son out, Chris held his arms out to his mother for a good-bye hug.

      “Have fun, little man. I’ll see you tomorrow night,” Nicole told Chris, covering his cheek with hungry little kisses.

      “Come on, Mom,” Chris whined, embarrassed. “I don’t want to keep Daddy waiting.”

      “I don’t want him to wait either, son,” Nicole said with a smirk. “And I hope he doesn’t keep СКАЧАТЬ