God Still Don't Like Ugly. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ Annette, you don’t know how long I’ve wanted to meet you! All my life I wanted a big sister to look up to.” Lillimae wiped a tear from her eye and sniffed.

      “And I’ve always wanted a sister, too,” I replied dryly. “When I was little, the only reason I wanted a sibling was so I could have somebody to boss around.” I laughed but I wished I hadn’t. It made my throat hurt.

      “Well, I bossed around my baby sister and brother when we was kids. Now I wish I could take all that back.” Lillimae paused and dabbed sweat off my chin with her thumb. She patted my arm and gave me a thoughtful look. “Because ain’t nobody supposed to torment the ones they love. There’s enough others goin’ to do that.”

      I blinked and nodded in agreement. The people that I had loved had been the ones who had hurt me the most. I had come to Florida, hoping to heal my heart. Daddy had helped break it in two.

      I set my suitcase on the freshly waxed linoleum floor and followed Lillimae to one of the couches. When we sat down, the couch squished and squeaked and almost flattened to the floor from the strain of our combined weight. And that had to be at least five hundred pounds.

      “It’s so nice to finally get you down here!” Lillimae grinned, squeezing my hand. I flinched as the rings on her fingers dug into my flesh. “All that prayin’ I done has finally paid off. Praise the Lord.”

      “Is…is Daddy here?” I asked, looking around the room. Daddy’s blood was all over the place. Two of the peach-colored walls in the living room were practically covered with pictures of other young faces that also resembled mine, down to the same flat, sad eyes and bloated cheeks.

      Before Lillimae could respond, my daddy, also wearing a long, drab bathrobe, shuffled into the room, sliding a limp, wet towel across his face. I gasped and covered my mouth with my hand to keep from screaming. The once-handsome man who had fathered me looked like he had just stumbled out of a mummy’s tomb. The healthy head of thick, black hair I remembered had been replaced with a receding halo of thin white cotton. The proud, inky-black eyes I had admired so much as a child now looked gray and tortured. Deep lines crisscrossed his face like a road map. Lips that looked like raw liver couldn’t hide his snaggle-toothed grin. The few teeth he had left would have looked better on a serpent. His broad shoulders had shrunk and now drooped like the shoulders of a man who had yoked a heavy load far longer than he should have. He had never had much of a butt. But now his backside was as flat as a board, making it look like he had a very long back supported by a pair of frail, slightly bowed legs. His belly resembled a huge cummerbund.

      “It took you long enough to get here,” Daddy snapped, weaving toward me, his bathrobe dragging the floor. The booming voice I remembered had been replaced by a weak, scratchy growl. “I sent you your airplane fare five years ago!” His eyes watered as he stared at me like he was seeing me for the first time.

      “I’m sorry, Daddy. I had a lot of things to take care of first,” I explained, rising. “Muh’Dear…she didn’t want me to come back down here.”

      At the mention of my mother, Daddy stopped and turned away, tossing the towel on top of a goosenecked lamp in a corner behind him.

      “I figured that,” he mumbled, shaking his head. His exasperation was obvious, but that didn’t faze me one bit. I was just as exasperated as he was. Maybe even more so. “Ain’t you around forty-somethin’ now, girl?” Daddy asked, facing me with one eyebrow raised.

      “Me? Oh—well, I’m thirty-five. My birthday was last week,” I stammered. My words hung in midair while I groped for more. I pressed my lips together and blinked stupidly.

      Daddy grunted and made a sweeping gesture with a hand so gnarled, it looked like it had never been straight. “Oh yeah, that’s right. You was born durin’ dog days. Well, that’s old enough for you to be doin’ what you want to do. I was beginnin’ to think that I wouldn’t get to see you again ’til the Rapture. Ain’t that right, Lillimae?”

      Lillimae chuckled. “Daddy got a notion in his head that the world’s goin’ to end any day now. He won’t even buy nothin’ on credit no more.”

      I was too nervous and confused to go to my daddy. I wanted to hug him and slap him at the same time. More than thirty years was a long time to be separated from somebody you loved. He had a reason to be angry with me for taking so long to come see him, but I had even more of a reason to be angry with him. He was the one who had run out on my mother and me at a time when we needed him the most. It was time for him to answer for what he had done.

      CHAPTER 3

      I was devastated that long-ago morning when Daddy deserted my mother and me, leaving us in a run-down shack with just ten dollars and some change to our names. A tornado had swept through Miami the night before, destroying most of our few possessions. That had been enough of a trauma. For many years I had blamed that storm for helping destroy my family, but Daddy had put his plan in place even before that.

      His cruel departure was unexpected and thorough. I knew he wasn’t coming back, because he took everything he cared about with him.

      Everything but my mother and me.

      I never got over losing my daddy. He had been the most honorable, gentle, dependable man I knew back then. He’d loved us with a passion and I had adored him. Like a slave, he had worked in the fields from sunup to sundown almost every day to support us and we had depended on him. He’d kept my mother and me happy by spending most of his meager wages on us. He would wear his shoes until the soles flapped, his clothes until they fell off his body, and sometimes he’d go without eating a meal so we could have seconds. But like it was a rug, he had snatched that security from under us and left us struggling around like we didn’t know which way to turn. And we didn’t. It was almost like being blind. I always knew that someday I would track Daddy down and make him sorry.

      My mother had shed so many tears and spent so much time in the bed those first few days, I felt like the parent. I had to help her bathe, comb her hair, and cook. And all that had frightened me. It had been a heavy burden for a three-and-a-half-year-old child.

      I had grieved, too, but behind my mother’s back. I could not count the number of times I’d wallowed on the ground behind an old orange tree in our backyard crying until I’d made myself sick. I didn’t want my mother to know that I was in just as much pain as she was.

      “Don’t worry. We’ll be all right,” I assured her. My mother must have believed me because right after I said that, she stopped crying and leaped out of that bed.

      It didn’t take long for us to spend that last ten dollars and change. After we ate all the food in the house, we ate berries from a nearby bush and oranges from the tree that I’d cried behind. My mother didn’t believe in going to the welfare department for assistance. Other than a distant aunt we rarely saw, there were no other relatives that I knew of for us to turn to. Both of my parents had taught me that it was wrong to steal, but that didn’t stop my mother and me from sneaking into other people’s yards in the middle of the night to steal fruit, vegetables, and anything else edible. One night we got caught snatching a chicken out of a man’s backyard. The man turned a dog loose on us that chased us all the way back home with that doomed chicken in a pillowcase squawking all the way. We got our best meals at church each Sunday and from food we stole out of the kitchens of some of the white people my mother did domestic work for.

      Like an answer to a prayer, one of my mother’s female friends moved to Richland, Ohio, and shortly afterward encouraged us to join her. She even sent us the money to cover our СКАЧАТЬ