God Don't Play. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ the house, and he ate and drank like a hog. When it came to meat, he only ate steak and lamb. And he had to have bread from a Scandinavian bakery way across town. And as much as he liked to drink, Budweiser beer and Wild Turkey weren’t good enough for him. He had to have some kind of Guinness brew or Remy Martin cognac. He was so lazy that when Rhoda wanted to make up his bed, she had to do it with him in it. That Bully. He took hour-long baths and chatted for hours at a time on the telephone, racking up hundreds of dollars worth of calls (that Rhoda and Otis had to pay) to people in Jamaica and London. He even had the nerve to complain when his meals were late.

      “And Lord knows Bully will have made a mess in my kitchen and I’ll be up all night cleanin’ it up.” It was one of the few times that I’d seen Rhoda complain with a smile on her face.

      “Well, the way my head is throbbing, all I want to do is crawl into bed,” I muttered. “I’ll call you from work tomorrow.”

      After Rhoda and her family had left, knowing I had a headache, Pee Wee saw that Charlotte got herself ready for bed. And when he finally came to bed, I pretended to be asleep.

      This was one of the few times that I was grateful for middle age. Especially middle-aged men. In some ways, it had slowed Pee Wee down more than it had me. With so much beer in his belly and him being tired from jumping around in our backyard, he was out like a light in no time, purring like a cat. This was the first time in years that his snoring didn’t bother me. When I finally did get to sleep, I woke up every half hour or so with thoughts whirling around in my head like gnats.

      I left to go to my job at the Mizelle Collection Agency the next day an hour ahead of my normal time. That way I didn’t have to see Pee Wee before he left to go to the barbershop that he owned and managed. He had inherited it from his late father, so it meant a lot to him. He enjoyed his work so much, he often stayed on the premises long after the last customer had come and gone.

      We had an agreement that he would get Charlotte up and off to the child-care center that Rhoda operated out of her house during the summer months. I took care of her the rest of the year. I didn’t complain about having to get my daughter up and out of the house nine months out of the year when Pee Wee only did it for three months. I looked forward to it. But Pee Wee was such a hands-on kind of daddy that I thought it was good for him to do some of the things that most men left to their women to do.

      Other than Mr. Royster, a bowlegged security guard in his late sixties, I was the only one in the office. Over the years it had become my home away from home because it was where I went when I needed some time and space to be alone.

      Right after I graduated from high school I had worked briefly as a switchboard operator. Then I moved to Erie for about ten years. But when I returned to Richland, the phone company gave me my old job back. I remained on that switchboard for several more years.

      Two years ago I landed a receptionist job at Mizelle’s, the biggest collection agency in Richland. Unlike at the phone company, where I’d only been qualified to work as an operator, Mr. Mizelle, the owner, had promoted me to a management position a year ago. They would have given me the moon to stay because I was the third person to fill that position that year. It didn’t take me long to figure out why. Even before Shakespeare created Shylock, the ferocious collector in one of his plays, collection agents had been despised. The company often had to bribe and beg employees to stay. Ironically, we shared the first floor of a small office building with the IRS, the only other group I knew of that was even more despised than collection agents. But I felt like some of the other brave people who stayed: it was a job and somebody had to do it.

      Some of the same angry people who had to visit the IRS for an audit also visited us on the same day to make arrangements to pay off a bill that they’d ignored until we stepped in. More than a few angry deadbeats had stormed out of the office spewing threats. That’s why we had to have a security guard. And an armed one at that.

      Mr. Royster’s age and the fact that he was so bowlegged fooled a lot of people. But this old brother was sharp and fearless, and he knew how to use that gun hanging off his bony hip. Before he came to work for Mizelle’s, he’d worked at one of the downtown banks. One day, a masked man entered that bank, armed with a gun himself. Mr. Royster had saved the day by shooting the would-be robber in both legs, incapacitating him until the police arrived. I felt safe at the office with our bowlegged security guard there to protect me.

      My only hope was that he would never have to use that gun on my behalf.

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