Red Light Wives. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ straight on my bed and crossed my legs. I kicked off my stilettos and was massaging my feet when Rockelle wobbled back into my bedroom. There was a bucket of cold Kentucky Fried Chicken in her hand.

      “Oh. That girl,” I mumbled, giving Rockelle a look of pity as she chomped on a chicken wing. Ester had told me the night before how she’d witnessed the brother walking into that store and getting shot, and I’d felt bad about it. Death had already claimed most of my family, so it was one subject that was always on my mind. “Where is she now?” I asked, waving Rockelle to the wing chair facing my bed. She ignored me and left the room again hugging that chicken container against her chest like it was a baby.

      “She’s right here with me. Believe me, you gonna like this girl. Uh, everybody gonna like her…”

      “I’ll be there in a little while,” I said, sighing.

      My apartment was the only place I felt comfortable in anymore. There was nothing in it to indicate what my life had become. I had tried to decorate my bedroom so that it would look as much like my old room back in Georgia. So many years ago. Plain, cheap items from stores like Wal-Mart and Target were everywhere. Thin, stiff plastic drapes covered my bedroom windows. Large, gaudy plants, not as green as they were when they were new, leaned out of crooked planters. My bed was a mattress on the floor with a vomit-colored bedspread and pillows so flat I had to use two at a time. Pictures of Mama and all four of my dead siblings, and my dead daddy, sat on my bedroom dresser in frames that I’d picked up at a yard sale.

      I didn’t want to be like Rockelle. She went out of her way to hide what she really was: a Black American Princess wannabe. Everything for her and her kids had to come from the most expensive stores in town, and she tried her best to buy herself some class and intelligence. But she was too stupid to realize just how stupid she really was. Her bear-claw nails, a hair weave that looked like she’d been flying, blue contact lenses, makeup that looked like she’d slapped it on with a spatula, and a bookcase filled with cheap paperbacks in her house said it all.

      Rockelle had returned to my bedroom balancing some barbecued ribs on a paper plate in one hand and a paperback copy of Jaws II in the other. Girlfriend wasn’t as highbrow as she wanted folks to believe she was, so I never expected to see her reading Roots or The Grapes of Wrath. But, Jaws II? Hello? California had some strange birds and most of them didn’t have any feathers.

      I knew that Rockelle thought I was an odd egg, too, just because I didn’t have a lot of fancy shit in my apartment like she did. She wouldn’t even sit on any of my chairs without covering the seats with some newspaper first. And I didn’t appreciate the fact that she wouldn’t even sit on my toilet seat. She would hover to do her business at my place. And as big as she was, that was a sight to behold. I didn’t care enough about her attitude to put her in her place. She was the one with the problem, not me. But I knew that I could always count on her when I needed her, and that was enough of a reason for her to be my girl.

      I could afford to decorate my place like it belonged to a princess, a real one, if I wanted to. Even though I hated having sex with a bunch of strange men, it was hard to turn my back on three hundred dollars to suck dick for a few minutes, or to do whatever else I had to do to get paid. As an escort, I made more money in a week than I used to make in a month at that cashier’s job I had in Detroit. I’d moved there after leaving Georgia. I got homesick all the time for both places, but I preferred to keep those thoughts to myself. I needed to focus my attention on my present situation.

      I didn’t rush to go pick up Ester. That hussy was a spoiled-ass bitch and expected too much from everybody. But she was the “baby” of my new “family” so to speak. She expected everybody to cater to her, and everybody usually did.

      In some ways, I used to be just like her. But that was a long time ago and a long way from the mean streets of San Francisco.

      Chapter 9

      LULA HAWKINS

      I couldn’t figure out why I was feeling so light-headed and paranoid. The women I’d just met had all been very nice to me, so far. Ester’s friends Rockelle and Rosalee seemed just as nice as Ester. Besides, I’d already lost my husband and almost been raped. What more could happen to me?

      We left that damn motel with the suitcases containing everything I owned in the world, including Bo’s clothes and the beloved saxophone he’d never play again, in the trunk of Rockelle’s Honda. During the tense ride to Rosalee’s apartment, the women listened as I poured out my whole story. And I left out nothing. They groaned when I told them about me coming home from school to a dead mama. They cussed when I told them how Larry had played me and agreed that he was a “hound from hell.” They didn’t say anything, but they shook their heads and moaned when I told them about my son dying and me hooking up with Bo then losing him, too, so fast and in such an awful way.

      “It seems like a black cloud’s been followin’ me around all my life,” I complained. I glanced out the backseat window, wondering how I could be feeling so miserable in a place as beautiful as San Francisco. We drove through the downtown area. The huge office buildings scraping the sky looked like big toys. But San Francisco was no toy box, and I was not Alice in Wonderland. However, I did believe that things had to get better for me. I was praying that my new “friends” would help make that happen. I just couldn’t bring myself to return to Mississippi. “Things have got to be better for me out here.”

      “Honey child, you got to make things get better,” Rosalee said, turning around to look at me from the front passenger seat. “If you can’t do that in this city, you can’t do it nowhere. That thing that happened to your husband, that could have happened to anybody anywhere. This is a nice city as long as you watch your step.”

      “I sure hope so,” I muttered. “I sure hope so.”

      The first thing I noticed when we entered Rosalee’s living room on the third floor of the cold brick building she lived in, was how cheap everything looked. In the center of a hardwood floor was a faded plaid couch with a brick holding up one leg. There was a matching love seat facing the couch that was just as faded. A coffee table lined with cigarette burns and cluttered with old issues of Cosmopolitan magazine had two end tables that didn’t match. A small television set was on top of a wooden orange crate. There was a hole big enough for a horse’s head to fit through in the wall next to the door. It was hard to believe that a woman like Rosalee, who claimed she made hundreds of dollars per date, lived in such a shabby place.

      “Sister, you been in the storm too long,” Rosalee told me. “You need somebody to fall back on…”

      There was something conspiratorial about the way the women looked at one another and nodded in agreement.

      “Well, I tried that and look how I ended up. I thought Larry Holmes was my soul mate. I don’t want to go back home because if I see his face again too soon, I won’t be responsible. A job and my own place is what I need now,” I said, sharing the couch with Ester and Rockelle.

      “How much money you got?” Rosalee asked, handing me a bottle of ice-cold beer. She stood in front of me with her arms folded. She was tall and thin, but she had curves in all the right places. Her body looked better than all the other women’s in the room, including mine. And, she was the prettiest. Her big brown eyes and full lips took the attention away from her long, narrow face.

      I clutched my purse. “Uh, maybe enough to last me about a month. A little over a thousand. I sold my car before I left home and Bo had a little money,” I told her. I drank the beer, wishing it was something stronger.

      Ester groaned. Rockelle and Rosalee looked at each СКАЧАТЬ