Gonna Lay Down My Burdens. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ last time you see me cry,” I replied stiffly, wiping my eyes. I attempted to smooth down my hair with my hand. All I did was make it point in a different direction.

      Desiree sighed and nodded. “Well, you’d better save those tears. You’re going to need them and then some before we get out of this mess.”

      “Did it ever occur to you that I’m just as scared as you?” I sobbed, my chest heaving.

      “I never thought otherwise. But you’d better get a grip.” Desiree shook her finger in my face before placing her hands on her hips. She had changed from the leather skirt she had worn during our brief but deadly encounter with Chester and slid into a pair of jeans. “How do you expect to make it to California in one piece? We can boo-hoo all we want to once we get there.”

      Suddenly, I didn’t feel half as strong as I thought I was. “I’ll be fine.” My voice was so thin and shallow, even I didn’t believe my own words.

      Desiree grunted and shook her head. “We still have a lot of time to kill, and a few margaritas wouldn’t hurt. I left half a bottle of tequila over here after your bridal shower the other night. Did you make more margaritas with it?”

      “Oh, that bottle,” I replied sheepishly. “I finished it off just before you called me to come pick you up.”

      “Oh.” Desiree shrugged and gave me a pitiful look. “Well, you got any weed up in here?”

      I rolled my eyes. Everybody knew that alcohol was as far as I went when it came to getting high. I didn’t even allow my friends to smoke cigarettes in my apartment, let alone weed.

      Desiree nodded. “Sorry.”

      “That liquor store down the street is open until midnight,” I told her. The insides of my nostrils burned when I sniffed, and ached when I took a deep breath.

      Desiree snorted and looked around the room. “I don’t want to go out again…until…until it’s time for us to leave.” She looked around my bedroom again. “You got a lot of nice stuff in here. It’s a shame to run off and leave it all behind,” she said quietly. “Were you really going to let Regina and me divide up some of the good stuff, too?”

      I nodded. “I was.” I lowered my eyes first; then I looked up and scanned the room. I did have a lot of nice stuff, and with the exception of my new brass bed, everything was paid for. Daddy had given me the daybed by the window and the brass lamp in the corner. But I had worked overtime two hours a day, five days a week for three weeks to pay for the DVD on top of the portable TV facing my bed.

      Desiree shook her head, and a sad smile appeared on her swollen face. “I packed everything that means anything to me. Chester can keep—Chester…” Her voice trailed off. She cleared her throat. “His mama can have all that stuff.” She sighed tiredly and glanced at her watch. “I’m going to go take a long, hot shower and then I’m going to stretch myself out on the sofa and try and get some rest. I was up most of last night fucking that horny bastard, and I feel like I’ve been gored by a bull.” She rubbed the insides of her thighs, then her stomach. One of the few things I didn’t like discussing with Desiree was her sex life with Chester. Not because I was a prude, but because I didn’t have a sex life. The gift-wrapped vibrator that Regina had given to me at my bridal shower didn’t count.

      “You want some milk or something? There’s some cold chicken in the refrigerator,” I blurted, praying that Desiree would not torture me with more details of her last romp with Chester.

      Desiree shook her head. She opened her mouth to speak again, but nothing came out. She grunted, then covered her mouth and bolted. I jumped up and sprinted across the floor and out of the room. I followed Desiree to my bathroom, where she threw up all over my floor and my nice, fluffy, shaggy white throw rugs. By the time she leaned over the commode, everything that was going to come up had already formed slimy puddles on the floor.

      “Are you pregnant?” I asked, a new fear forming in my brain.

      “Two months,” she whispered. “It was the one thing Chester prayed for every night. He wanted a child more than anything in the world.”

      “You’re carrying his baby and he still hit you?” I growled.

      Desiree would not look at me, and she was taking too long to answer. More for me to worry about.

      “Desiree, talk to me.” I hovered over her like a hawk. My threatening shadow on the bathroom floor was even more sinister than it appeared on the wall in my bedroom.

      “I wasn’t going to tell him until I got away. If he had known, there is no way in hell he would have let me take this baby and leave him.”

      After I helped Desiree clean up herself and my bathroom floor, she curled up on my sofa. I dragged myself back to my bedroom.

      I stretched back out on my bed, facing the window. The wind whistling through the open window made the crisp, ruffled curtains rise and flutter like the leaves on the pecan tree in the fenced-in yard in back of my building. I was going to miss that tree and those pecans. A streetlight flickered off and on like it was running out of juice. I felt the same way.

      Stiff, lying on my back with my hands folded across my chest, I felt like I was already dead. With what little life I had left in me, I blinked at that weakening streetlight as I tried to make some sense out of my life and all of the events that had led up to this day.

      CHAPTER 6

      June 1982

      Every girl that I knew over the age of eight developed a crush on Chester Sheffield sooner or later. I was no exception. But mine was more than a crush; it was a mission. I felt I had an advantage over the other girls because he lived three houses down on the same street as me in a cul-de-sac and had to pass my house to go anywhere. I monitored his movements like an ambitious spy. Even peeping at him from around trees and from behind parked cars. I was twelve and it was the deepest summer of my life.

      It wasn’t just Chester’s good looks that had captured my attention and triggered my obsession. The way he interacted with females he cared about had a lot to do with it. “You can tell if a man is worth his salt by the way he treats his mama and his sisters,” Mama told my older sister Babette and me on a regular basis. My own daddy treated all of the women in his family like Nubian queens. He showered us with gifts and ran when an argument erupted.

      At least once a week, Chester hauled huge bouquets of roses and neatly gift-wrapped packages to his mama and his baby sister, Kitty. Katherine “Kitty” Sheffield was my best friend at the time. She and I were the only girls Chester allowed in the tree house he and his boys had built in his backyard. Chester never gave me roses. And I didn’t get too upset that time he slid a frog down my blouse when Kitty and I followed him to Lake Mead, where he went fishing with his boys. That slimy frog was a small price to pay to retain my position as Chester’s sister’s best friend. Chester and I were two halves that would eventually come together as one. I knew it right after that time he goosed my butt during a game of hide-and-seek when I was ten and he was fourteen. It didn’t matter to me that he had already done the same thing to three other girls that same day. It meant something when he did it to me.

      Because of my long, sturdy legs and the fact that I could kick a ball as far as most of the boys and hang upside down from trees, kids had a lot of nicknames for me. Slim, Long Tall Sally, and Stretch were just a few. Chester was the only one who called me Crazy Legs.

      Chester’s СКАЧАТЬ