Authors: D. Bryant Simmons
“Ricky! She company!”
“I look like I care? She in my house. At my table, eating my food. You tell her or I will...”
I was so embarrassed I ain’t know what to do or say. Just sat there holding on to my napkin and staring at the middle of the table. The girls were right there with me. But Helen was new to our table. She didn’t know the rules.
“Well, I think there’s a difference between not being able to keep a man and not taking no stuff. I can be miserable by my damn self. I don’t need a man for that.”
“Yeah...” Ricky took a gulp of his beer and got up from the table. “Pecan, come on upstairs when she gone.”
Helen ain’t even wait until Ricky was all the way upstairs before she turned to me with big eyes and said, “Ooo, girl, I ain’t know that’s what you was dealing with.”
A quick nod and a smile was all I could manage. She kept on talking but I ain’t hear much after that. Was too busy thinking about what was coming next. Ricky’d probably jump in the shower but then he would be expecting me. Expecting me to make him feel better, feel like the man he liked to think he was and was only two ways to do that.
“You want me to go?”
“What? No. No, stay. He just cranky because he got this fight coming up. It’s okay. Girls, finish your supper.”
“I don’t remember him being like that. Was he always like that?”
“Yeah,” Jackie piped up. “I ain’t never getting married. Boys suck.”
“I wanna get married,” Nikki said dreamily.
Should’ve made me happy that she could still be so googly-eyed after all she’d seen but it didn’t. Just wanted to shake her and make her see reason. Make her think more about protecting herself than whatever googly-eyed thoughts were rolling through her head. I had time to set her straight so I piled one plate on top of another and headed into the kitchen. Helen followed behind me, carrying as many glasses as she could.
“Look, I’m sorry if I was rude before. You know me. I get started talking and I can’t really stop until I say the wrong thing.”
“You ain’t say the wrong thing. It ain’t you.”
“No. I should learn to just keep my big mouth shut.”
Sudsy water washed over my fingers and the words were just sitting there on the tip of my tongue. Begging to be said. So I said them. “Ricky hits me sometimes.”
“What?” She leaned against the counter not really paying attention.
I ain’t blame her since it was barely loud as a whisper. “He hits me,” I repeated. Then I waited. Seemed like forever. I washed a few plates, set them up to dry. And waited some more. “Helen?”
“Yeah, I heard you.”
“When you leave…most likely that’s what he’s gonna do. You hear me?” She gulped down whatever she was wanting to say and nodded. I ain’t never seen Helen speechless. Not until then. “Been going on for a while. Usually Clara could talk some sense into him but she gone now.”
“How she do that?”
“Shouting mostly. Sometimes she use a skillet or a shoe or something. Anything to get his attention.”
“Pecan, look at me.” She squeezed both my arms until I thought she was fixing to ground me or something. My fingers dripped dishwater into little puddles all over the floor. “Why you ain’t tell me?”
“I knew what you’d say. That I’m stupid or weak...I ain’t saying you wrong...”
“I wouldn’t ever say that!”
“PECAN!”
We both leaped up outta our skins then held so tight to each other I couldn’t tell where she ended and I began. It was probably a good thing too. To have some of Helen rub off on me. Ricky kept on hollering, though. He hollered so much the girls came in the kitchen to see what I was doing. Helen just held me tighter. Then we heard his feet on the stairs. Tighter we held each other. And heard him coming down the hall. Tighter.
“Pecan, I know you hear me—oh, you still here?”
“Yeah,” Helen finally let me go long enough to melt her hand into mine. “But I ain’t leaving. Me and Pecan gonna have us an old-fashioned sleep over. What you girls think of that? Huh? Wanna have a sleepover?”
I never had a better friend than Helen. The next day she took me to work with her. Told her boss that if he ain’t hire me they would miss out on the best saleswoman Chicago had ever seen. They put me on the schedule for the very next week. Said my paperwork should be processed by then. I was officially a working girl and hopefully one step closer to being one of them man eating dikes.
"M
AMA
,
DON
’
T
LEAVE
.” N
IKKI
pleaded. “If she’s sick...”
“She’s not sick. It’s just a cough. She’ll be fine.”
Nat was wrapped around me like one of them monkeys at the zoo. Coughing her short dry little cough on my neck. Putting her to bed wasn’t too hard since she was barely awake. Nikki stood next to me, watching as I tucked her in.
“She gonna wake up.”
“Not before I get back. She’ll be fine. Okay? Just try to keep it down. Don’t y’all go screaming through the halls or nothing. Your daddy’ll be home in a few hours anyway.”
“Why you gotta go?”
“I gotta work.”
“Why?”
“Because, Nikki. I just do. Now you in charge until I get back. Y’all can go play in the snow once your daddy get home, okay? Just show him how to take her temperature and where the medicine is. Okay? You listening to me? It’s my first day. I need you to help me out.”
“Okay.”
Soon as she said it I had second thoughts. Wasn’t right leaving my baby alone when she was sick but I thought Nikki could handle things. The truth was I trusted her more than I trusted her daddy. But still...she wasn’t nothing but eleven years old. When I was eleven I ain’t have nobody to look out for but my dolls and stuffed animals. It was too much to put on her but she was all I had.
“Here, I wrote down the number to the store. And you know Anise right across the street if you need anything...and your Auntie Paula...I’ll write down her number too. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Everything’s gonna be fine, okay?”
“Okay, Mama.”
On my way out the door I took a little detour across the street. Anise was always at home since her mama wasn’t really able to go anywhere. She answered the door on the first ring.
“Hey, Pecan.”
“Hey, can you go over and sit with my girls? Nat gotta little cold and I just feel better if somebody was with them. Or maybe they could come over here...”
“Mama can’t have sick folk around her. Because of her immune system being so weak. You know she gotta have dialysis like four times a week now. They talking about just admitting her...”
“Oh. I ain’t know.”
“It’s okay.” Anise sighed and threw a quick glance over her shoulder. “Maybe I could go over for a little bit. When mama go down for her nap.”
“Thanks.”
“Um...Pecan?” She eased out the door damn near barefoot in her house slippers. It closed gently behind her and she rubbed her arms like she was trying to start a fire or something. “I ain’t trying to um...start nothing but I heard something I thought—I thought maybe I should tell you because we friends and all and if it was me I’d wanna know...”
“Know what?” My watch said 3:15. I had thirty minutes to get to the store.
“It’s just...you know how some folks like to shoot the messenger?”
“I ain’t about to shoot you.”
“It’s about Ricky.”
Maybe it was her tone. Maybe it was how she looked me straight in the eye. Anise never looked folks in the eye for more than a few seconds—but there she was standing out in the cold and looking me dead in the eye.
“What about Ricky?”
“I…I heard he got a woman up on Chestnut.” I must have gasped something terrible because Anise started panicking and breathing all heavy, like the more air she took in the better off I’d be. “I’m sorry! Maybe it ain’t true!”
Couldn’t say nothing, just shook my head. It was true. I could tell it just by the way the wind was blowing down the street.
“Pecan? Say something.”
“I gotta go to...to um...to work.” In my head I’d made it down the porch steps to the sidewalk but in reality I was still standing in the same spot. Watching Anise look at me with those sad pitiful eyes. She was thinking poor, poor Pecan. “How? Where’d you hear...?”
“Mrs. Patton, she mama’s nurse. She come by every few days now. She asked me about you and how come you don’t never go to none of Ricky’s fights...she say there be this big hip woman always hanging around. You know the kind that look like she asking for it. That she always sit right in the front and that they be leaving together after. She say everybody know. I ain’t know so I figured you ain’t know neither. Guess I was right.”
“I gotta go.”
My first day as a working girl was off to a great start. I got to the store just ten minutes before I was supposed to be there but it was enough for somebody to show me how to sign in and where my locker was. And then I hit the floor. The store manager had put me in the men’s department, saying that men liked buying things from pretty girls. I started to argue with him, say I wasn’t no pretty girl. I was a year away from being thirty and I had four kids. I may have started off as a pretty girl but I wasn’t no more. Pretty girls had they pick of men. I had two that ain’t really want me.
“So, how’d your first day go?” Johnathan Bryer was a tiny sorta guy with big speckled glasses that took over his face. He was mostly bald with peachy kinda skin, one of them white folks that ain’t look real real white. And he ain’t sound how he looked. He had a big voice that kinda reminded me of my daddy. “Mrs. Morrow?”
“I did alright, I guess. Sold two shirts. Took me a while to figure how to ring them up, though.”
One side of his mouth went up in a grin and he stopped tapping numbers into the calculator on his desk. “Mrs. Morrow, don’t you know you’re supposed to lie to the man who signs your checks? When he asks you how things are going you just smile and say everything’s great.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Where’s the smile?” I did my best. It couldn’t of been that bad because he let out this laugh that made the pictures on the wall shake. “Well no one’s going to accuse you of playing fast and loose with the facts. If you don’t like the sales floor we can move you into the office.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow. Would you like security to walk you to your car?”
“Don’t have one. I’m on the bus.”
“That doesn’t sound too safe. This time of night. Why don’t you ask one of the other girls—”
“I’ll be just fine. Thank you, Mr. Bryer.”
Couldn’t nothing else happen to me. If I could make it through a whole week living under Ricky’s roof after trying to leave him a second time, I could make it to the bus stop. On the ride home I sat by the window and watched my life go by. When I was a little girl I used to like chasing butterflies. They’d fly all crazy like, had me running in squiggly circles. Seem like the very next day I was grown with a man and a baby, still running in crazy circles. Couldn’t go back but I thought maybe I could go somewhere. Somewhere where nobody looked at me like poor Pecan. Where I ain’t feel like her neither. Maybe I’d take the girls to go see Clara for a bit. They’d probably like the South. Then I saw it. Chestnut. Just hanging right there over the sidewalk like it was asking me to come for a visit. We rolled on past and I turned to watch it rock forward and back from the chain hanging off the stoplight. Wasn’t like I knew where the woman lived exactly. Or even if Ricky was there. Didn’t matter no way because when I got off the bus I knew something was wrong. Mya and Jackie was waiting for me at the bus stop.
“Nat sick, Mama! She real sick! Nikki say she got a fever of one oh five!”
“Um...” They took both my hands and led me down the block. Given how cold their hands felt they were probably waiting for a while. “How long...when her fever get that high?”
“I don’t know.”
“She awake?” The both shrugged and kept on moving. “What y’all doing out in the middle of the night? How come your daddy ain’t—”
“Daddy not home yet.”
The porch steps creaked underneath us but I ain’t pay them no mind. He hadn’t even seen fit to come home or at least call. Shouldn’t of shocked me but it did. Some part of me still thought that deep down he probably loved the girls. I was a stupid, stupid woman. Nat was balled up on the sofa shivering and sweating buckets.
“I tried to put a blanket on her but she keep kicking it off, Mama. I don’t know...I ain’t know what to do.”
“It’s okay, Nikki. You done good. Okay?
“Mmmhmm.”
Nat was just barely coming around. Her eyes opened enough to call out my name. Wasn’t nobody else to save my kids, just me. They were all looking to me.
“Mama, what we gonna do?”
“Shh! Just let me think.”
“She sick! Look!” Jackie pointed one finger just as Nat leaned over the side of the sofa to get rid of whatever they’d eaten for supper. “Mama, do something!”