CHAPTER THREE
FOUR YEARS LATER
Johnny Parks smiled at the skinny white waitress who gave him that look he knew so well.
Those white girls loved his black ass. But he wasn’t about to cross that line.
All those sisters out here with their slamming bodies and their gorgeous faces was what he was after.
And since they were after him with equal vigor, he wasn’t interested in substitutes.
But over the course of their relationship, Maude’s trifling ass sometimes made him want to reconsider his decision.
Sometimes he thought seriously about giving those other girls a chance.
He looked at his watch when he saw her hurrying into the restaurant.
She was late. Again. By nearly half an hour this time.
And as usual she looked rushed and harassed and not at all like the polished sister he liked his women to be.
The only reason he fooled with her for those past ten months was because she had what those other ladies never bothered to have.
But Maude had morals, and values, and ethics.
She had unimpeachable character. She was somebody he knew he could trust with his life. With his money. With his secrets.
But now, as he watched her hurry to his booth with that big-ass shoulder bag she seemed to keep the world inside of, even those grandiose attributes had worn thin on him. And he didn’t regret what he’d done.
He knew her tardiness was going to be all about that job of hers.
She was relentless in her pursuit to be the best reporter in Georgia.
She was nowhere near it in all the ten months he’d known her, but she was always hustling.
She was always certain her next story would be the biggest one of her career.
She was a pain in the rear when it came to that job if you asked Johnny. But that was Maude.
She was a creature of habit too. That was why he’d already ordered her drink: a gin and tonic. That was why he knew the line she was going to lay on him when she made it to his booth.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said at the very same time he said it.
Maudetta “Maude” Drayton looked at her boyfriend when those same words she was saying spewed out of his mouth too.
But because she knew Johnny, she didn’t smile like it was a cute joke.
She knew it wasn’t coming from a humorous place.
It was coming from an annoyed place. He was pissed with her. Again.
“What was it this time?” he asked as she hugged his neck and kissed him on the cheek. Then she plopped down across from him. “Was it the traffic? The job? Or here’s a novel idea: Maybe it’s you. Maybe all your problems are of your own making.”
She continued to stare at him as she removed her shoulder bag and sat it on the booth seat beside her. “Okay, what’s wrong with you?”
“Me? Why would something be wrong with me? Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“Oh it has to be,” Maude said as if it went without saying. “Because what you are not going to do is sit up here and bash me as if something’s wrong with me.”
“Wasn’t trying to bash you. But you are late. That’s a natural fact. My time is valuable too.”
“If I owned my own business and could set my own clock, then I would never be late either, Johnny. But when I’m interviewing a source, there’s no way I can just leave. It took longer than I thought it would take. It happens.”
“Did you get any great information from this source of yours?”
Johnny looked as disappointment washed over her pretty face. That was always the rub with Maude. She was a journalist, alright, but in his view she wasn’t a very good one. “I wouldn’t call it great information, no,” she said.
He looked as if he knew that would be her response. “Do you ever get any great information?” he asked her.
Maude stared at him again. They had been together for almost a year.
Ten months. They had ups. They had downs.
Lately it had been more than their share of downs.
But today something was particularly off.
She could tell it by the snippy way he was talking to her.
It wasn’t giving love at all. It was giving something closer to hate.
Not that he was never dismissive about her job. He was always dismissive about her job! But this time was different. His tone had an edge to it. A hateful edge. “What’s wrong?” she asked him again.
“I just think you’re wasting your time giving your all for that rag of a newspaper. They don’t even want you there. Probably gonna fire you soon.”
Maude frowned. “Fire me? That’s ridiculous!”
“Then why do they keep cutting your pay, Maude? Tell me that. Those white boys ain’t getting no pay cut. Probably those white girls ain’t either. Why you always got to get one?”
Maude didn’t have an answer for that, either, so she didn’t respond.
“And I know you’re struggling,” Johnny continued. “You can pretend you aren’t, but I know you are. Even though you won’t accept a dime from me.”
Maude frowned again. “Boy bye! I’m a grown-ass woman. What I look like accepting money from you? I can take care of myself, thank you very much. I don’t need your money.”
“I glanced at your phone when I was over to your crib the other night. Your car note is past due. Your rent is past due.”
“And I’ll catch up both when I get paid next Friday.”
“That’s not how you handle business, Maude, geez.” Then he looked at her disgustedly. “You’re a mess. You’re just a mess!”
He didn’t know it because Maude never showed it, but whenever people used that dismissive term to describe her, and many people did, it always hurt her to her core. Those were among her aunt’s favorite words for her too: A mess.
It started after the accident when her aunt, her father’s sister, came to pick her up after her monthlong stay in the hospital.
She carted her off to Dillon, Georgia where they were coming from when the accident occurred.
That was twenty-three years ago. Maude was just six years old.
But her aunt, who seemed to be in grief over for years, blamed Maude the entire time she lived with her.
According to her aunt, she was the reason she no longer had a brother, or sister-in-law, or niece. As if they weren’t Maude’s family too.
Her aunt had just gotten married when that accident occurred.
Maude and her parents and her sister, in fact, were going back home from the wedding.
But her brand-new husband didn’t want children right away.
Yet there they were saddled with a suddenly orphaned six year old.
And they didn’t know what to do with her any more than she knew what to do with them.
Just that they knew she was a mess. They never ceased to remind her of that fact.
And then one day, ten years later, they left Georgia for greener pastures up north.
Maude was sixteen at the time. But according to them she thought she was grown and strong, so they let her be grown and strong and left her ass right where it was.
Her aunt, who was so in love with her domineering husband that she’d walk off the face of the earth for that man, took that baby she had with him and left Maude behind to fend for herself. And they never looked back.
Although Maude was used to trauma by then, she was nevertheless surprised by her aunt’s abandonment. But nobody would have ever known it. Because she got on with her life.
She was working at Burger King at the time of the abandonment, but she put her age as eighteen on an application for an apartment, got the apartment, graduated high school, and then got a job with the Dillon Post-Dispatch newspaper company.
Where she still worked to this day. She never looked back either.
“Since you claim to know all about me,” she said to Johnny to avoid getting into it with him about her own life, “let’s talk about you. What’s going on with you?”
He looked at her as if she was as out to lunch as he took her to be. “I know you didn’t just ask me that.” Then he leaned forward. “How can you work in the news field and never bother to watch the news? Or even read it?”
Sometimes this man talked in riddles to her. “Johnny, what are you talking about? You know I’ve been heavily absorbed in this story I’m working on. This story could change my life. If I get it just right, it could even get picked up by major newspapers across the country.”
“That’s what you say about every story you work on.”
“But this one is different.”
“You say that too.”
Now she was irritated. “Just tell me what’s going on, dang, Johnny. You don’t have to be so damn nasty. What is it?”
“The society column announced it before I had a chance to tell you.”
“The society column?” That didn’t ease Maude’s puzzlement. “Why would I be reading the society column? What would some gossip column have to do with us?”
“I’m a business owner here in town, Maude. I’m considered one of the town’s elites.”
“And?”
“And they made the announcement before I had a chance to talk to you. But I see you never bother yourself with what pertains to me.”
Maude’s heart was beginning to grow faint. It was bad news. She could feel it. “Johnny, what are you talking about? Just tell me.”
“Well hello there.”
It was a woman’s voice. When they both looked, a tall, very attractive black lady was standing at their booth.
She was a professional-looking woman to Maude who wore a business skirt-suit and carried a briefcase at her side.
She seemed more interested in staring at Maude than looking at Johnny.
But Maude didn’t think she’d ever seen the lady before. “Hello,” she said.
“Is she another one?” the woman asked Johnny presumably, but she continued to stare at Maude.
Johnny smiled a smile that looked more nervous than joyful, and then he nodded. “Yup. She’s another one.”
The woman began to shake her head as if she’d sized up Maude and found her seriously lacking. “You can surely pick’em,” she said, then finally looked over at Johnny. “I agreed to let you wrap this up with all of them. But don’t push it.” Then she gave Maude another assessing look and left.
Maude and Johnny both looked as she walked out of the restaurant. Then Maude looked at Johnny. “I’m another what?” she asked him. “And she agreed to let you wrap what up? Who is she?”
“She’s my wife,” he said. And he said is so easily, as if he was telling her it was cloudy with a chance of rain. As if that earth-shattering news was just that inconsequential to him.
But it was earth-shattering to Maude. She just sat there.
Her boyfriend of ten months, the man that asked her to marry him the first day they met, was already married?
It sounded like gibberish to her. Like she so misheard him that it didn’t sound like words to her.
She could not believe it. She was involved with a married man?
And she had no clue? No way. She knew she could be gone sometimes, and out to lunch sometimes, but she was not that far gone.