Family of Lies (16 page)

I
WAS MAD AS HELL!
I
COULDN’T WAIT TO TALK TO
B
O!
I
WANTED TO
wring his goddamn neck with my bare hands!

I didn’t like that he wasn’t following my plan. I had told that fool to court that dumb-ass girl for at least three or four months to make it look good. I told him to treat her like a queen, lick her pussy all day long if he had to, and spoil her so rotten she’d have to be weaned like a baby to get back to normal.
Then
he was to ask her to marry him, not six
weeks
after he met her!

Bo managed to avoid me all day Sunday and he left for work Monday morning before I got up. I called that hardheaded jackass at work five times before noon. I left a message each time, but he hadn’t returned any of my calls. It was after 1:00 p.m. when I finally caught up with him. And that was only because I had pressed *67 before I dialed his number so my name wouldn’t show on his caller ID.

“We need to talk,” I hissed into the telephone.

“Hi, cuz. Sorry I haven’t been able to return any of your calls. I was in a payroll meeting all morning. Kenneth and I just returned from lunch with a rep from an account we’re trying to land.” I couldn’t believe how casual he sounded.

“Negro, don’t you go there! You know I don’t give a good goddamn about a fucking rep. I know you’ve been dodging me and you know we need to talk about that little stunt you and Sarah pulled yesterday.”

“I’m kind of busy at the moment,” Bo claimed, sounding nervous now. And that did not surprise me. He had to know I had a bone to pick with him. “We can talk when I get home.”

“We’ll talk then, too, but we need to talk
now
before I blow a gasket.”

“I’ll be home early. We can talk then.”

“How do you expect us to talk with Sarah clinging to you like a vine as soon as you step into the house and Kenneth lurking around like Turkey Lurkey?”

“All right. Hold on just a second.” Bo put me on hold for about five minutes, which was four and a half minutes too long. By the time he returned to the phone, I was seething. “Where are you now, Vera?”

“I’m in my bedroom. I’ve been trying to reach you since this morning!”

“I told you I received your messages, but I was too busy to call you back.”

“Look, dear cousin, if you want to stay busy and keep that job, you’d better straighten up and fly right.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know damn well what it means. I moved your pitiful ass out here for a reason.”

“Yes, you did. You moved me out here to work for your husband.”

“Correction, I brought you out here to take care of Sarah. The job was just a smoke screen. I initiated this thing between you and Sarah and I—”

“Hold on now. You can stop right there. I happen to be in love with the girl.”

“Only in a pig’s eye!”

“No, I really do love her. I know you and I talked about a . . . uh . . . a setup, but things didn’t work out that way after all. She’s . . . well, she’s a good woman and she has a lot to offer a man.”

“Tell me about it! She’s worth millions and will be worth even more someday—”

“Vera, I’m glad Sarah is rich, but there is a lot more to her than her money. If I had met her under different circumstances, I probably would have fallen in love with her anyway, even if she didn’t have a plugged nickel to her name.”

“If you really do love her, why the rush to get married? I told you to court the bitch a few months, not a few weeks!”

“Vera, please calm down!”

“Calm down my pussy! This is my future and my life you’re playing with! I have come too far and worked too hard to let you ruin things for me!”

“I am not going to ruin anything for you, woman. And I don’t appreciate you talking to me like I’m some kind of flunky. I’m forty-seven years old and nobody tells me what to do!”

“I don’t believe my fucking ears! What do you think Kenneth would say if I told him the
real
reason you moved out here?”

“I moved out here to work for him. That’s the real reason,” Bo said flatly. “Listen, we’re not going to lose a damn thing by me marrying Sarah this quickly. You’ll still be in control of Kenneth’s money. I will be married to his daughter and I will be in control of her. If she’s this anxious to marry me now, I want to strike while the iron is hot! What if I had held out for a few months like you wanted me to and Sarah lost interest in me? Then I would have moved out here for nothing but the job after all.”

I had to consider Bo’s words. What he’d just said made me calm down. “I just wish you had discussed it with me before you asked her to get married.”

“I didn’t ask her. We hadn’t even discussed anything that serious. Cuz, you know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t have made such a bold move on my own. I would have discussed it with you first.”

“What? Do you mean to tell me Sarah proposed to you?”

“Not exactly. She didn’t
ask
me to marry her. I guess you could say she
told
me that’s what we were going to do. She had already made up her mind and the first I heard of it was yesterday morning when she led me to you and Kenneth’s bedroom. Uh, a few minutes before that, Collette had barged into Sarah’s room and caught us in her bed taking care of business.”

“What the hell . . .” My voice trailed off. A few moments passed before I continued. “Oh. I didn’t know any of that,” I said in a low, apologetic voice. “But why didn’t you tell me that getting married was her idea?”

“Why didn’t you give me a chance to tell you? I was going to take you aside and talk to you this evening when I got home.”

“Shit. Well, I guess you really should marry her as soon as possible now before she changes her mind.”

“I agree with you on that. I do love the girl and I think she and I can have a good life together, even though she is kind of immature and impulsive. This is going to be a real challenge for me.”

“Tell me about it. But you’re the best man for Sarah if she’s so anxious to get married. You should have seen some of the creatures she had coming to this house!”

Bo laughed and I laughed right along with him.

“So, are you still mad at me, cuz?” he teased.

“I guess not. I feel a little bit better. Just don’t screw things up. Marry her and treat her nice. She’s just as gullible and stupid as her daddy. But she’s so crazy about you anyway, I’m sure she’ll do whatever you tell her to do.”

“All I want her to do is be good to me.”

“Don’t worry. I’m sure she won’t do anything to disappoint you. If she makes a fool out of you, you’ll know how to deal with her.”

Bo was taking too long to respond.

“Bo, did you hear what I just said?”

“I did,” he said quickly. “I just hope she doesn’t make a fool out of me the way Gladys did. If she does . . . I don’t know what I’ll do this time.”

V
ERA AND
I
AND
S
ARAH AND
B
O FLEW UP TO
R
ENO ON A PRIVATE JET
the following weekend. The flight was only about forty minutes long, but during that whole time, Sarah couldn’t stop grinning and fawning over Bo.

Just seeing them together reminded me so much of my first years with Vera and how giddy we had both been. It looked like history was being repeated and I could not have been more pleased. My marriage was a big success, so I had every reason to believe that my baby’s would be too. However, I did have at least one mildly disturbing thought dancing around in my head. Bo being a man, he no doubt possessed some of the same flaws as other men, especially ambitious men like me. He would probably lose his perspective on life from time to time, which I had come to believe was normal. Men made more mistakes than women. I just didn’t want Bo to put my baby through what I’d put Vera through. It was unrealistic for anybody to think that any man on this planet could be married to a woman and be one hundred percent faithful to her throughout the duration of their marriage. That was such a bunch of baloney. It made me want to laugh every time I thought about it. However, a good man learned from his mistakes. I was proof of that. I just prayed that if Bo involved himself with other women along the way, my daughter would never find out. If she did, I hoped that she would handle it with the same level of dignity that Vera had.

But this was supposed to be a happy day, and I didn’t want to ruin it for anybody. I cleared my mind and plastered a smile on my face.

My baby girl married the love of her life in a little chapel with a life-size statue of Cupid propped up on the front entrance steps. I had never seen Sarah look more beautiful and radiant in my life, and I prayed that she would remain that way.

“If he ever hurts her, I’ll die,” I told Vera in our luxurious hotel suite later that night, a few hours after the ceremony. “She’s the most important thing I have in the world, and I wouldn’t want to live if something happened to her.”

“What about me?”

“What about you?”

“You just said Sarah’s the most important thing you have in the world. What about me?”

When I realized how insensitive my comment must have sounded to my wife, I wanted to bite off my own tongue. I had never put my foot in my mouth so deeply before in my life! “Oh, baby. You know what I mean. You’re my wife and I have never loved a woman as much as I love you. You should know that by now. You’re just as important to me as Sarah. But nobody’s going to hurt you as long as I’m alive. I’m responsible for your welfare. And now that Sarah belongs to Bo, she’s his responsibility. That’s what I meant.”

“Bo would never hurt Sarah. As much as his ex put him through, he knows what real pain feels like, but he never put his hands on Gladys. Sarah’s a nice, quiet girl who goes out of her way to please people. She’s nothing like that witch he used to be married to, so I doubt if there is anything Sarah could do that would make him snap.”

“I know, baby. But I’m a daddy and that’s just the way our minds work. We worry about our kids no matter how grown they get, and we don’t want to see anything happen to them. And I’m not just talking about something physical. I’m talking about emotional hurt too.”

“Look, as bad as Bo’s ex treated him, he never hurt her physically or emotionally. As long as Sarah stays with Bo, she will be just fine. Now, I thought you were going to take her down to the gaming area so she could try her luck at the roulette wheel.”

I jumped off the bed. “Shit! Thanks for reminding me.” I froze in my spot. “I’d better call her up first. I’d hate to interrupt them.” I laughed as I dialed the honeymoon suite. Sarah answered on the first ring. “Baby . . . uh . . . I hope I didn’t interrupt anything,” I said quickly, feeling embarrassed. My daughter was a grown woman. I didn’t know—and didn’t want to know—about her sex life. Just knowing she would be sleeping with Bo every night now made me cringe.

“Oh, Daddy. Please don’t go there. It’s only five-thirty and Bo and I have the whole night ahead of us. Are we still going to the roulette table?”

“That’s what I was calling about.”

“I’ll meet you downstairs in ten minutes.”

Vera stood in front of the mirror on the huge dresser facing our king-sized bed, putting on a new face. “Honey, I won’t be gone long,” I told her. I walked up behind her and placed my hands on her hips. She pressed her body into mine and started a slow grind. My dick jumped to attention right away. The more she moved, the harder it got. “Aw now, baby. You know I can’t leave this room with this blue-steel brick in my pants!” I teased, pulling Vera to the bed. She giggled as she lay back, spreading her legs open like a pair of scissors.

Sarah was meandering around the gaming area by the time I made it downstairs twenty minutes later. Vera had declined my invitation to join Sarah and me. She was craving a few margaritas and was convinced that the only place in Reno that made her favorite drink the way she liked it was a nearby Mexican restaurant called Bertha’s. She had invited Bo to join her and he had reluctantly agreed.

“What took you so long?” Sarah asked, hands on her hips.

“I had to return a call to the store. And I had told my staff not to bother me this weekend!” I fibbed, trying to sound annoyed.

“I thought you told me you advised everybody to call Cash if they had any problems?”

“I did,” I responded, leading Sarah by the hand to the gaming area. Harrah’s casino was as busy and crowded as ever. We had to squeeze our way into a spot at the roulette wheel. “But somebody had a question Cash couldn’t answer.” I didn’t like to lie to my own child. But I was not about to tell her the real reason I got held up.

One thing I loved about Vera was that it didn’t take much to satisfy her in bed. Oh, she used to need more bedroom maintenance years ago, but like me, age had slowed her down. The last time she sucked my dick, I got off in less than thirty seconds. I had gone from being a minute man that night to a half a minute man. We had both laughed about that.

Sarah and I didn’t have much luck at that damn roulette wheel. So we played a few games of blackjack. After we lost a couple of hundred bucks at that in just a few minutes, we went to the casino bar to have a few drinks.

“Baby, I just realized that this is the first time in years that you and I have had a drink together, just the two of us.”

“I didn’t realize that. I enjoy drinking with you, Daddy.”

Sarah hauled off and kissed my cheek. I noticed a wrinkled white dude accompanied by an equally wrinkled white woman looking at us with puzzled expressions on their faces. They kept their gaze on us too long for me, so I gave them a harsh look until they looked away.

I had already gulped down a few drinks in the room with Vera, so I was already tipsy. But I swallowed a double shot of bourbon right away and it hit me like a ton of bricks. My head felt like it was swimming in a bowl of quicksand. I blinked and looked around the room. The wrinkled couple had left. I looked around some more and shook my head. “Baby, don’t look now but there’s a dude directly across from us that looks a lot like me. And he’s with a sweet young thing too. I know folks will stare at them the same way that couple was staring at us a few minutes ago. They are probably thinking I’m some dirty old man taking advantage of a cute young chick.” I laughed, but I didn’t laugh long. There was a sad look on Sarah’s face.

“That’s us, Daddy,” she said gently.

“Huh?”

“That’s a mirror on that wall. That old dude and the sweet young thing you’re looking at are us.”

“Oh.” I pushed my empty glass to the side and covered my mouth to stifle a belch. “I guess I don’t need anything else to drink if I’m too drunk to recognize my own self and my own child in a mirror.”

“I don’t need anything else to drink either,” Sarah said with a mild belch. She had drunk only half of the piña colada she’d ordered. The sad look was still on her face.

“What’s the matter, baby? You don’t look like a woman who just got married a few hours ago.”

“Daddy, I hope everything works out between Bo and me. I hope he treats me the same way you treat Vera.”

That statement sobered me up considerably. “What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing, you’re old enough to be Vera’s daddy, but you treat her like you’re both the same age. I have never seen you treat her like a child the way some old men do when they marry young women. I just hope Bo always treats me the same way you treat Vera.”

“Don’t you sit here and tell me that you’re having doubts about your marriage already!”

“I’m not having doubts. It’s just that . . . everything happened so fast.”

“Then why didn’t you wait like Vera suggested? If you’re not pregnant like you said, there was no reason for you to rush into something as serious as marriage.”

“I’m not pregnant. I wanted to do it fast because . . . uh . . . I was afraid that if I waited too long, Bo might go back to his ex.”

“Honey, you don’t have to worry about that. Bo told me that he wouldn’t reconcile with that woman if she came back in a gift-wrapped box.” I gave Sarah a big hug. “I’m just glad to know that Bo was just as anxious to get married as you were. I will rest in peace when the time comes.”

Sarah gave me an exasperated look and said, “I wish you would stop doing that!”

“Stop doing what?”

“Talking about death.”

“Well, it’s the one thing we’ll all have to face one day.”

“I know that, but I wish you wouldn’t talk about it. It worries me.”

“Well, you can stop worrying. I’m going to be around for a long time. As long as nothing bad happens to you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I told Vera that if something really bad happened to you, it would kill me.” I had a smile on my face, but I was dead serious.

“Daddy, nothing bad is going to happen to me. Bo is going to take real good care of me. He promised.”

“I know he will,” I said, standing up. “Bo’s a man’s man, and I couldn’t have picked a better man for you if I had tried. You landed yourself a real big fish.”

“I know I did, Daddy.”

“Well now! I’m glad that’s out of the way.” I took a deep breath and patted the pocket I kept my money clip in. I was mad that the wad of bills I had brought to gamble with was a lot thinner now. It was time for me to get the hell up out of Reno. “Vera and I are going home tomorrow so you can enjoy the rest of your honeymoon alone with your husband.”