God Still Don't Like Ugly (27 page)

“Where else do you think P. could be?” I asked, getting more nervous and frightened by the second.

I heard Jean sniff a few times before she answered. “We don’t know.

She was outside jumping rope and making a snowman most of the day. I got so busy in the house I didn’t realize how much time had passed before I went to check on her. She wasn’t in the yard and none of the kids around here have seen her.”

“Well, you know how kids are. I think I heard that ice cream truck a little while ago. She probably followed it like I used to.”

“It’s wintertime, Annette. That truck doesn’t come around this time of the year,” Jean snapped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you. It’s just that . . . that P.’s been gone since early this morning,”

Jean choked. “She never misses her lunch. And her granddaddy picks her up every Saturday afternoon to take her shopping. She would never miss that.”

“Oh. Maybe she wandered off and got lost. Maybe she’s afraid to come home because she thinks she’s going to get a whupping.” P. was one of the most obedient children I knew. Disobeying her mother was way out of character for her. “She’s got to be lost.”

“That’s what Vinnie and my daddy said.” Jean paused and sucked in her breath. “P.’s been lost before, but she’s always found her way home.”

“Where’s Vinnie?” I asked evenly.

“Huh? Oh, he’s here. He’s blown out a fuse in his brain trying to figure out where P. is. We are about to go out again and look for her some more.”

I became so uneasy I could barely talk. Without knowing all the facts, but with what I did know, I immediately felt that Vinnie knew more than he was saying. “Well, if you want me to help—”

214

Mar y Monroe

“Oh no, you don’t. You stay right home with your daddy and your sister. I’ll come over as soon as we locate P. Vinnie said after we find my baby, he’d come to your house with me, if you don’t mind.”

“Uh, you can tell Vinnie that he can come, too,” I said. “Now you go on and find your child, Jean.” I hung up the telephone and had a brief cry. The main cause of my grief was obviously P.’s disappearance, but also the fact that the missing child could have been me at an earlier time.

There was no way I could not get involved. A missing child was everybody’s business.

“Uh, that was a friend of mine from down the street. Her little girl is missing and I need to go see what I can do to help out,” I announced, immediately after returning to the living room. Daddy and Lillimae were tired from their long plane ride. They didn’t protest when I suggested that they turn in for the night.

Pee Wee and Scary Mary insisted on accompanying me to Jean’s house. Another neighbor, a pretty brunette, greeted us, standing in Jean’s doorway with her arms folded like she was on guard duty. “Jean and Vinnie are out looking for P.,” she told us.

“Do you know where they went? We’d like to help search,” I said in the gentlest voice I could manage.

The woman coughed and looked up and down the street before responding. “I don’t know why, but Jean insisted on going out to the city dump with a flashlight. She borrowed my son’s old collie to see if he could sniff the way.”

“What? Why would P. be way across town by herself, at the city dump? I know Jean doesn’t think somebody . . .” What I was thinking was so horrific, I couldn’t even finish my sentence.

I could not imagine somebody taking P. to a nasty dumping ground and leaving her there among trash that included the bags of Jerome’s things that I had discarded. Only if—I couldn’t even bring myself to think the worse.

“The police said somebody found one of P.’s snow boots out there,”

the woman stammered, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.

Unbearably grim thoughts crossed my mind, but I refused to pay attention to them. I shook my head so hard I saw spots.

Pee Wee started cursing.

Scary Mary waved her hands high above her head and prayed in a loud voice, “Lord, please be with P.”

GOD STILL DON’T LIKE UGLY

215

“Oh no,” I muttered, stumbling back a few steps. If Pee Wee hadn’t caught me in his arms, I would have fallen off Jean’s porch.

I didn’t like the thoughts that wouldn’t leave my head no matter how hard I shook it. My stomach started churning. I covered my mouth with my hand, hoping I wouldn’t throw up the dinner I had spent so much time preparing and eating. I tried not to think about Jean out there in the dark, in a dump site, with a flashlight and a dog.

Looking for her child.

CHAPTER 53

Ihad arranged to take the following Monday and Tuesday off so that I could spend more time with Daddy and Lillimae. That Monday evening I offered to take them to dinner at Laslo’s. I wanted to keep myself busy so I wouldn’t have to think about P., wondering where she was and what had happened to her.

Laslo’s was the nicest place in town for steaks, but everybody who worked there and most of the people who dined there were white. I thought that eating in a place like Laslo’s would be a nice experience for Daddy and Lillimae.

Big mistake.

Right away Daddy and Lillimae started to complain about one thing after another: our table was too close to the kitchen, white customers were giving us dirty looks, it took too long for us to get waited on. There was nothing that they didn’t complain about.

“And them smashed potatoes tasted like wallpaper paste. How can anybody enjoy something like that?” Daddy laughed.

“And the toilet is enough to scare anybody into constipation,”

Lillimae complained, glaring at a sirloin steak the size of a small saucer.

Daddy snorted and shook his head. “Tell me about it. I wasn’t half done doin’ my business on that toilet before it started flushin’ by it-self!”

I sighed and shook my head. “Stop that,” I scolded. “I thought you GOD STILL DON’T LIKE UGLY

217

two would like to eat out at a really nice place for a change. This place is a world away from the greasy rib joints you usually go to. This is how the other half lives.”

Daddy and Lillimae looked at one another, then at me. “Baby, we ain’t the other half; we the ones in the middle,” Daddy told me, looking up toward the ceiling with a frown. “Now what in the world kind of music is they playin’ up in here?”

“It’s ‘Strangers In the Night’ and that’s Frank Sinatra singing it,” I told Daddy as he rolled his eyes. “You can’t expect a place like this to be playing something by B.B. King.”

Daddy and Lillimae looked at each other and shrugged, then they looked at me.

“Is this the kind of music white folks listen to when they eat out?”

Daddy asked, laughing some more.

I sighed and nodded.

Living in a cosmopolitan city like Miami for so many years hadn’t refined Daddy and Lillimae at all. As much as I loved my daddy and my sister, I loved them just as they were. Their lack of sophistication was endearing. I watched in amusement as they struggled through the rest of our meal.

On top of everything else, our waitress was rude. Lillimae was the only one that the scowling redhead was courteous to. She smiled at Lillimae and addressed her first each time she came to our table. A lot of the Black people I knew didn’t go to Laslo’s that often because they felt that some of the servers were racist. I had not eaten at Laslo’s that often and until today I had never had a problem.

The last straw was when the waitress refilled Lillimae’s water glass and ignored Daddy and me. Lillimae beckoned the waitress back to our table.

“My daddy and my sister would like a little more water, too,” Lillimae said loud enough for the people three tables away to hear. With a stunned look on her face, the woman poured more water onto the table than she did in our glasses.

Finally, she left the check on the table in front of Lillimae.

“Well, that heifer sure won’t get a tip,” I grumbled, lifting the check, poring over it to make sure she didn’t overcharge us.

“Don’t you leave that cow nothin’,” Daddy hollered, loud enough for the woman to hear. “Somebody need to tell that wench that we in the middle of the 1980’s—not the 1950’s! And this ain’t the South.”

218

Mar y Monroe

My face was burning. Not with embarrassment, but with anger.

Lillimae shook her head and waved her hand at me, a devilish smile sitting on her face. “If you don’t leave nothin’, she’ll think you forgot. I’ll take care of the tip,” she announced, rooting through her purse. She fished out two pennies and dropped them on the table, making sure the waitress saw her. “That’s how you tip for bad service.

Come on, y’all.” Lillimae glared at the waitress and all the other looky-loos as we waltzed out.

There was not much to see in Richland, so “sight-seeing” was not an option. However, I did suggest that we take an extended drive throughout the city so I could point out our few landmarks. By the time we returned to my house, Daddy was snoozing in the backseat of my car like a big cat and Lillimae was anxious to get to my bathroom so she could use a toilet that didn’t interrupt her while she was sitting on it.

A few beers seemed to restore their equilibrium. Sitting next to me on my living room couch, Daddy stared at the side of my head and let out a deep sigh. “I am so glad to see you again, sugar. You don’t know how glad I am.”

I blinked hard to hold back a tear that was threatening to reveal it-self. “Uh, maybe by summer we can plan a family reunion,” I said weakly.

Daddy and Lillimae looked at one another, their faces expressionless. Turning to me, Lillimae said, “I thought we’d already done that when you came to Florida.”

I shook my head. “I mean all of us. Amos and Sondra, too.”

“We’ll all get together someday soon,” Lillimae told me. “If you don’t mind, I’ll give ’em both your address and telephone number so y’all can talk some.”

“I’d like that,” I said gently. “I’d like for us all to get together soon.

I want all of my family together.” A stiff look on Daddy’s face told me he needed some clarification. “Not Muh’Dear, Daddy. Just us for now.”

Lillimae gave me an address and some telephone numbers so I could contact my other half-siblings at the military base in Germany where they were stationed. But for some reason I knew in the back of my mind that I would not make the first move. I had to handle things a little at a time. I had to deal with Muh’Dear and Daddy’s reunion first.

GOD STILL DON’T LIKE UGLY

219

I wanted to see some more closure in my family before it was too late. One thing I felt I didn’t have was a lot of time. Muh’Dear and Daddy were not getting any younger. As far as I knew, they were both in fairly good health and I realized they could both probably outlive me because I was not getting any younger, either. But time was still not on my side.

While Daddy was snoozing again on the living room couch, Lillimae and I attempted to watch television. I had moved from the couch to the floor and curled up on a throw rug with my head on one of the throw pillows from the couch. Lillimae had stuffed herself into one of my wing-armed chairs across from me.

I don’t even remember what was on television because we spent that time talking. She did most of it. She shared with me her concerns about her rocky marriage, her love for her sons, her disgust with her weight, and the fact that the other children her mother had given birth to lived right in Miami and she couldn’t spend time with them.

“And I am so sorry about your weddin’ bein’ called off. Maybe that Jerome wasn’t the man for you, after all. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I have a feelin’ he was a scoundrel in the makin’. So many men are,” Lillimae told me with a smile. “But I know in my heart there is another one out there more suitable for you.”

“I am sure there is,” I said sadly, wondering what Pee Wee was up to.

To make our conversation more interesting, I told Lillimae all about Scary Mary and her sordid activities.

“I figured that old sister had a hidden agenda that first time I met her. The way she didn’t look me straight in the eye when she talked and all,” Lillimae laughed. “Well, anyway, that Scary Mary woman still sounds like a good friend to you and your mama.” Lillimae sighed and turned her head to the side, staring off into space. “Bosses, coworkers, they come and go. Next to family, friends is the most important individuals in a person’s life. I hope that in time, you and I will be both to one another.” Lillimae paused and ran her tongue across her lips. There was a faraway look in her eyes as she continued. “I got a few girlfriends. Sisters from the church, co-workers, neighbors. But I don’t feel that close to any of them. I don’t really feel as comfortable talkin’ to them as I do with you. I feel like I can share anything with you. I hope you feel the same way about me.”

“I do,” I said. And I meant it.

220

Mar y Monroe

I wanted to open up my entire life to my sister and I knew that one day I would. I knew that I had to tell her about Mr. Boatwright and what he had done to me. I knew that I had to tell her about Rhoda and what she had done for me. And when I did, I would leave no stone unturned. I had not seen Rhoda since I’d seen her standing in Jean’s front yard. And with everything going on with P., I couldn’t pump Jean for information about Rhoda yet.

The only person in my life I wouldn’t give Lillimae too much information about was Pee Wee. I didn’t want her to know how weak I was when it came to him and how weak he was when it came to me. As mysterious as my relationship was with that man, there was something sacred about it and I wanted to keep it that way.

Like Lillimae, he was another wild card in my life.

CHAPTER 54

That Sunday when I got up after a restless night filled with nightmares, Pee Wee called to say that P. was still missing. Now, I also planned to use my time off to help look for P. I didn’t have to do that, though. Around noon, Pee Wee called my house again.

“I . . . I guess you done heard about poor little P.” His voice was low and labored, which was rare for Pee Wee. I had not seen or heard him cry since his sissified, teenage years. He had cried like a baby and fainted when President Kennedy got assassinated. He was crying now so I knew what he had to tell me was bad.