I Ain't Me No More (9 page)

“What's wrong? I can tell something is wrong,” she said, persisting.

I sighed and then paused for a moment. “You know what we were talking about inside? Before the nurse called our names?”

Konnie thought for a minute. “Oh, you mean about Dub and Boyd sleeping with other chicks?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed.

“Well, what about it?”

“I think you may be right, at least about Dub, anyway.” With that said, I pulled off, with every intention of dropping Konnie off and then heading back to my place to pack some bags. I wasn't leaving Dub. I was putting him out!

“Girl, I ain't been cheating on you! I caught chlamydia from all the weed I smoke.”

Believe it or not, that was what Dub told me in regards to how he'd caught chlamydia and transmitted it to me. What was even more preposterous was that a fragment of me credited his defense. I wanted to call the doctor and ask if it was at all possible, but I didn't want the doctor thinking I was the budhead myself. I didn't know if he had some type of professional obligation to send the police to search my house for drugs or something. I was young, dumb, and wanted to believe I hadn't withstood all that I had with Dub for naught.

My inner voice was on a rampage my outer voice would never have had the courage to go on. “How dare you? How dare you put me through all this hell and not even have the decency to be loyal? How dare you act jealous and deranged when, all the while, you are the one out there cheating?” Some things were starting to make sense now. Dub was so worried that I was out cheating on him because that was exactly what he was out doing.

“Baby, I swear to God I didn't cheat on you,” Dub vowed. “You know weed does more than just get people high. My boy Duane, you know he can't even get a girl pregnant because he smoked so much weed.”

I'd once watched one of those “Who is the baby daddy?” shows, and that was the same excuse one of the prospective fathers gave the host when asked why he didn't think he was the father of the child in question. I didn't know if this had been scientifically proven or not, but this was now my second time hearing this. Maybe there was something to marijuana use besides getting high.

At the end of the day, I was foolish enough to believe his personally written and choreographed stanzas and waltz. Dub had honestly convinced me that he'd caught chlamydia from smoking weed in excess. Back then I had had no idea what weed was truly capable of. Heck, now they said marijuana even cured some ailments. Bud had come a long way since Cheech and Chong's simple recreational use.

After that incident, the two cases of crabs I caught from Dub were easily explained by him. “I used the bathroom at such and such's house. I know that's where I got it.” This was the second time I'd heard this excuse from Dub.

“So you mean to tell me the crab hopped all the way from the toilet seat up to your stuff?”

“No, my stomach had been hurting real bad, so I was sitting down on the toilet, doing number two.” He thought for a moment and then continued. “Besides, how do you know that you ain't the one who caught it?” He turned the tables on me. I was not about to set myself up for that fall. I knew if I dared challenge him, by the end of the argument he'd be convinced, and have me convinced, too, that I had cheated on him and had caught the crabs and given them to him.

I was drained. It had been at least forty-five minutes that we had been standing there over a bottle of Nix, arguing back and forth. A bottle of Nix that, to add to the embarrassment of having crabs, Dub had to borrow money from his mother to purchase. Not only had he borrowed the money to get the bottle of medicated shampoo, but too embarrassed himself to go inside the pharmacy to get it, he had even had her go in and purchase it. Great! My boyfriend's mother knew we were walking around with a Red Lobster entrée in our pants.

Any other chick would have been long gone, but not me. Nope. I'd invested all of myself in this life with Dub. You didn't start a marathon and then quit halfway through it. Through all the cramps and pain, you just kept running. Quitting now, right in the middle of the race, made that first half all in vain. I was in it not necessarily to win it, but to at least finish what I had started. I knew no other life, no other way. This was it. I could imagine there was something different, something better out there. But at the same time, what if there was something worse in store for me instead? Fear wouldn't allow me to take that chance, the same fear that kept me confined to my relationship with Dub.

 

 

It wasn't even nine o'clock in the morning yet as I stood at our back door, fumbling for the house key. I had spent the night over at Nana's house because we'd planned on getting up early that next morning, heading to Bob Evans, and then going to yard sales. Dub allowed me to spend time with Nana on a regular basis without ever getting upset, angry, or jealous. Of course, ever since my mom had clocked him with that sock full of change that one time, he hadn't cared too much for her, but Nana was still all right in his book.

When I got up that morning, I realized that I'd never taken my cash out of its hiding place and put it back in my purse. Even though Dub said he was out there hustling in the streets, he was still always asking me for money. One time I lied and told him that I didn't have any. I guess it must have been his bum intuition that told him otherwise, because when I went to use the bathroom, he raided my purse. I came down the stairs and saw him standing there, holding all my money in his hands. Not only did he knock me upside my head a few times, but he also took the twenty dollars he'd asked to borrow in the first place.

“That'll teach you to lie to me,” he said before he threw the rest of the money on the coffee table and headed out the door.

I stood frozen for a few seconds before I moved. Trying to find the blessing in the matter, I told myself that at least he didn't take it all, and then I went to gather the money and put it back in my purse. No sooner had I moved a muscle than he made his way back into the house.

With the front door still open, he walked over to the table and grabbed the money before I could. “It's gonna cost you extra for lying to me.” And with that, he walked back out the door, leaving me broke financially and in spirit.

Now I made it a point to keep my money in hiding, and if I wanted to go yard saling, I needed to retrieve it.

When I opened the door, there was a loud screech, caused by a chair planted in front of the door. “Who the heck left a chair here?” I said to myself, followed by a curse word or two. “Now, this fool know if I came through the door, this chair was going to screech and make all kinds of—”

My words came to a halting screech just like the chair had. It was at that moment that women's intuition kicked in. I swear, I couldn't make it up those steps fast enough. Something wasn't right, and when I reached the top of the steps, only to find my bedroom door closed, I knew something was very wrong. It only got worse when I went to open the door and the sucker was locked.

With hands on hips, I mumbled, “Ain't this 'bout a . . .” I immediately began banging on the door. “Dub, open the door. Why you got the door locked? Open the door.” It took him about thirty seconds to finally unlock and open the door.

“Hey,” he said, feigning sleepiness, stretching and giving out a morning yawn like he was Slick Rick.

I gave no greeting in return. I brushed past him and began to look around the room. Nothing seemed out of place, but still, my gut feeling said otherwise. “Why was the door locked?”

He looked at me like I was crazy before he replied, “I always lock the door. You want somebody just running up in the house? You know we live in the hood.”

He was right. We did live in the hood. I could look out my window and see crackheads copping or a group of corner boys trailing behind a crackhead female as she went into a dope house so she could barter her body for a rock. One time it was the talk of the neighborhood when one of them got a crackhead to have sex with their pit bull and took pictures and showed them off. Thank God for that woman there weren't social networking sites back then.

“I'm not talking about the door to the house,” I spat. “I'm talking about why the bedroom door was locked.”

“Oh, uh, that.” He swallowed. “I had the guys over, you know, and I didn't want any of them coming in the room or anything while I was asleep.”

“Well, then, you shouldn't have people in the house who you don't trust. And on top of that, why would you leave anybody in our house and then go to sleep?”

“Yeah, you right.” He sat on the bed and put his head down. “I was crazy high and drunk and wasn't thinking. My bad,” he said, apologizing.

Okay, that was way too easy, and he's being way too nice,
I thought. Dub never did anything nice and easy. He was like Ike with Tina Turner. He always did things rough.

After giving the room one last once-over, though, I didn't see anything suspicious. I felt like a cop who'd just interrogated a suspect who she knew had committed a crime, only she didn't have enough evidence to make an arrest.

Reluctantly, I decided to head back to Nana's, but not before I walked over to the nightstand and discretely pulled my cash stash from between the pages of the Bible that was located inside the drawer. I knew the Bible would be the last place Dub ever looked. Heck, I never even opened it myself unless it was to hide my money. I owned a Bible only because it was passed down to me from my great-great-grandmother on my grandfather's side, who, if my grandmother told it, was the devil herself. But even the devil knows God's word.

“Have fun with your grandmother,” Dub said as I exited the room. “And tell her I said hi.”

He was way too excited about me leaving. And did he say for me to have fun? He hated for me to have fun. I was supposed to suffer a miserable existence under his watch.

“Yeah . . . thanks,” I said suspiciously. “I'll tell her.”

As I headed down the steps, I observed every corner of the house. Yeah, the fellas had definitely been over. There were ash-filled ashtrays, fast-food containers and empty forty-ounce bottles here and there. Feeling a little less suspicious, I went on and headed back out to my car. As I turned on the engine and started to drive off, that was when I saw it.

There, in the bathroom window, was Dub, peeking out. As soon as he caught me looking at him, he began to wave cheerfully, as if he was simply seeing me off.

“Negro, puh-lease,” I said as I threw that car in park, turned off the engine, and jumped back out.

When he saw me heading back into the house, he jumped from out of that window just as quickly as I had jumped out of that car.

I unlocked the door and made my way straight up to the top of the steps, where Dub was waiting for me.

“What did you forget?” he asked quickly.

Without saying a word, I bumped past him and headed straight toward our bedroom.

“What are you doing?” Dub asked as he stood in the doorway, watching me turn the room upside down.

I was checking the closet, behind doors, in corners of the room. I kicked at the pile of dirty laundry to see if what I was looking for was buried underneath that. I pulled the covers back off the bed. Nothing. I thought for a minute before kneeling down to check the one place I hadn't yet searched, underneath the bed.

“Dang it,” I mumbled under my breath. What I was looking for wasn't under there, either. But just as I was about to get up, my eyes caught something. I reached my hand farther under the bed, and when I pulled my hand out, in it was a shoe. A shoe that I did not recognize. “What's this?” I stood up with the shoe in hand, giving Dub one of those Jennifer Hudson looks, my tongue rolling inside my mouth, my neck popping, and my hand on my hip.

“A shoe.” He said it as if I was an idiot for not knowing what a shoe looked like.

“Don't play with me, Dub. I know it's a shoe, but whose shoe is it?”

Once again, he gave me that “You idiot” look and said, “Yours . . . of course.”

“Boy, you don't think I know my own shoes?”

“Baby, that shoe been up under there since we moved here. It's been so long that you probably forgot you even had those shoes.”

I paused for a minute. I swear on everything that this boy really had me thinking about whether or not this was my shoe. I knelt back down and found the other one. Holding both shoes in my hands, I tried to recall when I'd purchased them, where I'd purchased them, and how much they'd cost. I mean, that was just how in control Dub was of my mind. I swear, if that man had told me that the sky was green and the grass was blue, I'd have thought it was true.

“These are not my shoes, Dub.” He could hear the uncertainty in my voice.

“Are you sure those are not your shoes?” He said it the same way Satan had spoken to Eve right before she bit into the forbidden fruit.

I thought for a moment longer and examined the shoes. After finding
SIZE NINE
printed on the bottom, and knowing I wore a size ten, I adamantly and confidently said, “I'm sure.” And on that note, I exited the bedroom in search of the owner.

My blood was boiling like water in a teapot someone had forgotten was on the stove because they were too caught up watching their favorite reality show. Oh, a reality show was about to go down all right—an unscripted one!

I immediately marched into the bathroom across the hall and pulled the shower curtain back. That music from the movie
Psycho
was playing in my head, because I had a feeling things were about to get crazy. To my surprise, there was nothing there but the window and Dub's forehead print from just moments ago, when he'd pressed his head against the windowpane, praying, I was sure, that I'd pull off and go on about my way.

“Baby, what are you l-looking for? There is n-nobody in this house,” he asserted with a stutter. “Isn't Nana waiting on you? You better go.”

I was filled with so much anger at this point that my fear had been superseded. I was like that pit bull that eventually turned on its master. The tables were turned, because now it was Dub who was acting all scared and nervous. He was more concerned with getting caught than getting mad, and my concern was, of course, catching him.