When You Dance With The Devil (Dafina Contemporary Romance) (2 page)

BOOK: When You Dance With The Devil (Dafina Contemporary Romance)

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After she finished eating, Jolene took the dishes to the kitchen, where she encountered a surprised cook. “You don’t have to bus your dishes, honey,” the woman said. “You start doing that, and Miss Fannie may decide she don’t need some of the help. My name is Marilyn, and I’m the chief cook.”

“Uh, sorry. I’m Jolene. It may take me a while to figure out how things work around here.”

Marilyn stuck her right hand on her enormous right hip. “Ain’t nothing to figure out. Just come to your meals on time, don’t smoke, stay sober, and don’t take your man to your room. If you can remember that, you’ll be the apple of Miss Fannie’s eye.”

With no chores to do for the first time in memory and no commands to follow, Jolene wandered into the lounge where an older man and two women sat watching television. She hadn’t ever watched an entire television show. She had rarely visited anyone, and Emma hadn’t seen the need for a television nor had Emma’s mother. Jolene sat in a chair some distance from the other boarders and watched. Fascinated.

“Judge Mathis is just leading that woman on, letting her hang herself,” one woman said.

“He sure is,” the old man said. “He’s laughing and joking, and she’s just digging her grave. But if you don’t know the difference between virtue and immorality, and if you’re so involved with yourself that you don’t care, you get what the judge is about to lay on that woman.”

“Come on, Judd,” the woman replied, “it’s just a television show.”

Judd leaned back in the shaker rocker—the only one in the lounge and the seat that, by tacit consent, belonged to him. “It may be a TV show, but that woman is being her real self, arrogant and self-absorbed. I’m glad she’s there and not here.”

Jolene stood and headed for the door. “Is she the new one?” Jolene heard one of the women ask.

“Looks like it. She sure could use a little manners. Walk in here and don’t say a word. Get up and leave just like she came. A dog would at least have wagged his tail.”

Jolene realized they were talking about her, and wanted a place to hide. From the corner of her eye, she saw the old man and two women who she presumed to be the house gossips. The thin, pursed lips of one woman reminded her of her mama’s attitude toward the rest of the world. “I’m not going to like that one,” she said to herself. She dashed up to her room, closed the door, and let it take her weight. What did they want from her? She didn’t know them.

By supper time, she had become well acquainted with the view from her window. The park that faced her, a wide open space with scattered trees, a pond, flowers, a narrow, river-like stream that was host to a small bridge. And she could see the edge of the bay. It was a place where a person could be free to embrace the world.

“Don’t be so fanciful,” she admonished herself as twilight set in and, in the distance, she could see fireflies and hear croaking bullfrogs. “It looks good, but it may turn out to be like everything else: something to sap your will, eat up your energy, and consume you. I’m not getting attached to anybody or anything.”

She dreaded supper, for it meant meeting ten strangers, and after having seen three of them in the lounge, she’d as soon eat her food in her room. But that wasn’t an option, so she washed her face and hands, added a lip gloss, combed out her hair—mama had insisted that she braid it or wear it in a knot at the back of her head—and trod down the stairs. The laughter and talking reached her before she got to the bottom step. After a deep breath, she laid her shoulders back and headed for the dining room. At the door, she saw an empty seat at one table, judged that to be her only option, and took it.

Total quiet ensued, and she gazed at the empty plate before her, certain that all ten of the boarders were staring at her. But when Fannie finished saying grace, the chatter resumed.

“That’s my biscuit, Miss,” a man beside her said. “Yours are over there on the left where your fork is.”

Heat flushed her face and neck. “Sorry,” she murmured.

“Oh, that’s all right. Where’re you from?”

“Hagerstown.”

“That’s a nice city. How long you staying?”

“I don’t know.”

“My name’s Joe Tucker. What’s yours?”

“Jolene,” she said, barely loud enough for him to hear it. Joe turned his attention to Judd Walker, who she’d seen in the lounge that afternoon. What kind of man slicked his hair with conkaline? Her mama would have dismissed as worthless any black man who straightened his hair. She glanced at Joe’s fingernails and wondered; they looked like the work of a manicurist. He was a big man, too, she mused, at least six feet four inches tall, and wearing a red corduroy shirt, at that. She shook her head from side to side. “Mama always said, ‘It takes all kinds,’ and maybe it does.” She concentrated on her plate.

At least the food was tasty, Jolene thought and, even if it hadn’t been, at least she didn’t have to cook it. She focused on the food and didn’t allow her gaze to meet anyone else’s. As soon as she finished the strawberry shortcake, she left the table with the intention of escaping to her room. However, she remembered having seen newspapers in the lounge and went there to get one.

“Where’re you going?” Fannie asked, effectively waylaying her. “We all sit here in the lounge after supper and have coffee or tea and watch the reality shows.”

“Well . . . I’ve, uh . . . had a long day and—”

Fannie’s knotted right fist went to her hip. “Listen, Jolene, if you’re going to stay here with us, you must try to be friendlier. You walked in tonight and didn’t say hello or anything else, and then you walked out without saying excuse me, good night, cat, dog or pig. And Jolene, please don’t blot your lipstick with my napkins. It’s hard to get it out.”

Jolene’s stomach began to churn the way it had when her mother berated her. She swallowed the liquid that accumulated in her mouth and reminded herself that Emma Tilman was gone.

“If I’ve done something to offend you, Fannie, please find a better way to let me know.” She reached down, scooped up the newspaper and headed up the stairs.
Nobody is going to tongue lash me, and if Fannie tries it again, she’ll find out what it’s like
. She hadn’t remembered that the napkins were linen because her mama used paper napkins, and she’d wiped her mouth automatically. Embroiled in misery, Jolene sat on the edge of the bed, holding her belly with both hands and rocking herself. She didn’t remember having eaten in the company of that many people before. What was she supposed to do and say? It had required all the courage she could summon just to walk to that chair and sit down. She took out her tablet and made some notes.
If I have to learn how other people live
, she said to herself,
I’d better start now
.

Thousands of miles away in Geneva, Switzerland, Richard Peterson sat alone in his elegant wood-paneled office eating lunch at a mahogany desk that sprawled across more than one-quarter of his thirty-foot-wide office. Alone and staring at Mont Blanc, a rare picture-perfect vision on a brilliant sunny day. Alone in the flesh and alone in the spirit. Although born in Brooklyn near the bottom of the heap, by the age of forty-five, tall, handsome, and polished, Richard had scaled the top. However, on the way to becoming an ambassador and, subsequently, executive-director of one of the largest and most prestigious nongovernmental organizations, he ruthlessly trampled his competitors, ignored underlings who needed his help, and used women for his own ends without regard to their feelings or needs. He also became a snob, a trim, six-foot-four-inch, good-looking and flawlessly dressed snob.

Richard recognized the justice of his own tragedy: a powerful man with no interest in or will to use his power. He glanced at the copy of the New York
Daily News
that his secretary placed beside his luncheon tray and saw the notice of Estelle Mitchell’s marriage. The account merely confirmed what he had known for months: she was lost to him forever. He stopped eating, leaned back in his swivel desk chair, and made a pyramid of his fingers.

Hadn’t he brought it on himself with his craftiness, his insistence on treating her as he had all other women, as a person undeserving of his integrity, a woman to be used? This, in spite of the fact that she was his equal in status and position. But Estelle Mitchell had not succumbed to his charm, nor was she bamboozled by his lovemaking, and it was she with whom he had fallen in love—and too late to correct his behavior. She wanted no part of him.

“Come in.” He sat up straight, brushed his fingers through his semi-straight curls and angled his square-jawed face toward the door.

“Mr. Pichat from France is here to see you sir. He has a two o’clock appointment,” Marlene Gupp, his secretary, said.

He wiped his mouth with the white linen napkin, and gestured toward the tray. “Would you remove this, please, Marlene? What does Pichat want? I don’t remember.”

Her eyebrows shot up in an expression of disbelief that he had witnessed often in recent weeks. “Sir, it’s about our contribution to the five-year plan.”

“Yes, of course.”

He didn’t see how he could continue the façade, the superficiality, the automatic grins and empty smiles, the shallow women. He no longer cared about the job. He dealt with important world problems that deserved more able attention than he or his cohorts were bringing to it. Oh, what the hell! It wasn’t working, and he wanted out. Maybe he would regret it, but he was tired of it all. And to think of the things he’d done in order to sit in that chair, eat at that desk and see Mont Blanc from that window. He’d give anything if . . . He couldn’t tolerate the man he had become.

He pasted a smile on his face and stood when Yves Pichat entered. “This is a pleasure, my friend,” he said. “Would you like coffee, a glass of Chablis or something stronger?” More shamming. He’d done it so long and so well that he wasn’t sure who he was.

Pichat took a seat. “Chablis would be fine. My wife wants to go to the Caribbean before it gets too warm, and you were ambassador to Jamaica. Where should she go and what should she take along?”

Wasn’t it always the same? Important men in important jobs running errands for their wives when they should be working to relieve the world’s poor. He let a grin expose his white teeth. “How’s Michelle? I’ve got some fliers and brochures here that ought to do the trick.” He opened the bottom desk drawer, gave the man the material and prayed that he would be satisfied and leave.

“I presume you’ve accepted the invitation to our official reception for the prime minister? If you’re not there, the single women will want Michelle’s head. Some of the married ones, too, I imagine.”

Richard lifted his right shoulder and let it fall in a show of diffidence. “You give me too much credit, man.”

Pichat left without mentioning the five-year plan or waiting for his Chablis. The man’s visit reminded Richard of the reasons he had begun to alter his way of life. Sick of its shallowness, he had begun to reject the high social life that he had once relished, indeed thrived on, to eat his lunch alone at his desk and to confine social interaction to what the job required. He stood at a precipice looking down at the great unknown, his life’s great divide into periods BE and AE, the era before Estelle rejected him and the period after she walked out of his life for good. A watershed, and he had to live with it. If he had known the price would be so high, would he have lived differently? He thought so.

“What do you mean, you aren’t going to seek reelection?” The executive-director of a sister nongovernmental organization asked Richard as they strolled along the banks of Lac Leman one March evening at sunset.

“Just that. I’ve had enough. I’m going back to the states.”

“Hmm. Wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain assistant S-G in New York, would it?”

“Only indirectly. She’s in the past.”

“Yes. I know. Where’re you planning to settle?”

“A small town somewhere, preferably near the ocean or at least near a large lake or big river. I need to live near the water.”

“I know just the place. It’s a small town in Maryland right on the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve vacationed there a couple of times, and when I retire I’m going to settle there.” He wrote something on a card and handed it to Richard. “Don’t let the name fool you. It’s a great place if you don’t want your own house or apartment.”

“May be just what I’m looking for. Thanks, friend.”