Who Asked You? (7 page)

“So, what kind of nurse are you?” he asked. He sounded like he’d been to college, so I decided to use my college voice.

“I’m an LVN.”

“Interesting. Have you ever considered becoming an RN?”

Have I ever considered becoming an RN? I couldn’t believe he was even asking me that, but I heard myself say, “I’ve thought about it, but I’m thinking about applying for a position as a traveling nurse. Fortunately, I’ve got six years’ experience, so I’ll see.”

“Very interesting,” he said. “And how’s that work?” He crossed his legs and was just about to lean back and, I suppose, get comfortable when Tierra came charging outta her bedroom and stood there like she was ready to take off her earrings and put Vaseline on her face and said, “Let’s go,” like she was giving him a direct order or something. He didn’t act like a punk until that very minute.

“I just need to go to the bathroom first.”

She didn’t buy it. Me neither.

“I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said, and he changed his mind and kind of ran after her but not before he turned to me and said, “Nice talking to you, Kim, and good luck in your nursing career. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

As soon as he was out of range, Tierra shut that door and locked him out, then looked at me with those cheap-ass Betty Boop eyelashes and put all her weight on one of those cheap-ass Payless pumps and put her hands on her hips in that tacky-ass Hervé Léger knockoff and said, “I knew you couldn’t be trusted.”

“What did I do?”

“You ain’t have no business talking to my man about yo’ personal shit when I was not in the room.”

“I was trying to be polite since you’re the one who got here late.”

“For somebody you just met, you was awful chummy chummy. What the hell was y’all talking about?”

“He asked me about being a nurse and I just answered his questions.”

“Yeah, and what if I had got here a half hour later? You’d probably be fucking him. You L.A. hoes all alike. My sister warned me but I didn’t listen. I want your ass out of here by the first.”

“You can’t put me out, Tierra. Both of our names happen to be on the lease in case you forgot, so you need to get the fuck over yourself.” And I crossed my arms. Dared the bitch to say another word. She stormed her insecure ass on outta there and slammed the door.

I decide to listen to her voice message: “Kim, this Tierra calling and I just want you to know that you can stay here. All my shit’ll be gone by the time you get home. Sneaky bitch.”

What?

I replay it just to make sure I heard right. It says the same exact thing loud and clear. This means she’s breaking the lease and I can’t afford this apartment by myself and I ain’t about to look for no roommate on craigslist.

I need a nap. I don’t like having too much on my mind, especially when I can’t do a whole lot right then and there to fix it. But if I fall asleep and Mr. Lee wakes up and I don’t hear him and he fall out the damn bed and hurt hisself then this would probably be Endsville for me. And I’ve been on top of things here. That’s funny. But I am not laughing. What I need to do is finish filling out this application for the traveling nurse program because it takes a month for them to let you know if you’ve been accepted. I might be homeless in a few weeks so I decide this might also be a good time to pray. But God can’t pay my rent.

So I watch
The Price Is Right
and don’t win, not even so much as a kitchen appliance, some boring furniture, or a trip to Hawaii. I watch two soap operas and laugh all the way through ’em. I give Mr. Lee his lunch and then decide to just leave the real world altogether, so I dig in my gym bag and pull out my Harry Potter
Sorcerer’s Stone
book. I love all this wizard shit. I wish I could fly. Sometimes I wish I could disappear and reappear and come back as a giraffe. They can see everything, they can eat the highest leaves, they can run fast, and even though they ain’t the cutest of jungle animals, they ain’t violent. I was just thinking about something. If I get into this traveling nurse’s program, I need to stop talking like I’m ghetto, because I know how. And I cuss like a fucking sailor, but mostly in my head when I’m thinking, like now. So I’m going to try to think and talk like I went to nursing school and I paid attention in English class. I can turn off the ghetto talk on a dime, especially when I’m around professional white folks. Black ones, too. Like my employer, Miss Betty.

I’m not feeling too Hogwarty. But happy birthday, Harry. Back at you soon. Right now, I have to figure out the most intelligent manner in which to solve my housing dilemma. See how many extra words that took? What I’m worried about is my credit rating. I am never late with my bills and it took me a while to get it up to 720 but that’s because back in my twenties when I was depressed and didn’t know why, instead of getting high like everybody else I went shopping. Fucked up all my credit cards, and then after I got diagnosed and put on meds I started paying ’em off and now I’m back on track. I might see if I can find me a homosexual. They make good roommates. They for damn sure neat and clean and most of ’em can decorate and you ain’t gotta worry about fucking ’em. I’ma give this some serious thought. I know a lot of homosexuals thanks to my brother being gay, so maybe I should ask him if he knows anybody who wants to live with a quiet, sweet, clean, responsible girl. If necessary, I’ll pretend to be a lesbian if it helps. Hell, this problem might already be solved.

I decide to check on Mr. Lee when I hear those little critters slamming the car door and galloping like Secretariat toward the front door. Would it just kill them to walk? I mean, what’s the big fucking hurry? This is just one more reason why I don’t care for kids. They annoy me. I just pretend to like them in front of their mamas or, in this case, their grandma. I’m wondering how long it’s gon’ take for Miss Betty to go on and get legal custody of ’em, ’cause I’ve heard her daughter be turning it down off Rosecrans and Adams but I always assumed Miss Betty knew her daughter was a crackhead and word on the street is she’ll suck anybody’s dick for a ten-dollar bag. The reason I know this is ’cause I got a couple of relatives down there competing with her and sometimes my granny made my brothers drive down there to look for ’em. They learned the hard way that you can’t save nobody who ain’t interested in being saved.

I can relate to what Miss Betty is going through, ’cause my granny raised me and my two brothers ’cause our mama died of breast cancer when we were little. Our daddy didn’t know what to do with three kids so he left us with our granny, our mama’s mama, moved to Kansas City, got married again, and I heard he had two or three more kids. That’s all we know. That’s all we want to know. Our granny was strict as hell and her middle name was “No!” but we did what she told us to do and things worked in our favor. One of my brothers is an airline mechanic. The other one work for Microsoft.

It should be obvious that I wasn’t no honor roll student in high school. My favorite class was boys. I graduated with a C+ average, and my granny made me look through the catalog at the junior college near our house and told me to pick something out that looked interesting. I picked nursing. So I went through the LVN program only to find out that hospitals and me don’t get along, just like dead people. So here I am. Just your average, everyday caretaker. I like taking care of people who can’t take care of themselves. Sometimes I go a little overboard, but men like Mr. Lee don’t have a whole lot of time left in this world and I feel good sexing them up and I get a little sumthin’-sumthin’ out of the deal myself. It’s a win-win situation and no harm done.

“Hi there, you little cuties!” I say with as much niceness as I can. That older one, Luther (what a horrible name to give to a baby), look like he’s staring at my breasts when he waves but I know I’m not seeing right, ’cause he can’t be no more than seven or eight now. But then when that other one runs on back to his room, and Luther sits on the couch and starts smiling at me, I feel a little uncomfortable because that little son of a bitch is looking right through my top.

“Hi there, Nurse Kim,” Miss Betty says as she walks in with three Mickey D bags in her hand and sets them on the cocktail table.

What I wouldn’t pay for a Filet-O-Fish and some fries about now.

“How’re you doing today? And how’s Lee David?”

Because I like Miss Betty, and she is nice to me, I always try to use my junior college voice with her too, because it’s important to sound like you went to college in front of the people you work for. “I’m good. Mr. Lee is fair to middling. He didn’t have too much to eat today and they might need to step up his meds. But I’m not a doctor. How about you? I see you’ve got the grandkids today.”

“Yes, Lordy,” she says.

She collapses in that La-Z-Boy like it’s her life support. But it’s cheap and the back is lumpy and the noise the massager makes can get on your last nerve. She woulda been better off sitting on the couch if Young Mac Daddy here would beat it, but Luther looks like he’s waiting for the right moment to ask for my hand in marriage. He grabs a pillow and props it behind his short little neck, like he ain’t going nowhere no time soon. Miss Betty leans all the way back in her La-Z-Boy and turns on the massager, but then she jerks like something scared her and sits straight up.

“Lord, it sounds like drums beating, doesn’t it?”

“Yep. Lots of drums,” Luther says.

She presses the lever so the chair is upright and walks over to sit down at the opposite end of the couch from Luther. “Forgive me, Nurse Kim. Luther, you know what Grandma does when she gets home from work and she’s tired and her knees and feet hurt,” she says, not like she’s waiting for him to answer, ’cause no sooner has she said “hurt” than she yanks that sad 1985 pageboy wig off and drops it on the end table. She’s got a fishnet on, and even though I only see a few gray strands around her edges, it looks like Miss Betty got a head full of hair. She needs to throw that damn wig in the trash and go to the beauty shop and let somebody bring her look up to 2001, or just buy a new wig or think about trying a weave. Old people wear weaves, too. Now that I can see her face, Miss Betty ain’t a bad-looking woman for somebody about to be a senior citizen. If she lost about twenty or thirty pounds, she could probably be attractive again. A nice foundation and the right lipstick and maybe get those bushy eyebrows waxed, and she could lose about eight or nine years right there.

She looks over at Luther, who still sitting there looking at me. It’s a little fucking creepy.

“Luther, why don’t you take your and Ricky’s bags and go on in the back to the kitchen and eat it before it gets cold.”

“I ain’t hungry, Grandma.”

Miss Betty cuts her eyes at him and I’m just watching.

“I mean, I’m not hungry, Grandma,” he says.

“You were starving a half hour ago.”

“I have homework, Grandma. I can write, Nurse Kim. You wanna see?”

“I do, but not today, sugar. Nurse Kim needs to finish talking to your grandma and try to beat that rush-hour traffic.”

“I can write fast,” the little fucker says.

“Luther. Say goodbye to Nurse Kim and please do what I just asked you to do.” She picks up those Mickey D bags and hands ’em to him. No drinks?

He still act like it’s killing him to stand up.

“I would love to see how well you can write, Luther, just not today, sweetie. Now, perhaps you should do what your grandma asked like a good little boy.”

He finally jumps up and dashes out of the living room like I pissed him off or something. He’ll get over it. I’m glad Miss Betty told him to beat it, ’cause Lord knows I did not feel like talking to him in my elementary school teacher’s voice another second. I wish I could appreciate what children have to offer but I just don’t see it. I mean, they can be cute and adorable and all that, but some of that sweetness is just a act they put on to pimp their parents so they can get what they want. And it works. All they do is beg. For everything. All the time. They take up too much energy. Your best energy. And they ain’t stupid. They know when you worn out, but they will wake you up from your nap to ask you for a glass of fucking milk. This mess goes on for at least eighteen years. To be fair, I do know that sometimes they can make you proud, but look how long you have to wait to see if you’re going to get a return on your investment. I don’t like the odds.

“Do you eat McDonald’s, Nurse Kim?”

“Every now and then,” I say.

“I have an extra Filet-O-Fish and some fries in there I am not in the mood for. You’re welcome to them, if you’re hungry.”

“Are you sure? You might want to warm it up a little later.”

“Have you ever reheated anything from McDonald’s, honey?”

I shake my head no and reach for the bag and try not to act like my dream came true. “Thank you, Miss Betty.”

She leans over to make sure the boys are doing what they supposed to be doing even though I hear video games and laughing, which mean Luther ain’t doing no homework. Miss Betty look like she got something on her mind and she about to tell me what it is.

“Trinetta’s into some things she shouldn’t be into so I’m keeping the boys here with me until she gets back on her feet. You understand what I’m saying?”