Bad Blood (16 page)

Chapter 30

Rachel

C
OFFEEVILLE WAS SUCH A SMALL TOWN, THERE WAS NO WAY
I could go on about my business and not run into Jeffrey from time to time. It seemed like everywhere I went, there he was. From a distance, I watched as he brazenly romanced the same girl whom I'd caught him in bed with. Each time I saw them together, I got mad as hell. I was afraid that sooner or later I'd snap and commit violence against Jeffrey again.

What bothered me the most was the way Jeffrey had started bashing me to our mutual friends. People told me he was going around saying things like “I had to drop that ignorant bitch” and “She ain't got nothing to offer me, nohow.” I recalled how he used to tell me that it didn't bother him that I lived in a low-rent neighborhood and that my family had so little, but now he was singing a different tune, and that bothered me. I was proud of my family, and it didn't bother me that we didn't live in the upscale neighborhood he lived in. I knew I had a lot to offer in a relationship, and I knew that someday the right man would realize that.

In the meantime, I got a job on the day shift, waiting tables at Jimmie's Soul Food Restaurant. Since it was one of the few black-owned restaurants in town, and they served excellent food, Jeffrey eventually showed up for lunch with Rita. It had been three weeks since I'd attacked him.

“You need to take the next table,” I told Vernell, the other waitress on my shift. “I don't want to go to jail today.”

Vernell knew about my situation with Jeffrey, as did almost everybody else in town, so she didn't ask any questions. She was from my neighborhood, and we'd been friends since elementary school.

“That punk has some nerve stepping up in here with that island monkey! You want to spit in his order before I serve it to him?” Vernell asked, giving me a mischievous wink.

“No, I don't think so. The best thing I can do is stay away from that two-timing bastard. He'll be leaving for college soon,” I replied.

But Jeffrey didn't leave for college that fall. I never found out the reason he didn't, but he started working as a cashier at the same grocery store I shopped in. I didn't want to violate the restraining order, so I had to plan my movements around his. I couldn't go grocery shopping at the market during the hours he worked. I changed churches, and I stopped going every other place I knew he went. Finally, I decided that Coffeeville was not big enough for him and me.

That was the real reason I decided to leave Alabama and move to California to live with Uncle Albert. I quit my job and got another one at a catering company, making a little more money. From the get-go I made it clear to my folks that I was saving my money to move to California, but nobody supported my decision.

“You must be crazy to want to leave this nice home and that good job you got to move to a jungle like California,” my aunt Hattie said.

“And it's a lot more expensive to live out there than it is here,” Mama pointed out.

“I'll have enough money to live on for a while, so I think I'll be just fine until I get a job. Besides, Uncle Albert said I could stay with him for as long as I want to,” I assured them.

I missed Uncle Albert and couldn't wait to see him again. He had always been like a big brother to me, and it had been nice to have a “normal” brother to look up to, one who didn't have mental issues, like my real brother, Ernest. Just thinking about Ernest's condition was painful, and I thought about it all the time.

We had always known that something was wrong with Ernest. He didn't talk until he was three years old. And the first thing he said was that a flying pig had come into his bedroom the night before. He would sit for hours at a time, just staring at the wall. Mama didn't take him to a doctor until he started running through the house, yelling that invisible creatures were chasing him. When the doctor told Mama that Ernest was autistic, it was a word that she had never heard before. Instead of trying to find out more about the condition, she and everybody else in my family just lumped my brother into the same category as retarded people, or people they called “slow.” Ernest was not retarded.

Despite my brother's condition, he was very gifted in some ways. He attended regular school until Mama got tired of trying to get the school staff to stop the other kids from taunting him. Then she began to homeschool him. By the time he was seven, he could read as well as I could. He loved animals, and without any formal training, he trained almost every dog on our block.

Even though Daddy had loved Ernest and had treated him well, after a while he couldn't cope with him the way Mama could. We never knew from one day to the next what Ernest was going to do or say. At the time, my sister, Janet, was in preschool, but she had begun to act strangely, too. But her mood swings, outbursts, and blank stares didn't seem as serious as Ernest's problems, so she didn't get the attention she needed until it was too late. By then she was what some people referred to as “mad as a hatter.” After a while, Daddy couldn't hide his frustration. The burden of having two mentally challenged children was too much for him. He began to spend most of his time at work cleaning the courthouse or with one of the women he had started fooling around with.

When Janet turned five, things got really bad. It didn't take long for us to realize her problems were just as serious as the ones Ernest had, maybe even more so. She was as cute as a button, but other kids avoided her because she did things that frightened them. She would stare off into space for hours at a time, and she would carry on conversations with animals. When Janet was six, she began to complain about invisible people whispering in her ear. Mama didn't wait as long to take her to a doctor as she had done with Ernest. The first doctor she went to told her that Janet was bipolar and paranoid schizophrenic, more words that my mother had never heard before. When the doctor told Mama what to expect Janet to do, hallucinate and maybe even get violent, my mother got her tubes tied a month later because she didn't want to take a chance on having another child with special needs. But that was like locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. Daddy's married lover's husband shot and killed him the same evening Mama came home from the hospital.

A few days after Daddy's funeral, Aunt Hattie barged into our house, clucking and complaining like a wet hen. She vented for over an hour. She had always “known” that some old gal's husband was going to kill Daddy, and if she had ever gotten “proof” that her long-suffering husband, Marty, had cheated on her before he died, she would have killed him herself.

On this particular day, Mama and Aunt Hattie sat talking like fishwives, totally ignoring me as I sat at the kitchen table, helping them make a quilt for Ernest's bed.

“I'm glad I got myself fixed. If I ever get married again, I don't want to bring no more kids into this world that'll have to be looked after as long as they live,” Mama stated.

Aunt Hattie took the conversation and ran with it. “Harrumph! That's why I'm glad I couldn't get pregnant again after my baby died all them years ago. Our family is cursed with all kinds of brain disorders. I know you ain't forgot how Daddy used to get naked and run up and down the street when we was kids. And what about Cousin Nadine's boy, Rollo? Last time I went to visit him in that military institution they put him in years ago, he told me he couldn't wait to get out so he could go to a mall and kill a few folks and go down in history.”

That was how I found out that various forms of mental illness ran in our family. I didn't even bother to ask any questions. What I had already heard was painful enough. Ironically, I still wanted to have children someday. I remained quiet as we continued to work on the quilt.

“Well, I'm glad I did have children, anyway. Ernest is a good boy when he's medicated, and I know that with God's help and the right meds, Janet will be just fine,” Mama said. “And look at how well Rachel turned out.”

“Harrumph!” Aunt Hattie said again. “Rachel's weak and naive. I bet she's going to marry some knucklehead who'll make a fool out of her, like Marcus done to you.”

That was when I finally spoke up. “Y'all don't have to worry about me. I'm not going to let a man make a fool out of me,” I vowed. I made up my mind that day that I would not let a man cheat on me and get away with it. “And if I do have children with special needs, I don't care. There is not one perfect person on this planet right now, and there won't be until Jesus comes back.” My last statement shut Mama and Aunt Hattie up. We finished making the quilt in silence.

I really didn't care if I had children with special needs. As far as I was concerned,
everybody
had special needs. Some more than others. My siblings just happened to be among the “others.” I didn't love them any less, though.

After a while, Mama began to refer to Ernest and Janet as “still being worked on by God,” and I felt the same way. I didn't balk when she asked me to stay home and babysit them when she needed to leave the house, or when she asked me to take one or both of them out for a walk. I didn't even protest the day Ernest got hysterical and took off running down the street because some jackass had tossed a firecracker in front of us. It took me, Mama, a small army of neighborhood do-gooders, and Aunt Hattie several hours to track him down and bring him back home. A few hours later, I took a baseball bat and hunted down the boy who had tossed that firecracker. I had every intention of laying his head open with that baseball bat. But when he started crying and apologizing, I let him off the hook.

“Mama, I think you need to start thinking about putting Ernest in some kind of home,” I said after we had calmed Ernest down and had put him to bed.

“The boy is ‘in some kind of home,'” Mama defended. “This house is his home just as much as it is yours. If you don't like what goes on in my house, you can either lump it or move out. And, in case you done forgot, Ernest ain't the only ‘boy' in this family with special needs. There is no telling what all Albert is into out there in that Babylon they call California with all them sissies.”

What I was never able to understand was why some folks, especially my family, thought that mental problems were acceptable but being gay was such a blight. It made no sense to me.

“I'm going to pray for Albert and for you, too,” Mama told me. “If you do move to California, don't you eat nothing Albert or one of his boyfriends cook. You don't know where their hands been.”

The day I boarded the plane was one of the most exciting days of my life. Uncle Albert had already arranged to take the day off from work so he could pick me up at the airport in San Francisco and drive me to his apartment in Berkeley.

The moment I set foot on California soil, I felt like I had been reborn.

Chapter 31

Rachel

A
S SOON AS
I
GOT SETTLED INTO MY NEW LOCATION,
U
NCLE
A
LBERT
taught me how to use a lot of different software, so I had no trouble landing temp office jobs. I made a lot of new friends right away, and before long I was enjoying my life again.

I didn't do much socializing. I joined my new friends for drinks after work every once in a while, but my main focus was on my future. I dated a few guys along the way, but I made sure they all knew I was not interested in anything too serious at the time. Most of the men didn't have a problem with that as long as they got what they wanted, which was a little company that included sex now and then. That was the extent of my “love life.”

I took a twelve-week business course at a community college in nearby Oakland, and a week after I completed it, I landed a permanent job as the assistant bookkeeper at Steele-Royce, a private school in one of Berkeley's most prestigious areas. It was a job to die for. The midsize white stucco building had all the luxuries that money could buy, and these included state-of-the-art furniture and electronic equipment, and an indoor swimming pool. I even had an office all to myself. There were only two hundred seventh- and eighth-grade students, all from prominent families, including those of a few local celebrities. Some of the kids came to school in chauffeur-driven limousines. My salary and benefits were incredible, so I counted my blessings every day.

Lucy had been the head librarian at the school for a couple of years and the only black employee, other than one of the janitors. We were both in our twenties, so we hit it off immediately and quickly became best friends.

I was still living with Uncle Albert at the time, and even though he kept telling me I could stay as long as I wanted, I was anxious to move into a place of my own. For one thing, my uncle partied too much for me. Every other night he had company. Sometimes up to a dozen men at a time, including a drag queen who performed in one of the clubs in San Francisco that Uncle Albert often went to.

Lucy had a friend who managed a couple of apartment buildings, so she was able to help me move into the two-bedroom, second-floor apartment with a balcony on College Avenue. As soon as I got settled in, with cute furniture and trendy knickknacks that I'd picked up at secondhand stores and flea markets, Lucy and some of her friends began to try to hook me up with their single male friends. Even though it had been more than two years since my fiasco with Jeffrey, I was still somewhat gun-shy. I had told my friends about Jeffrey and what he had done to me. I'd even told them what I'd done to him.

“Too bad you didn't hit him where it would have hurt the most—his crotch.” Lucy laughed.

Lucy, Paulette Ramsey, who was one of her closest friends, and I were having drinks at a bar in downtown Oakland, where Paulette worked as a personnel manager for a small insurance company.

“My cousin Bobby just got a divorce, and he likes to party. If I was still single, I'd go after him myself,” Paulette said.

“Thanks, but no thanks.” I chuckled.

“Girl, you need to forget about dude back in Alabama and get on with your life and get you some new meat,” Lucy scolded.

“I am over him,” I insisted. “And I do want to meet somebody special. But I'm in no hurry to taste any new meat.” It had been several weeks since I'd met and lost Matthew Bruner, the parole officer I'd had such high hopes for.

Lucy was the kind of woman who didn't take no for an answer. She continued to try to set me up with men she knew. And I began to weaken. When Lucy finally told me about Seth Garrett, I was only slightly interested in meeting him, and I didn't get my hopes up. But the more she talked about him, the better he sounded.

“Not only is he fine, but he's from a fine family, too. And I don't just mean in the looks department. His daddy, his brothers, and one of his aunts are lawyers. They live in this huge house in the hills,” she gushed.

“Oh? Why would a man with all that going for him want to meet a little old country girl like
me?
”

“I have to be up front and let you know that Seth has a little bit of baggage. He has a son by some hoochie mama who moved to L.A. a while back. She's about as wretched as they come. That heifer has such a long reach, she's still making his life a living hell, so he spends a lot of time down in the dumps. Especially lately. He's a real cutie-pie, but he's not as smart or ambitious as his brothers. He didn't even finish high school, but he eventually got his GED and is supposedly taking some kind of business class and working a pooh-butt job in a cannery, of all places. ”

“The dude is a high school dropout who works in a cannery,” I mused. “And you want to dump this loser off on me?” I couldn't stop myself from laughing.

“Seth is going to run his own ad agency someday. He's working toward a real future. He goes to church occasionally, and he's good to his mama. A man who treats his mama well usually treats his women well. Besides all that, I've already told him about you. If you don't agree to meet him, it'll make me look bad. I think he really needs a strong, smart, hardworking, sensible woman like you to help him stay afloat. . . .”

“Help him stay afloat? That doesn't sound too appealing to me. I hope you didn't make him think I was looking for a man to take care of. The last thing I need is a man who needs a mama, or a nursemaid, more than he needs a lover.”

“Girl, please! Do you want to meet the man or not?”

“I'll meet him, but I'm letting you know now, I am not going to jump into anything with him anytime soon. Especially bed . . .”

“That's good enough for me. Now, how about this Sunday? He'll be attending church with his parents. I've already checked with him.”

“I guess that's as good a time as any. But I'm telling you right now that if this Seth Garrett turns out to be another criminal like Skirt or looks like Godzilla, I'm holding you responsible.” I laughed again.

I didn't laugh when I met Seth and his parents that Sunday in church. There was something about him that made me tingle all over.

After our first date, we immediately began to spend several nights a week together. I got so attached to him, I didn't want him out of my sight.

A year into our relationship, I asked Seth to move in with me.

Uncle Albert adored Seth, and the feeling was mutual. Seth had even accompanied me to a few parties at Uncle Albert's new residence. Uncle Albert had recently moved in with Kingston Takahashi, a small-framed, baby-faced Japanese American man in his early thirties, with shoulder-length black hair and lots of attitude. Kingston's family owned several upscale restaurants in Japan, Singapore, and San Francisco. Once again my greedy, free-spirited uncle was being showered with gifts and treated like a prince by a man of means.

One Saturday night a few weeks after Seth moved in with me, he and I had dinner with my uncle and his new lover. While Seth was in the living room with Kingston, admiring some of the artwork he had picked up on his last trip to Japan, Uncle Albert and I were in the elaborate master bedroom in their three-bedroom apartment a few blocks from UC Berkeley, where Kingston was a professor of political science.

“Girl, you've struck black gold,” Uncle Albert whispered. “I used to read in the newspaper about Seth's daddy and all the high-profile cases he'd won over the years before he retired. The Garretts might not be as rich as some of the other families in their neighborhood, but they've got more than me and you. Get what you can while the getting is good,” Uncle Albert advised me. “Milk that cash cow dry.”

I gave my uncle a dismissive wave. “I don't want to ‘milk that cash cow' or any other cow. I can take care of myself without a man footing my bills,” I said firmly.

“What's wrong with you, girl? These days, you have to take somebody before they take you. This is America, the land of opportunity, where any and everybody is out for all they can get. How do you think I got where I am today?”

“Yeah, but that man who was taking care of you back in Alabama was not too happy with you when you snuck off and left him with a bunch of humongous bills.”

“So? He got what he wanted from me. I'm still getting what I want from my men. I've got money in the bank, credit cards I don't even have to pay for, a generous allowance, and I live in a pad that most people would kill for. I couldn't have done all this by myself on my pooh-butt secretary salary.”

I shook my head. “I would never take advantage of Seth like that. Or any other man, for that matter. If you'd stop eating steak and lobster three times a week and shopping at Neiman Marcus, you could do all right by yourself.”

“Hell's bells, girl! You and your Dollar Tree–shopping, buy-one-get-one-free, coupon-clipping self. You're going to have a miserable life if you don't wake up and smell the bubbly, girl. You straight people sure have some warped ideas when it comes to love, romance, and finances.”

I had already decided that I would never let my uncle know that I was the one footing most of the bills for me and Seth. I didn't mind being generous with my money, because I truly believed that Seth was a good investment in my future.