Nasty (8 page)

Pops was a good man though. The best man. Together they had raised three boys. Three men now. Tarik and Carlos were successfully running their record company. Their youngest, Jonathan, was on a clear path toward academic success and basketball fame. She wished Pops had hung around longer to see the fruits of their labor.

After taking a quick shower, Ophelia rushed home to prepare a big welcome-home dinner. Tonight her boys were coming to celebrate Jonathan’s return from prep school.

Tarik and his family were the first to arrive. His wife, Sherry, led the way, carrying a macaroni and cheese casserole. She set it down on the kitchen counter and gave Ophelia a warm hug.

“Mama Ophelia, I followed your directions. I didn’t put as much butter or cheese, like I did the last time, even though I know it won’t taste as good. But I did what you said.”

Ophelia liked her daughter-in-law. She was a tough, sharp-talking straight shooter that was strong enough to handle Tarik and keep him in line. She also knew it wasn’t easy for Sherry to change her favorite recipe, so she complimented her and said, “Good. Good, and I’m telling you, it’ll be just as delicious.”

A four-year-old speeding bullet named Javon ran smack into his grandmother’s arms. She lifted him up in one swoop and hugged him. “And how’s Grandma’s baby doing?”

“I lost my tooth in the car and Poppi said you knew this fairy, and…”

Ophelia kissed the grandson who had stolen her heart the first time Tarik had introduced him to the family over two years ago.

Whispering in his ears, she promised, “Javon, after dinner, I’ll get in contact with my buddy.” She winked at him and added, “The Tooth Fairy and I are good friends.”

Javon smiled; he knew she wouldn’t disappoint him. He had Mama Ophelia twisted all around his little brown finger.

“Hi, Ma. How’s my best girl doing today?” Tarik gave Ophelia a quick peck on her cheek, and headed directly for the refrigerator. He opened the door and dug around, rummaging for food. He pulled out a roasted chicken leg and happily announced, “This’ll hold me ’til dinner.”

She looked at her fine son as he devoured the meat. She trembled when it hit her.
My God! He looks just like…just like…Eli,
she thought. She had never realized how much Tarik resembled her first husband. It was those dreadlocks he had started growing a year ago. They were now covering his head, just like Eli’s had.

“Ma, what’s wrong? If you want me to put the chicken back in the fridge…”

“No…no…eat…eat…don’t mind me…I had a…had a senior moment.”

Now that she allowed herself to think about Eli, she had to confess that Tarik shared more than his looks. Like Eli, Tarik was artistic, spiritual, peaceful; a gentle soul. Pops, before he reached four hundred pounds, had tried to “toughen up” Tarik and had taken him hunting and fishing. But the boy had never taken to Pops’ ways.

Tarik hated guns and violence of all kinds. They did find a way to bond, in that Pops recognized early that they both shared a love of music. A gifted pianist, Pops had taught the young boy all he knew about the instrument. Despite some of their differences, their relationship had been tighter than a drum.

Seeing Tarik’s resemblance to his biological father wasn’t the only thing that had upset her lately. Instead of entertaining fond memories of her late husband, Ophelia’s dreams now included scenes of the years she had shared with Eli. They were disturbingly erotic, loving images of the man she had made sure Tarik would never know.

It didn’t help that in his last years of their relationship, Pops was so out of shape that his performance in bed was just plain unappealing. She faked headaches so she could miss having his fat, sweaty body pounce her for the two seconds he could keep his dick hard. Even in the beginning of the marriage, Pops never did rock her world. She had left the man who could do that. Eli’s worthless ass absolutely excelled in the bedroom, and that’s what her dreams were now all about.

“Hey, Mama Ophelia, I brought you a gift!” Carlos yelled out as he entered the kitchen. His voice snatched her away from her intense thoughts about Eli. She looked up and saw the person she had been waiting all day to see. At last, her seven-foot baby boy, Jonathan, was home. She called everybody to the dining room. It was time to eat.

“Mama Ophelia, you gonna spoil that boy!” warned Sherry.

Ophelia paid no mind to her unsolicited critique. She hadn’t seen her boy since he graduated from high school a few weeks ago.

She piled mountains of macaroni and cheese, smothered chicken, and mashed candied yams, all of Jonathan’s favorites, on his plate. He encouraged her. “Yeah, Ma, that’s the way to put food on the plate.”

“How come he doesn’t get the ‘portion control’ speech?” inquired Tarik. He yelled down at the other end of the table at Carlos, “Hey, brother man, how you like being pushed aside by the baby now?”

Barely coming up for air as he tore up a juicy barbecue rib, Carlos sputtered out, “Long as I get
my
share, I don’t care.”

Ophelia laughed at her boys. But they were absolutely right; she was doting on her baby. She looked at him across the table as grease from the chicken dripped all over his white T-shirt. Jonathan’s dark skin, brown eyes draped by notoriously thick black lashes, and an easy smile that lit her world up like the Rockefeller Plaza Christmas tree in New York City made him quite a handsome young man.

Ophelia had missed Jonathan more than usual and worried about him being so far away from the family. Sometimes at night, she’d wake up, her heart fluttering, wondering how he was, afraid that something dreadful had happened to him or that he had gotten himself into some kind of trouble. She’d always call him, no matter what time it was, simply to hear his voice.

Looking at him, laughing and joking with his brothers, she realized her mind was working overtime. Jonathan was a fine young man and had never done anything to make her think he wouldn’t act correctly. How could she worry about a young man who was an active member of a Christian youth group that was
determined not to engage in premarital sex? He was saving himself for marriage. She was so proud of him. Looking at him, trying to wipe the grease spots off his shirt, she decided not to spend another moment worrying about her boy.

After the meal, Carlos came into the kitchen carrying a pile of dishes. She smiled. “You didn’t have to do that, baby.”

Stacking the dishes in the sink, he said, “You know how I like working in the kitchen with you. But uh…ruh…I can’t stay to wash…I have some work to do…but I uh…”

She playfully pushed him away from the sink and started prepping for the dishwasher. “You don’t fool me one minute. You’re going out with one of your girlfriends!” Seeing that she had him dead to right, she added, “Which one is it tonight? Hmmm?”

“Let’s see. If today is Tuesday and tomorrow is Wednesday, I should be with…”

Concerned by his admission, Ophelia warned, “It’s not nice or
healthy
to be with too many different woman and you do know what I mean by
healthy
, don’t you?”

“Yes, I
do
, and I always protect myself. Besides, it’s easier to have lots of women ’stead of just one.”

“How the hell you figure that?”

“One girl demands all your time. When they know they’re part of a harem, they’re happy to get a few seconds with King Carlos.” He winked at Ophelia.

She shook her head and pointed her finger in his face, trying not to laugh at his bodacious bragging.

“One day, boy, with God as my witness, you will find the one who will make you lose your mind. Mark my words, young man.”

He leaned over and gave her a hug. “T’aint a woman alive could make me lose my mind. I got control of all of this.”

Carlos performed a little moonwalk dance, and exited out the kitchen, all the while waving his hand at Ophelia. She laughed so loud and hard she had to hold her belly to keep it from bursting. Ever since he was a boy, he could always make her laugh. It was his humor that had captured her heart so many years ago.

As she placed dishes in the washer, Ophelia’s mind drifted back to the time when she had given birth to Jonathan. Pops received a call from the Miami police in the middle of night. His twin sister, Ernestine, had been shot and killed by her husband, Hector Salinas. When the police had cornered him in the couple’s home, they had begged Hector, a highly decorated police officer, to release their seven-year-old son, Carlos. Instead, he had turned the gun on himself and blown his brains out.

She and Pops decided, on the spot, that they would raise his sister’s only child. Money wasn’t a problem. They could afford it. He owned a successful architectural firm and she was a nurse practitioner, adding one more person to their family would not be a problem.

Expecting to see a depressed, solemn, withdrawn seven-yearold boy who had witnessed an atrocious event, she had insisted they schedule him for counseling. Pops disagreed. Though he was a well-educated architect, trained at Tuskegee and Georgia Tech, Pops didn’t trust mental health professionals. He thought lots of love and attention would be all Carlos needed. If that didn’t work, he promised he’d personally take him to the shrink. Ophelia wanted to push the issue, but she was so busy raising Tarik and her new baby, Jonathan that she didn’t have time to fight Pops.

Ophelia didn’t have anything to worry about. Right from the start, Carlos did appear to be a well-adjusted boy. With the exception of an almost pathological aversion to ice cream, the
handsome little boy had shown no signs of mental instability. He had excelled in school and easily made friends. When they adopted him a year after he arrived, it was as if he had been in the family all along.

The only time he seemed to have trouble with his past, was the day they were looking at Pops’ old home movies. Carlos was fifteen years old. Pops popped in a reel that turned out to be footage of Carlos’s parents’ wedding. Before Pops had a chance to pull the plug, Carlos was confronted with scenes of a happier time for his parents. Tarik, not knowing who the people were in the film, innocently commented that the groom looked a lot like Carlos. Obviously upset, Carlos immediately got up and ran out the room.

And Tarik was right. Carlos was the chocolate version of his Cuban father. It was a resemblance that proved too much for the teenager. The next day when he returned from school, Carlos had cut off all of his curly black hair. In his ear was a tiny diamond stud that had belonged to his mother. He had found it next to her body the day she was murdered.

From that day on, he wore a clean-shaven head and always had his mother’s earring in his left ear. He obviously wanted no connection to Hector Salinas. She remembered asking him, then, if he wanted to talk to her or a counselor about his parents. He refused. Wise beyond his years, he remarked that what had happened in the past was behind him. The only thing that mattered, according to Carlos, was now, and he was fine with that. Ophelia left the door open for him to talk about it anytime he wanted to, but in the ten years that followed, he had never once approached the subject of his parents with her.

And it was funny. After seeing Tarik’s resemblance to Eli, she truly knew how Carlos felt about not wanting to look like or
share any trait or behavior with Hector Salinas. She wished to hell that she could erase Tarik’s connection to his father…just like Carlos had hoped shaving his head would destroy his dad’s memory.

Ophelia went to bed early that night, looking for a way to sever thoughts of Eli out of her mind. Instead, her dreams betrayed her. A healthy, fit Eli greeted her in her subconscious mind and made sweet love to her all night long.

“Y ou lying! You ain’t never had no pussy?” Carlos stared up at his little brother with horror and disbelief. “You’re a basketball star. I know the babes are throwing it up at you. Don’t tell me you’re turning shit down. Not my baby brother.”

Defending his virtue, Jonathan bragged, “When you’re truly in love, kissing is” Visions of his last wet dream flashed through his mind. He added half-heartedly, “Kissing and holding hands is…is special enough!”

Carlos really lost it then. “You mean to tell me that, at eighteen years old, you don’t even know what it smells like? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“There’s...there’s nothing wrong with me.”

Ignoring Jonathan’s claims, Carlos paced back and forth, trying to make sense of what he knew was a senseless situation. He stopped abruptly and faced Jonathan. “I know what it is. Something’s wrong with your equipment. That sports injury you had two years ago. Fucked you up. Right, man?” Carlos desperately searched Jonathan’s face for an answer. He was truly concerned. Never had any pussy. He couldn’t fathom it. Not in a million years.

“
Feeling he hadn’t handled his position adequately, Jonathan looked Carlos in the eye. “Everybody is not like you, Carlos. In my church group, we’re taught that love is…”

“I know…I know…it’s
special
. You already told me that before. Boy, you better get that pole of yours good and greased before it breaks off. You do know what they say?” Jonathan shook his head no. Carlos warned him. “If you don’t use it, you sure ’nuff gonna lose it.”

Jonathan nervously picked up his ball and twirled it on its axis. “There’s plenty other things a man can do…like…”

“Jerking off? Shit, all that beating your own meat unnecessarily cuts off oxygen from your balls. Causes all kind of diseases. Makes you sterile.”

Jonathan looked at him with an air of disbelief.

“Carlos, you know that’s not true.”

Carlos would not back down. “I know because I read it in a book.”

“You’re a crazy man.”

“I’m crazy? Shit, you better let one of these freaks at least give you a blow job while you’re here.”

Jonathan looked up at him with an innocent “what does that feel like” look.

“Don’t tell me none of those cheerleaders ever went down on you?”

Carlos had successfully worn him down. His own frustration with the girls he dated in his church group and their ultrastrict “no-touch” policy made him drop his head and avoid all eye contact with Carlos.