The Company We Keep. Mary Monroe

off on his grandmother when he was thirteen for her to finish raising. And that old hag had beat the shit out of him more than his mother. When his mother came to visit, she and her mother took turns beating his ass for one thing or another—masturbating, torturing animals, and trying to look under girls’ dresses. As far as he was concerned, his only crime was just being a boy and doing what all his male friends did. All three of his sisters were bitches on wheels, and the one six-year-old daughter he had, whom Nicole didn’t know about, was already walking around with an attitude, rotating her little neck and rolling her eyes. Black women were more trouble than they were worth. No wonder they couldn’t keep their men out of the white woman’s bed. But he wasn’t into white women, thank God. They’d gotten so big for their britches lately that, as far as he was concerned, Asian women were the only ones worth a man’s time anymore. Shit.

      Nicole let out a heavy sigh from the bathroom, leaning toward the slightly ajar door so she could hear and see what was going on in the living room.

      “Hey, chief! How’re you doing?” Greg yelled, coughing some more. He rolled his eyes at Nicole as she exited the bathroom and strutted into the living room, straightening magazines on the coffee table and rearranging chairs as she moved. “Don’t you ever cook anything but cabbage, greens, and neck bones? This place smells like an outhouse, as usual,” he said with a sneer.

      “Hello, Greg,” Nicole said, sounding as cordial as her temper would allow. She wanted to stomp his smug face into the ground for the way he had disrespected her residence and the way he was looking at her. From the look of contempt on his face and the way he treated her these days, you would have thought that it had been she, not he, who had ruined their marriage by sleeping with every Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Filipino woman in the area. He was now married to a Korean woman, and they had a two-year-old daughter who Greg treated like gold. “From the looks of things, seems like it’s time for you to replace your toupee,” Nicole remarked, talking out the side of her mouth. She knew damn well that all the hair on Greg’s head was his. But he should have known better than to insult her because she was the one person who knew what button to push to piss him off. She knew that his hair was and had always been a sensitive issue with him. Just like hers was with her, thanks to him. He knew from his premature receding hairline, and the bald spots on the back of his head, that he’d be completely bald by the time he turned forty, just like his father and all the men on his father’s side. He ignored her comment.

      Greg smoothed back his hair with his hand again. He blinked hard and chewed on his bottom lip to keep from saying something else to Nicole that would set her off. He had come to believe that black women were like land mines, just waiting to explode and destroy or disfigure their men. Was it any wonder that there were so many black men walking around with no balls?

      “You ready to go, chief?” Greg asked his son, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and sliding his hands in and out of his pockets. He wanted to leave. There was no doubt in Nicole’s mind that this was the last place he wanted to be. And it was the last place she wanted him to be, too.

      “Almost, Daddy. I have to find my Transformer first,” Chris replied.

      Nicole was glad she still had a slight buzz. Had she not been so mellow, there was no telling what else she might have said, or done, to Greg. To keep from saying or doing something crazy anyway, she went to the bedroom to look for Chris’s toy. “You’re two hours late,” she told Greg, talking with her back to him.

      “Kim Loo had a few errands for me,” he responded, entering the bedroom like it was still his. He didn’t even try to hide his exasperation. Neither did Nicole.

      “As usual,” Nicole replied. “The new wifey needs you to play houseboy, so your son comes last.”

      “I am surprised you can find anything in this mess,” Greg remarked, looking around with disgust at the messy room. With the tips of two fingers, he lifted a week-old newspaper from the nightstand next to an empty pizza box. He shook his head and mumbled profanities.

      “And while we are on the subject of being late, you are two months late with the support payments,” Nicole reminded him, with her arms folded.

      “I found it!” Chris yelled from the living room, grabbing his bulging Spider-Man backpack from the coat hook by the door.

      “Good. Let’s get up out of here!” Greg hollered, purposely ignoring Nicole’s last comment. He shook his head some more, waved his hands in the air, and spun around so fast he almost fell trying to get back to the living room in a hurry. He wasted no time opening the front door. But before he could usher his son out, Chris held his arms out to his mother for a good-bye hug.

      “Have fun, little man. I’ll see you tomorrow night,” Nicole told Chris, covering his cheek with hungry little kisses.

      “Come on, Mom,” Chris whined, embarrassed. “I don’t want to keep Daddy waiting.”

      “I don’t want him to wait either, son,” Nicole said with a smirk. “And I hope he doesn’t keep us waiting, either.”

      “The check is in the mail, woman,” Greg snapped, slamming the door behind him as he scurried out.

      CHAPTER 4

      It had been an hour since Teri had spoken with Nicole. While Nicole was still in her apartment stewing over her latest face-off with her ex-husband and trying to decide what to wear, Teri was still at the office, stomping out fires with both feet.

      “Look, Paul, I have to get back to the other line. I am trying to finalize some arrangements for one of our artists. One of our A-list stars,” she said proudly. “I’ve been playing phone tag with his tour promoter for days, so I really need to take his call. I promise we’ll talk later in the New Year.” She didn’t wait for a response from Paul Bailey, the high-strung realtor she’d met at a party a month ago. Since he couldn’t get her to go out with him, he was determined to sell her a new condo. She clicked back to the other line. However, before she could announce that she was back, she heard the loudmouth tour promoter, Ronnie Thigpen, complaining about the fact that she was involved in the tour arrangements for one of his most important clients. The tour that she was so committed to. That punk!

      Teri held her breath as she listened. “That uppity bitch is with the fucking record company, not the artist. Young Rahim is the artist. Compared to him, she ain’t nobody! I don’t know why, but he trusts that woman to make sure all the details are correct. Why? There is no reason in the world we need her help! Hold the line a minute, man. Let me get my beer.”

      Ronnie had recently recovered from throat cancer, and it had taken three surgeries to save his voice. However, he would sound severely hoarse until the day he died. Under normal circumstances, Teri would have felt sorry for a person who had to live with such a condition. But in Ron’s case, his voice was particularly irritating because of the harsh words coming out of his mouth about her. She bristled but managed to remain composed as he continued.

      “We’ve got our own people that can get the job done.” He paused again to take a long, loud drink from his beer can. Then he belched, coughed, and sneezed for almost a full minute. “Excuse me! That shit went down my windpipe. Anyway, how hard is it to hook up a goddamn tour, anyway? That bubble-butt heifer likes to meddle as much as she can just so she can get more money. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear she was kissing Rahim where the sun don’t shine. Either that or he’s heard how she can suck a mean dick and wants to get him a few blow jobs before he goes on his tour this summer. Ha! If it was up to me, I’d tell her to kiss my black ass and bark at my asshole!”

      Teri exhaled quietly. She had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing; she wondered what Ronnie would say if he knew that she hadn’t even seen a dick in six months, let alone sucked one.

      If there was one thing she couldn’t stand it was having somebody disrespect her, even when it wasn’t to her face. But since it was the holiday season and she was planning to get loose before the night was over, she let Ronnie slide this time.

      She cleared her throat to make sure she could be heard. Without hesitation,