Borrow Trouble. Mary Monroe

balled his fist and socked the steering wheel as he glared at me. Saliva was oozing from the corners of his mouth. “Look, woman, that’s one place you don’t go unless you go with me!”

      “You can’t tell me where I can go and where I can’t go, Mr. Man. I don’t tell you where to go,” I shouted, giving him the most incredulous look I could manage. “If Inez and other women can go there without their men, so can I. And if you can’t give me one good reason why I shouldn’t, you can just shut the fuck up.”

      “I’ll give you a damn good reason—I can’t trust you!”

      My mouth dropped open. “What? What have I done to make you think you can’t trust me?” I glared at Leon’s head, wanting to slap it on both sides. “I don’t cheat!”

      “The hell you don’t!” he guffawed. “Is that what you told my man Robbie? If I recall, you were still engaged to marry him when I met you. We had quite a few dates before you broke it off with him. Did you forget all of that?”

      “That was different,” I said slowly, my head spinning. “I…I didn’t feel the same way about him that I feel about you. I wouldn’t cheat on you.”

      “And I am supposed to believe you?”

      “You should believe me. I believe you when you tell me something.”

      We were silent for the rest of the way to Mama’s house.

      “Why y’all both looking like undertakers?” Mama asked as soon as we got inside. There was an amused look on her face.

      “I don’t feel well,” I muttered, tossing my jacket onto the plaid sofa, next to my sister Frankie’s lap, in Mama’s neat little living room.

      Leon remained silent and went straight to the liquor cabinet.

      Frankie lifted my jacket with a flyswatter and inspected it with a sniff. With a giggle and a slight frown, she tossed it aside. “I don’t like most of the mammy-made stuff you wear, but can I have that see-through blouse Inez brought you back from Jamaica?” Frankie asked, her eyes on the television in front of her. My sister was thirteen now and really into BET, MTV, and any other station where she could watch music videos. As much as she got on my nerves, I loved my sister more than words could say. Like Inez, I knew I could count on this nitwit when I needed her.

      “No!” I snapped, flopping down hard next to her. I gave my kid sister a playful tap on her head, and then I grabbed a handful of her neatly braided hair.

      “Leon must not be giving you any,” Frankie teased, saying it low enough so that I was the only one who heard it.

      “Girl, you need to slow down,” I advised, shaking a finger in her face.

      Leon sat down on the wobbly bamboo chair across from us.

      “Don’t y’all get too comfortable. I got a pot roast in the oven, a pot of pinto beans on the stove, and a gallon of lemonade in the icebox,” Mama said, coming into the living room, wiping her hands on her plaid apron. She still had on the white usher’s uniform that she’d worn to church. “Leon, I am so glad to have you in the family. I thank the good Lord that I don’t have to worry about my baby spending too much of her time with a jezebel like Inez now.” Mama let out a disgusted sigh before she started fanning her face with the tail of her apron.

      “Inez is not a jezebel, Mama,” I said, with conviction, looking at Leon to see his reaction. “Is she, baby?”

      “She’s all right, I guess,” he mumbled, picking up the latest copy of Ebony off of the coffee table. “Mama, remind me to take a look at your dishwasher before we leave.” I had learned how to tell when Leon was nervous. He would scratch his head a lot and do annoying things, like tap his knuckles on the coffee table. He was doing both now.

      “Leon tells me that Inez has got herself a new man,” I added, my eyes still on him.

      “Already? Didn’t she just get a divorce from her third husband?” Frankie laughed. “That sister gets around like a loose wheel! I hope she’s using some protection. Me, if I was a man, I wouldn’t touch her with a flagpole.”

      “Frankie, did you finish all your homework?” Mama asked, shaking her head.

      “Yes, ma’am,” Frankie mumbled, her head bowed submissively. Then she sucked in her breath, sprang from the sofa, and galloped across the floor to the telephone on the stand by the doorway. “Speaking of Inez, she told me to call her up, and she’d make me an appointment to do my nails for free. I’m going to baby-sit for her this weekend,” Frankie announced, with a huge smile, as she dialed Inez’s number.

      “Let me speak to her before you hang up,” I said. Leon shot me a hot look, and then he promptly started scratching his head some more. With all of the nervous scratching that he had been doing lately, I was surprised that his head didn’t have holes in it by now.

      I was glad when Frankie handed the telephone to me.

      “Hey, Inez. I’ll be by the shop tomorrow after work if you’re going to be there,” I started.

      “Sounds good to me. What’s up?” Inez said in a voice that was exceptionally cheerful, even for her.

      “You tell me.”

      “That’s what I want you to do,” Inez insisted, with a laugh.

      “For one thing, I want to hear about your new friend,” I said, choosing my words carefully. Even though I was Inez’s best friend, she would cuss me out and tell me to mind my own business as quickly as she would anybody else. I softened my voice, making it sound like I was only casually curious, not straight-up nosy. “Uh, Leon told me he saw you with him at the Victory Club the other night.”

      “He’s the one.” Inez sighed.

      “Ok. He’s the one what?”

      “He’s the man I’ve been looking for all my life, I think. He’s from the Middle East and looks like a young Omar Sharif. His daddy’s a sheik—I looked him up on the Internet—and he’s worth a couple hundred million dollars,” Inez told me. The way she was swooning, you would have thought that she’d reeled in Lawrence of Arabia. “His name is Hassan Hassan. Isn’t that an intriguing name?”

      “Uh-huh. Like Sirhan Sirhan.” I sighed.

      “Who?”

      “Bobby Kennedy’s assassin. He was from the Middle East, too,” I chided.

      “Don’t you start,” Inez warned, with a gentle laugh. “And whatever you do, don’t make any remarks about him being a terrorist, or any of the rest of that shit that everybody thinks every man from the Middle East is involved in. Mama almost had a cow when she found out that Hassan’s from Iran. ‘I didn’t raise my girl to sleep with the enemy’, she told me. And right in front of Reverend Beauchamp. You should have seen the look on his face!” Inez laughed again, so I knew she was not the least bit angry or concerned about what other people thought about her new lover. But she sounded eager to talk about him, so I did.

      “Oh. Did you meet Hassan at the Victory Club, too?” I asked.

      “Of course, I did. That is the place to go when you want some new meat.”

      I glanced at Leon. His eyes seemed to be looking straight through me. “That’s what I told Leon. He doesn’t want me to go there unless I’m with him.” I didn’t want to say too much in front of Mama and Frankie, so I let Inez do most of the talking.

      “Fuck him! He is not your daddy. You can go to that club and any other club you want to go to without him. I tried to tell you that he was going to try and run your life. Tell you what to do. I tried to tell—”

      “I’ll come by the shop right after work,” I said, cutting her off.

      I knew that Inez and Leon still couldn’t stand each other. Even though they were cordial to each other around me. But I couldn’t