Borrow Trouble. Mary Monroe

best to tolerate my best friend. And, in her own way, Inez was trying to get along with him, too. She didn’t have to accept a ride home from the airport with him. She could have called a cab. But she didn’t. And I knew that it must have been difficult for her to sit by herself in the same car with Leon. I was glad that the two of them had made some progress in improving their relationship.

      I was also glad that Frankie and Mama dominated the dinner conversation. I didn’t have to say too much. Leon hardly spoke at all. But he did a lot more nervous scratching that day.

      CHAPTER 15

      When I found out I was pregnant, the first person I called up was Inez.

      “I am so happy for you!” she squealed. “I can’t wait to tell my girls. Those two little monkeys are always asking me how come their auntie Renee doesn’t have any kids of her own.” Inez paused and then started talking in a low, serious voice. “How is the proud papa taking this blessed news?”

      “I don’t think he’s going to be anybody’s proud papa when I tell him,” I told her, gripping the telephone in my sweaty hand. “He wanted us to wait.” Leon’s daughter, Collette, had only been to the house a few times since I’d moved in. I liked the girl. She was no better or worse than any of the other kids her age that I knew. At least, that’s the way she was around me. However, Leon had one horror story after another to tell me about how Collette misbehaved when he was alone with her. He’d even told me about an episode at the mall where she had thrown a major hissy fit because he had refused to buy her the new Prince CD. She had stomped out of the music store and run into the mall atrium, screaming, until a burly security guard calmed her down.

      “You have to make young kids feel like they are important. Especially girls,” I told Leon when he told me about Collette’s tantrum at the mall.

      “Well, from now on when she comes to visit and wants to go to the mall, you take her,” he told me. His voice was cold and steely, and his jaw twitched.

      Leon was not a patient man. Even when it came to his daughter. So I knew that I always had to watch my step with him. I eventually reached a point where I could pretty much read him like a book. As long as it wasn’t too much of a hardship, I bent over backwards to keep the peace between myself and Leon.

      Whenever Collette visited now, I volunteered to take her to the mall before she even asked, and she seemed to enjoy my company. When I refused to buy her something, she didn’t even sulk. I had a way with kids, which was why I had chosen a teaching career, and why I was looking forward to having one of my own in a few months.

      “Leon is so full of surprises, I never know what to expect from him. But I hope he’s happy about the baby. He’s been awfully nice lately. And by the way, I am glad to see that the two of you are acting more and more civil to each other these days,” I told Inez.

      “I’d still keep my guard up if I were you,” Inez advised, with a snort. “Leon wears a mask more often than a full-time bandit.”

      “What’s that supposed to mean? Look, I know he is trying his best to tolerate you—”

      “Tolerate me? What in the world…why…That’s a strange word,” Inez said, cutting me off in mid-sentence. “I have never met a man yet who felt he had to tolerate me. I won’t tolerate behavior like that from a man!”

      “Well, Queen of Sheba, if you feel that way, why should you care if my man only tolerates you? He sleeps with me.”

      I didn’t like the silence on the other end of the line.

      “Did you hear what I said? Leon sleeps with me,” I said in a firm voice.

      Inez cleared her throat before speaking again. “Now, yes. But I assure you that Leon wasn’t a virgin when you hooked up with him, like Robbie was.”

      “Where is this conversation going?” I demanded. “How did we get from talking about my pregnancy to talking about Leon and Robbie?”

      “I didn’t want to go there. You brought up Leon. I didn’t.”

      “No, you brought him up. You started talking all that shit about him wearing masks. What is your problem, girl?”

      Inez gritted her teeth and let out a tremendous sigh. “I am sorry, Renee. I don’t like it when people talk trash about my men, so I should know better. It’s just that…I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

      “Hurt how? Why are you so worried about me getting hurt? What do you think Leon is going to do to me?”

      “Renee, let’s just drop it. I am happy for you, and I will pray that you have a healthy baby.” Inez sniffed. “Where do you want to have drinks tomorrow?”

      “That bar on Morrison is nice. Ernie’s.”

      “That’s fine with me. But I am telling you right here and now, you will not drink any alcohol! I don’t want that baby coming here with two heads and hooves.” Inez laughed.

      I laughed, too. But a strange feeling came over me. I was not satisfied with her responses as to why she seemed so concerned about Leon hurting me. I knew Inez well enough to know that she was not the type to hold back critical information. Especially when it involved me.

      When I arrived at Ernie’s Bar on Morrison Street the next evening after work, enduring a bumpy fifteen-minute bus ride because Leon wasn’t answering his cell phone and I didn’t have money for a taxi, Inez was sitting in a booth in the back. Shonda and Pat from her nail shop were with her.

      So was my husband, Leon.

      It was too late for me to slink back out of the door without being seen. If Inez had not spotted me and started waving and drawing attention to me, I would have made a U-turn and left that place, running. The way Leon looked at me, wide-eyed and amused, you would have thought that I was naked. I sat down hard next to him, purposely hitting his knee with mine. I pinched his thigh under the table, not surprised that he didn’t even react.

      “Did I miss anything?” I asked, forcing myself to smile.

      “Shonda and Pat insisted on joining us,” Inez explained, looking at Leon as she spoke.

      He cleared his throat before speaking. “And as I was on my way out, these lovely ladies were on their way in. They invited me to have a drink with them,” he volunteered, scratching the back of his head so hard, sparks flew off. Normally, when we ran into each other in public, he greeted me with a kiss. He didn’t kiss me this time, and that surprised and disappointed me. If anything, he seemed annoyed by my presence.

      “Well, I won’t stay long,” I said. I was beginning to get used to Leon doing things that surprised me. “Baby, I thought you were going to visit your uncle in the nursing home?”

      “I did. But he was so out of touch, he didn’t even know me,” Leon said sadly. His elderly uncle Martin had been struggling with Alzheimer’s for several years now and was in a nursing home in Shaker Heights. I visited the old man more often than Leon.

      I patted Leon’s hand for the benefit of the others at the table, but as soon as everybody looked away, I pinched his hand and whispered, “You just wait’ll I get your black ass home, you nasty buzzard.” I planned to read him the riot act. He ignored my threatening words as he delivered a delayed but passionate kiss on my lips, his tongue darting in and out of my mouth like a serpent’s. I was glad that I’d eaten a garlic pizza for lunch. My breath was so foul, it made him cough.

      As usual, Inez dominated the conversation. She had more adventures than a pirate, and she loved to talk about them all. She and her rich Iranian were still going strong, but she had gone behind his back and spent a night with her second ex-husband, on a mercy fuck mission for his benefit. Everybody at the table, except Leon, laughed as Inez regaled us with one blue story after another.

      I didn’t know what that woman did to her men to make them so devoted to her, even after she dumped them. I had asked her several times what it was that she did to them that was so potent.