The Company We Keep. Mary Monroe
waxed legs. She was hoping that somebody would notice how good her legs looked and pay her a compliment. Nobody did.
“I’m still looking,” Cynthia said, rolling her heavily made-up eyes. A job was the furthest thing away from this girl’s mind. She wasn’t a man, and as far as she was concerned, work was for men. A woman’s “job” was to keep her man happy. She was one of the few relatives that Teri had little or no use for. Especially after Teri refused to hook her up with some of the musicians she worked with or to make arrangements for her to shake her shapely ass in somebody’s music video. Instead, Teri—with her jealous old-maid self—had offered her a receptionist position as a backup to Nicole. Cynthia had looked at Teri as if she were crazy.
“Well, you better look harder. Don’t you want to be like your cousin Teri?” Grandpa Stewart asked, frowning at the way his granddaughter displayed her naked legs. Had young people become so loose that they had no shame left whatsoever? That had to be the case.
“Not if I can help it,” Cynthia said with a snort, shaking her head.
“In the meantime, pull your skirt down and cover your shame, girl,” the old man ordered.
Teri and her grandmother talked about trivial things as Grandma Stewart searched for some documents in the dresser drawers in her bedroom, spilling contents to the floor like a burglar.
Every few minutes, Grandma Stewart brought up the fact that Teri was “still single” and that that wasn’t normal for a woman her age. But each time Teri’s marital status came up, she steered the conversation in another direction.
“Sister Hawthorne is looking mighty healthy these days,” Teri commented.
“Healthy? Baw! She’d better look healthy with her pig-ear-eating, three hundred pound self. Brother Hamilton asked her to marry him last month and she jumped at the chance. Can you imagine that? I don’t know what this world is coming to. But with her being a widow going on two years and him just losing his wife, and them living next door to each other, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Now if she can get a man, even one that looks like a baboon and smells like a nanny goat like Brother Hamilton, a girl like you ought to be able to get somebody like Obama or Denzel.”
Teri looked around the room and sighed. She wondered what her grandparents and Nicole were going to complain about once she did get a man.
“There’s a sale at Kelsye’s furniture store.” Teri pitched her words like a baseball.
“That reminds me. I saw the Kelsye’s older boy the other day. The one that spent twenty years in the military. He’s going to make somebody a good husband. You want his phone number? I’ll ring up his mama before you go home today.”
“Nanny, listen to me. I am happy being alone. How many times do I have to say it? What do I have to do or say to make you and Grandpa stop worrying about me being by myself?”
Grandma Stewart gave Teri a stern look and let out wind from both ends before she spoke, excusing herself first, though. “Get married, I guess,” she said, fanning the fumes she’d just released. The old woman gave Teri a hopeful nod. “Grab the Kelsye’s son before somebody else snatches him up.”
Teri was too exasperated for words, but she knew that if she didn’t continue to defend herself, her grandmother would wear her out.
“I don’t need you or anyone else to help me find a man. I can do that on my own,” she insisted.
“Then why don’t you?”
“Why don’t I what?”
“You work with men every day. What’s wrong with one of them?”
Teri gave her grandmother a thoughtful look. “There is nothing wrong with the men I work with. I used to date one of the guys in our personnel office,” Teri confessed. “But things didn’t work out.”
“And why didn’t things work out? It don’t take much to keep a man happy, if you know how. And I am not talking about all that bedroom foolishness. The first time I was with Isaac in the flesh, you would have thought he was tearing down a house the way he rode me. The whole time I was laying there under him, all I could think about was how I was going to wash all his sweat and jism off my sheets.”
Teri stared at her grandmother in slack-jawed agony. “Do I really need to hear this?” She had to look away to keep from laughing at the thought of her stuffy grandparents having sex.
“Once you put that physical part in the proper perspective, the rest is easy. You feed your man what he wants to eat, make him think he’s some kind of king—and all that means is telling his dumb ass a lot of barefaced lies, and keep his house and kids clean. That’s all it takes. That’s why divorce is a stranger to most of my generation.”
“The guy I dated from work wanted a mama…” Teri admitted with a pensive look on her face. She recalled how heartbroken she had been when Derrick Hardy told her that the only reason he’d asked her out was because she reminded him of his mother. That same day, she had stopped at the mall and purchased a more youthful wardrobe on her way home from work. Derrick no longer worked for Eclectic, and she made sure that every piece of clothing she purchased came from the most youth-oriented boutiques—for women in her age group, of course—that she could find.
CHAPTER 11
Teri ignored the look of disapproval on her grandmother’s face as she smoothed the sides of her short black skirt.
Like everything else in the Stewart home, the bedroom furniture was old, but well cared for, too. There was the bed that looked more like a wagon that Teri was not looking forward to inheriting.
Watching her grandmother rooting around in her dresser drawers reminded Teri of how she had searched for the document that she needed to complete her media report before the party last night.
“Here they go,” the old woman said with a sigh of relief. She beckoned for Teri to join her on the bed. The old bed’s springs squeaked like a herd of mice when they sat on it. “We haven’t signed these yet.”
“What is all this?” Teri asked, reaching for the beige folder in her grandmother’s gnarled hand.
“Just some paperwork.” Grandma Stewart held the papers out of Teri’s reach. But Teri took them anyway. She frowned as she read. “This is just to renovate the front of the house and replace the front porch,” Grandma Stewart said, stroking the side of Teri’s head. “And look at all that good hair. A man would love to run his fingers through it.”
“You can’t sign these papers. We could lose this house!” Teri exclaimed, rising. “We need to get Grandpa in here.”
“We can talk about all this later. After everybody’s gone. I don’t want the whole world to know my business,” Grandma Stewart told Teri. She motioned for Teri to return to her seat, but Teri refused, shaking her head like a defiant child.
“Let’s go,” Teri ordered. With the papers still in her hand, she ushered her grandmother out of the room.
They found Grandpa Stewart back in the dining room standing at the table. Nicole stood next to him with a plate in her hand. Teri was glad to see her. Nicole was always a reliable defensive tool for her to use when she had to deal with her meddle-some grandparents. No matter what her grandparents said, Nicole always took Teri’s side, unless it involved Teri not having a man.
“Hey, girl,” Nicole said in the light and cheerful voice that made her such a joy to be around in situations like this. Sometimes all Teri needed was Nicole’s presence to get her spark back. “How come you didn’t wake me up for church this morning?”
“I thought you were busy,” Teri replied with a smirk then a wink. Teri’s grandparents gave each other a puzzled look.
“Where’s that young’un of yours, Nicole?” Grandpa Stewart asked, clearing his throat as if he were trying to remove a frog.
“He’s