Teri managed, still chewing.
“He’s been keeping to himself most of the night and I’ll bet it’s because he’d rather spend his conversation on you…”
Teri stopped chewing. “Where is this conversation going?”
“Teri, I don’t know what you are waiting for. And maybe you will get exactly what you want one of these days. Knowing you, you will. But in the meantime, have yourself some fun, girl. There is nothing wrong with that. You could probably wrap Harrison or Dwight, or any other man, around your little finger if you wanted to. Do it while you still can.”
Nicole’s words gave Teri something to think about, but not for long. However, it did make her lose her appetite. She set the saucer on a table outside the bathroom, even though a couple of chicken wings remained. “Are you through? Is there anything else you need to say to me?” Teri asked, licking grease off her lips. She couldn’t remember the last time she had behaved so “ghetto.” It was a liberating experience.
“I had a dry spell—by choice like you—for a year after Greg did his disappearing act. It didn’t bother anybody but me.” Nicole paused and shrugged, then gave Teri one of her sharpest looks. “I decided that if I couldn’t beat ’em, I’d join ’em. I hooked up with a couple of…uh…on-call maintenance men, as you like to call them, and I’ve been happy ever since. I want you to be happy, too,” Nicole concluded with a pleading look on her face.
“I am happy,” Teri insisted, dismissing Nicole with a wave as they both moved toward the steps.
Teri decided to locate Harrison and wish him luck in the New Year. She decided that that was the least she could do. But by the time she and Nicole got back downstairs, where she had summoned enough nerve to locate and approach Harrison, it was too late. Teri spotted him walking out the door with the same bitch who had rolled her eyes at Teri when she saw her gobbling up those chicken wings a little while ago.
Teri looked at Nicole and blinked. Nicole saw what Teri had just seen. She looked at Teri, shook her head, then gently rubbed her arm. Teri felt as stiff as a board and was hot to Nicole’s touch. “We’ll talk tomorrow,” Nicole offered. “Right now, I’ve got a man waiting for me outside. But if you need me, I can send him on his way.” Teri gave Nicole a sorrowful look and shook her head. “All right then. Listen, you drive carefully,” Nicole told her before she left.
CHAPTER 9
The afternoon after the rapper’s party, still slightly hung over, Teri attended service at the same church with her beloved grandparents. The predominantly black congregation spilled out of the old white building with its tall steeple.
It was warm for January, even for L.A. The rays from the sun stung Teri’s eyes. She was sorry that she didn’t have her sunglasses with her. Some of the two hundred members looked and behaved like they couldn’t get off the premises fast enough.
“Baby, we know you probably want to spend the rest of the day with the other young folks,” Teri’s grandfather said, knowing the reaction he would get from Teri. He said the same thing every time they left church together. He knew her response was always going to be the same, but he liked hearing her say it anyway.
“Don’t you start that,” Teri scolded, brushing lint, ravels, and fuzz off the lapels and arms of the blue serge suit he wore, which he should have disposed of thirty years ago. “I am with the folks I want to be with today,” she said, shaking her head in mock exasperation. “Now let’s get to the house and do some serious kicking back and some serious eating. We want to start the New Year off right.”
The elder Stewarts had raised Teri after her parents died in an automobile accident when she was eight. And as far as they were concerned, they were still “raising” her. Despite their advanced years, their minds were still fairly sharp and they still applied a lot of good old-fashion common sense when it came to most things. But Grandma Stewart would have still been spoon-feeding Teri if she had her way.
The light green adobe house with the neat lawn and cobblestone walkway that the Stewarts owned was nowhere near as opulent as the mansion that Teri had partied in the night before. But given a choice, she would have chosen the modest single-family home in a middle-class black neighborhood over anybody’s mansion any day. It was one of the few places where she felt totally at peace. It was also the one place she could go where she didn’t have to do a damn thing to gain anybody’s approval. She could eat greasy chicken wings here all day and all night and not worry about some uppity so-and-so looking at her as if she had brought down the whole black race.
“What are you thinking about, girl?” Grandma Stewart asked Teri as soon as they parked in the driveway and got out of the Lincoln that Teri had cosigned for them the year before. Teri had also made an ample down payment and paid the first six notes. Financially, the Stewarts could afford to manage on their own. With their combined pensions after forty years’ service, each working for the post office, and the fact that they had made some good investments over the years, they were more than comfortable. But Teri had a six-figure income, a first in her family. She had everything she wanted or needed. With no children or siblings to shower with affection and gifts, she did more than she needed to do for her grandparents, whether they wanted it or not. Last year, she almost had to hog-tie them and have them carried onto the cruise ship where she’d booked them a seven-day cruise to the Mexican Riviera as a surprise for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They’d come home wearing sombreros, smelling like tequila, and grinning like teenagers.
“Oh? Who me? What am I smiling about? Oh, I was just thinking about what Reverend Upshaw said about Lot’s wife…” Teri told her grandmother.
“Wasn’t that a wonderful holiday sermon? I swear to God, whenever Reverend Upshaw gets loose in that pulpit, I feel Jesus go through me to the bone. Don’t you?”
“I sure enough do. Uh, let’s get in the house and get comfortable,” Teri insisted, escorting her grandmother into the house with her arm around her shoulder.
The Stewarts’ furniture was old but sturdy and well-cared for. A maroon couch, a matching love seat, and a La-Z-Boy dominated the cozy living room. Doilies that Grandma Stewart had made and shaped with starch and beer bottles covered the dark oak coffee table and the end tables and lined the windowsills. High-back chairs faced the big-screen TV in the room that was also a dining room where meals were served on a long, low wooden table covered with a crocheted white tablecloth. Brocade draperies covered the windows in every room except the kitchen and bathroom. Everything in the house could easily last another twenty years before it fell apart. Grandpa Stewart had built this house that Teri loved so much many years ago with the help of some of his church members. And just like it was with Teri, this house also felt like home to a lot of the church members, too.
This was a typical late-afternoon dinner gathering, served buffet style so it was every man, woman, and child for himself. It didn’t take long for every single person to have a plate in hand. Old, stout Maybelle Hawthorne, wearing a white floor-length frock that looked like a bathrobe, had a plate in each hand. Both contained generous mounds of food threatening to spill onto the freshly waxed linoleum floors. Some folks stood in groups of three or four, talking as they ate. Others sat or meandered throughout the house.
The destination for most of the males was the room with the big-screen TV where a previously recorded Lakers game was on, featuring Dwight Davis. There was almost as much emotion displayed in the living room as there had been during Reverend Upshaw’s fiery sermon. This was the “down-home” atmosphere that kept Teri focused and balanced. This was where her character had been formed. This lifestyle had made her the caring, hardworking, no-nonsense
