When he told me he wanted me to meet his daddy, I knew our relationship was something special.
Odell’s daddy, Lonnie, and his wife, Ellamae, lived on a dirt road at the bottom of a hill in a run-down three-bedroom house on the outskirts of town. It was about a quarter of a mile from one of the same sugarcane fields where he and most of his family used to work. When we pulled up in the front yard, a three-legged hound dog hobbled up to the car and started sniffing at my door. “Odell, I’m scared of dogs. Make him go away,” I wailed.
“Shoo, shoo, Duke!” Odell yelled and honked the horn. The dog howled and backed away, so I opened my door and piled out. When my feet hit the ground, Duke trotted up to me and started sniffing my leg. Drool was trickling off his lips, so it was a good thing I had decided to wear pants. I also had on the same low-cut blouse I’d worn on my first date with Odell because he liked it so much. I’d recently ordered three more just like it, but in different colors. “Don’t worry. Duke don’t bite and he ain’t got no fleas,” Odell laughed. And then he rushed around to my side and grabbed my hand. After taking a deep breath, he led me up onto a rickety front porch with a rocking chair on one side and a foot tub filled to the rim with soapy water on the other. “Daddy’s mind comes and goes, so I guess he done got a little senile, but it ain’t nothing to be concerned about. He still got a good disposition. My stepmama had a slight stroke two years ago, and it had a bad effect on her brain. She ain’t too hospitable, and never was much in the first place. These days there’s enough bad blood between me and her to flood the Dead Sea. Once you meet her, you’ll see what I mean, and you probably won’t want to stay longer than a few minutes. But if you want to leave sooner, just look at me and blink three times to let me know and we’ll haul ass straightaway.”
“Odell, be nice now. I’d like to stay long enough to get acquainted with your daddy and your stepmama,” I insisted.
When we got inside, I understood why he thought I wouldn’t want to stay long. A heavyset, elderly woman in a ratty gray housecoat and a plaid bandanna tied around her head stood in the middle of the floor with her hands on her hips. Her dusty bare feet looked like bear claws. There was such an annoyed look on her plain, round, reddish-brown face, I thought she was in pain.
The first words out of Odell’s stepmother’s mouth made me want to run back out the door. “I just mopped this floor! Look at all that sand y’all done tracked up in here!” she snarled. She looked me up and down and frowned when she got to my feet. Now that I had a man who was so tall that I had to look up at him, I had purchased my first pair of high heels. They were comfortable and looked good on my long feet. But the way Ellamae was staring at them, I wished I had worn a pair of shoes that wouldn’t have drawn so much attention.
“Uh, hello, Ellamae,” Odell greeted in a gentle tone. “I’m sorry about tracking up the floor. Next time I’ll make sure we wipe our feet before we come in.” He stopped talking and glanced from me to Ellamae. “I want you to meet Joyce MacPherson, my new lady friend.”
I reached over to shake Ellamae’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you, ma’am.” I forced myself to smile even though she looked mad enough to bite off a snake’s head.
She ignored my hand. Instead, she reared back on her knotty bowed legs, looked over my shoulder, and shaded her eyes with her hand and stared at the car. “That jalopy y’all rolled up in belong to you, Joyce?” she asked, looking me up and down some more with her eyes narrowed.
“No, ma’am. It belongs to my daddy. He lets us borrow it when we go out so we won’t have to walk or take the bus,” I replied.
“How old is you?” For such a grumpy old woman, she had a pleasant, young-sounding voice.
Just as I was about to respond, Odell answered for me. “She’s thirty, a year younger than me.”
Ellamae folded her arms. Her eyes were still on me. “Thirty? Humph. Well, I do declare. I never would have guessed that. You look a heap older than that.”
“That’s because I’m so tall,” I said, grinning. “When I was a little girl, I was so much taller than the kids I played with, some people thought I was a lot older than I really was.”
Ellamae turned to Odell with an impatient look on her face. “Your daddy ain’t here,” she barked. “And I hope y’all don’t plan on staying for supper on account of I didn’t cook enough for four.”
“We already have plans for supper. I came at the spur of the moment because I was anxious for you and Daddy to meet Joyce.”
Right after Odell stopped talking, a back door slammed. An elderly dark-skinned man, who was even taller than Odell and just as handsome, shuffled in holding a bucket of blackberries. He was barefooted too. He set the bucket on the floor
