The first night Odell spent in my bedroom with me, Mama must have barged in every five minutes, even after we’d gone to bed and for the most mundane reasons. She wanted to know if we needed more pillows. She wanted to make sure we’d cracked open a window so the room wouldn’t get too stuffy, and so on. I knew that if Mama visited me too often in my house, it’d drive me crazy. Another bad thing about the location of the vacant house was that some of the grumpiest elderly people in town lived on the same block. But after spending two weeks with my parents, we decided to move into that vacant house anyway. There were ways to get around my parents’ interference: We wouldn’t answer the door when we didn’t want to be bothered. That’s what Mama did when she didn’t want to entertain company.
We didn’t have to spend too much of our money on things for our house. We took all we could from the store: cookware, linen, dishes, food, and a few other necessary household items. We picked up a few nice pieces of new furniture from a discount store, but everything else came from a secondhand store.
After living with my parents most of my life, I knew that living close to any senior citizen would not be a cakewalk. I was prepared for all kinds of bullshit from Clarabelle Copeland and her husband, Henry, the eighty-something-year-old couple that lived right next door to the house we’d moved into. They didn’t waste any time getting on our nerves. Two days after we moved in, Clarabelle cussed at me for spitting on the sidewalk in front of her house. The next day, Henry stuck his head out their living room window and cussed me out when Patsy dropped me off after work. The problem was, the loud muffler on her car had woken them up from their naps. Each time we did something they didn’t like, we apologized and promised we wouldn’t do it again. Other than that, everything else was perfect.
As far as I was concerned, nothing could go wrong for me and Odell. We couldn’t have been happier if we’d died and gone to heaven.
Chapter 16
Odell
SOME DAYS I ACTUALLY PINCHED MYSELF TO MAKE SURE I WASN’T dreaming. Each day I loved Joyce a little bit more. I made love to her two or three times a day, three or four times a week. I joined the same church she and most of the other colored folks on our side of town belonged to, and I did everything else I thought she wanted me to do. We spent hours at a time with my in-laws drinking tea and discussing all kinds of mundane subjects. Things like that bored the hell out of me, but I went along with it because I didn’t want to ruffle nobody’s feathers. I had a damn good thing going and if I played my cards right, it would get even better.
I looked forward to going to work each day, especially now that I was the one in charge and my in-laws didn’t come in too often. The fly in the ointment—or two flies I should say—was Buddy and Sadie. They was slow, unpleasant to some of our customers, and they complained all the time. What they enjoyed doing the most was running their mouths and blabbing other folks’ business. I’d made it clear to them that I didn’t like that kind of foolishness, so they didn’t do it as much when I was around. But they were dependable and didn’t mind doing other things around the store. We didn’t have a cleaning person or a janitor, so Buddy and Sadie took care of things like dusting, sweeping, and mopping after hours—and only because Mac had promised they’d get paid time and a half when they worked past their shifts. Being as slow as they were and because they got paid by the hour, they made almost as much when they did a few hours overtime as they made doing regular time. Since part of my previous job had included some light “housekeeping” and other miscellaneous chores, I continued to do those things too. Not because I wanted to, but to show Buddy and Sadie—and the MacPhersons—that I was still eager to do some of the same unpleasant chores they had to do.
No matter how much grunt work I performed, I knew that Buddy and Sadie didn’t like the fact that Mac and Millie had made me the new boss, and I could understand why. I’d only been an employee for a few weeks and they’d both been working at MacPherson’s a lot longer, but were still in the same positions. That was bad enough. I could tell from their whispering, eyeball rolling, and the hostile looks I got when I told them to do something that they didn’t like taking orders from a man young enough to be their son. As long as they continued to do their jobs, I didn’t care what else they did. I tried to keep at least two stock boys on the payroll, but they came and went for a lot of different reasons. The teenage boy that me and Mac had hired to take over my old job had lasted only two days. Other than those minor things, everything was good.
On the first weekend in our new home, Joyce and
