Читать книгу The Company We Keep - Mary Monroe - Страница 14

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 person she was today. No matter what happened in her future personal life, this was what she would always measure her sense of values against.

Grandma Stewart had spent most of the day and half of the night before “cooking up a storm,” as she had declared. In addition to a deep-fried turkey, five Crock-Pots full of collard greens, four platters of corn bread muffins, six mac and cheese casseroles, and enough yams to feed a small army, there were six huge pots of black-eyed peas—more than enough for every person present to have several helpings. Grandma Stewart didn’t care how much everybody ate. And she made it clear that she didn’t want anybody to leave without eating some black-eyed peas.

“Everybody knows that if you want a New Year to start off right, you got to start it off with some black-eyed peas,” Grandma Stewart announced, spooning peas onto a huge plate for herself. Black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day had been a family and cultural tradition for generations. For a woman who liked to cook and eat rich food, Teri’s grandmother was a petite woman with an attractive but chubby face that resembled a chipmunk. Black moles dotted her warm brown face. Her husband was only slightly larger with a mole-like face, a head that resembled a coconut, and sparse, wiry white whiskers on the sides of his face that looked like they belonged on a cat. Teri had her grandmother’s eyes and her grandfather’s full lips, but she had inherited her five foot seven inch height from her mother’s side. One of her biggest sorrows was that her maternal grandparents had both died before she was born so she’d never know what else they’d passed on to her.

Teri enjoyed good southern cooking as much as everybody else in the room. And even though she didn’t think of herself as a superstitious woman, she ladled more peas onto her plate than anybody else. There was nothing else on her plate, not even one of the golden corn bread muffins that her grandmother had just removed from the oven with steam still floating above them like miniature clouds.

“Girl, I know you are not going to bypass that turkey and those greens,” Grandma Stewart commented, frowning at the contents on Teri’s plate.

“The peas are enough for me right now,” Teri declared, stirring a few drops of hot sauce onto her meal.

“Well, if all you are going to eat are the peas, you’re going to wind up with enough gas to light up Florida. Are you all right? You look a little peaked. I hope you didn’t stay out too late last night. I woke up and called your house around eleven-thirty last night and you hadn’t come home yet. I hope you are not running around with the wrong crowd, drinking and doing whatnot. You know how we worry about you, with you still out there by yourself as manless as a nun…”