Every Woman's Dream

By Mary Monroe

“An epic novel that spans a generation” from the New York Times bestselling author of the God and Neighbors series (Library Journal).

As teenagers, best friends Lola Poole and Joan Proctor concocted a scheme to escape their boredom, pass the time between boyfriends—and bring in some money. It all started when they got in the habit of corresponding with lonely, unsuspecting—and generous—older men. In return for their “love letters,” the teens were rewarded with checks. The fun only ended when their swindle nearly got them killed. Now they’re grown, but they’re still longing for every woman’s dream of love and excitement. And thanks to online dating and a parade of lovers, they’re getting all the sexy fun they missed out on. It’s a downright addictive game. But games can’t last forever—and someone has to lose . . .
  
“Engaging, provocative, disconcerting and shocking, as the author shrewdly characterizes the hazards when adults play dangerous games with strangers.”—RT Book Reviews
 
Praise for Mary Monroe
 
“Mary Monroe is an exceptional writer and phenomenal storyteller!”—Kimberla Lawson Roby, New York Times bestselling author of Here and Now
 
“Impossible to put down.”—Susan Holloway Scott, national bestselling author of The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr
 
“Engaging, provocative, disconcerting and shocking, as the author shrewdly characterizes the hazards when adults play dangerous games with strangers.” —RT Book Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kensington Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781617737992

Mary Monroe

Mary Monroe is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five novels and six novellas. She is a three-time AALBC bestseller and winner of the AAMBC Maya Angelou Lifetime Achievement Award, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and the J. California Cooper Memorial Award. The daughter of Alabama sharecroppers, she taught herself how to write before going on to become the first and only member of her family to finish high school. She lives in Oakland, California, and loves to hear from her readers via e-mail at [e-mail]. Visit Mary’s website at MaryMonroe.org.

Book preview

Series.

Chapter 1

Lola

September 1999

T

WO WEEKS AFTER

L

ABOR

D

AY, SOMEBODY RANG OUR DOORBELL

. It was a Saturday, about an hour before noon. When I opened the door without looking through the peephole or asking who it was, I was surprised to see a woman—I had never seen her before—standing on our porch. She was almost as wide as she was tall, and she had to be at least six feet. She was a light-skinned, middle-aged black woman with a scary scowl on her face and one hand on her hip. She wore a dark green pantsuit that looked like it was at least two sizes too small. There were a few strands of gray hair on her two chins and several black moles dotted her thick neck. I could tell she had been crying because her eyes were red and swollen.

I’m sorry, ma’am. No solicitors, I said, pointing to the

NO SOLICITORS

sign that my stepmother had made me tack on the wall outside next to the doorbell. It was not my nature to be mean to strangers, so I smiled.

The woman didn’t smile back and the scowl on her face was even scarier now. She narrowed her eyes and gave me a skeptical look. Her short, reddish brown wig sat at such a crooked angle on her head, the bangs that should have been above her eyes were on the side of her face. There was bright red lipstick smeared on her teeth and she had on two different earrings. On top of everything else that was off, this creature had dressed in such a hurry, she had buttoned only the three top buttons on her blouse.

Fuck that damn shit! I didn’t come to this goddamn place to sell a motherfucking thing, so you can forget about that ‘no solicitors’ bullshit! she screeched with spit flying out both sides of her mouth. I knew a lot of people who cussed, myself included. But this woman had used more profanity in just a few seconds than everybody else I knew used in an hour. Whoever she was, she obviously had a bone to pick with somebody, but I couldn’t imagine who.

The smile was no longer on my face and I was ready to do some cussing myself, but I chose not to. This woman was already hot enough. The last thing I needed to do was add fuel to a flame when I didn’t even know what had caused it.

I stood up straighter and folded my arms. Lady, you need to chill, I began, speaking in the most civil tone of voice I could manage under the circumstances. I don’t know what your problem is and why you’re here.

What I heard next made my jaw drop. I’M HERE TO KICK SOME ASS! she roared, wagging her finger in my face.

I was so taken aback; it was a couple of seconds before I could speak again. You—you’re w-what? I stuttered. If this woman had shot me with a stun gun, I could not have been more stunned and frightened. My chest tightened and my heart rate felt like it had doubled. I thought hard and tried to recall if my stepmother, Bertha, had mentioned anything about her being involved in a dispute that would explain this angry woman’s presence. If that had been the case, Bertha would have been talking about it nonstop every day. Ma’am, I don’t even know who the hell you are! You’ve come to the wrong address! I said bluntly.

No, I did not come to the wrong address, so don’t you stand here with your mealy mouth and tell me that shit! I’m looking for Joan Proctor, the whore who has been fooling around with my husband!

My head felt like it was swimming in a mud puddle and my stomach was churning. Oh, I said in a small voice. So many thoughts suddenly formed in my head, it was hard to decide which one to deal with first. Only one made any sense to me. And that was for me to slam the door shut and lock it. But if I do that, what will I do next? I asked myself. I gulped when I noticed a pink envelope with a red rose above the return address in the woman’s hand. I recognized it immediately. I had purchased a hundred of the same envelopes with matching stationery from Office Depot. Because of that, I couldn’t call the cops on this ferocious woman without digging a hole for myself. She waved the envelope at me in a threatening manner.

So . . . uh, you’re looking for Joan Proctor? I asked with my lips quivering.

Tell that bitch to come out here and settle this shit with me right now!

Uh . . . well . . . um . . . For a streetwise girl like me, who always had a lot to say, this was one time when I didn’t know what to say next. Here I was spewing gibberish.

Where is she? the woman hollered as she looked over my shoulder. "I want that no-good slut to know that I found the letters she sent to my husband! And I found the canceled checks he sent to her gold-digging ass! I am not leaving here until I set that wench straight! The man she’s in love with and wants to marry already has a wife! Me! We’ve been married thirty-five years and we have five children and nine grandchildren! I don’t care what he told her. He still loves me and I will never give him a divorce. Shit. We just paid off our mortgage and I’m not about to let another woman replace me after all I’ve done and been through with that man of mine. Least of all some bitch he met through a magazine ad! A magazine ad! I never in my life heard of black folks getting caught up in foolishness like a lonely hearts club! For goodness’ sake! I even found, hidden in his sock drawer, the issue of the magazine with his name, picture, and all them lies about him being a widower! He ain’t no widower, but I might end up being a widow if he don’t stop this mess! Before I left my house, I beat the tar out of that cheating motherfucker and I’m going to do the same thing again when I get back home! Him and Joan are crazy if they think I’m going to sit back and let them ruin my life so they can live happily ever after, like she said in her last letter. That bitch!"

I sucked in some air and bit my bottom lip. Ma’am, uh, Joan doesn’t live here, I managed, looking around to make sure none of our neighbors were out and about. We lived in a quiet, low-crime area, but we had some of the nosiest, most meddlesome neighbors in South Bay City, California. If they knew that a strange woman had come to our house to attack somebody, they would gossip about it for weeks.

"I ain’t playing with you, girl! I can see you ain’t nothing but a teenager, but do I look like a fool, fool? I was going to write a letter to that Joan Proctor bitch myself, but I thought it’d be better for me to straighten her out in person. From all that shit she wrote in her letters, she sounds like the type of die-hard skank who needs a hands-on approach!" The woman waved the envelope at me again. Her fat fingers covered the name of the man the letter had been sent to, but I could see Joan’s name and my address in the sender’s section.

Honest to God, lady. Joan Proctor does not live here.

This letter with this house address was postmarked last week! It’s full of every sex word in the book and then some! That sex-crazed hoochie-coochie woman mentioned things in her letters that she’s going to do to my husband—tongue baths and dick milking and whatnot—that I ain’t never even heard of! Now, if you think I don’t believe Joan lives here, you just as crazy as she is! I drove a long way and I am not about to get back in my car and turn around and leave until I straighten out her nasty self!

I had to say something that made sense and it had to be convincing. "Joan Proctor used to live here! I said quickly, clutching the doorknob. This huge woman could easily overpower me and force her way in and crucify me. She moved last Saturday. Just me and my stepmother live here now."

My confused thoughts were bouncing from one side of my head to the other. It was hard for me to hide the fact that I was scared. I was shaking like a leaf and sweat had already formed on my forehead. I didn’t care how scared I was and what I had to say, I had to get rid of this woman before my stepmother returned. If she blabbed to Bertha, not only would Joan Proctor’s goose be cooked, mine would be too.

I don’t want to stand here talking to a young child like you. I want to talk to your stepmother.

Huh? Oh, s-see—she’s not here, I stammered. She just left to go shopping and then she’s going to have lunch with a friend. After that, they’re going to the beauty shop, so she’ll be gone for several hours. Uh, look, ma’am, I feel bad about this Joan woman chasing after your husband and taking his money and talking about doing nasty stuff with him, but I can’t help you. Check with the post office and see if she turned in a change-of-address form. I managed to smile again. I hope you can track her down and straighten out this mess. . . .

The irate stranger’s scowl disappeared, but she still looked mean. She let out a heavy sigh and blinked. What’s your name?

Lola, I said with a sniff. Lola Poole.

Well, can I use your telephone, Lola? I left my cell phone in my hotel room.

Uh, I’m not allowed to let strangers in the house when I’m here by myself. I paused and swallowed the dry lump that had suddenly formed in my throat. This is a high-crime area and I’ll get a whupping if I let somebody I don’t know in the house.

I don’t know why my husband did this to me. I’m a good wife, the woman said, choking on a sob. A tear rolled down the side of her face. He’s driving me crazy.

I know just how you feel, ma’am. Some husbands don’t know how to behave. My dead daddy was so buck wild when it came to women, he had the nerve to move his girlfriend into our house to live with him, my mother, and me! But I really am sorry that I can’t help you. If you don’t mind, I have to go so I can finish my chores before my stepmother gets back. Now, you have a blessed day. The woman looked so hurt and sad, I felt awful when I abruptly closed the door before she could say anything else. I immediately secured the chain lock and the dead bolt. I put my eye up to the peephole and watched as she stumbled off the porch and down the walkway to a shiny black Ford parked in front of our house. She slowly opened the door on the driver’s side. Before she got in, she looked at my house and shook her head. Right after the car drove away, I ran to the telephone on the stand by the living-room couch and called up Joan Proctor, my best friend. I prayed she was home and wouldn’t freak out too much when I told her about the angry visitor. We were in our last year of high school and I wanted it to be as pleasant as possible for us, especially since she was pregnant.

I tried to reach Joan on her cell phone first, but she didn’t answer. I didn’t leave a voice mail or send her a text because if she didn’t answer her phone, there was no telling when she’d hear my voice mail or see my text message.

I had no choice but to call the landline.

Joan’s mother, Pearline, another scary woman, answered the telephone. Lola, didn’t you just talk to Joan last night? she growled.

Uh-huh, I did. But I forgot to tell her something about our biology class assignment, I muttered. May I please speak to her? It’ll only take a few minutes.

Don’t y’all tie up this line too long. Joan’s got a lot of things to do around this house today and I’m sure you have things to do yourself.

Yes, ma’am. I started tapping my foot on the floor while I waited for Pearline to call Joan to the telephone. I’m so glad you’re home! I yelled when she came on the line a few seconds later. Can you talk?

Yeah, I can talk. What’s up?

Girl, we are so busted! I hollered.

Busted how? she asked, speaking in a casual manner. Talk fast. I’m drying my nails so I can go to the mall with Mama.

Listen up. A real mean, fat old woman just left here! She was looking for you!

Huh? Why would a ‘real mean, fat old woman’ be looking for me? Joan didn’t sound so casual now. She sounded frightened. What did she say?

She said she came here to kick your ass for fooling around with her husband!

WHAT?

She’s one of the wives of the old men we’ve been writing to in that damn lonely hearts club!

Chapter 2

Joan

L

OLA WAS THE ONLY PERSON WHO KNEW

I

WAS PREGNANT

. B

UT THE

way I had been running to the bathroom almost every morning for the past two weeks to throw up, I knew I’d have to tell my family and my baby daddy soon. In the meantime, I planned to act as normal as possible.

I had been up since before dawn and I had the living room all to myself that morning. I was standing in front of the opened front window, waving and blowing on my just-polished nails to help them dry faster when Mama yelled from the kitchen for me to pick up the telephone on the end table next to the couch.

As soon as Lola mentioned some old man’s wife looking for me and threatening to kick my ass, I forgot about my wet nails and raked my fingers through my hair, smudging all five nails on my right hand. I plopped down onto the couch and everything on my body, except my mouth, froze. What wife? The men I’m writing to aren’t married, I said with a gulp.

Well, one of them is! Matter of fact, all of mine and all of yours could be married or shacking up with some woman, for all we know. We lie to all of them in our letters, so more than likely they are writing a bunch of lies to us too! Lola screamed. I don’t understand why so many older people don’t want to communicate by e-mail like the rest of the world! If our pen pals did, we wouldn’t have to use a street address and nobody could come after us in person like that woman did!

Lola, will you stop screaming like a banshee? I’m not deaf. With my parents, my old maid cousin, and three of my six siblings living under the same roof with me, there was not much privacy in our house. I kept my eyes on the door and began to whisper. Which one’s wife was it?

How the hell should I know, Joan? The woman didn’t tell me her name. She said she drove a long way to kick your ass. From the size of her, you would have looked like a wet noodle by the time she got through with you. She said she found the canceled checks her husband sent to you. She had the letter you sent to him last week. The way she was holding it, I couldn’t see who you had addressed it to. And she went on and on about how they have a bunch of kids and grandkids and how she’d never give him a divorce so he could be with you.

"It’s Mr. Blake in Reno! He was the only one I wrote to last week. He always sent me three or four letters every week—until last week."

What if it’s not Mr. Blake?

Oh, it’s him, all right. My other men friends live on the East Coast and in foreign countries or thousands of miles away in other directions. Only somebody close enough would actually get in a car and come here—like his wife did! I should have known better than to get involved with somebody who lives only a few hours away!

Why did you write to Mr. Blake in the first place? He looked like a bulldog in his picture.

Because he sounded so sweet and generous in his profile. When I received that first letter from him, with that three-hundred-dollar check made out to me, he sounded even sweeter.

Every single one of them sounded sweet and generous in their profiles and letters. You were the one who said we should only write to men who lived so far away that we would never have to worry about them sneaking up on us!

"None of the men did! It was only that one woman!"

It’s only that one woman, so far. Do you have a telephone number for Mr. Blake? If you do, call him up and see if it’s his wife. And if it is, can you come up with a story to tell him so he can call off that pit bull wife of his?

I don’t have his telephone number, but I do believe he’s the one. Some of the stuff he told me in his first letters didn’t jibe with some of the stuff he told me later. First he said that he was a retired army captain collecting a fat pension check every month from Uncle Sam. A few weeks later, he told me he was a retired navy man.

Army, navy, so what? What difference does it make what those old men are really doing to get the money they send to us? We need to be worried about the woman who came to my house! Bertha will have a cow if she ever finds out what we’ve been up to, using her address and all. And her kids—oh, God, Bertha’s kids! They will shit bricks and do God knows what to me!

For a stepmother, Bertha was a nice enough woman. Lola never said anything bad about her except that she whined a lot and kept her on a real short leash. She liked her stepmother and they got along well. But I could totally understand her being scared of her stepmother’s children. Libby and her twin brother, Marshall, were twelve years older than Lola. They were the stepsiblings from hell: mean, self-centered, and greedy were just a few ways to describe those two. There was just no telling what they would do to Lola if they found out what we’d done.

You’re right, I agreed. Those two miserable jackasses would make your life even more of a living hell. I feel sorry for you if they ever find out.

"You feel sorry for me? You’re the one who dragged me into this lonely hearts club mess! What do you think your mother and your stepfather would say if they found out about our scheme—that you came up with?"

They wouldn’t be happy about it. But goddamn, somebody’s wife coming to beat me up? I never expected something like that to jump off!

Neither did I. If I had, I wouldn’t have let you use my address. Now I’m afraid that the wife of one of the geezers I’m writing to might come here looking for me while I’m at school! We need to figure out a way to get out of this mess before anybody finds out about it.

It had been my idea for us to write pen pal letters to a bunch of lonely, love-struck old men. I’ll address this issue in more detail later, but I’d like to reveal my side of the basics of this bizarre story now. Anyway, joining a lonely hearts club was originally supposed to be something to do to keep us from getting bored, and a way to kill time between boyfriends. Especially since we had already participated in a previous pen pal project last year in Mr. Maynard’s social studies class.

Writing to teenagers in foreign countries had fizzled out real quick. They had badgered us to send them expensive gifts and forward letters from them to American celebrities, like Will Smith, Denzel Washington, and Madonna. A girl in Uganda had the nerve to ask me to send her a plane ticket so she could come and stay with me for two weeks.

Lola got tired of her pen pals asking her for gifts and favors, so she stopped writing to them after only six weeks. I continued to write to a few—only dudes, though. They were much more interesting than girls—and never asked me to send them gifts or to hook them up with celebrities. I enjoyed corresponding with boys all over the world. Learning about their cultures was good practice for me because one of the things that I thought I wanted to be when I grew up was a journalist for a cool publication like National Geographic.

I had sent my male pen pals some real cute pictures of myself, so they had all fallen in love with me. Writing love letters to dudes I had never met, and probably never would, had been a lot of fun, until today.

Chapter 3

Joan

I

HAD WRITTEN TO THOSE YOUNG BOYS FOR ABOUT SIX MONTHS UNTIL

I got bored. I decided that older people would be much more interesting pen pals for me and Lola to write to, this year.

We joined Aunt Martha’s Friendship Association, which was a fancy way of describing one of those lonely hearts clubs where desperate people hooked up by mail. It was featured in a cheesy confession magazine that came in the mail every month addressed to my unmarried, plain, heavyset, middle-aged cousin. Her name was Flossie, but everybody called her Too Sweet. We shared the same bedroom, and in addition to her being a nuisance, she was a slob. She left her magazines all over the place, so I didn’t have to look far to find what I needed. As far as I knew, Too Sweet had no interest in corresponding with strangers. For one thing, she was too cheap to spend money on stamps. When I had my teenage pen pals, she told me one time that she thought it was stupid for me to write letters to strangers telling them my business.

Too Sweet had been reading her magazines for as long as I could remember. Every month, in addition to several lurid confession stories with outrageous titles and provocative illustrations, the last four or five pages in back of the magazines were devoted to mature people looking for love. Their names, profiles, and pictures of them in color were featured in the section called Let’s Become Friends. And, boy, did they sound desperate! Some bragged about how fine they were and what great personalities they had. Most of the people on the list were women. But there were a lot of men looking for new friends too. A few were honest enough to admit that they were not exactly easy on the eyes or were a little on the heavy side, but that they made up for those flaws in other ways.

The majority of the men and almost half of the women came right out and said they were people of means and didn’t have a problem being generous. That grabbed my attention right away, of course. With that in mind, our original notion—we’d only be writing to a bunch of older dudes for the heck of it—took on a whole new meaning. Once it dawned on me that we could kill two birds with one stone, I decided we could say things in our letters that would make our pen pals send us gifts. But even if they turned out to be stingy and didn’t want to be nice to us, I still thought that communicating with them would be something fun to do. Who wouldn’t want to correspond with people who were all but telling the world that they were willing to practically pay for some attention? Those were the ones we focused on, and the older the better. There were only a few people under the age of fifty. But as far as I was concerned, they were too young for what I had in mind. I was acquainted with a lot of people in their fifties, so I knew that their brains were still somewhat fresh and sharp so they’d be too much trouble to get over on.

And we only selected the lonely hearts who lived out of state. Some were as far away as Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, and several Latin American countries. The reason I used Lola’s address was because I couldn’t take a chance on one of my meddlesome family members opening my mail. I’d already had one bad experience in that area and didn’t want to have another one. One of my former teenage pen pals, a gorgeous redhead named Pierre, lived in France. He liked to write sexually explicit letters. I looked forward to reading about the things he would do to my body if we ever met. One day one of my nosy sisters opened one of my letters from Pierre by accident and read it. She ratted me out. My whole family was horrified when they found out what I’d been up to. At that point, they all still thought I was a virgin and decided that even sex by mail was not acceptable for the baby of the family.

Mama told me I could no longer write to Pierre or any other pen pals. I had always been rebellious, so I continued to write to Pierre. The only difference was I had him send his letters to me in care of my cousin Lola at her address.

Lola didn’t have to worry about some busybody opening any mail that came addressed to her. Her biological parents were deceased and her stepsiblings had their own homes, so she and her stepmother lived in the big house on Evelyn Circle alone. Bertha was way too lazy to get off her fat ass and go out to their curbside mailbox to get the mail every day. Lola picked it up when she got home from school during the week and on weekends so we didn’t have to worry about Bertha intercepting any of my correspondence. There was no way I could have let my new pen pals send letters to my address, so that was the reason I had used Lola’s again.

* * *

Lola’s loud voice interrupted my thoughts. What if that lady comes back one day and Bertha answers the door and blows the whistle on you? she asked. "What in the world would we do then? What would you do if I was forced to tell that lady the truth and where you live? I was lucky enough to get rid of her this morning without too much trouble, but she didn’t look like the kind of woman who would give up on anything too easily. You know how black women are when it comes to men and money."

Tell me about it. I hope that lady doesn’t come back and cause a ruckus in front of Bertha. She’s already got one foot in the grave. Something like that would probably make her have a fatal heart attack!

Or what if that woman is driving around right now, looking for you, and runs into you on the street when you leave the house? She might even come back to my street and knock on one of my neighbor’s door and ask a bunch of questions about the people at this address. The first thing they’ll tell her is that nobody named Joan lives here, but that I have a best friend with the same name! You know how Mr. Fernandez next door likes to run his mouth.

"Let’s pray that Mr. Fernandez is not home if and when she returns to the neighborhood. In the meantime, that old battle-axe can cruise around this town all she wants looking for me. She’s never seen me, so she wouldn’t know me from the Queen of Sheba. We didn’t send pictures of ourselves to anybody, remember?"

Oh, yeah. I forgot.

* * *

Most of the men had requested friendships with women in their twenties and thirties. We had sent each one a recent photograph of my twenty-seven-year-old divorced sister, Elaine. My sister—bitch that she was—got on my last nerve, but I couldn’t deny her beauty. Before she moved back in with us last year, she had lived in L.A. and worked as a swimsuit model for four months. With her big brown eyes, high cheekbones, curly brown hair, and butterscotch-colored skin, she practically had to beat the men off with a stick. Using Elaine’s picture without her permission or knowledge was real deceitful, but we didn’t let that stop us. That was not the only deceitful thing going on, though. I had another scheme in the works that Lola didn’t know about. One of the lonely people I’d been writing to and receiving money orders and checks from was a childless, sixty-five-year-old woman in Miami named Lee Lawson. With a name that could also belong to a man in the return address on the envelopes, Lola had no reason to suspect that I was corresponding with a woman.

In the first sentence of her profile, Lee stated that she was not interested in men in her own age group. She wanted one who was young enough to be the son she never had so she could mother him, as well as enjoy his manly favors. She bragged about the mansion she owned, the real estate business she ran, and how much money her late husband had left her. Now that she was alone again, she stated, all she was interested in was having a good time with the right person. I couldn’t believe it! A woman that desperate had no business advertising for a young lover in the first place. Couldn’t she find a son/lover in Miami? Didn’t she realize how she was setting herself up to be taken advantage of? I wrote a letter to her five minutes after I finished reading her profile, hoping I’d get to her before somebody else did. Lee looked like a typical woman her age, moon-faced and grandmotherly. The expensive-looking earrings and diamond necklace she wore in her profile picture looked good on her. But the Tina Turner–style wig made her look ridiculous. I sent Lee a picture of a thirty-five-year-old man from my church named Leroy Puckett. I told her that my father had recently left my mother after being married for forty years and she had had a nervous breakdown. I had to work three jobs to help support her. She was so attached to me, her only child, that she couldn’t stand the thought of me leaving her, not even for a woman. Therefore, until my mother got well, all mail to me needed to be addressed to my cousin Joan Proctor. I doubted that Lee would buy such a cock-and-bull story, but the following week I received a three-page letter from her. She told me in the first paragraph that she was so impressed with my letter and good looks, she decided not to write to any of the other men who had responded to her ad. She also said that since I was so good to my own mother, she knew I’d be good to her. In the meantime, she wanted to help me out as much as she could until we could be together. I received a check for a thousand dollars from her the following week so I could buy myself something nice.

Maybe it was a good thing that that angry woman came looking for me today because the Lee woman had become real demanding. Last week I received three letters from her on the same day, saying almost the same thing: I had to come to Miami, or return the five thousand dollars she had sent to help me get my car fixed and pay off some bills, so I wouldn’t have to keep working three jobs. I stalled her by claiming some new issues related to my mother had suddenly come up, so I couldn’t come until I resolved them. My plan was to give her enough time to cool off. Then I’d send her a letter telling her that I was going to take my mother to Mexico to live with my uncle Alex. I would explain that I’d be gone for at least three weeks and would write to her again as soon as I could. I actually did have an uncle Alex, my stepfather Elmo’s older brother. And he had moved to Mexico last year. Elmo and some of his friends drove down there a couple of times a month to visit him and do some deep-sea fishing. I planned to accompany them on a future trip and mail a letter from there to Lee so it’d have a Mexico postmark. In the last letter I planned to write to her, I’d tell her that I had to stay down there indefinitely, because I’d been in an accident. I had sustained a broken back and I had no idea how long it would be before I recovered. If she was stupid enough to travel to Mexico to look for me, she’d never find me. The letter I planned to send would have a bogus address. Before I could even write that letter, Lee suggested something I didn’t like and had refused to do with any of my other pen pals: she demanded that I include a phone number in my next letter so she could talk to me.

So far, Lola and I had been able to avoid giving out our phone numbers. We told everybody that first we wanted to get to know them really well. When some of them got too pushy on that subject, we stopped writing to them, and replaced them with new friends. Our lives were complicated enough. The last thing we needed was for some love-struck old person to start pestering us on the phone. The letters were bad enough. One of my pen pals had suffered a stroke a few months ago, so his handwritten letters looked like chicken scratch now and took me twice as long to read as the others.

After what happened today, going to Mexico to send my final letter to Lee was out of the question. I had to send her that letter today.

In the meantime, I was more concerned about the woman who came snooping around today and how we had dragged my innocent sister into our mess.

* * *

Oh, shit! What if that old woman cruises around and sees Elaine swishing down the street? I wailed.

‘Oh, shit’ is right. There is just no telling what she might do to her if that happens. She’d probably shoot first and ask questions later. Your poor sister could get beaten up or killed and not even know why!

If it comes to that, I’d never be able to forgive myself!

Neither would I. You’d better hope it doesn’t come to that, Lola told me.

Chapter 4

Lola

T

HE THE THOUGHT THAT

J

OAN AND

I

WERE PLAYING A DANGEROUS

game never crossed my mind, but it should have. She and I knew better! We watched a lot of the true crime TV shows, the daily six o’clock news, and we read the newspapers and tabloids regularly. We knew that there were a lot of stalkers and serial killers running around loose. Like a lot of teenagers, we didn’t think anything bad could happen to us. The truth of the matter was, it was not a stretch for one of our desperate pen pals—or the mate they’d been cheating on with me or Joan—to become a stalker or something worse.

Joan, what have we gotten ourselves into? I asked, sounding more and more like a scared rabbit as the seconds rolled by. And your sister!

We may have gotten ourselves into a fine mess for sure, Joan admitted.

You’re damn right. That lady made it clear that she didn’t come all this way from wherever she came from for nothing. She might run into somebody who knows you! If she comes to your house and sees Elaine, all hell could break loose. That woman had a big purse and there could be weapons in it. I knew this scam was going too good. Why did I ever let you talk me into this shit? What was I thinking? I’ve never done anything this crazy before in my life!

Calm down, Lola.

Calm down, my ass. We could be in a lot of trouble, so how do you expect me to calm down? If that woman comes back and beats you up, you being pregnant and all, it’ll be all over the newspaper.

Let’s not even discuss me being pregnant. That has nothing to do with this new problem we have. And don’t worry, because I’ll figure out something.

Well, you’d better figure out something quick. Since that woman is from out of town, she probably won’t hang around here too long. She might decide to try and catch up with Bertha and come back here today or tomorrow.

Listen, the very first thing we need to do is stop writing letters to all those men immediately. I had been thinking for a long time, anyway, about stopping this shit. I guess we don’t have a choice now.

Oh, really? As if I hadn’t already come to that conclusion, I sneered.

Did any new letters come today?

All the mailman delivered this morning was a bunch of bills.

"Good. I’m glad to hear that. Now I know it was Mr. Blake’s wife who came looking for me. He would never let a whole week go by without sending me his usual two or three rambling letters on the same day. Look here . . . Joan paused and sucked on her teeth for a few seconds. When the mailman brings some new letters, shred them. Uh, but open the envelopes first and make sure they don’t have any money or checks in them."

I agreed with Joan, but I didn’t agree when she suggested we write Dear John letters to all of our pen pals and tell them we’re in love with somebody else and couldn’t write to them anymore. I don’t think we should write any more letters, period, I argued.

"Look, we have to write to them one last time. We’ve been writing to some of them so long, if we stop without giving them an explanation, they will probably keep writing for God knows how long. And if that one woman had the nerve to come to your house, some of the men or some of the other wives or girlfriends might do the same thing. Now we need to write to them all today—except for that lying-ass Mr. Blake—and tell them we’re going off with another man to, uh, someplace far away, where they won’t come looking for us."

All right, then, I muttered.

"How do you spell ‘Cairo,’ one r or two?"

"Cairo, Egypt? Be serious. Those old men are not stupid enough to believe some crap like that. American women who fall in love and run off with men do not go to a dangerous place like the Middle East, where Americans are so unpopular. Mexico would make more sense."

Yeah, you’re right about that. Mexico sounds more believable, I guess. So does Canada, Joan said. As long as we pick a foreign country. Nobody would be fool enough to look for us if they think we’ve left the States.

What if they don’t believe us and come here to look for us, anyway? We used our real names and sooner or later they’ll run into somebody who knows us.

You’re not making this easy, Lola.

This was never ‘easy.’ It was wrong from the get-go, and you knew it.

You knew it was wrong from the get-go too! Don’t you put all of the blame for this shit on me! I didn’t twist your arm to get you involved. You came into this with your eyes wide open, so don’t you dare go there with me!

I’m sorry. I sucked in a mouth full of air and rubbed the back of my neck, which had begun to ache. So had other parts of my body. My head was still throbbing and my stomach felt like it had turned upside down. I’m just as guilty as you are, I guess.

Is ‘Bertha Butt’ home?

Joan, I wish you wouldn’t call my stepmother that. Her butt is not even as big as your mama’s. . . .

I’m sorry. I keep forgetting. Anyway, I need to come over there so we can get busy writing those letters so we can mail them all today.

"Bertha’s having lunch with Reverend Bailey’s wife. You’d better get over here real quick so we can get as many letters written as possible before she comes