Red Light Wives by Mary Monroe Read Free Book Online Page B

to her, too. It took me a while to figure out why. Verna was a lesbian, but that was not the word I heard. Both Daddy and Etta always referred to Verna as being “confused.”
    â€œConfused hell! I ain’t confused. I know what I am. I just like to eat me some pussy,” Verna said to her mother, with me standing right there in the living room listening. It was my ninth birthday. The way Etta’s eyes bulged out, with her mouth open, I thought she was having a stroke. But all she did was shake her head and stomp out of the room, dropping pieces of my birthday cake all over the floor. “Lula Mae, the sooner you learn about life, the better off you’ll be. I ain’t never goin’ to hide nothin’ from you, girl. You done already seen more than a child your age should anyway,” Verna told me, a serious look on her face. Even though I was still a child, sassy and disruptive most of the time, Verna treated me with respect and affection.
    She was a gentle person. But with her big moon face, beady black eyes, shaved head and barrel-shaped body, she looked like a truck driver. As a matter of fact, Verna was a truck driver. Daddy co-owned a trucking company with another man and Verna worked for them. Most of her jobs only took her across town to help somebody haul something to the junkyard, every now and then, she had to drive out of the state or to some other city in Mississippi to haul fruit or live chickens. I hated the days when Verna had to go out of town overnight.
    Daddy was old, almost as old as my mama’s daddy. So, like most other older people, he slept a lot and was out of touch with a lot of things. Verna was the only person in my life at the time with whom I felt comfortable. When she was gone, I felt like I was all alone in a world that was so big and unfair, I never knew if I was coming or going. Attention seemed to be the one thing of which I could never get enough.
    As old as Daddy was, he still had enough juice in him to get my stepmother pregnant with twin boys.
    I was fourteen when Etta gave birth to Logan and Ernest. She wasn’t so young herself, so when her health started to fail, she took me out of school so that I could stay home and help her with the twins.
    â€œLula Mae needs a education,” my daddy said weakly. “I want her to be able to fend for herself.”
    â€œLike her mama did? Either Lula stay home and help me with them babies, or you hire me a full-time nurse,” Etta told Daddy, from the bed she rarely left anymore.
    â€œI can always go back to school, Daddy,” I said, peeping around the door to the bedroom he shared with Etta.
    With a surprised look on her long, evil face, Etta lifted her head off her pillow and glared at me. “You so triflin’ you don’t care nothin’ about no school nohow,” she insisted with a smirk. “I got a lot of things for you to do around this house,” she declared, laying her head back down on her pillows so hard the bed’s headboard shook.
    I hated school, and as far as I was concerned, I’d learned as much as I could anyway. As bad as it was being in the house with Etta and her two squawking brats, it was better than being in the school I attended. Barberton had a lot of small-minded people with big ugly attitudes, and I suffered because of that. Etta was on the school board so she knew every one of my teachers and had managed to poison most of them against me. I was glad to be away from mean old Miss Windland. That heifer used to make me stand in a corner just for having a “stupid look” on my face or for being disruptive. I got violent when kids said something nasty about my mother, so I had to get “disruptive” a lot. And Miss Windland never failed to remind me that when she’d taught my mother, my mother had been just like me.
    Every time a teacher punished me and sent me home with a note, Etta made me snap a switch off a tree for her to whup