Tempest Rising by Diane Mckinney-Whetstone Read Free Book Online Page B

her mother always told her those dark stockings on her light legs looked whorish. “Get the cinnamon-colored; that’s the shade a girl who purports to be a Christian like you should be wearing,” Mae always said. Ramona shook off her mother’s voice about the color of stockings. Least she could do was show off her legs in the shade she wanted, especially after being saddled with grief-stricken girls until Mae got back.
    She passed the five-and-dime where the window was done up in an oversized box of Jean Naté toilet water. “The scent for all of his senses,” the sign read. The bright yellow box stopped Ramona, made her back up to gaze in the five-and-dime’s window. She fingered the change from her stockings, which she’d dropped into her coat pocket. “A dollar and nine cents,” the sign seemed to whisper, “splash on this, and he’ll be all over you for a well-spent dollar nine.”
    The streetlamp in front of the five-and-dime popped on, and Ramona shrugged off the whispered enticements of the Jean Naté. What was the sense in eating into next week’s bus fare just to make herself irresistible to Tyrone when she was only going to have to sneak him up to her tiny bedroom? Piece of car he drove barely had a back seat, and surely he couldn’t afford a room at a drive-inmotel, much less a lavish suite somewhere downtown where Ramona thought she belonged.
    The March wind was starting to gurgle and belch on Sixtieth Street, and Ramona pulled her coat collar up around her ears. She was glad she’d worn her good trench coat with the genuine suede trim; she always wore her good clothes when she got her hair done on Sixtieth Street lest the loud-talking women in the shop think she was needy. They knew she made a half-decent living as the assistant buyer in Lit Brothers bargain basement, and she didn’t want anybody to guess her real financial nonworth, how Mae was always siphoning her money, talking her out of generous bits of her pay week after week while Ramona watched in horror as her hard-worked-for dollars slipped through her own fingers into Mae’s card-playing hands like Johnson’s baby oil. So Ramona wore her good trench coat with the genuine suede trim in order to cover up for Mae.
    Ramona straightened her back and brushed at her new French roll. She turned from the five-and-dime window and made her way toward the Sun Ray drugstore on the corner. Decided if the sun could do her thing with the night so boldly, she could certainly stop at the Sun Ray, treat herself to a Coke, sit at the counter, and listen to the els go by. She hoped she wouldn’t run into any of the gospel choir, who’d surely want to talk. She wanted instead to try to think about Tyrone. Wanted to try yet again to summon up those tingling feelings that glittered that she thought she should have for Tyrone. Except every time she tried to think about Tyrone in the dreamy-eyed way appropriate for a woman allowing herself to fall in love, she’d end up sighing to herself, the way she guessed the sun would have sighed had she not been able to beckon the night; it wasn’t Tyrone’s face she’d see at all. It was a face more formed, hardened, lined in ways that stirred Ramona’s passions. She felt cheap and common when she thought about that face in such a gushing, silky way. It was Tyrone’s father’s face. Ever since she was a teenager and would giggle to her best friend Grace how fine she thought Perry was, he’d had that effect on her. And Grace would tell her he was too old, old enough to be her father, and what did her father look like anyhow because on The Edge of Night somebody was in love with an older man and it turned out just to be a need for a father figure? But Ramona never knew her father; some high-yellow sailor who came and went with the ships at the navy yard was all she knew, so she told Grace that couldn’t be it because Perry was brown as a chocolate snap cookie, and probably as sweet.
    She shifted on the stool and