Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [3]
“You a mess, Til, a natural mess.”
They laughed easy laughs, and then the air got stilted, as they both realized at the same instant it seemed the startling truth to Til’s words: how Til had almost made two separate spheres out of Line ’Em Up Larry’s face who’d lurked around after Clarise’s mother died, insisting that the toddler Clarise was his child and he’d come to claim her, to take her to live with his sister, Vie, and him on Bainbridge Street.
Til told him he was either crazy or drunk. Anybody could look at Clarise and see she was no seed of his, black as he was, blacker than pitch tar, plus everybody knew his pecker had been crushed long before that short spell when he took up with Clarise’s mother, when he jumped bad with the Irish during the union riots and they crashed him in his middle with a fifty-pound bag of sand, so he just better keep his black ass away from their house. He didn’t heed Til, though. Came back again, talking about “my child, I’m here for my child, me and my sister, Vie, gonna raise my child.” And Til told him to just wait right there, she was gonna split him in half. He waited. That became a family joke between the brothers and sisters. If they were talking in superlatives about how stupid somebody was, they’d sum it up with “He’s stupid enough to wait in the living room while Til goes to get her sharpest hacking knife to split his head in two; in fact, if there’s anybody else around, he organizes a line and claims his spot at the head.” Line ’Em Up Larry survived, but that didn’t stop two burly detectives from arresting Til and charging her with attempted murder, spurred on by Larry’s sister, Vie, who boasted connections at City Hall, said she’d see Til under the jail. Til was found guilty but only slapped on the wrist with a suspended sentence since Larry’s sister was only a low-level clerk down at Family Court.
“Ness,” Til said, after they had both breathed and sighed and stirred up the bedroom air with remembrances of Til’s fight to protect their baby niece, “you getting ready to cry, aren’t you, Ness? I can hear it in your breathing.”
“I am. Won’t deny it. I’m just gonna miss our girl so.”
“And you thinking about her mother, right, Ness?”
“How can I not think about Baby Sis at a time like this and the painful ending to her too-short life?”
“Clarise will have a better ending, Ness. But you go ahead then. Go ahead and cry. Just don’t let Brother and Brother hear you. As it is, we gonna be wiping up their spilt tears for the next week once they realize our girl went and eloped.”
“All right, Til. Stop talking then. Just let me cry, and while I’m crying, I’m gonna pray for the peace and love of their union, and for their prosperity; I’m praying real hard for their prosperity.”
Clarise’s aunt Ness wasn’t the only one praying for their prosperity. Finch had moneymaking on his mind from the start of their holy matrimony. Clarise’s type of beauty begged for mink and silk. But before he thought about such large-scale purchases, he knew he’d want to keep her in sheer, lacy nightgowns. He’d noticed right away after he’d carried her over the threshold of their honeymoon hotel on Kentucky Avenue in Atlantic City and she’d unpacked the quality tweed suitcase that belonged to the uncles, there was only one fancy nightgown. Lord have Mercy, he thought, she’ll leave me for some other cat if I can’t keep her in good lingerie. He could hardly concentrate on satisfying her appetites that night thinking about that nightgown. She’d teased him so, played peekaboo and hide-and-seek with her one nightgown before she’d let him poke his fingers through the holes the lace made.
Finch just lay there staring at the ceiling that entire night while Clarise snored softly against his chest and lightly ground her teeth. Instead of counting sheep, Finch ticked off the mammoth hidden costs of having such a beautiful bride. In addition to nightgowns, there would be fine nylons, imported scents, luxurious skin creams, manicures, and pedicures, and