Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [4]
The list of expenses kept accumulating in Finch’s head even until the morning, when Clarise woke glowing and chattering about that delicious ocean breeze sifting through the screen in the Kentucky Avenue hotel.
“Come on, Finch”—she giggled—“let’s hurry and swim in the ocean early before the beach gets crowded and people let their untrained children stir up the sand in our faces and pee in the ocean and scatter wax paper from their bologna and cheese sandwiches all over the shoreline.”
Mercy, Lord, he thought. He hadn’t even gotten to children. Children would be a whole separate list. As it was already, he’d have to work night and day as a short-order cook at the Seventeenth-Street Deweys. But he couldn’t work night and day. Surely Clarise would get bored waiting for him to come home to play peekaboo games with her nightgown.
He was so plagued with thoughts of some prosperous cat showering his exotic beauty of a bride with see-through lacy lingerie that his steps lumbered heavier than usual as they walked to the beach. Clarise tickled him and tried to entice him into a game of tag; she slapped his butt, blew into his ear, called him honeybunch, and jumped up and down like a squirrel as they walked. Finch hardly grunted. “Got things on my mind, pretty baby,” he said.
“But the sun is overhead, the ocean’s in our sight, the day is young, and so are we, Finch. What could possibly be so pressing on your mind?”
Before he could tell her that it was money, the type of money he’d need to treat her, to keep her, to do right by her as her man, a seagull released its creamy droppings right on Finch’s hatless head. “What the fuck,” he said as he patted his head and looked up, only to have the loose-boweled gull go again and again and again, substantial plops, until Finch had to cover his head and run around in circles.
Clarise was laughing and really hopping now. “Oh, Finch, it’s glorious, it’s the most wonderful thing. I knew it! I knew it! I was right. Thank you, Lord, I was so damned right.”
“What the hell is so freaking wonderful about a nasty gull shitting on my head?” Finch asked, wiping his forehead furiously, trying to keep the shit from his eyes.
“It’s luck, silly fool.” Clarise continued to laugh. “Bird shit, just a dripping, on your head means prosperity. And look at you. You’re covered in the shit. We’re going to be rich, rich, I tell you, Finch. Filthy rich. So rich we’ll move to a huge, brick, single heaven of a house. And that’s what we’ll call it, Finch. Heaven. We’re on our way to Heaven, my wide-backed, flat-footed man.” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and kissed at his face, even where the milky omen of their prosperity dripped and ran.
Finch bought into the bird shit legend. After that it made sense for him to parlay what little he had left of his merchant marine final pay into his own enterprise. Cooking. He became a caterer.
This was 1950 in Philadelphia, and business was booming for the wedding receptions, sweet sixteen parties, cotillions, graduation dances, golden anniversaries of Philadelphia’s established, up-and-coming, and wannabe, well-to-do black folk. So Clarise named the business, Heavenly Caterers, and initially Finch managed it from their one-bedroom basement apartment on Ridge Avenue. He’d bake and fry and stew and broil and baste in the well-sized kitchen, then rent out a hall appropriate to the size of the event. Clarise would do the setting up, the coordinating of details; she had inherited the uncles’ eye for mixing colors and knickknacks and lace and art. Plus with her heightened olfactory sense, which enabled her to almost see with her nose, she would go into a barren, dingy hall