Page 47 of Happy Is On Hiatus
That was how she’d learned to refer to Justine around the Aunts, because once they’d brought her to live in this house, Aunt Vi had truly become her mother in every sense of the word, and Uncle Hale had filled the space of the father she hadn’t wanted to mourn. For Sharae, there was a difference in the title—her mom had given birth to her and for a time had nurtured and cared for her, even if there’d been moments when Sharae had considered her a weak woman. Aunt Vi had been a mother when she needed one the most, giving her love, support, discipline, and purpose. She’d raised Sharae into the woman she was today, and for that she’d be forever grateful.
“Anniversary’s coming up,” Aunt Rose said with a nod. She wore purple capris with a matching striped shirt and brown sandals on her wide feet. The only one of the Aunts who’d never married, but had kept a slew of boyfriends who’d often contributed to her bills as well as offered her entertainment, this was the sister Sharae was most like in personality and in looks.
“You wanna do something other than the usual gravesite prayer and brunch?” Aunt Ceil asked.
Sharae glanced at this aunt, the one who’d been closest to her mother before Aunt Ceil had gotten married and moved away with her soldier husband. They were the two youngest Johnson girls, and Sharae could remember listening to them talk on the phone. Aunt Ceil would call on Sunday afternoons when it was cheapest, and her mother would sit in the kitchen holding the phone between her ear and her shoulder, smoking a cigarette and laughing. It seemed her mother was always the happiest when her sisters were around, which, with the exception of Aunt Ceil, they always were.
“No,” Sharae answered. “We can keep the same ritual.” Every new year, Sharae marked the date in August on each of her calendars with a pink rose. There’d been so many pink roses at her mother’s funeral. If Sharae closed her eyes and visualized them, the scent would waft freely through her nostrils, and sadness would follow.
She cleared her throat. “I’ve been thinking about why she stayed with him.” Those thoughts had come after she’d sat on the floor in her bedroom, crying her eyes out while holding Sanford’s ashes. “He always hit her. Some of my earliest memories are of them yelling and fighting. Well, it was never really a fight since Sanford was the only one ever doing the hitting.”
Logically, Sharae knew the answer. There were so many barriers the woman faced in these situations, ones that oftentimes outsiders didn’t understand. During her years on the force, Sharae had seen plenty of domestic-abuse cases end in the same way her mother’s had, and she’dtaken the time to speak to therapists and counselors at the women’s shelters in an effort to gain clarity on the situation. So she knew about those barriers and how difficult they were to break through, and with every woman in this situation she’d encountered throughout her career, she’d done everything she could to support and empower them to make the best decisions for themselves. The abuser was the criminal and the one who needed to be held accountable for their behavior. She never lost sight of that, except when she thought about Justine. The realization made her heart ache.
“I wanted her to leave. Every time, I just wanted her to walk away from him and never look back. Like you did, Aunt Ceil.” Sharae heard the emotion in her voice, and she felt the pain and confusion she’d held in over the weekend swell in the center of her chest.
“We did too,” Aunt Ceil said. “I could hear the sadness and the fear in her voice each time I talked to her.”
“I wanted to slice that bastard’s throat every time I saw him with that slick ole smile and those evil eyes,” Aunt Rose continued.
Aunt Vi shook her head. “It’s in the past. We can’t go back now, baby girl.” She looked at Sharae with nothing but love in her deep brown eyes. “We all loved Justine and thought many a time of what we could’ve done to make that situation better. To save our sister.”
“I would’ve saved my sister,” Sharae said vehemently. But she hadn’t, had she? She and Jemel both knew Nate wasn’t the right man for Rita, and yet they’d stood at that altar beside her, smiling while she married him. To their credit, they’d tried to talk some sense into her the night before the wedding, but Rita was in love, and she was insistent, and they loved her, so they’d backed off and supported her. Even through the years when they all knew he was cheating. She felt like an ass for doing that now that Rita was going through a divorce.
“Some situations aren’t for us to save,” Aunt Vi said. “I prayed so hard for Justine.”
“And it didn’t work!” Sharae leaned forward and dropped her elbows onto her knees. Tears burned her eyes, but she clenched her hands together in an effort to keep them from falling. “Your prayers didn’t work! God didn’t save her.”
“Oh, but he did,” Aunt Vi said in that quiet tone she used sometimes. It was her praying tone, the one that said she was about to give a spiritual lesson that wouldn’t soon be forgotten. “He gave her peace that this world couldn’t give her. As long as she was here, there would’ve been turmoil and pain and suffering. San was a troubled man, and he wasn’t going to change until he got ready to. The Good Lord didn’t want Justine to have to wait that long.”
Sharae shook her head. She knew that at the root of this, her aunt was right. That didn’t make it any easier to swallow, and it didn’t stop that pain searing through the center of her chest. “Men ain’t shit,” she muttered.
Aunt Rose laughed so loud and hard, Sharae’s head shot up as she stared at her. After another couple of seconds, Aunt Ceil joined in the laughter while Aunt Vi gave Sharae a scolding glare.
“You still got that potty mouth. Remember all the bars of soap my mama used to wash your mouth out? Guess it didn’t work.” Aunt Vi shook her head, but there was light in her eyes now.
“Sorry,” Sharae said quietly.
“Whew, chile,” Aunt Rose said between the breaths she had to take or her raucous laughter would surely cause her to go into a coughing fit. “I remember saying those same words so many times.”
“Don’t encourage her, Rose,” Aunt Vi told her sister.
Aunt Rose shook her head. “What?” She waved a hand at Aunt Vi and continued to chuckle. “It’s the truth. They ain’t shit, and the Good Lord knew it too; that’s why he created woman.”
“She got a point there,” Aunt Ceil added. “I mean, I found out the hard way, but once I did, I got a clue and learned how to proceed accordingly.”
“By never getting married again?” Sharae asked.
Aunt Ceil nodded. “That’s what worked for me. I had my hands full taking care of Jemel anyway, so getting another husband wasn’t on the agenda. But even when I started dating again, I knew there’d never be another ring on this finger.”
And she’d been happy. Or at least Aunt Ceil had always seemed happy.
“I ain’t nevah want no ring on my finger,” Aunt Rose said. “I learned early that men were only good for two things, and sometimes they fell flat on that.”
Sharae wasn’t about to ask her sixty-three-year-old aunt what those two things were. But Aunt Rose, with her candid self, told her anyway.
“Sex and money,” she said, counting off the two on her fingers. “And like I said, sometimes you don’t even get that in a good way. But in all my life I knew that’s all I was ever tryin’ to get from any of them. I didn’t want none living with me or tryin’ to tell me what to do. Had my own everything—house, car, job, bank accounts. They couldn’t tell me nothin’, evah.”
Exactly. While Sharae had never asked a man to pay any of her bills or give her money to buy anything, she felt the same way Aunt Rose did. She just didn’t need the hassle. So why had Desmond’s business card been burning a hole in her pocket since she’d stuck it there earlier this afternoon?
