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PART II
ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS

48

“SISTER ALBRIGHT?” MARINA whispered once the house was quieting down for the night, with Sister Albright in the middle of tucking the smaller children into bed. “I need to speak with you before I go home. In private. There’s something I haven’t said and must.”

Sister Albright simply nodded and continued to sing to the toddler.

When that was finished, she came into the kitchen and said, “Marina, take me to see your new home.”

“Oooh!” Dot said, hopping up.

“I need you to stay here and help me sort sutures,” Bishop said blithely. “You can go tomorrow.”

“But Daaaaddy,” Dot whined.

“Sit.”

Dot flopped into the chair with a harrumph. If Marina had ever displayed such behavior to her parents … Maybe, somewhere in the back of her mind, she’d always known Mother was capable of such violence.

Marina hugged Dot and Bishop, who had his fingers wound in catgut, thanked them for dinner, company, and advice (even though she was now scared to death), and gathered her things. “I don’t really know how to do this very well,” she apologized. Sister Albright helped her along until she got the car started. “It’s dark,” Marina said, bemused, searching for how to turn the headlamps on. “I guess you know what I want to talk about,” she said hesitantly while she searched.

“I do. Right now I want you to concentrate on driving.”

“Do you want to drive?”

“No, because you’ll have to bring me home again and I want to make sure you can do it.” With that, she reached over and pulled the lever for the headlamps.

Marina took a deep breath and managed to pull out and get herself puttering in the right direction. She finally got to her alley, drove down it, parked, and sat trembling in the silence.

Sister Albright chuckled. “It’ll get better.”

Once inside, Sister Albright exclaimed over everything, the Hoosier, the freezer (“That’s it. I’m getting one.”), the dining room and living room, the upstairs, and the bathroom. “Well, well, well,” Sister Albright said approvingly, plopping down on the bed and patting the spot beside her as if it were hers and Marina was a guest.

Marina didn’t like that at all. How best to say it? “Come down to the kitchen. I have bread I made this morning.”

“Spill it, sweetie,” she said once they were seated at the table with jam from the supermarket, which Marina did not like.

She took a breath to begin, but then, thinking about where to start—loose women. “I don’t know how to explain it,” she finally said. “This is how it started.”

It took her a while because she had to think of every single word that was said or she couldn’t make it make sense. She failed anyway. “ … ruins the friendship and he doesn’t want to do that. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Sister Albright mused, licking jam off her finger.

“How?”

“In our previous life, Bishop and I saw that happen quite a bit. But we found out when you marry your friend, being indecent together can only strengthen the friendship. It’s like … oh, a good, well-seasoned skillet. Say the skillet is the day’s business, the job or housecleaning. Say the food is the friendship and the fun, like the outings he took you on, which I have no reason to think he won’t continue. What you do together in bed is the grease, although I didn’t want to use the word ‘grease,’” she teased with a wink.

Marina couldn’t help her smile.

“Right now, you’re in an awkward position, but you have time. Soon you’ll be showing more. Men don’t generally feel right about being with pregnant women, so he probably wouldn’t expect anything anyway. You’ve got another year yet to work this out between you. Talk to him. Make him talk to you.”

Marina chuckled. “He doesn’t have any problem telling me exactly what he thinks.”

“But why does he think those things? That’s what you have to get to.”

“That’s all? Talk?”

“Yes, and settle in. Every night you sleep with him is a chance for him to make you his wife instead of just his good friend.” She paused. “Do you want to … ?”

Marina shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I want to make him happy, but he’s not going to be happy whether I do or don’t. I … All I really want is that he not do … that … with anybody else.”

Sister Albright sighed, but said nothing except, “The baby needs to be fed, so I need to go home.”

Marina glanced at the clock, her brow wrinkling. “How do you know that?”

“My breasts are heavy and beginning to leak.”

Marina gulped.

“Well!” she said, suddenly bright. “I know one thing you can do to prepare for the baby.”

“What?”

“Help me with mine!”

 

 

49

THE SUNDAY FOLLOWING their wedding day, Trey grabbed his cute little wife as she was about to hop out of bed long after she had intended to get up. He wanted … He didn’t know what.

“Trey, I overslept!” she hissed, yanking her wrap off the foot of the bed and pulling it around herself as if it were armor. She refused to be uncovered in his presence if she could help it, and she refused to look at him if he were naked, which he was a lot, and she would cling to the edge of the bed if she was awake when he got home from work and climbed in.

“It’s just you an’ me, Sugga. You don’t have to whisper like somebody’s gonna wake up. And you don’t have to hop up and around like you’ve got an army to feed, especially since we don’t got a church to go to an’ I brought supper home from the speak.”

“You did?” she asked in a small voice.

“You been workin’ too hard. I understand why you’ve been over at the Albrights’, learnin’ how to take care o’ babies. An’ I understand you don’t have much to do right now an’ you’re tryin’a pay ’em back for helpin’ you after your mama tossed you out. An’ I understand you miss Dot and you go to Kresge’s with her and whatnot. An’ I understand you don’t wanna be home alone all night. But I’ve been workin’ hard too an’ I wanna lay in bed—”

“Lie.”

“Lie? You think I’m lyin’?”

“No. You said ‘lay.’ It’s ‘lie.’ Lie in bed.”

“That don’t—doesn’t—sound right.”

“Because no one you run with says it correctly,” she said gently. “That does not mean you’re stupid or uneducated or a hick. It means you’ve been around too many lazy people. That’s what Mother taught me.”

“Lazy?”

“The way you speak is lazy. You cut your consonants off and run words together. Some people do it so much it’s as if they’re speaking another language.”

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “But you go to school with a lot of people like me.”

“It’s one reason Dot and I have no other friends. We’re accused of putting on airs. We’re not. That’s the way we speak in our households, but if it makes a difference, it’s difficult for us not to speak like that when we hear it all the time. It’s … easier.”

That shocked Trey. “You’re kiddin’.”

She shook her head. “But sometimes … ”

“It’s the sometimes that nabs you.”

Trey felt her little chuckle.

“Yes. But you did it wonderfully while we were courting.”

Now he changed his enunciation to his proper accent. “This, what we are doing right now, is what I want. I want to lie in bed with my wife on a Sunday morning and talk.”

She relaxed a little. “About what, besides grammar?”

“Everything. Nothing. Grammar. A whole buncha things in between. Bunch uvvvv. That was pure laziness, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“We ain’t—haven’t— We haven’t done that a lot since we got married, surely not as much as we did when we was courtin’. Were courteeng. Now lay—lie—on back here, Sugga, and snuggle up.”

“Trey, it’s hot,” she sighed.

“And later there will be cold water in the shower. C’mon now.” She resisted a little, but then did exactly what he said without further argument except that she was still tense in her nightdress and wrap, lying there like a board, looking up at the ceiling. Her manner of acquiescence irritated him because he wanted to cajole and seduce her to do things, not order her around. Sometimes orders were necessary, and it was the sometimes that nabbed you. “C’mere.” He pulled her into his body until she was half lying on him and his arm was around her shoulders. It wasn’t hard, but he knew she was just going along with it because that was what a good wife did. He’d have to work with what he got. “Put your hand right here.” He placed her tiny hand on his opposite shoulder. “Put your ear right here,” he murmured, tapping right over his heart. She did. “What do you hear?”

After a few seconds, she murmured, “Your heartbeat.”

He kissed the top of her head. “Know what?”

“What?”

“I missed you.”

“When? You’ve been home every morning.”

“Eh, I missed talkin’ to you. You know, between the last time I saw you and our wedding.”

“How did you know I was in the family way so you could leave me?”

“I didn’t,” he said, surprised. “I just couldn’t do that to my good friend anymore. No, I don’t like the woman I was fucking—” She winced. “—but I like you a whole lot and whenever you looked at me the day after, I— Your sweet little face, looking at me as if the night before hadn’t happened and you were back to being my good friend, it laid me low. Laid? Lay? Lie?”

“You’re correct,” she murmured.

“Good. I was getting ready to tell Boss Tom I was not going to do this to you anymore when he called me in to give me the keys. He told me you were at the Albrights’.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I thought somebody already had,” he said simply. “I left you because I was ashamed, the same way I left the nice girl who corrected my grammar.”

He felt her throat constrict against his bare chest. He brought her hand up to his breastbone and manipulated her fingers into caressing him. She balked a little, but then let him direct her movements.

“What happened to Gene?” she asked softly.

He sighed heavily, wondering how much to tell her. “Gene,” he said slowly, “had his own reasons for abandoning Dot. What he told her was a lie. He really wants to marry her.”

She gasped and struggled to an elbow to look down at him. “He what?!”

Trey nodded wearily. “He can’t. He will never be able to because of his circumstances, and he’s as heartbroken as she is. Do not ever tell Dot that because she’ll—”

“Look for him,” Marina said sadly, settling into his arms again. She was relaxed now, caressing his chest absently because she was thinking about something else.

“And declare her love and tell him it doesn’t matter, love will find a way, all that, what romantic girls do, and beg him to run away with her. He told Albright everything. That’s how he found out about the bet.” Marina whimpered. “And even if Dot got Gene to run off—which he wouldn’t, because he loves Dot too much to harm her, Albright would hunt them down, drag Dot home by her hair, and likely kill Gene.”

“Poor Dot,” Marina sighed.

“Poor Gene,” Trey countered.

“Yes.”

“See, this? This is what I wanted to do with you this morning. Afternoon. Lie here and talk. It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“It is,” she agreed.

Trey couldn’t tell if she were sincere or not, which irked him. “Sometimes I feel like you’re the only person I can talk to. I talk to Gene. I talk to my girls. But not the way I want to talk to somebody who’s mine.”

She was silent for a moment then muttered, “You’re twenty-four, a mob boss, businessman. I don’t know anything you’ve done, but it’s probably really bad. You know how everything works. You’re educated even if you don’t sound like it when you don’t have to. You’re smart even if you don’t think so. Why do you want a sixteen-year-old preacher’s daughter who didn’t know how babies were made until she made one?”

That was a damned good question. “I don’t have much of an answer to that,” he said, stroking her back, wishing she were naked, “except I just knew you and I would hit it off. I wasn’t lying when I told the reverend I forget how old you are. For instance, Dot.” She stiffened. “Dot think she’s worldly, knowing what’s what, being cynical and suspicious, carrying a gun—”

“She what?!”

Trey smirked. “She’s walking around heavy, Sugar. In her pocketbook. Which reminds me, I need to get you armed and sassy too.”

She whimpered. “You want me to … ”

“I most certainly do. This might be a nice, quiet neighborhood, aside from the ambulances, I mean, but in reality, there is no such thing as a nice, quiet house for a gangster.”

She snuggled a little further into his side, which Trey knew was not fake. She was a little scared. He felt really bad about that. She needed to be a lot scared.

48-49A

If you don’t want to wait 2 years to get to the end, you can buy it here.

Speakeasy staff.