Diary of A. . . (6 page)

At noon, I called Mack.

He was very excited to hear from me. “I
didn’t think you would call.”

“Why would you think that?” I asked
affronted. “I had a wonderful time.”

“Can I be honest and say something,
Sheryl?”

“Sure.”

“Though I indicated otherwise, inwardly I
still thought you only slept with me to secure my account for your
company. I just want to reiterate that I was going to accept your
company before I ever slept with you.”

Hearing this was a relief to my ears. I made
my own confession. “I also thought my sleeping with you was the
determining factor for you coming with the company. It’s good to
know that I was wrong.”

“Well, knowing a very smart intelligent
woman such as yourself would be working on my account was a nice
enough thing, even though I was very sexually attracted to you. I
want to see you again when I get back in town, Sheryl.”

“When will that be?”

“Monday night. I wanted to come by as soon
as my flight landed.”

I wanted that too, so I accepted that offer
and told him I would pick him up from the airport. After that, I
asked, “So you didn’t have any idea that Peter wasn’t coming?”

“No, I didn’t. Peter had just called me an
hour before to confirm the appointment to make sure I would be
there.”

That was about when Peter should have been
at the hospital with his wife having the baby – if Peter was
telling the truth, but I highly doubted it the more I listened to
what Mackeroy had to say.

I wouldn’t know until Monday when I would
see Peter, but that white man was definitely on my shit list. I had
a feeling he planned on my face and personality swaying Mackeroy to
choose our company.

Mack and I spoke some more. When I got off
the phone with him, I decided to go over to visit my mother. The
issue about my crazy sister was bothering me in the back of my
head.

My mother, Nina Banks, had been a single
parent all our lives. Nina had always been stern in her discipline
to us, which pretty much kept us out of trouble. Her philosophies
about life were embedded in my mind and I relished knowing that I
had a lot of her strength in character.

She was an older version of Lauren, but Nina
didn’t look old enough to be the mother of two grown daughters in
their thirties. She looked more like she was in her early forties,
not about to be sixty in two weeks.

I told my mother exactly what my sister had
said to me. The whole time Nina looked as if someone was holding a
gun to her head.

“I told that child she was just having crazy
dreams. All pregnant women have them.”

“I believe that, too, Momma,” I agreed. “But
the woman is ready to leave her husband and you know I don’t think
I could have her up in my house. She’d start on that religious crap
again, walking around in the middle of the night and just…well, I
don’t think I could take it.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Help me, help her.”

Nina sighed and sat on the couch, pulling a
pillow over her chest as if in comfort. I didn’t sit, but instead
stood above her waiting for her to come to terms with some
deep-seated emotional strife that she was fighting with. I could
see the desperation in her eyes.

“How was I to tell you about your father? I
was single and desperate for assistance back than. I needed the
financial support. E just gave me a way out of a lot of debt that…”
She paused as if to bite her tongue.

Confused, I asked, “What are you talking
about?”

“I didn’t know until it was too late,
Sheryl. Until… I saw the bruises.”

Now I sat down next to her. “So Lauren’s
telling the truth?”

“Almost… well, I’m not sure. I didn’t want
to exacerbate the situation.” Taking a deep breath, she said, “And
he told me he’d never hurt anyone. I believed him at the time
because I was so in love with him.”

“Who? What exactly happened, Momma? E was my
father? Start from the beginning.” I wanted to get angry, but I
also wanted to know the truth, too.

“E Heasly was your father,” she confirmed.
“We met when I started this new job at a company he also worked
for. He was accused of hurting some young employees at the company,
but he said they only said this because he refused to play their
sexual games. I had heard other rumors, but he was a charmer, so I
believed him. He had this beautiful smile and wonderful personality
– you’d have loved him… he was so much like you.”

Nina looked at me, but I knew she wasn’t
seeing me. When I was growing up, she often looked at me like that,
as if there was someone else there. Now I know that she was looking
at my father all this time. I also finally understood why - Nina
was still in love with him.

This was the first time she had spoken to me
in depth about him. I mean I knew his name: E, but whenever I asked
about him when growing up, Nina would get angry or just avoid the
subject altogether.

“I guess I was missing a lot of things,”
Nina continued. “Home and… well, I threw caution to the wind and
let E romance me. He loved how young looking I was. He liked that
very much and his strange nuances didn’t faze me until one night we
were at the state fair and he was looking at this young teenager
with this weird expression on his face. Being so much in love, I
ignored this because I was pregnant with you then.”

“You left him when I was two, right?”

“Yeah. He was having sexual relations with a
seventeen-year-old intern at his company. That’s when I learned
your father loved fresh young faces. So I told him I never wanted
to see him again. But we had children together and he still wanted
to see you. So I told him only if he swore to never allow his
personal vices be known to anyone and that included you and Lauren
especially. He agreed and that’s why you had to visit him like
that.”

“So what made you all of a sudden stop?”

“One night you came home after seeing him.
You had fallen in some mud and I had taken you into the bathroom to
wash up. I saw a bruise on your leg. You told me you fell, but this
bruise was on the inside of your leg. It was a thumbprint. His. I
just knew it.” Nina looked at me dead serious and hurt. “I also
knew that I was not going to take the chance of him hurting you
ever again.”

I wanted to scream that she was a lying
whore?! That it couldn’t have been true. I couldn’t find this in my
memory anywhere. What she was telling me was so unimaginable that I
could never ever in my lifetime believe something like that.

My father had raped me?

Entry Eleven

I really don’t know how long I sat there,
pondering what my mother told me. I started thinking back on what
Lauren had said to me, too. Some things just didn't sit right with
me, but if I said something now, I would be telling my mother she
was a liar.

“When Lauren was young, did she ever say she
was raped?” I asked.

Nina answered snidely, “Ha! That girl
practically killed to go over to E’s house every weekend. She would
pack her clothes three days in advance, while I had to drag you
every time.”

That I remembered. But why couldn’t I
remember everything else?

“And why wouldn’t Lauren want me to ask you
about all this?”

“Because Lauren has always wanted to divide
and conquer. You don’t get involved and she can keep you just where
she wants you – away from me. That child has been trying to get
attention since you came out my stomach. If she can make herself
smell like a rose when she really smells like shit, then she’s
happy.”

Even though Lauren had never said it out
loud or done anything I could really say was bad to me, I’d always
had a feeling that she was somehow jealous of me for the close
relationship that Nina and I had. Though I’d never demanded
attention, Nina just genuinely liked me better as a person than
Lauren, who tried too hard to please everyone. Sometimes I would
see Lauren practically do a song and dance to garner my mother’s
attention, while I stood there like a rose. I’d get the praise, but
my mother would constantly bark at Lauren to sit down and shut
up.

“So I shouldn’t take all of this with a
grain of salt. E’s dead, right?” I tried not to make it sound too
much like a question, so I didn’t wait for her to answer. I knew
that if I waited, it would tell her that I didn’t believe her. “And
that all Lauren is imagining is-”

“Pregnant woman craziness,” Nina cut me off
with this suspicious look in her eyes.

“Do you think E raped me when I was
little?”

“I’m not sure what he did to you, Sheryl.”
Nina sighed. “I didn’t take you to the doctor. I didn’t want to
ruin the man, but I made him swear never to set eyes on you again.
That if he did, I’d run to the police and tell them. I’d ruin him
and his business.”

“He agreed?” I asked quietly.

“Yes, he agreed and even made the offer to
keep giving me child support for the both of you.” She took a deep
cool breath. “E was giving like that. He thought of everything.
Shortly after, the accident happened and that was it.”

I left, not really wanting to speak about it
anymore. At one point my mother sounded like she hated this man,
but at another point it was as if she still loved him. She was torn
between her daughters and the truth.

But had anyone ever asked E what had been
done? My mother said she made accusations, but Nina was a lot like
me. She probably didn’t ask outright because she still wanted the
respect of him.

If E was still alive, maybe he was just
keeping to the promise. Maybe it was better to stay away from what
he wanted than to be around what he couldn’t have.

I was deeply bothered by all this and got
very little sleep.

Awaking Monday morning, I trudged into work
with a lot on my mind and plate. Cassandra arrived on time and
brought my coffee while reminding me of all the appointments. I
made very little changes to the schedule before handing her some
reports to correct and some to retype.

“Can I ask a question?” she asked.

“Sure.” I sipped my coffee, looking at her
over the brim of the cup. Today she was dressed in this flowery
vintage dress that reminded me of Carol Brady, except more
contemporized.

Cassandra tilted her head to the side, which
meant she was about to get personal. I had picked up on all her
vices on her first day. I was like that with people.

“What’s the deal with Lisa?”

I rolled my eyes heavenwards. “Well, my last
assistant got the story from the office gossip pool, so I’m not
sure how it is because I rarely believe office fodder.” I put my
coffee down and pointed to the chair in front of my desk. “Lisa was
the boss’s secretary for a long while when he was here in
Detroit.”

“Have you ever met Earl?”

“No. I was hired by the Florida office
manager actually, and although I’ve gotten correspondence from him,
I’ve never personally met him. I’ve even done conference calls in
meetings, but …” I drifted off in my thoughts for a moment because
that suddenly seemed strange to me.

I think everyone in the company has had
direct contact with Earl, except me. With me it has always been
non-face-to-face. I never paid much attention to that fact before
probably because I was always rewarded for my success and for being
a good employee

“Any way, Lisa overstepped her bounds once
or twice and Earl had to show her who was boss,” I continued. “When
he decided to move the head office to Florida, she was left here
while he hired a new assistant.” Internally I also noted when he
moved the head office down there that was when I was offered the
position up here.

Very strange.

“A lot of people said she was about to get
fired, but for some reason Erin kept her. They have this hate-hate
relationship. Lisa does the work, but she hates Erin,” I went on to
say.

“So why doesn’t she quit?”

“She likely has few prospects outside of the
company, so it’s probably better to just stay since she can’t go
anywhere else. Plus, no one wants to work for Erin.”

“You can say that again. She has something
against you.”

“How do you know, Cassandra?”

“Because when I came here over the weekend,
she was here, too. She decided to take me to lunch since we were
the only ones working.”

I was shocked. “Why’d you come and work over
the weekend?”

“Oh, don’t worry. It was on my own time. My
husband was out of town, so I decided to stay out of trouble and
straighten up the files. There were a lot of things that needed to
be boxed away from last year that were completed.”

“Thanks, Cassandra. That was so sweet of
you. Okay, so what did Erin say about me?”

“Well, she first wanted to know had you told
me anything about how you’d gotten the job. I told her no, but I
would assume just from the short time of knowing you, that you knew
what you were doing and could do it very well with your arms tied
behind your back.”

I giggled and thanked Cassandra for the
compliment.

She smiled. “So she says she can’t figure
the damn thing out. One moment Earl was in a piss ass mood about
things not going right with the big auto show project. The next
thing she knew he was talking about moving the head office down to
Florida and bringing you up here for this position. She thought he
was going half–crazy, bent on ruining his own company. But it
worked and that seemed to piss her off.”

I was amazed that Earl, who’d never met me
personally, had so much confidence in me. Certainly enough to leave
me responsible like that.

Cassandra continued, “I told her of course
it would work, because you’re damn good. She was sick of my praise
and changed the subject to find out my experience. Anytime the
subject went back to you, she quickly avoided it and would say flip
remarks.”