LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

someone said.

      Needy quickly spun around. She let her angry brown eyes spray accusatory bullets at the women and dared them to flinch. None of the usual suspects moved. It was as if whatever words had been spoken were frozen in time.

      Needy decided to let the snipe go unchallenged for the time. “Why don’t y’all just go ahead and read the minutes from the last meeting.” A wide menacing grin appeared on her face before she continued. “Birdie, why don’t you do it since you and I are the only ones here that are college-educated.”

      Needy gave the insult a minute to hit Cill and then she added, “Oh, I’m so sorry, Cill. I keep forgetting you decided to drop out and play in some Middle-East sand lot.” She didn’t wait for Cill to reply or throw something at her. “It’s only a few paragraphs at the most so y’all decide who’ll do it while I go and change.”

      A collective sigh filled the room as each woman, thinking silently of what Cill had said aloud, came back to life.

      “We’ll do that while you change,” Cill purred through her clenched teeth. “Take whatever time you need to pull yourself together.”

      Needy could feel her chubby fists involuntarily open and close. She suspected that Cill had made the earlier dig. Although this time the comment was said softly, the voice still had the same venom that had spat out the unkind words earlier.

      “Girl, you know I love you…all of you,” Cill said, gesturing to Needy’s wide hips.

      “You wish,” Needy said as she sashayed past.

      Like Petunia, forty-year-old Cill Lee was one of Needy’s oldest sometime-friends. Their friendship was on and off more times than a light switch. They’d reconnected while attending Hampton University.

      College didn’t sit well with Cill. She’d always wanted to study automotive design. Although Petunia wouldn’t let her touch her prize Camry, Cill could, back then and even now, take apart and put together any engine. She’d thought it would be an easy degree to obtain in college. After a time, she began to feel differently about school, because it was all books and no hands-on. She thought the studying was too hard and definitely too boring.

      Cill decided she’d join the army and spent four years trying to be all that she could be. Then she spent nine months in Kuwait. All the sand, one-hundred-plus-degree days in the sun, and lack of toilet facilities caused her to rethink her choices. She still wanted to be all that she could be—just not in Kuwait.

      Six months after Cill had left the army, she returned home. She reconnected with Needy, and moved into a doublewide trailer next door. Somehow, she never noticed that she’d only traded Kuwait for Pelzer, because her trailer sat on a lot that seemed to have as much sand. During the summer, the humid temperatures were unbearable and she was in constant need of plumbing services. Sometimes she’d wished she was back in Kuwait.

      Ten minutes passed and Petunia still had not come inside from trying to park her car, but it was enough time for Needy to prance back into her living room. She’d changed into a beige sleeveless housedress that covered her oversized blouse. She always wore something beige or in the beige family because she thought it complimented her muddy-brown skin. Her rather large legs and feet seemed an afterthought as they poked out from an even larger pair of khaki pants that didn’t seem to fit the rest of her body. But that was her normal, indoor, warm weather wear.

      With all eyes on her, Needy placed her hands on her wide hips and began to bark at the other women like a sergeant in boot camp. Normally, she wouldn’t speak in such a manner but when it came to the singles meeting, she took on a different persona, and this time she wanted to insult Cill by imitating Cill’s masculine manner.

      “Okay, I know you’ve had enough time to poke your noses into whatever I’ve bought lately for my house as well as into my business. Let’s get this meeting started properly because in about twenty minutes we’re gonna bring this pitiful gathering to an end.”

      Her skin suddenly sprouted prickly heat bumps brought forth by her rising anger. The other women looked on in horror, as Needy’s dark eyes bulged while her bountiful bosom heaved in and out like jaws on a puffer fish.

      Needy pulled together the top button on her blouse when she saw Cill Lee pointing towards her.

      “You might wanna handle those,” Cill said, struggling to keep a straight face while pointing to Needy’s escaping breasts.

      Needy tried not to act embarrassed. Not only was the top of her blouse unbuttoned; so were several buttons that appeared to zigzag from the uneven fastening. She was showing a lot more cleavage than the other women wanted to see.

      “Stop gawking. Y’all should be ashamed of yourselves, you’re just jealous of my two gifts,” Needy laughed, nervously, and laid her hands on her chest. She suddenly forgot that a moment ago, she was barking orders at them.

      When Needy was younger, the attention paid to her ample bosom often embarrassed her. She’d learned to cope by embracing them, because that’s all she could do. According to Needy, her size 44DD breasts were a gift that more than made up for her lack of beauty. However, when she wasn’t bragging about her double-D ammunition, secretly she’d complain about her stooped shoulders and constant lower-back pain.

      Needy gathered her wits and continued in a kinder and more even tone. “Each of us, in our own minds, is the epitome of womanhood. We’re self-sufficient, with jobs and benefits. So, why is life still giving us the middle finger?” Without realizing it, Needy was ranting again. “Why does life sometimes seem to just toss us crumbs?”

      The other women, all of them seasoned and unsuccessful man-hunters, began to nudge one another, nodding in agreement.

      They were physically different, yet they had one thing in common; armed with an arsenal of low self-esteem bullets and hair-trigger raging libidos, they were desperate, and extremely lethal.

      They were also, with the exception of one, women with their biological clocks locked and set on “Right now, Lord.”

      Although Mother Bea Blister was the oldest spinster and should’ve received the most respect, she was often the crankiest.

      When she’d responded to the group’s open invitation to join, she’d said that she was in her late sixties or early seventies. This vagueness really depended upon her memory or whether she felt people were just being nosy. Unlike the others, Mother Blister didn’t have a hormonal clock. She’d been on the prowl the longest, so she had a sundial.

      With dementia slowly yet daily settling in, she sat motionless with a concerned look etched on her face while the others listened to Needy’s rage. Without meaning to do it, she let her mind wander any place it chose to go. Her wandering mind finally settled on trying to figure out why and where she was.

      Mother Blister, who for most of her adult life had worked as a housekeeper for the rich and infamous, continued her mental trip through fantasyland while nestled in a corner. She sat hunched over looking like the letter C. She was sandwiched next to the wall clock, which was shaped like a black and white grinning cat; its obviously broken pendulum hung instead of swinging. On her other side hung an oversize calendar with a grinning Japanese woman pouring tea.

      “Do you smell that men’s cologne?” Cill grabbed Birdie’s arm and asked, while pretending to sniff the air. “You know she sprayed it so that we’d think she had a man in her home. Any man that would wear that skunk smell, she can have,” Cill said as she tightened her grip on Birdie’s arm, causing the skin to redden as she laughed at her own joke.

      “Ouch! You’re hurting me,” Birdie winced.

      “Sorry,” Cill whispered. “You’re so skinny I thought I was holding on to a climbing rope.” She laughed again.

      “I’m sure any man that any of us gets is most appreciated,” Birdie hissed, ignoring Cill’s comment about her weight. At that moment it was more important to quickly extricate herself from Cill’s unwanted and too familiar grip.

      As usual,

Скачать книгу