Richard said he didn’t mind me keeping Bo’s name, too.
“You can hold on to whatever part of your past you wanna hold on to, Lula. You my wife now, and all I care about is our future.”
The day after we got married in Reno in the same tacky little chapel where I’d married Bo, we returned to San Francisco. A week later I started a new job at the California Department of Motor Vehicles. I was assigned the same boring job I’d done at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Mississippi! The pay wasn’t that great, but with me and Richard both working, we were able to move into a nice two-bedroom apartment out near the beach.
I had used all the money that I had left from the hundreds of tricks I’d performed on new furniture, a new car for us to get around in, and baby clothes. My son was due any day.
After I’d been cleared of all charges for shooting Clyde, I went to visit my daddy, and we had a nice reunion. My pathetic stepmother, Etta, had been nicer to me than she’d ever been before in my life. That alone made the trip worthwhile. I even visited my mother’s parents. I hadn’t seen them since my mother’s death, and even though they’d changed, I would have known them anywhere.
“Lula, don’t you be a stranger. You keep in touch, and remember you always got a home to come back to,” my elderly grandfather told me. “This new husband of yours, Richard Rice—he any relation to Jerry Rice, the ballplayer? I smell money!”
“I don’t think so, Grandpa,” I said, laughing.
If I didn’t have Richard to go back to in California, I probably would have stayed in Mississippi. I didn’t realize how important family was until then. But Richard was my family. He came first in my life. I had learned that from Rosalee’s foolishness. If she hadn’t left her husband to run off with her manipulative mother, she would have avoided a lot of pain and suffering.
I spent the rest of that day enjoying my grandparents’ company and laughing about some of the stupid shit my mother used to do. Some of the same things I’d done, but I didn’t go there with that. Not with my grandparents. I would only discuss my sordid activities in San Francisco with the people who’d shared it with me, and I didn’t plan to do it that much. I wanted to get over it as soon as I could. But that wasn’t going to be easy. Clyde was a hard person to forget. I prayed that he was resting in peace. He had suffered a lot, too. He’d grown up without a mother and had to raise a severely handicapped child. Those were things I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I prayed for Keisha every night. I planned to visit her one day so I could tell her just how sorry I was for taking her daddy away from her. I prayed she would forgive me.
I spent the last few nights of my visit to Mississippi with Verna and Odessa.
“You ever think about Larry?” Verna asked.
“Larry who?” I laughed because now that’s all Larry Holmes meant to me. Something to laugh about.
Sex had a whole new meaning in my life, too. It wasn’t something to laugh about like Larry, but it no longer caused trouble in my life. And that was a good thing because Richard couldn’t keep his hands off me.
Ester and Manny, and their daughter Lulita (Little Lula), had moved to Mexico City the month before. I missed her, but she called me all the time. I planned to visit her after I had my baby. She was pregnant again and happier than she’d ever been. She’d landed a job working for an organization that located homes for abandoned kids. That didn’t mean she was “living happily every after.” None of us probably ever would. Ester and Manny didn’t have enough money to afford a place of their own yet. They lived in a cramped house with ten of his relatives and had to sleep on a dirt floor. And Manny was having some problems with his health because of a bullet lodged in his back from a street fight during his reckless years.
And even though I had Richard and a new baby on the way, my life was not a bowl of cherries, either. But it could have been a lot worse. We could have all been arrested or killed by deranged tricks. And I could have gone to jail for a very long time for killing Clyde.
I’d had lunch with Rockelle the day before at a little sidewalk café in North Beach. Her relationship with the mailman didn’t work out, but she’d hooked up with a clever detective who had been investigating a murder in her building. He helped her track down her deadbeat husband. With all the back child support she got from that fool, she was able to move into a better neighborhood. I was real happy to hear that she had moved her mother in with her.
“I heard from Rosalee again last Monday,” Rockelle told me, munching on some lettuce. I was real happy to see that she’d lost forty pounds. “She and Sammy just had a little boy.”
I got so misty-eyed I couldn’t even finish my lunch. I hadn’t spoken to Rosalee since she left California.
“Do you think she’d mind if you gave me her telephone number? I’d like to chat with her again, too,” I said, stirring my bowl of clam chowder with my spoon.
“And I’m sure she’d like to chat with you again, too,” Rockelle told me. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t bring up…you know.”
“The tricks?” I asked.
Rockelle dropped her eyes and nodded. “Yeah,” she muttered.
“Uh, do you still read a lot of books?”
“Every day,” Rockelle said cheerfully, giving me a thoughtful look. I’d never seen her looking as relaxed as she did at that moment. “You know, somebody ought to write a book about us. Me, you, Ester, Rosalee. And even Helen and Megan. Maybe if other stupid females read about all the dumb shit we did, they’d learn something.”
“It would take somebody like Stephen King to tell our strange story,” I said, laughing.
Just thinking about Clyde, Mr. Bob, Fat Freddie, and all the other hundreds of men we’d slept with for money made a sharp pain shoot through my stomach. And it didn’t stop there.
My son was born later that night. I named him Richard.