Maudetta “Maude” Drayton looked at her boyfriend when those same words she was saying spewed out of his mouth too. But because she knew Johnny, she didn’t smile like it was a cute joke. She knew it wasn’t coming from a humorous place. It was coming from an annoyed place. He was pissed with her.Again.
“What was it this time?” he asked as she hugged his neck and kissed him on the cheek. Then she plopped down across from him. “Was it the traffic? The job? Or here’s a novel idea: Maybe it’s you. Maybe all your problems are of your own making.”
She continued to stare at him as she removed her shoulder bag and sat it on the booth seat beside her. “Okay, what’s wrong with you?”
“Me? Why would something be wrong with me? Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“Oh it has to be,” Maude said as if it went without saying. “Because what you are not going to do is sit up here and bash me as if something’s wrong with me.”
“Wasn’t trying to bash you. But you are late. That’s a natural fact. My time is valuable too.”
“If I owned my own business and could set my own clock, then I would never be late either, Johnny. But when I’minterviewing a source, there’s no way I can just leave. It took longer than I thought it would take. It happens.”
“Did you get any great information from this source of yours?”
Johnny looked as disappointment washed over her pretty face. That was always the rub with Maude. She was a journalist, alright, but in his view she wasn’t a very good one. “I wouldn’t call it great information, no,” she said.
He looked as if he knew that would be her response. “Do you ever get any great information?” he asked her.
Maude stared at him again. They had been together for almost a year. Ten months. They had ups. They had downs. Lately it had been more than their share of downs. But today something was particularly off. She could tell it by the snippy way he was talking to her. It wasn’t giving love at all. It was giving something closer to hate.
Not that he was never dismissive about her job. He was always dismissive about her job! But this time was different. His tone had an edge to it. A hateful edge. “What’s wrong?” she asked him again.
“I just think you’re wasting your time giving your all for that rag of a newspaper. They don’t even want you there. Probably gonna fire you soon.”
Maude frowned. “Fire me? That’s ridiculous!”
“Then why do they keep cutting your pay, Maude? Tell me that. Those white boys ain’t getting no pay cut. Probably those white girls ain’t either. Why you always got to get one?”
Maude didn’t have an answer for that, either, so she didn’t respond.
“And I know you’re struggling,” Johnny continued. “You can pretend you aren’t, but I know you are. Even though you won’t accept a dime from me.”
Maude frowned again. “Boy bye! I’m a grown-ass woman. What I look like accepting money from you? I can take care of myself, thank you very much. I don’t need your money.”
“I glanced at your phone when I was over to your crib the other night. Your car note is past due. Your rent is past due.”
“And I’ll catch up both when I get paid next Friday.”
“That’s not how you handle business, Maude, geez.” Then he looked at her disgustedly. “You’re a mess. You’re just a mess!”
He didn’t know it because Maude never showed it, but whenever people used that dismissive term to describe her, and many people did, it always hurt her to her core. Those were among her aunt’s favorite words for her too:A mess.
It started after the accident when her aunt, her father’s sister, came to pick her up after her monthlong stay in the hospital. She carted her off to Dillon, Georgia where they were coming from when the accident occurred. That was twenty-three years ago. Maude was just six years old. But her aunt, who seemed to be in grief over for years, blamed Maude the entire time she lived with her. According to her aunt, she was the reason she no longer had a brother, or sister-in-law, or niece. As if they weren’t Maude’s family too.
Her aunt had just gotten married when that accident occurred. Maude and her parents and her sister, in fact, were going back home from the wedding. But her brand-new husband didn’t want children right away. Yet there they were saddled with a suddenly orphaned six year old. And they didn’t know what to do with her any more than she knew what to do with them. Just that they knew she was a mess. They never ceased to remind her of that fact.
And then one day, ten years later, they left Georgia for greener pastures up north. Maude was sixteen at the time. But according to them she thought she was grown and strong, sothey let her be grown and strong and left her ass right where it was. Her aunt, who was so in love with her domineering husband that she’d walk off the face of the earth for that man, took that baby she had with him and left Maude behind to fend for herself. And they never looked back.
Although Maude was used to trauma by then, she was nevertheless surprised by her aunt’s abandonment. But nobody would have ever known it. Because she got on with her life.
She was working at Burger King at the time of the abandonment, but she put her age as eighteen on an application for an apartment, got the apartment, graduated high school, and then got a job with the Dillon Post-Dispatch newspaper company. Where she still worked to this day. She never looked back either.
“Since you claim to know all about me,” she said to Johnny to avoid getting into it with him about her own life, “let’s talk about you. What’s going on with you?”
He looked at her as if she was as out to lunch as he took her to be. “I know you didn’t just ask me that.” Then he leaned forward. “How can you work in the news field and never bother to watch the news? Or even read it?”
Sometimes this man talked in riddles to her. “Johnny, what are you talking about? You know I’ve been heavily absorbed in this story I’m working on. This story could change my life. If I get it just right, it could even get picked up by major newspapers across the country.”
