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Maggie opened her arms to her children. They ran quickly right past Jack and Prosper and into their mother’s embrace.
“Stop it. Both of you! You’re scaring them!” Maggie cried out.
Prosper looked from Jack to Maggie and back again. His whole body shook with rage.
“Accept it! Is that what you’re doing now, you motherfucking moron? Is that the shit you’re pulling now? Jack, you telling me that you’re gonna just lie down and watch Maggie fucking waste away. You prepared to watch her d—”
“Stop!” Maggie screamed out an interruption as she clapped her hands over her children’s ears. Then she summoned what little was left of her strength and pointed a furious finger at Prosper. “Get out! You get out of my house, Prosper Worthington. You get out and never come back!”
Prosper looked once more from Maggie to Jack with total and absolute disgust.
“I’ll leave, Maggie, but you can bet your ass that I’ll be back. So you better be ready, and you better hear this—I amnevergoing to accept what is happening.Never!And if I have to put Jack to ground and pull you all the way to the clinic by your goddamn hair, then that’s what I’ll do.” Prosper kicked the door wide open and let it slam shut hard behind him. In a red rage he picked up the heavy wooden picnic table then heaved it high up over his head and threw it clear across the lawn, where it splintered into a thousand pieces.
Then Prosper got on his bike, kicked the engine over hard, and twisted viciously on the throttle. His wheel spun out a ton’s worth of gravel before he rode hell bent towards the highway.
Bang! Bang! Bang!Pinky was woken up from a deep sleep to the sound of the door being practically torn from the hinges. Her heart raced as she tried to gather her wits about her in the dark room.
Pinky’s first thought was that her apartment had been mistaken for the one next door by an ATF SWAT team again. But she knew from experience that by now her door would have already been broken in and she would have had several weapons pointed at her while the agents began to rummage through her personal belongings. This would go on and on with Pinky protesting loudly until the special agent in charge realized his mistake.
But that was obviously not this.
Her next thought was that it must be Prosper, but then she glanced at the clock and thought again. Even with his seemingly random scheduled “booty calls” as Dolly was fond of calling them, Prosper never came to Pinky much past midnight. And then he’d announce his arrival with a few soft raps on the door. Pinky had actually always thought it strange … a big man like Prosper and his knocks on her door were always tentative and light as if he was hoping that she wouldn’t hear him.
It wasn’t more than a few seconds later that she heard her name being yelled loudly from outside the building. She thought it was her name anyway. The sound had an inhuman, tortured, and wailing quality to it. The howling reverberated through the still of the night in a haunting cadence. Like the last cries of a wounded animal … dying, desperate, and suffering from intolerable pain.
Pinky looked on in stunned horror from her window to see Prosper standing under the light in the courtyard. He wove unsteadily on his feet in the very center of the complex.
Lights came on all over the apartment building. Her neighbors, angry from having their sleep interrupted, called out threats from their opened windows.
It was like that scene right out ofA Streetcar Named Desire, only instead of Stanley Kowalski calling out in anguish for Stella, Prosper was calling out for her.
Pinky watched on as Prosper muttered and tossed and turned in his sleep. She got up quietly from the bed and padded into the kitchen. She made herself a cup of coffee, brought it to the kitchen table, and sat down to think about what the hell she should do about Prosper Worthington. After Pinky and Dolly’s discussion, Dolly had been like a dog with a bone and wouldn’t let up on Petey. She cajoled, begged, and bribed him for information before she finally resorted to tears. That was followed up with three days of freezing him out of the bedroom, which was nothing short of sexual blackmail as far as Petey was concerned. Petey held out as long as he could, but honestly, he had never been and never would be a match for Dolly. It wasn’t because he was weak, it was because he was a good man and a loving husband who truly hated denying his wife anything. When it came right down to it, he also didn’t want to see his sister hurt if he could prevent it, so he finally opened up. After Dolly heard the whole sad story, she sat at the table and wept. Then Dolly had called Pinky and revealed the situation clearly, concisely, and without judgement.
Thewithholding of judgementthing had lasted the five minutes it took for Dolly to be at Pinky’s house. Then Dolly had had it, because her main priority was Pinky, and not Maggie and Prosper, the two star-crossed lovers.
Petey and Dolly were of two different minds about the matter of Prosper Worthington. While Petey had warned Pinky off, he had also told her that once Prosper had gotten on the other side of the pain he was carrying, he was a man worth having.
But Dolly had seen things differently. She saw the situation as a lose-lose for Pinky.
Pinky sipped at the too hot, too strong coffee and felt it course through her veins, waking every part of her up and giving her clarity of thought. She remembered word for word what Dolly had said to her:
“You’re his meantime girl, honey. You want to settle for that?”
“But Petey says …”
“Petey’s wrong.”
“Prosper’s going through the worst thing a person can go through. How can I just ignore that? Abandon him? That would be cruel.”
“Honey, what you’re allowing to happen to you right now is cruel.”
“Prosper is not a cruel man,” Pinky protested.
“On that, we can agree.” Dolly sighed. “I don’t think he means to hurt you. He’s just in so much pain himself, he can’t see past it. You said it yourself. When it all gets too much for him to bear, he comes to you.”
“But when it’s over, when that poor, poor woman is dead and gone … maybe …”
“Maybe what? You think he’s going to magically see you with new eyes? Honey, for the rest of Prosper’s life he will associate you with the bad that made him need you in the first place. Moments in bed with you will all be tied up in his mind with moments of Maggie’s illness. And we haven’t even talked about the guilt he’ll feel when he thinks about whose bed he was in when she was dying.”
