God Ain't Through Yet

Book 0: GOD

by Mary Monroe

Genres: African American; African American Women's Fiction; African American Romance

Synopsis

Mary Monroe lights up the New York Times best-seller list with shimmering novels that show the all-too-human passions of her finely drawn characters. In God Ain’t Through Yet, Annette Goode Davis is thankful that her husband, Pee Wee, has decided to give her a second chance after discovering she’s having an affair. But post-betrayal Pee Wee seems a million miles away, and with true forgiveness the bitterest of pills, they may need a miracle to keep their marriage together.

Release date: March 31, 2015

Publisher: Recorded Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Richland, Ohio, 1997

My husband was the last man in town that the people in our close-knit circle of friends expected to have an affair. Why he didn’t cheat was as much of a mystery to me as it was to them. When I mentioned to one of my female friends that I was married to a man who didn’t cheat, her only question was, “What’s wrong with him?”

It saddened me to hear that some people thought that there was something wrong with a man who didn’t cheat on his wife.

“There is nothing wrong with my husband. He’s as normal as any other man,” I told that friend.

“Ha! If that’s the case, he’s not normal,” that friend told me.

Maybe she was right. If it was normal for a man to cheat, then Pee Wee was not normal.

Despite the fact that I had cheated on my husband just a few months ago (yes, I’d cheated, but I’ll get to that later) and had accused him of being unfaithful on numerous occasions, I knew in my heart that he had not slept with another woman since he married me. However, one of my concerns was the other women who were dying to get their hands on him.

“If you ever break up with Pee Wee, send him to me,” another female friend had jokingly suggested. “He’s perfect.”

When I told my mother what my friend had said, she told me, “Girl, as brazen and desperate as women are these days, I’d be worried if I were you.”

Even after my mother’s comment, I didn’t worry or complain because I felt secure and comfortable. Looking back on it now, I realize I was too comfortable. That was my first mistake. I had a ringside seat in the eye of a major hurricane, but I was so comfortable I didn’t realize that until it was too late.

The day that Pee Wee, my “perfect” husband, abruptly and cruelly left me for another woman had started out like any other day. It was the middle of March, and still a little too cold for my tastes. I’d been a resident of Ohio for over forty years by this time, and I still hadn’t adjusted to the weather. When I was a child growing up in Florida, I used to run around naked in our front yard in March. Kids doing such a thing in Ohio, in March, was unheard of.

I had crawled out of bed during the night and turned up the thermostat. When the weather was nice enough, Pee Wee slept in the nude, and I usually slept in something very skimpy. Right after dinner the night before, he had slid into a pair of flannel pajamas. I’d wiggled into a pair of purple thong panties, a matching Wonderbra, and a snug cotton nightgown. I’d slid my freshly pedicured feet into a pair of nylon socks. Large pink sponge rollers covered every inch of my head, individually wrapped around my thick, recently dyed black hair. A rose-scented, wrinkle-busting, white gel, one of the many weapons that I used to fight Father Time, covered my face. We looked like we were made up for a Halloween party, but it had been a night of raw passion. I had peeled off my socks and that snug gown like a stripper. He’d helped me remove everything else. Within minutes I had his handprints on parts of my body that hadn’t been touched since my last physical exam. And I had assumed positions that I hadn’t been in since I gave birth to my daughter. Afterward, I fell asleep in his arms. But when I opened my eyes the next morning, I was in bed alone.

Pee Wee had already left the house by the time I got up and made it downstairs to the kitchen. That was odd, but it wasn’t that big of a deal because he didn’t do it that often. He usually waited for me to fix his favorite breakfast: grits, biscuits, scrambled eggs with green bell peppers mixed in, and beef bacon. And when I didn’t get up in time to cook, he strapped on an apron and did it. The last time he had prepared breakfast, he had served it to me in bed.

For some reason, Pee Wee had not made breakfast this particular morning. He’d left the small clock radio on the kitchen counter on to some rap station (how many people listened to rap music this early in the morning?) and a mess on the kitchen table, which included the morning newspaper folded with the pages out of order, his empty coffee cup, a Krispy Kreme donut box, and an ashtray with the remnants of a thick marijuana cigarette piled up in it. I made a mental note to scold him about leaving a roach in plain view. It was hard enough trying to hide certain things and activities from our inquisitive eleven-year-old daughter, Charlotte, not to mention nosy relatives and friends who dropped in at the most inconvenient times. One day my mother went snooping through my bedroom closet and stumbled across an XXX-rated VHS tape that I often watched with Pee Wee when our sex life needed a shot in the arm. She took me aside and quoted Scripture nonstop for twenty minutes. By the time she got through with me, I felt like I knew every harlot in the Bible personally. She’d “excused” Pee Wee and “reminded” me that men were too weak, stupid, and horny to know better.

Pee Wee and I had shared a good laugh over that. Our life together was so idyllic at times that my meddlesome mother’s antics and crude comments didn’t bother us. I had the best of both worlds. He was not just my husband; he was also my best friend.

In spite of all my shortcomings and flaws, I looked at matters of the heart from a realistic point of view. I knew that no man, or woman, was perfect, and that anybody could make a mistake. Me jumping into bed with that low-down, funky, black devil that I got involved with last year was one of the biggest mistakes I’d ever made in my entire life. It had been such an intense and passionate affair that it had me acting like a fool. I had done things for him that I had never done to please a man. I’d told lies to be with him. And I’d given him money. It had begun gradually, but when I realized I was “paying” for some dick, I got real concerned because that went against everything I believed in. When I refused to continue paying for my pleasure, the relationship ended in a violent confrontation. Luckily, I had escaped uninjured—at least physically. But I had “paid” a very high price for my mistake. I was so disgusted with myself that for a long time it was hard for me to look in a mirror without flinching.

My husband had reluctantly forgiven me, and we had moved on. “Annette, you ain’t the first woman to cheat, and you won’t be the last. I’ll get over what you done . . . I guess,” he told me, cracking a weak smile to hide some of the pain that I’d caused.

I could not have been more repentant and humble if they’d revised the Bible and included a psalm in my honor. “Honey, I swear to God, something like this will never happen again,” I assured him, with reconstructive ideas about how I was going to repair my marriage swimming around in my head.

Once that was behind us, I began to focus on the only intimate relationship that mattered to me now. But I was no fool. I knew that if I could fall into the deep black hole of infidelity, anybody could. However, since it was usually the man who acted a fool and got involved in an affair, it was more important for me to focus on what my husband might or might not do. I believed that if he ever did cheat on me, I had to look at the situation from an overall point of view: Would I be better off without this man? Does he no longer love me? Is he worth fighting for? Is this marriage dead? Has he become such a slimy devil that he is no longer good enough for me anyway?

Had any of that been the case, the bombshell that my husband dropped in my lap this morning wouldn’t have caused so much damage. Because when he informed me that he was having an affair, I could not have been more stunned if somebody had told me that the Easter Bunny was a pimp.

He had committed the granddaddy of indiscretions: a torrid, ongoing, “I’d rather be with her than you,” sexual relationship with a woman whom I had called my friend. To me, that was the worst kind of affair. If I couldn’t trust my husband and a woman I called my friend, who could I trust?

To make matters even worse, I was probably the last person in our circle to hear about his affair!

Pee Wee was self-employed, and he took advantage of his position. He usually moseyed on over to the barbershop he owned, which was located a couple of miles from our house, whenever he felt like it. Some days he didn’t go in at all. He had dependable people working for him, so it wasn’t necessary for him to be on the premises all the time.

He spent his time away from work fishing in some of the many lakes and rivers in the northern Ohio area or just hanging around the house enjoying the lifestyle of a successful, self-made man. Lately, he’d been taking off days so that he could do special things for me. One day last week he took off so he could shampoo our carpets and prepare dinner. Now that might not sound so romantic to most people, but when he did that, it was because he wanted me to be extra nice to him. That was one of my easiest jobs. Pee Wee didn’t have to do much to get me to be nice to him. I never told him that, but it was a win-win situation. The more he pampered me, the more I pampered him.

I didn’t think anything about him going in early that Friday morning and then coming back home about an hour later, until I heard the red Firebird he drove pull up and stop in our driveway. I knew it was his car without even looking out the window. He had done one of those stupid things that men do to the motors of their cars so that it now had such a distinctive sound I’d know that Firebird was in the vicinity immediately, even without seeing it.

Right away I assumed he had forgotten something, or that maybe he had decided to take the day off so he could do something special for me. Since we had been trying to repair the damage to our marriage that my affair had caused, he initiated sexy little activities like calling me at my job and ordering me to meet him at a nearby motel for a quickie.

One day last month he’d sent a stretch limo to my job to bring me to a romantic hotel suite that he’d reserved for the night. By the time I got there, he had already ordered a candlelit filet mignon dinner and a dozen red roses. The last time he’d called me at work—interrupting my weekly staff meeting—it was to tell me to meet him in an alley behind the Grab and Go convenience store so I could give him a blow job in his car.

I was the one who had cheated, but he was the one who was bending over backward to keep our marriage alive. That was the kind of man he was.

Just thinking about my passionate relationship with my husband generated a wicked smile that spread across my face like a knife wound. There was just no telling what he had up his sleeves, or in his pants, for me this time.

I turned off the radio. Now I was so turned on, I practically collapsed back into my seat at the table, settling into it like a jaybird claiming its nest. I spread my legs open as I waited for Pee Wee to come in the house. It got so hot between my legs I had to spread my thighs so I could cool off my crotch.

I was anxious and curious to see what he was up to. I hoped that it was something that we could do quickly, because I had a lot of work on my desk at the office and I wanted to get there at a reasonable hour, hopefully before noon. That was mainly because I had plans to do lunch with a sister friend from the Baptist church that I attended from time to time. That poor woman—she had just found out that her husband was fucking his ex, so she needed some advice. Advice on what, I didn’t know. I was surprised that a woman with a cheating husband would want advice from a woman with a man like mine. What in the world did she think I could tell her? I certainly could not tell her what to do to keep her man from cheating. It was too late for that. But I was also known as a good listener, and I had two very nice shoulders for people to cry on. I was pretty sure that those were some of the things that made me so appealing to my husband.

My office hours were from nine to five; but as a senior manager for Mizelle’s Collection Agency, I had a lot of flexibility. Some days I went in an hour or so earlier than I was supposed to, some days I stayed an hour or so late, and some days I worked from home. I didn’t even have to get out of bed or my nightgown on those days. I just propped up a few pillows in my bed, kicked back with my legs crossed at the ankles, and perused a few files. I even enjoyed a few glasses of wine while doing it. It seemed like I was literally getting paid to “kick back.” What more could I ask for? But since I loved my job and I loved getting out of the house, I preferred going to work to staying home.

Glancing at my watch, I saw that it was a few minutes past eight. I was already dressed and my office was only a short drive from my house. I figured I’d get there early enough to finish most of the work on my desk and address any issues that required my attention before I went to lunch with Sister Scruggs. Since it was casual Friday, I wore a fairly short denim skirt and a yellow Bob Marley T-shirt. It was a “youthful” outfit, but I was a youthful middle-aged woman. It was also one of my favorite outfits. I had been a fool for Bob Nesta Marley since his “I Shot the Sheriff ” days. Before my recent 100-pound weight loss, wearing T-shirts or skirts or dresses with hems above my ankles was something that I could do only in my dreams.

The bathroom scale was still my worst enemy. When I stepped on it this morning, it claimed I had gained eight pounds back, and here I was smacking on my third Krispy Kreme glazed donut in the last twenty minutes! I laughed out loud; then I glared at the donut, hating it for what it represented. Just thinking about all the compliments I received about my drastic weight loss, and the proud way my husband looked when we went out in public, brought me back down to earth. I put the rest of that third donut back into the box and brushed the crumbs off my hands. “Now,” I said with a mighty belch, proud that I still had some self-control and discipline.

I had sent my daughter off to Reed Street Elementary School, which was only a few blocks away. I still had time to have a couple of cups of coffee before I left the house. And if Pee Wee had something else in mind for me to do, there was time for that, too.

Despite all the problems that we had encountered in our eleven-year marriage, Pee Wee and I still had it good.

Life was so good to me.

I was happy. My husband was happy. I had everything I wanted. My proverbial cup was not just running over, it was falling over.

I never would have guessed in a million years that I was about to lose that cup and everything in it.

I looked at my watch again. I listened and waited. The longer I listened and waited, the more anxious I felt. The wind was howling like a wounded animal. Normally, it was one of the sorriest sounds in the world as far as I was concerned. It didn’t bother me much this time, though. The wind was also blowing hard. It made the tree branches on the cherry tree that leaned toward the side of my kitchen rattle the window above my sink like a clumsy burglar. It seemed to be taking a long time for Pee Wee to get out of the car and into the house. But then he was not as spry as he used to be. Like with me and most of our friends, intruders such as arthritis, gout, excessive gas, incontinence, and other ailments associated with age had become some of his most frequent visitors. He was still in good shape for a man his age, but he had slowed down considerably over the years. However, he wasn’t that slow. Several minutes had passed since he pulled up in our driveway!

I rose from my seat at the table and was about to trot over to the window above the sink so I could look out into our driveway on the side of our house. I wanted to check and make sure he had not stumbled on a rock, or stepped on a pop top and landed faceup on the ground like old man Kelsy next door did from time to time. Before I could reach the window, I heard his car door slam. A second later, I heard a second car door slam. That was odd, but I didn’t go to the window to investigate. I scrambled back to the table and sat back down, trying not to look too excited.

As soon as Pee Wee opened our back door and entered the kitchen, I knew that something serious was about to unravel.

Even though I read Pee Wee like a book, there were times when I had no idea what was on his mind. He kept secrets from me, but that didn’t bother me because I kept a few secrets from him, too. But I could usually tell when something was wrong. This was one of those times. Something was definitely wrong. For one thing, he didn’t look directly at me, and he was not alone. Elizabeth Stovall, the manicurist who worked in his barbershop, was with him.

“Annette, we all need to talk. We need to talk right now. It’s real important,” Pee Wee blurted, his eyes darting around the room as he shuffled across the floor. He stopped in front of the table and finally looked at me. His face was so stiff it looked like he had turned to stone. When he coughed to clear his throat, his lips didn’t even move. Then he glanced at the Krispy Kreme donut box, frowning at it like it was a dirty diaper. He was the one who had coaxed me into eating those damn things on a regular basis. But by the way he was wringing his hands and glaring at the box, you would have thought that he was looking at a hand grenade. He nudged Lizzie with his elbow.

“Uh, yeah, we all need to talk,” Lizzie said.

Now, this was an interesting turn of events. I had told Pee Wee just yesterday to tell Lizzie that I wanted her to help us plan our next backyard cookout. I decided that she must have been anxious to share some ideas with me for her to come to the house so soon.

I liked Elizabeth. We had all attended junior and high school together, and I had been one of the few classmates who had not teased or made fun of her. And even though she liked me, too, back then we didn’t have enough in common for me to consider cultivating a friendship with her. But she was a friend now because I had handpicked her to work for my husband when she lost her job. One reason that I’d encouraged Pee Wee to hire her was because I pitied her. Poor woman. She was so socially isolated and awkward. She was the kind of wallflower whom other wallflowers felt sorry for. I knew that for a fact, because all through my teens I’d been a wallflower and I’d felt sorry for her. She was also so shy and withdrawn that she didn’t have a lot of friends other than her staid parents and the elderly people at her church whom she played bingo with one night every week. Bingo! And on the most popular night in the week: Saturday. If that was not the last refuge for the truly desperate, I didn’t know what was.

It was my nature to do things for other people that I thought would make them happy. However, my willingness to do “good deeds” sometimes backfired. I’d been betrayed and abused by more than one person over the years. But I had survived my trials and tribulations intact, and learned a few important lessons because of them.

At the end of the day, I felt blessed. However, I was now more alert, and not as trustworthy. I was so busy trying to avoid all of the wolves with sheep’s clothing in their closets that I didn’t even consider the fact that there were a lot of sheep who owned a few wolf outfits as well.

In the meantime, it was refreshing to have a friend like Lizzie in my life now. Life had not been too kind to her either.

Unfortunately, because of a bout with polio, one of Elizabeth’s legs was noticeably thinner than the other. People called her Little Leg Lizzie. She admitted that she liked her cute nickname, and she encouraged people to call her that. She said it made her feel “special.” But she didn’t like it when people stared at her leg or made fun of her because of it. “It makes me feel like a freak,” she had complained to me one day in Miss Krayling’s gym class in tenth grade. Feeling like a freak was one of the things that she and I had in common all through school. That and the fact that none of our male classmates wanted to date us.

She had come such a long way. Now here she was in my kitchen for the first time (that I knew of), with my husband.

Why?

Pee Wee moved a few steps closer to me. Lizzie walked behind him, dragging the foot on her skinny leg like she was dragging a mop. This was the first time I’d seen her in running shoes. She was very fair skinned and she had sharp European features. As a matter of fact, people who didn’t know her thought she was a full-blooded white woman because she had not inherited any of her black Jamaican father’s features. Her straight, jet black hair was covered under a black scarf. She wore a yellow and brown tweed dress with the hem halfway down her legs and a long beige trench coat with a thin belt around the waist. And it must have been colder outside than I thought because her ears and nose were red.

I glanced at Lizzie’s leg, the thinner one. I gave it, and her, a confused look. What I didn’t understand about Lizzie’s handicap was that it was not always that noticeable. When she wore pants or long skirts, you couldn’t see the difference in her legs, and she didn’t walk like there was a difference. However, I did notice that she walked with a mild limp when she got upset or nervous. Well, whatever it was now, she had entered my house walking like she had two club feet. And her eyes were on the floor.

“I hope you don’t take things the wrong way,” Pee Wee told me, blinking so hard his nostrils flared.

“I hope you don’t either,” Lizzie added, talking to me but looking at him.

I suddenly got the feeling that they had not come to talk to me about a backyard cookout. They didn’t look too happy or comfortable to be in the same room with me. And what they had just said sounded ominous. My eyes darted back and forth from him to her. Then I fixed my gaze on my husband’s face. He couldn’t look me in the eyes. The way his eyes rolled up, he was looking more at the top of my head than he was my face.

“Pee Wee, talk to me,” I ordered. “Look at me!” I hollered. He did, but he took his time doing it.

It felt like the air had been sucked out of my lungs by a gigantic vacuum cleaner. My left leg was shaking so hard against the table leg, the top of my pantyhose suddenly split open with a run that reached from my knee to my ankle. “What’s going on?” I asked, finally rising. I had to grab the back of the chair to steady myself so I wouldn’t fall. “Pee Wee, Lizzie, what’s going on?” I asked again. I looked from his face to hers some more. He looked at her; then they both looked at me. My words stuck in my throat like a fish bone. I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. Bile and a large lump had begun to rise from somewhere within the pit of my insides. “What . . . is . . . wrong?” I demanded, sweat forming on my face.

“Wrong? Um, nothin’ is wrong,” Pee Wee managed, looking like a condemned man.

“The hell it isn’t! Why else are you both standing here looking like pallbearers?” I hollered.

Something was definitely wrong. I could tell that just by the way my husband and my friend looked. If Pee Wee’s face got any longer, it would be on the floor. There was sweat on his face, too. He was obviously nervous about something.

Lizzie looked guilty.

But guilty of what?

“Annette, I want you to know that you are the last woman in the world I ever wanted to hurt,” Lizzie mumbled, choking on a sob. “You’ve always been good to me. . . .” She removed a wrinkled white handkerchief from the small denim purse in her hand. She honked into her handkerchief; then she blinked real hard a few times. The next thing I knew, she grabbed my husband’s arm—which was shaking like one of those branches outside on my cherry tree—with both of her hands. “I was glad when we all became friends.”

Friend?

She didn’t look like a friend of mine now. And the way she was holding on to my husband’s arm, she looked more like his nurse than his friend. What she said next stung my ears like a wasp. “Baby, you tell her.”

Baby? Had all of that sugar from those Krispy Kreme donuts dulled my mind to where I couldn’t hear right? Had I just heard this woman address my husband as “baby” right in front of me? Yes, that was exactly how this woman had addressed my husband.

When I cleared my throat it sounded more like I was growling. “Well, baby, you or somebody better tell me something before I turn this damn house inside out!” I yelled. My voice was loud, dark, and deep, like thunder rolling out of a black hole in the sky. I had to press my lips together to keep the bile from oozing out.

“I’m gettin’ to that,” Pee Wee replied in a shaky voice with a shaky hand in the air. There was so much sweat on his face now that it looked like he’d just climbed out of the shower.

“Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on here? And you’d better tell me now!” I ordered, fists clenched. “What the fuck have you done to hurt me?” I looked so hard at Lizzie’s hands on my husband that she released him. But the look that suddenly appeared on her face angered me even more. She looked like she had just swallowed Big Bird.

“I’m in love,” Lizzie announced, dabbing at her eyes with the same handkerchief that she’d just used to blow her nose.

I don’t remember what my first thought was when I heard that bitch croak that line because several thoughts danced around inside my head at the same time. In addition to those thoughts, there was a buzzing noise going back and forth, gnawing on my brain like a shark’s teeth. The bile in my throat and mouth had turned into the worst kind of slush. I wanted to vomit, and the only reason I didn’t was because I didn’t want to soil my favorite T-shirt. But something told me that there was going to be a lot more than bile for me to deal with.

Lizzie had once been the plainest Jane in town. But after a recent extreme makeover—that I had encouraged—she’d been transformed into a more glamorous version of Betty Boop. However, she didn’t look like Betty Boop to me right now. She looked more like one of those cheesy blow-up dolls that they propped up in the windows in adult sex product stores. No, that description of her was too mild. She looked like the devil. She had eased her wretched ass into my life, my husband’s bed, and now my home.

Like with a terminal illness, when dealing with the devil, a person didn’t know what all to expect. I sure didn’t. If my husband and his she-devil had told me that Pee Wee’s barbershop, which provided the lion’s share of our impressive income, had burned to the ground or that they had been robbed, it would have been less painful than what they had just told me.

“You’re in love, Lizzie? In love with who?” I asked, my eyes burning, my ears ringing. “I know you are not standing here telling me . . . you and my husband . . .” I couldn’t even finish my sentence because I could not believe my ears. Even though I knew in my heart that what I’d just heard was true, I still managed to laugh.

I was the only one laughing.

I stopped laughing because my throat suddenly felt like I had a rock stuck in it. I had to cough hard, so hard I almost choked on some air, to clear my throat before I could speak again. “Come on, you two. What is this really about?” I asked. I almost didn’t recognize my own voice. It was so hoarse and husky I sounded like a man. I shook my head, rubbed my ear, and blinked. “What is really going on here?” I demanded. The words felt like rocks in my mouth, but I laughed again anyway. “Who are you in love with, Lizzie? Did Pee Wee finally hook you up with one of his friends?”

My mind felt as raggedy as a bowl of sauerkraut. I was talking out of my head. It made no sense for Lizzie to be telling me that she didn’t want to hurt me if the person she was in love with was one of Pee Wee’s friends. But what was becoming more and more obvious to me didn’t make any sense either.

“Annette, maybe you should sit back down,” Pee Wee suggested, nodding toward the chair I had risen from. “You might take this better sitting down.”

“Sit down my ass!” I screamed, my lips trembling. I kicked the chair over and slammed my fist on the top of the table so hard that the newspaper and everything else on it fell to the floor, even that Krispy Kreme donut box. “Talk to me, dammit!”

Pee Wee’s hand was in the air again and it was still shaking. “Hold on now! You ain’t got to tear the house down!” he advised. For the first time, this man looked ugly to me. He had on the crisp white smock that he worked in, and the way I was feeling it could just as well be his shroud. I wanted to kill him, but first I needed to know exactly why I wanted to kill him.

“If you don’t talk to me and tell me everything, this house won’t be the only thing I tear down!” I threatened, kicking another one of the four chairs to the . . .