to connect. I never removed my panties. I just slid one leg over to the side. Like Viola’s husband he was docile, but without my encouragement. He often insisted on washing my dishes and running errands for me. After a while we developed a routine you could set a clock by. He’d come over without calling every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday evening to eat one of the lavish dinners I’d prepared. He liked whatever I cooked, but his favorite meal was collard greens, corn bread, fried chicken, and potato salad. That’s what I cooked every Saturday. A few times he’d come over just long enough to gobble up a couple of plates of food, then run. “I got to carry my mama somewhere,” or “I got a union meetin’ to go to,” he often told me. Like with Viola, I didn’t have too much in common with Levi. We shared our love for good food, movies, and the church. “Girl, it sounds like that man is usin’ you,” Rhoda teased when I told her about all the dinners and sex I was into with Levi. I didn’t want to think that I was being used. Levi’s mother lived with him and cooked whatever he wanted her to. He didn’t have to depend on me for a decent meal, and I was sure there were other women who would sleep with him, too.
“Oh I don’t think so. He brings a lot of food to my place for me to cook that he buys with his money, and he’s always offering to do things for me,” I told her. He was fun, he never disagreed with me, and, most of all, I was no longer lonely. The closest friend I had in Erie was Viola, but she spent a lot of time with her other friends, family, and her husband, so she didn’t have as much time to spend with me as I wanted her to. Levi took up where she left off.
Viola went to visit relatives in Louisiana the week of the Fourth of July. Cynthia Costello showed up at work after the holiday wearing dark glasses to hide a black eye, and there was a Band-Aid on her nose. None of the other women or I said anything to her all morning about her injuries. Two months before she had come to work on crutches because her husband had broken her leg in two places. She had just gotten rid of the crutches. Before that it was a cast on her arm. She chatted along with the rest of us about sales, something that was on TV the night before, and recipes. I felt so sorry for her I wanted to hug her.
“What are you doing for lunch today, Cynthia?” I asked a few minutes before noon.
“I brought my lunch,” she mumbled, clearing her throat. It was only when she smiled that I noticed a deep cut on her bottom lip, too. Cynthia brought the same things for lunch every day, either a Spam, liverwurst, or peanut butter with jelly sandwich. I spared no expense when it came to eating out. With my paycheck and five thousand dollars left over from Mr. Boatwright’s money, I could afford to. Though Viola and I bought our lunch at McDonald’s a lot, we ate like kings at least three times a week at the nice restaurants close to the factory. The nicest most expensive one was Giovanni’s, an Italian restaurant that reminded me of Antonosanti’s in Richland.
“Would you like to have lunch with me at Giovanni’s? The food’s great—my treat,” I said to Cynthia.
First, she gave me an incredulous look, then a broad smile appeared on her face.
“I haven’t eaten in a restaurant in five years,” she managed to say.
“You can order anything on the menu,” I told her, then I gave her a big hug.
Along with lunch, Cynthia drank five glasses of Chianti. She was a functional alcoholic and nobody could tell when she was drunk unless she told them. I felt good the rest of that day because I’d brought a little joy into somebody else’s tortured life. Nobody knew better than I how far a little kindness went.
CHAPTER 51
Three years after I’d started dating Levi he stopped spending the night with me. We talked on the phone a few times a week and he came over without fail every Saturday night to eat and have sex, but he left right afterward. One Friday he called me at work and told