leave Mr. King’s house because the roads were too bad. She stayed over with him often, so her staying over this night was not unusual. Pee Wee was with me, and, for the first time, he spent the whole night. Sirens woke us up in the middle of the night, but we were too exhausted from hours of lovemaking to get up to investigate. We found out the next morning that the Nelsons’ house had mysteriously burned to the ground.
“I heard that Antonosanti had somethin’ to do with that fire. He was so angry with Brother Nelson for not payin’ off all that money Johnny borrowed,” Scary Mary told me and Pee Wee the next morning. Knee-high snow had not prevented her from leaving her house and coming over for coffee. “Another story I heard from Caleb is that Brother Nelson paid somebody to set that house ablaze so he could collect the insurance money.”
We never found out what really happened, and whatever it was I didn’t really want to know. To me, the fire destroying the Nelsons’ house was symbolic. It was the last connection I had to Rhoda. For reasons I can’t explain, one beer-filled night a week after the fire, I dialed her number in Florida. A recorded message informed me that the number had been changed and was now unlisted. Just like Mr. Boatwright, there was nothing left to indicate that she had ever existed.
I was living on the rest of Mr. Boatwright’s insurance money and money I have saved up from my job in Erie, but Mr. King promised I could start working as a hostess or a waitress at the Buttercup whenever I was ready. It was a long way from the corporate environment I used to believe I wanted when I was younger.
Like Muh’Dear taught me, God’ll come through when the time is right. He did for her. After so many years, Muh’Dear felt it was the “right time” for her to take her dream trip. She finally made it to the Bahamas, and, in a roundabout way, she got her own restaurant; Mr. King married her. He took her to the Bahamas for a two-week honeymoon.
Even though she didn’t have to work anymore unless she wanted to, she continued to cook and clean for Judge Lawson because he wanted her to.
“You can rest now, Muh’Dear. You’ve worked long and hard enough,” I told her. Just thinking about the fact that she had been breaking her back to cater to other people even before I was born reduced me to tears.
“I ain’t about to go back on my word to old Judge Lawson. He been good to us, and the least I can do is stay on with him in his last days,” Muh’Dear told me adding, “I got a feelin’ Judge Lawson goin to outlive all of us.” She laughed.
I wanted her to retire, but I also wanted her to honor the judge’s request. I don’t know what would have become of us without him and people like Scary Mary, who were forever pulling us out of a hole. Mr. Boatwright’s abuse was by then nothing more than a memory to me and one of several ugly secrets I’d carry with me to my grave.
I have the house on Reed Street all to myself now and Judge Lawson said I can stay in it for the rest of my life if I want to. He even encouraged me to rent out two of the three bedrooms and to keep the money for myself. But I’d had enough of boarders a long time ago with Mr. Boatwright and his mess.
I moved into the room that used to be Muh’Dear’s, and I turned mine into a guestroom. I had not been inside Mr. Boatwright’s old room since the day I returned from Erie and every time I passed it, I shuddered. As far as I was concerned, that room no longer existed.
A week after Muh’Dear and Mr. King returned from their honeymoon, the day after Easter, I started waiting tables at the Buttercup. In mid-December, Mr. King decided to have the inside of the restaurant painted so he closed it for two weeks. It couldn’t have happened at a better time. I had a lot of Christmas shopping to do and several parties to attend. Even with all that on my plate, I constantly thought about all the things that had happened to me. Having Mr. King as my new daddy made me think