I have no idea why Bethany was slumped against the wall like she just ran a marathon, twice. Her hair looked a mess, the bags under her eyes resembled miniature saucers and her breath smelled like she brushed her teeth with cheap wine. Before I could even say anything to her about it, Tanya's ever-tardy behind came sashaying in the restaurant as if she weren't late. With her Luis Vuitton bag dangling carelessly from her chubby arm and her ultra inappropriate little black dress clinging tightly against her body, she wedged herself into the booth gingerly with a practiced wiggle so not to draw attention to the effort it took to get her fat ass in there in the first place. I just smiled at her. I wasn't going to tell her she was late. She knew. I wasn't going to tell her that she looked ridiculous. She didn't care. I certainly wasn't going to ask her how she was doing, because then our entire meeting was going to be based on a question I didn't even really want an answer to. I love my girls, but I just can't figure out why they can't get it together.
I shot a sly peek with Mia who was already smiling at me. We quickly broke our glance and giggled discreetly. She must have been thinking the same damn thing.
Realizing that we were all in attendance, I didn't hesitate to motion to the waiter so we can get started on drinking. I didn't care that it was only 2pm on a Saturday. It was a Saturday damn it. I needed a drink just to make it Sunday, no screw that... I needed a drink just to make it to the evening.
Of course when the waiter came he stopped directly in front of Tanya. Lord help us. Men always want to pay attention to Tanya. Sure she has a pretty face, but she's a flashy fat girl with a "come and get it" sense of style. Tanya promptly took in a deep breath and allowed her boobs to rest on the table on the way down with the exhale. The waiter grinned, displaying his gratitude. I stared blankly at her Tanya's ginormous weave and unconsciously shook my head toward her. So much for hiding my disdain.
"Hey sweetheart, we just want martini's for this round." Tanya looked up at the waiter, who was all of twenty-five years old if even that. She bat her false eyelashes and gave him a doe-eyed stare. "Can you make mine dirty though?" Now she was grinning.
Skinny too-young-for-Tanya waiter tells her of course, smiles and does a slow walk to the bar so she can savor each step. Tanya isn't even looking. Her eyes are fixed on me. She's not happy.
"Why the hell are you shaking your head at me for Erica?" Tanya's lip gloss was so thick that little strings of syrupy goo formed each time she said a word. There was no need to tell her that she had too much on. She wouldn't care.
"You're just a trip." I said flippantly.
Tanya looked at Bethany, her normal "go-to" girl for support. She was out of luck however, because Bethany apparently felt and looked like crap so there was no saving her. Bethany frowned at Tanya apologetically. Mia began to cackle aloud.
"You want to say something Mia?" Tanya asked softly. She always whispered before she let the beast come it. It was the calm before the storm and we haven't even had any alcohol yet. Mia, sat up and leaned her slender frame forward and positioned herself so she could look Tanya directly in the eye. Mia is the bravest skinny girl I know.
"Would you like me to, Tanya?" Mia said in an equally calm tone. I didn't see any fans in the room but the shit was about to hit something.
"Just stop it." Bethany managed to interrupt the impending argument and silenced us with her bad breath.
"What the hell was that smell?" Tanya screwed up her face and darted her eyes frantically scross the restaurant as if she would somehow be able to identify the culprit. Mia and I started cracking up.
"That's your homie." I said dryly to Tanya. "I've been holding my own breath since I got here."
Bethany still sat right next to me crouched against the wall of the booth as if there were no holding her up without it. She began to laugh at herself and in doing so nearly created a massacre at the table. Death by breath seemed inevitable for all of us. She really needed a mint, not a martini.
The waiter came back with our drinks and we all began to sip them. I guess it was a hell of a week for all of us.
To our relief Bethany's breath improved with each sip of her drink. We all eyed her suspisciously but no one said anything. Every glance at the table was a non-verbal exchange about Bethany. Although Bethany looked like crap, her brain still worked and she knew we were all eyeing her.
"I'm okay everybody." She said loudly. Her normally caramel skin looked a bit sallow to me but I wasn't going to argue with her about her health. Bethany was an extremely attractive woman, probably the best looking among us all. She just didn't seem to care about her looks at all. She normally tossed on the first thing she could find and swept her long hair into a pony tail. That was if we were lucky. More often than not, it was in a Granny bun that made me want to relocate her to a shoe with dozens of children so she can truly live out this persona she was adopting.
"Is it Brian?" Tanya began to quiz her. Well, if anyone was going to get it out of her it was Tanya so I just shut the hell up and waited for the truth.
"He lost his job again so I picked up a little something on the side just to keep us afloat until he gets back on his feet." Bethany said this without making any eye contact. She just kept sipping and speaking to her martini. "I'm just doing some waitressing because the hours are flexible but its wearing me out working at the Nursing Home and then going to the restaurant." She finally looked up at us and those UFO's around her eyes suddenly made sense. She wasn't getting any sleep.
"He lost his job again?" Mia blurted wide-eyed. I swear that child has no tact. She is worse than I'll ever be sometimes. Mia already had large eyes, so when she was shocked, surprised or amazed she looked like she had Grave's Disease. Mia was fair with blue-grey eyes which always got compliments. The only time they were ever overlooked was when Tanya was standing next to her and that may very well be because Tanya's normally half naked whether she's standing next to a stranger or her husband.
Bethany was already putting her guard up, and I could anticipate the myriad of excuses that were about to flow out of her stinky mouth and into my disinterested ear drum. Bethany's husband was what we call a deadbeat. He couldn't hold a job if you super glued it to him and he had no problem allowing Bethany to pick up his slack.
"Well, he's a loan officer Mia and if you don't get enough loans they get rid of you." Bethany explained this to Mia as if Mia were a child asking if Santa was real or not.
"I never met anyone who can get a job and lose a job as quickly as your husband. Actually we never really met him because he wants nothing to do with your friends, so I take that back." Mia said flatly. I really wanted to know if there was going to be a drama free day with these women because it seemed like this was the second time in forty-five minutes that someone stood the risk of getting their ass whooped.
"I guess its easier to pick on someone else's husband when your's hasn't picked you yet." Bethany was quick to silence you with her tongue before anything else and apparently her comment toward Mia did the trick. Mia scowled and sat back in her seat, silenced. I have to give it to Bethany. She knew how to extinguish her own fires. She didn't need help.
Tanya grinned, obviously pleased by Bethany's retort. She must have still been a little salty about her own brief exchange with Mia. I sat quietly sipping my martini, refusing to put myself in the line of fire.
"So what's going on ladies?" Tanya quizzed enthusiastically. "Who are you ladies screwing now?" Tanya had a mischievous grin pasted on her overly made-up face.
"If someone wanted me, I'd have a story to tell." I lamented.
"Will is still giving you the cold shoulder?" Mia snapped. She was over my fiance about as much he seemed to be over me.
"Yeah, he says that he can't trust me." I let out a sigh. Talking about my fiance was a sore subject. I didn't even know if he was still my fiance.
"You should move on girl. He know's what kind of business you're in and the fact that he can't respect it makes him selfish." Tanya said.
Bethany looked on, observing but deliberately not interacting.
"Well, I wish it were that easy" I motioned for the waiter to give us another round of martini's "but it's not. He wants me to step into the role of wife and running back and forth to the West Coast for photo shoots is not his idea of a woman who wants to be someone's wife."
Mia shook her head letting her enormous curly afro sway freely. I would totally wear my hair like hers if I could pull it off, but I couldn't. "Will is a mess. He sure loved traveling with you to LA and New York when you first met. Now he's stuck on this 'be a wife' crap." She sat sipped her martini and rolled her eyes dramatically.
"I'm with Mia." Tanya co-signed. "You need to just need to live your life and let Will learn how to roll with the punches."
"Sometimes you need to yield to your partner." Bethany interjected. Her thoughts weren't surprising. She was killing herself for her man child.
"Yielding is one thing, changing is another." Mia barked.
"I say screw either. A man knows what the hell he got after the first year." Tanya giggled. She didn't care what men thought of her which is probably the reason why she never had an exclusive relationship.
"Tanya, you don't bend a little in relationships which is why you don't have a man." I said honestly.
"I have had relationships!" Tanya whined. I think I hit a nerve but it was actually unintentional this time.
"Well, exclusive..." I added to soften the blow.
"If we are having glasses of wine, fine dining and great sex for a weekend in Aruba, New York or hell even in my bedroom its exclusive. I don't care if its five minutes, he's all mine for five minutes. How's that for exclusive?!" Tanya retorted.
"Tanya," Mia reasoned, "you need to get divorced before you keep having these five minutes of exclusive horizontal action."
Tanya sucked her teeth and whipped her weave behind her shoulders. Her manicured nails had just about every color on the spectrum plastered on her ring finger nail. All of her other nails were a bright crimson. She eyed Mia defiantly as she spoke.
"I'm working on that. You don't worry."
Mia threw up her hands defensively. "If you want to be with Boo Boo thats what you should do, and if you don't just leave him." Mia cackled. We all cackled along with her. We knew that her comment was going to get Tanya uptight.
"First of all, bitch his name is Baba and I married him because he needed to be legal." Tanya always seemed to tell this story with pride as if she saved someone from a certain doom when the reality is she pocketed ten thousand dollars to marry an illegal immigrant.
"I'm a bitch now? Well damn!" Mia laughed. Tanya was always the first to call someone a bitch and everyone was used to it by now. No one cared if she was angry. Tanya got angry more often than there are days in days in the week.
"You know his name is Baba and you just like to say his name wrong to piss me off." Tanya let out a giggle. She was softening up.
We quickly became silent as the waiter approached us.
"Can I get you ladies anything else?" He was looking directly at Tanya, who at this time was in no mood to entertain him.
"No baby." She said sharply without so much as glancing in his direction.
The waiter walked away with a defeated stride. I guess that's just how it goes sometimes. You have someone's attention one minute and moments later you're old news. I knew exactly how that waiter felt. I didn't even want to go home. If I saw Will's car in the garage I was sure I was going to pass that damned house and find somewhere else to go.
"When's the last time that you had sex with Will?" Bethany asked.
I was embarrassed to answer. Don't get me wrong, Mia, Bethany and Tanya are my girls but there are something's that you don't want to share. At the same time, I couldn't lie and I definitely could not decline to answer. It would be easier to lie than to do that.
"A month." There. I said it.
"WHAT?!" Mia and Tanya said it at the same time. Bethany even turned her head so she look directly at me.
"Well, there were two weeks that I couldn't have sex with him anyway." I admitted. I felt like it was time to come clean. I wasn't going to continue omitting information from everyone. It was the very reason why Will and I were in bad shape. I had to try my best to be honest going forward.
"Why couldn't you have sex for two weeks?" Tanya said as if it were the most absurd thing that she ever heard. Sex was a major necessity for Tanya. I would never want to know how many people she slept with. Once she started adding women to her list, I quit keeping track. "I told you to lay a towel on that bed and just forget about it." She scolded.
"I wasn't on my period!" I chuckled. In Tanya's mind, sex was always a possibility and menstruation was never a deterrent.
"So then what's been going on Erica?" This time, Mia was the one pressing the matter. The one thing I hate about having this many girlfriends is that they gang up on you when they want to know your business.
"I had an abortion." I admitted. Mia and Bethany took pause but Tanya looked at me unfazed as if she were waiting to hear something else.
"Will may be ready to pounce on you now that you're all healed up." Tanya said hopefully. Bethany went back to engaging with her martini. Mia cast a worried glance in my direction as she nervously sipped her drink.
"I don't think so." I said quietly.
"Well, why the hell not?" Tanya sighed, clearly exasperated. I didn't want to come out with the truth. I just wanted to sink into the cushioned chair of the booth and disappear. Still, I mustered up the courage and answered them.
"He won't want to sleep with me because I never told him I was pregnant."
*
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