Read an Excerpt
The Honey Well
By GLORIA MALLETTE DAFINA BOOKS
Copyright © 2003 Gloria Mallette
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-7582-0468-X
Chapter One
Misshapen, the stretched out wire clothes hanger, angrily flung across the large bathroom, hit the sandstone-colored tile floor with a tinny clank as it splattered specks of contaminated water on the wall and floor. The hanger bounced twice and vibrated before settling and lying still like a petrified, undernourished snake. For the last twenty minutes, Arnell had twisted and maneuvered the hanger in a myriad of different shapes trying to hook her diamond engagement ring and pull it out of the unflushed toilet bowl. She just couldn't seem to get the tip of the wire to slide under the ring so that she could hook it. Her futile efforts had only frustrated and nauseated her. Thank God she had eaten some time ago. Still, Arnell wretched time and again when the ring kept slipping and sliding on the porcelain on the bottom of the toilet bowl. Several times she had almost hooked her ring but it would slip into the narrow hole, completely out of sight, scaring her, making her work harder to pull it back into sight. In the end, the clothes hanger had only wasted Arnell's time, making her later than she already was. And that was just it, she was late. She hated being late for any appointment, but more than she hated being late, Esther was going to hate it even more. Esther-or Queen Esther, as she liked to be called by her girls or people that worked for her-didn't like anyone messing with her money, and Arnell being late was doing just that. But wait a minute. Arnell wasn't supposed to be one of Esther's girls anymore, and really, she wasn't supposed to be working for her in any capacity. Yet, she was stressing herself out trying to keep an appointment that she wanted nothing to do with.
The appointment with Mr. Woodruff Parker, from the upper west side of Manhattan, had been set up a week ago by Robert Morris, one of Esther's favorite clients; and Esther wanted Arnell to take care of him personally, which was the reason her ring was off her finger in the first place. She couldn't very well wear an engagement ring to meet a man that she had never laid eyes on and that she was going to take to bed. After she brushed her teeth, she had slipped the ring off her finger and set it on the back of the toilet tank. When she finished her business and stood, she must have bumped the tank because the ring slid off into the bowl before she could catch it. She had screamed, "No!" but that was about all she could do. She watched her beautiful three-carat marquis-cut diamond ring sparkle brilliantly just before it sank amid the putrid waste. For the first five minutes she had shouted, "Damn!" no less than ten times. She was angry at herself for taking the ring off in the bathroom and for putting it on top of the slippery smooth tank, but then she had cursed Esther for putting her in the position to have to take the ring off her finger in the first place.
Esther had promised Arnell she would not have to work after she got her B.A. in Fine Arts, which she got a year ago from Long Island University after attending classes part-time for six years and a day. Arnell's dream had been to teach high school English, but she was realistic. An ex-prostitute teaching a classroom full of sexually fertile minds was even too scandalous for her, so she let go of that dream real quick. Turns out though that she was a damn good editor. Arnell found that out by helping a classmate with her term papers. So she started working from home as a freelance copy editor. She made good money, but even so, her degree was thirteen years past due, and had been hard-earned, mainly because she had, in hindsight, stupidly continued living in Esther's house, at Esther's pleading, and servicing clients all the while she was in school busting her butt. One would think that Esther would respect Arnell's determination to stay in school and do well to boot. But no, Esther saw Arnell's education as a "foolish waste of time" when she already had a "God-given moneymaker-your vagina." This is why Esther disregarded her promise to let Arnell completely quit the business when important, free-spending clients like Woodruff Parker called. According to Robert Morris, Woodruff Parker, Wall Street maverick, had money to burn, and Esther intended to be the furnace. She ordered Arnell to be especially beguiling in order to entice Woodruff Parker into being overly generous. Esther didn't care what she had to do or whom she had to use to get what she figured was due her, and that was all the money she could get her hands on.
The money she hoarded was not from need but from greed. Esther had more money than she'd ever dreamed of, more than enough to keep her in the lifestyle of the grand madam she had set herself up to be. Besides her fancy cars and expensive clothes and jewelry, Esther lived in a sixteen-room mansion that she had moved heaven and earth to purchase. Esther would not be satisfied until she could afford to buy the century-old Victorian house, in the upscale Ditmas Park area of Brooklyn, that was once owned by the very proper and very rich Mrs. Abigail Hawthorne, although Esther used the mansion, which her clients had dubbed The Honey Well, for a business that Mrs. Hawthorne, long dead, would never have approved of. But did Esther care? No. Esther planned on taking the hate she had for Mrs. Hawthorne to her grave.
Esther's mother, Alice Moore, had been Mrs. Hawthorne's housekeeper and cook for four years when Esther was a teenager. Esther said that Mrs. Hawthorne treated Alice like she was a slave, always yelling at her, demeaning her if the food wasn't cooked to her liking, ordering her to dust the furniture over if she saw a smudge, but worse than that, demanding that Alice wash and massage her feet every Friday afternoon. At times, Esther said she had to help her mother clean Mrs. Hawthorne's house and those were the times she saw how her mother was treated. Those were the times Esther wanted to punch Mrs. Hawthorne in the mouth, but her mother would always rein her in, stop her cold. Alice needed her job. There was nothing else she was qualified to do and Mrs. Hawthorne did pay better than most. But Esther, when she turned fourteen, after calling Mrs. Hawthorne a crotchety old bitch for calling her a pickaninny, refused to step foot inside Mrs. Hawthorne's house ever again. That is until Esther set her sights on buying the mansion. Her only regret was that Mrs. Hawthorne had to die before she could get her hands on that prize. But that didn't spoil the satisfaction for Esther. She was content thinking that Mrs. Hawthorne was turning over in her grave every time the doorbell rang. Esther thought that was really funny. For a time after she bought the house, Esther would ring the bell herself, tickling her own funny bone. Esther was very proud of what she was able to accomplish. Her money put her where she wanted to be and as long as she made the money, she would stay there. Nothing and no one would stand in the way of Esther making her money, including her one and only child, Arnell.
Which is why, until Arnell did what Esther wanted her to do, Arnell would have no peace.
"Arnell, there isn't anything I wouldn't do for you, and you know it. All you need to do is ask, and what I'm asking you to do for me, isn't anything you haven't done before."
"And that's exactly my point," Arnell said. "What I've done before, I've done too many damn times as it is. And I'm just not going to do it anymore."
"So this is how you show appreciation for the sacrifices I've made for you."
Arnell wanted to scream but she took a deep breath. "You know, Mother, I am tired of hearing about these so-called sacrifices you've made for me. What damn sacrifices? I'm the one that had to prostitute my body, not you!"
Esther cooly dragged on her cigarette. "And that's because youth is the most powerful aphrodisiac. You had it and I didn't. You're selfish, Arnell. I could have made a better life for myself without you, but I was determined to raise you on my own. After your father died, I could have put you up for adoption or in a foster home-lots of people told me that I ought to, but," Esther shook her head, "no, you were all I had, and I was all you had. There was no one to put a hand out to us. We had to take care of each other, but I would take the food from my own mouth to put in yours, if you didn't have enough to eat. So don't tell me about sacrifices."
Esther always had plenty of guilt to dump on Arnell's head, and as she had done in the past, Arnell tucked her tail and let Esther set her up with Mr. Parker, but still she couldn't bring herself to stick her hand down inside the toilet. She had been staring down at her own shit for damn near thirty minutes, trying to figure out how to get her diamond ring out. More than once she started to flush the toilet but she didn't know if the ring would stay put on the bottom when the water swirled and pushed the waste out, or if the rush of water and waste would push the brand new white diamond out into the city sewer. In fact, Arnell had foraged around so much in the toilet bowl with the clothes hanger that she couldn't even see the ring anymore, although she knew that it was there hiding underneath all that crap. The irony of it all was that this situation was so much like her own life. Underneath all the crap, there was another her, a better her, trying to get out. If only she could get Esther to release her hold on her.
Way off down the hall, the wall clock in the living room chimed. It was eight o'clock. Arnell was supposed to meet Mr. Parker at nine at the mansion. She wasn't even dressed yet. Ahead of her, from Garden City, Long Island, she had at least a forty-five minute drive into Brooklyn. Time was rushing by, but Arnell couldn't leave her ring to marinate in waste. While James might be understanding about the ring if she lost it, surely he would kill her if he ever found out about the life she once lived that he knew nothing of. He had given her the ring three months ago at the engagement party Esther had thrown for them at the mansion. Esther had been real proud when James slipped that expensive rock on her finger. The size alone had impressed her. Hell, Esther might want to kill her, too, if she didn't get that damn ring out of the toilet. Come to think of it, if that had been Esther's ring, Esther would not have thought twice about sticking her hand in all that crap to retrieve it. Arnell was reminded that nothing would stand in Esther's way when she was going after what she wanted. That's how Esther faced life's problems-head-on. No matter how messy, how ugly, how difficult, the end result was all-important, and that was that she come out on top. At this moment, something she'd heard Esther say a long time ago was never truer-Sometimes you have to stick your hand in a bowl of shit to get what you want.
Outside the bathroom door, Arnell could hear the telephone ringing. It would be no one else but Esther calling to see if she had left. The ringing was persistent.
Arnell looked back down into the toilet.
It was now or never.
As she bent over the bowl, Arnell held her breath and squeezed her eyes shut. Haltingly, she eased her hand down toward the murky water. She wretched. She stopped short, yanking her hand back. She couldn't do it. Gloves. She needed a pair of rubber gloves. Arnell threw open the vanity doors underneath the sink. Squatting, she looked inside and there, draped over the drain pipe, lay limply, a pair of yellow rubber gloves. She snatched them. She was about to close the doors when she glimpsed a bottle of green pine disinfectant. That, too, she took. She plugged up the sink and poured the whole bottle of disinfectant into it-the strong pine smell filled the room and Arnell's nostrils. Now she was ready.
Holding onto the cuff of the right glove, pulling and stretching the rubber as far up her arm as it would go, Arnell again closed her eyes and eased her hand down into the midst of her own waste. She grimaced when the coldness of the water reminded her that although her eyes didn't see it, there was more touching her gloved hand than water. Yuk! Disgusting. Again she wretched.
"Just do it!" Arnell eased her hand haltingly but gingerly to the bottom of the bowl. She pressed her fingers firmly against the porcelain, feeling for the roundness of the gold band or the rock-like feel of the diamond. Suddenly, she touched the hardness of the stone.
"Thank God!"
Arnell wasted no time pulling the ring and her hand out of the toilet. Immediately, she dropped the ring into the pine disinfectant. The ring was still sparkling. The gloves she pulled off inside out and dropped them into the wastebasket lined with plastic. The whole thing she would discard on her way out of the house. No matter what happened this evening, nothing would faze her. Not after what she just had to do. Although, as with sticking her hand in the toilet, Arnell was about to wade back into the cesspool of a life she wanted so badly to forget. After this one last time, nothing, not even Esther, as expert as she was with laying a guilt trip on her, was going to get her to step foot back inside The Honey Well. Mr. Parker had best enjoy what she was planning to lay on him; he would never have the pleasure again.
Arnell pushed down on the handle of the toilet and sent all the crap in her life on its way. Tomorrow was going to be a new day.
Chapter Two
Sixteen was a lousy age and Trena Gatlind couldn't wait to get out of her teens. It seemed that some adult always had something to say about what she did, especially her sister, Cheryl, who was older than her by eight years. Cheryl had her own car and a full-time job. Why Cheryl didn't get out and get her own apartment, Trena didn't know. If Trena was twenty-four, she would have been long gone, but not Cheryl. Cheryl didn't look like she was ever going to move out, which meant that she was always going to be there to keep bossing her around. Ever since their mother, Maxine, who was a nurse, started working the night shift at Kings County Hospital nine years ago, Cheryl had become a serious pain in the ass. Their dad, Joe, when he was home the last time, told Cheryl to ease up, but he wasn't home much to see that Cheryl did. Joe was a long-distance trucker, "pushing the big rigs," he called it. He had been "putting his foot in the floor and getting in the wind" way before Trena was born. Joe said, "The only thing that would pull me off the road is death-my own," and he meant it. His own mother died two years ago; he never made it to her funeral.
Trena heard her mother say every time she argued with her father, "You love the freedom of the road more than you love your family." Her father never denied that and thought electronically transferring large portions of his pay back home from wherever he was more than made up for his lack of presence at home. He made good money and supported them well, but Maxine still worked long hard hours all the same. At the end of the day, she barely had enough energy to climb into bed, which is why Cheryl pretty much did as she pleased. Since Cheryl stopped seeing Alex, she was always in a nasty mood. Cheryl wasn't going over to Alex's apartment anymore so she was always home to get on her case about every little thing. "Clean up your room, Trena. Have you done your homework, Trena?" Trena was beginning to hate to hear her own name said out loud, but that's all right. It was Friday night. She was going partying, and it was none of Cheryl's business where she was going. She was so damn nosy. Always sneaking around trying to catch her doing something so that she could snitch on her, especially after what happened two weeks ago.
Cheryl said she was going shopping after work with her girlfriend, Phyllis. If they did their usual dinner afterward, Trena figured Cheryl wouldn't be getting home until after ten o'clock. Breathing room-plenty of time for her to have some fun with Omar, her boyfriend of four months. But then, just as she and Omar were getting a good feel on down in the basement, Cheryl comes home-early.
"Trena, are you down there?"
Trena abruptly pushed Omar off top of her and scrambled to her feet.
"Damn!" Omar whispered. He had a hard-on that uncomfortably strained the skin it was in. Holding himself, he scrambled to find a place to hide in the wide-open basement. There was nowhere.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Honey Well by GLORIA MALLETTE Copyright © 2003 by Gloria Mallette. Excerpted by permission.
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