Mama Ruby Read Free Page B

piano music comin’ out of there every time I walk by,” Othella pointed out.
    “Yeah, there’s a piano in there, but it belongs to the church, so it ain’t the same as havin’ one in our livin’ room.” Ruby looked around, amazed by all of the pictures on the walls of dead presidents, and a couple of scowling philosophers that she didn’t recognize.
    “Some white lady that Mama did some ironin’ for gave this piano to her for payment last December. It was her Christmas present, too. My uncle Ernest hauled it here in his truck,” Othella revealed.
    “Hey, Simone,” Ruby greeted, offering one of her biggest smiles.
    Simone lay sprawled on the couch with a catalogue on her lap that was open to a page with an ad for girdles at the top and one for chewing tobacco at the bottom. She was just waking up from a drunken stupor.
    “Hey, Ruby Jean. A storm must have blowed you over here. Your daddy don’t want his kids hangin’ out with mine,” Simone said with a sneer.
    “Oh, I don’t worry about my daddy, bless his soul. What he don’t know won’t hurt him,” Ruby replied with a dismissive wave and a chuckle.
    Othella’s handsome brother Ike was seated on the other end of the couch with his mother. He winked at Ruby, and that made her heart skip a few beats. She felt the blood rise in her face, heating it like a steamed towel. She had to force herself not to giggle.
    “Hi, Ike,” Ruby muttered. “Uh, I like y’all’s house.”
    “Yeah,” Ike said. “A uptown girl like you must be used to nice things like we got.”
    “Uh-huh. I’m goin’ to have to come over here more often.” Now Ruby’s whole body felt hot, especially her crotch. She couldn’t take her eyes off Ike. Ike was so cute, with his soft, wavy black hair and big brown eyes. His skin tone was what they called high yellow, and he had slightly darker freckles in the center of his face that resembled the footprint of a small cat’s paw. He looked like the doll that Ruby’s aunt Lucy had given to her a few Christmases ago. Hadn’t she heard something about him having a pecker the size of a cucumber? Girls lied and exaggerated, but Ruby had already made up her mind to find out if what she’d heard about Ike was true. Whether it was true or not, she wanted him. And, according to Othella, he wanted her.
    “You do that, Ruby Jean,” Ike said with a sniff.
    “Sure enough. We like company,” Simone added with a nod. “We are a real sociable family, if ever there was one.”
    “I’m glad to hear that, because I really like your house, Simone,” Ruby said, putting more emphasis on her words than was necessary. “I ain’t never seen no red walls and red curtains, except at that circus that my mama took me to last year.” She gasped with glee when she noticed a guitar and a harmonica on the scarred coffee table.
    Bright green linoleum covered the floors in half of the six rooms in the house. Wood covered the other three. There was a deep well in Simone’s backyard, right next to a chicken coop that she regarded as one of her most prized possessions. The family ate chicken in some form almost every day of the week. Simone and her children shared the well with several neighbors. There was no indoor plumbing, so the whole family bathed in foot tubs or took bird baths in the kitchen sink. And since there was no indoor plumbing, they used portable toilets, better known as “slop jars,” when they didn’t want to go outside to use the outhouse.
    Simone always managed to keep a dependable jalopy in her driveway. As soon as one became inoperable, she acquired another one with a little help from her men friends.
    Almost every house in this section of Shreveport, which was an unincorporated district called Thelma City, had a backyard garden that contained everything from collard greens to tomatoes.
    As hard as it was to believe, Othella’s shabby gray house was on the same street as Ruby’s, just three blocks away. But compared to