Should Have Known Better

  Also by Grace Octavia

  His Third Wife

  What He’s Been Missing

  Playing Hard to Get

  Something She Can Feel

  His First Wife

  Take Her Man

  Reckless (with Cydney Rax and Niobia Bryant)

  Published by Dafina books

  SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER

  GRACE OCTAVIA

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by Grace Octavia

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Fire

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright Page

  To all of the happily divorced women who have

  approached me at book signings and said,

  “You need to tell my story!”

  Hell hath no fury!

  Acknowledgments

  This isn’t my story or one I even knew how to tell. But at some point, it seemed that everywhere I went, I was meeting women who were divorced and/or divorcing, and they wanted me to share their stories. They were angry. They were heartbroken. They were in pieces and wanted the world to know what it was like to go through something so terrible it threatened to ruin the very fabric of who they once thought they were. They’d lost control of the car and threatened to drive off of the bridge. I had to tell the story, they said. Now, that was a tall order. I write comedy. I write about love and squabbles. Not real pain. Not true pain. And who really wanted to read about that stuff anyway? But then, at a book club meeting for Something She Can Feel, I met a woman who changed my mind about my inability to write about such a sad topic. She said divorce was the best thing that ever happened to her. No—she said her marriage, the breakup of it, and then the eventual divorce were the best thing that ever happened to her, because it showed her who she really was—a boring librarian. She laughed, filled her glass up with more wine, and we both listened as other women in the club sipped and shared similar stories. Soon, we were all laughing at late-night trips to some man’s new apartment, what it was like having a crush at forty, and feeling like you could lose your mind if you have to go to court to see the man you hate just one more time. I looked around and realized that the book club was less about reading and more about talking about these kinds of things. It was a safe haven. A safe place. And no doubt a way for these women to work through their pain. And, yes, most of them had joined the group during or after their divorce. From this, I came up with the idea for the Hell Hath No Fury House in this book and from there, the story behind this book was born. It’s all advice and all comfort for women who have been there and done that and now say they “should’ve known better.”

  I want to acknowledge every reader, male or female, who has been through this kind of trauma and allowed me to be with you along the way. As a reader, you allow me to speak to you, mirror you and make a play out of something that is very real in your life. It’s humbling, and I don’t take the responsibility lightly.

  To the book clubs, virtual and actual, thank you for your support, free wine and consistent lists of my hits and misses (really). I firmly believe you all are the hidden support groups for women around the world. Ladies, if you are reading this and you don’t belong to a group—find one. They’re so much fun.

  To my agent and confidant, Tracy Sherrod, thanks for your continued friendship and belief in my work.

  To Mercedes Fernandez, my editor and sounding board, thanks for giving me phone time and trying to help me be on time!

  I love all of you! Thank you so much.

  Fire

  I never really believed in God. Not a god. Not “the God” that you probably believe in. I know that must sound peculiar coming from a preacher’s daughter. But, you know, I just never had a reason to honestly think someone or something other than myself would show up to save me when the whole universe was crashing in and burning me to bits. And that’s what God is—what you really say He is—a savior. Some big hand to hold you together when you’re a pile of hot ash. And I’d been there before. My son has autism. Mild autism. When he was three years old, he stopped saying, “Mama.” Just stopped one day and then a man with a gray beard in a white jacket told me that he had a disease I could hardly pronounce. There was no cure. There was no cause. They couldn’t say where it came from. “It came from me,” I cried and sobbed in the bathtub with my hands resting over my vagina. The water was boiling all around me and turning to lava, scorching me alive. I didn’t think any god would come then. And no god came. I got myself out of that fire. I fought to save my son. I was the only one there.

  That wasn’t the god the good Reverend Herbert George II talked about on the pulpit every Sunday at First Salvation Church of God in southwest Atlanta. No. Sitting there in the first row beside my mother in one of her lavender suits with sparkly lilac rhinestones around the collar, I listened as my father talked about a god who saved and fixed and came “just in the nick of time”! That “on time” god. Right?

  I always knew it was a lie. It couldn’t be true.

  Nothing my daddy ever said was true.

  The good Reverend Herbert George II killed my mother every day. But “Thou shall not kill”? God should’ve put something more direct in that chapter of his good book. Like don’t kick your wife so hard in the stomach that she can’t have any more babies.

  There was no God.

  I didn’t expect it. I didn’t see.

  But that’s just all what I believed then, how I understood things before I’d been on the earth for thirty-three years and ended up locked in a bathroom, once again, blaming myself for losing everything I loved.

  I was so angry, the fire within me was burning up, the world crashing in.

  I was about to kill somebody.

  Either myself. Or my husband. Or my best friend. Or maybe, all of us.

  And not figuratively. Seriously. The gun was on the floor; I was running out of the energy to save myself.

  I cried. I felt like no one would ever hear me, but I cried out for the name I’d heard my mother scream so many times. My God. The heat in me boiled out of my mouth so fast that I lurched forward to my knees.

  “God,” I cried. “God, help me!”

  1

  The second fire started on a regular day.

  Summer was coming and the teenagers in the library were getting restless. The new Georgia heat was making people crazy. Not to mention it was Friday, and that brought with it a particular kind of recklessness.

  “And get this, girl.” Sharika, my coworker at the triple-wide barn-sized library flicked her pink and yellow airbrushed fingernail tips in my face for some kind of dramatic buildup. “She up and killed herself. Just did. Shot herself in the head . . . or maybe the stomach.” The air conditioner clicked on and hummed, making her get louder. “In the stomach!”

  She paused and looked at me for a second, her dark brown face in a tight frown beneath the harsh halogen lights that hung over the help desk. She was thirty, short, and probably fifty pounds overweight, but you’d never know it by how she carried herself, switching and always with one hand on a poked-out hip. She was funny in a way that women like her just could be. The kind where her high self-esteem was to hide low self-esteem. But smart. She could recite classes in the Dewey decimal system like poems. Had
a quick temper though.

  “Isn’t that some shit? She killed herself,” she said and a hand went to her hip.

  Behind her, I could see a cheerleader and her boyfriend padding rather suspiciously down the hallway toward the bathroom.

  I nodded at Sharika and made a mental note to look after them in a few minutes. When I’d selected library science as my major in graduate school, I never imagined I’d end up chasing hot teens out of the slender bathroom stalls of a tiny satellite library. But then again, I don’t really recall what I did imagine I’d be doing here.

  “Now that’s a damn shame. Killed herself over that man. Fuck that!” Sharika went on. “Won’t catch me killing myself over some fool. I have too much to live for.”

  “Shssh!” I warned, elbowing her. “Somebody might hear you up here cursing.”

  She rolled her eyes and looked around the half-full, square-shaped reading room where we were both librarians. Four long, wooden tables, which had been donated to our location when the main library downtown underwent renovations, made a large square in the middle of our dwindling and aged stacks of books. It was 3:33 in the afternoon and, besides us, the only other adults in the library were Mrs. Harris from the seniors romance book reading club and Mr. Lawrence, the neighborhood misfit. For hours, we watched as the hot teens took turns trying to sneak off to the bathroom and back stacks for secret rendezvous, Mr. Lawrence pretended to look for jobs in an upside-down, week-old newspaper that no longer carried a classifieds section, and Mrs. Harris faked reading Their Eyes Were Watching God as she secretly spied on Mr. Lawrence.

  “You don’t think these two old folks cuss?” Sharika shot, her backwoods Augusta drawl purposely positioned to bite at every syllable she uttered. “Please, they could and would cuss both of us under a bus. Don’t sleep on old people! They’ll cut you first and cuss you last!”

  Sharika giggled at her joke and I couldn’t help but smile. She was crazy, but so right. Reverend Herbert George II had had a way with words, too, especially when he’d had some drinks in him.

  “But really.” Sharika swiveled her seat around to mine. “I just feel so bad for her. Why would she do that? Kill herself for some man? They were divorced already. It was time to move on.”

  “How long were they married?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “And you said there was another woman?”

  “Yeah, apparently he’d just gotten engaged to some tramp . . . some whore. And how she found out: stumbling on their wedding registry at Target?!? At Target?”

  “Why did she look up his name?” I asked the obvious question, trying to seem a little concerned with Sharika’s tale. Every day with her had a new story. And sometimes it was hard to tell if the story was based on real life or a book. She told both just the same. And if you missed a step, she’d happily start right back up again. It was important to feign some kind of attention.

  “You’re missing the point,” she announced.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is that there’s no reason to kill yourself for a man. I don’t care who he married or who he left you for. There’s just no reason. Life goes on. Shit, she could’ve found a better man . . . and the way things are going today, she might’ve been able to get a better woman!” She pulled a few wispy strands of her blond bangs from her eyes, and I considered for the third time that day that maybe someday someone who really loved Sharika would tell her that blond just didn’t work for her. My skin is two shades lighter than hers and the most diversity I see in hair dye is jet black and just black. She calls me a “Plain Jane,” but at least I’m not a grown woman walking around with blond bangs. I wear my hair cut at the ears and curled under: early Michelle Obama style. I know it gets . . . regular . . . but it’s functional. And my husband couldn’t care less about things like that.

  “Is this one of your friends?” I got up from my seat at the mock mahogany counter and placed a stack of returned movies on Sharika’s reshelf cart.

  “Dawn, I told you this is from the book I read last night,” Sharika answered. “Have you been listening to me? God, I just feel so sorry for the woman. Like for feeling so down that she thought the only way out was suicide. That’s awful. And how did everybody miss it? Her friends? Her family? No one knew she was about to put a gun to her head? I’ve never been that caught up and I don’t plan on getting there either.”

  “Oh, come on! You’re speaking like a single woman who’s never been in love,” I said. “After having been married for twelve years, I can kind of understand her—the character. This woman wasn’t just caught up. She was in love and she lost it. That can be devastating for anyone. I don’t support suicide, but nothing will make you contemplate catching the first bus out of here like heartbreak. I know that. Ask any of those fools jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  I slid the last book from our return bin onto Sharika’s cart and she jumped up from her seat to tug it away.

  “Again,” she said, playfully cutting her eyes at me. “I ain’t been nowhere near such a bus, and I don’t plan on getting directions.”

  “You get back to me when you finally fall in love,” I replied. “When you find a man you love and he breaks your heart, you get back to me about that bus.”

  I sat and watched Sharika attempt to walk away, readjusting her too-tight yellow skirt as it rode up with each step. When she first came to the library, after the last co-librarian—a white woman from Athens who’d burst into tears one day when one of the teens called her a cracker—quit quite expectedly, I thought little of Sharika. She seemed too flashy and too loud to really be interested in being a librarian. But after just days of working beside her, I saw that Sharika, who was just three years younger than me, might have been more qualified for the job than me. While “business” and “acumen” and “customer” and “service” were words that seldom came together in her mind, she was a voracious reader who coveted knowledge from words like soap-opera fans do the story lines of their favorite characters. She was one of those people who could read Giovanni’s Room in one evening and come back to work the next day talking about it as if it were the most interesting thing she’d ever read. The most interesting thing about that, though, was that she was always doubting her skills. She’d been talking about going back to school for her doctorate in library science for years, but she could find every excuse in the world not to: the programs were racist, the best ones were too far away . . . But I thought she was just scared of something. Of someone seeing what I saw every day and not being able to look past it to see who she really was. Yeah, she needed some polish, but the passion was there already.

  I clicked on my computer screen and looked at my desktop photo, a picture I’d taken with my husband during a camping trip to DeSoto Falls a month before. His head leaned into mine. I was peeking over at his silhouette and smiling. I could see the sun setting in his sunglasses. Reginald had taken the picture with his cell phone, and since I still hadn’t picked up the prints we ordered from our digital camera, this was the only shot I had. He kept begging me to go to Target to get them, but I never had time.

  Except for the hot teenagers, hours in our little library were unpredictable. Sometimes they were unacceptably slow since the only thing to do was watch people argue over computer terminals and fall asleep as they pretended to read a book about screenplay writing or starting a marijuana garden. And other times, time ticked like a bomb as the drama of simply having different kinds of people crammed into the only remaining library in Augusta’s poorest neighborhood promised full frontal action: a lovesick girl might discover her boyfriend making out with his ex-girlfriend in the reference section; Mr. Lawrence might decide to take a long afternoon nap and snore so loudly that it sounded like a demon was about to climb out of his mouth.

  “So, you think she should’ve killed herself?” Sharika asked as we ushered the last few stragglers out of the library before closing.

  “No. I didn’t say that,” I said. “I just pointed ou
t that I know how hurt she must’ve been. Love is an amazing thing. And when you’ve been married for a long time, divorce is like . . . it’s like failing at what everyone said will be the most major thing you do in your life. So you don’t want to let go.”

  “Then why are so many people getting divorced?”

  “Lack of focus. Forgetting what they signed up for. It can be any number of things,” I answered, helping her stack a few books people had left on a table onto her cart. I pulled the keys to the front door from the pea green cardigan I kept at my desk for afternoons when the air-conditioning in the library got a little nippy. “I’ll lock up out front,” I added before leaving Sharika to tidy the rest of the floor.

  On my way to the front door, I decided to check out the bathroom to make sure none of the teens had been left behind; we’d unknowingly locked a couple in the library for the night once before. When I went to pull the swinging door, it flew out quicker than I’d expected and I could tell someone was pushing from the other side.

  “Oh, shi—” I groaned, feeling the corner of the door scrape the top of my penny loafer. I looked down at the damage and was ready to scold the fast cheerleader and her boyfriend with the short, raggedy dreadlocks that I’d seen sneaking off earlier, but when I looked up, instead there was Mrs. Harris standing in the doorway. “I’m so sorry,” I apologized, embarrassed that I’d almost cursed in front of her. “I didn’t know you were in here. We’ve closed. You can come back in the morning at—” I stopped myself, noticing that Mrs. Harris hadn’t said a word and she looked even more surprised than I did. “Is everything OK?”

  “Sure, honey,” she said, her voice more sweet than usual. She flashed a bright smile, but didn’t move and held the door only half opened. Her shirt was misbuttoned.

  After a second, I tried to push the door open, but she held it steady.