James Hackett

Laventille

9: 00 p.m.

Sandy Brown applies the last of her lip gloss staring into the mirror as Tiba lies asleep in the bed.

Sandy is not her real name, and he has never really bothered to ask.

Coming to her feet, undoing a mass of curls with a hairbrush, she cannot help but think of the lifestyle she’d been enjoying.

He had offered her so much, most of these things had been goals of hers, things she could only have hoped would someday come. Of these gifts he had offered, and which she had politely refused were a house, a car, and a wedding ring.
But of the many things Tiba could offer, commitment and loyalty did not make the list.

Sandy had come up that narrow walkway like so many girls before her. Some of them wore mini skirts, some of them were models, some were here to stay and most were here to go, but all of them considered themselves Tiba’s girlfriends.

What was really so special about Tiba anyway? He was good looking but not an Adonis, bad but not a butcher, good in bed but not a porn star. Yet Sandy knew already one thing about him that satisfied her mind, she knew that she loved him and probably would whenever the police showed up to take him away.

You see unlike the girls before her and undoubtedly the ones sharing him with her, she was sure that Atiba Samuel Mc Neal, loved her back too. No don’t disillusion yourself to think that he was at all the marrying kind. She had seen him do all sorts of things. It was not a classic sort of love. It was a more modern explanation of love. The kind of love in late night movies where the guy goes to Mexico and the girlfriend is driving the car while he shoots out the window at Babylon.

Sandy had high hopes of driving that car. She day dreamed a lot about a two seater; no room for another girl, where finally the beep on the phone line was not a baby mama, a friend, a client, or some whore.

But wasn’t she a whore?

She shook the thought from mind, settling alongside him in the bed, deciding to stay instead uninvited for the night. Around 11:00 p.m. when he turned over in the sheets and felt her there, he took her again, half asleep and sweetly, with giggles and sighs that were almost intimate, even for a man like Tiba. She uttered words then that she could never take back, unless to injure his pride or to wake deception within herself.

At 3:00 a.m. when he finally slid from her embrace to wash up, she rolled into his side of the bed. The warm pillow where his head had lain was where she laid hers and smiled.

She slept there in comfort as Tiba dressed himself and went out to handle business. This was of course the same business that paid for this expensive lifestyle Sandy was beginning to enjoy. The lifestyle Tiba was sick of maintaining.

She longed for him in the bed again, but didn’t know how far he had really gone, even as the car rolled from the curb into Port of Spain.

When he returned at six, wanting to slip in on her, he found her gone. This was the first time Tiba Mc Neal ever missed someone.

He sat on her side of the bed, and touched the phone on the bed stand about to call her to apologize. He however found he had run out of the words, and across town, she slid her key into the lock of her father’s house door, and awaited the argument inside.