Free God Don't Make No Mistakes by Mary Monroe Page A

restaurant. I just plucked those red skin potatoes out of my garden this evening,” he told me, removing his brown corduroy jacket, which was too heavy for the warm summer night. It had been somewhat chilly most of the day, but now the temperature had risen to the mid-eighties.
    â€œTell me what I can do to help,” I suggested, squinting at a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. “I should probably wash those dishes.”
    â€œI’m glad you brought that up on your own! I was just about to tell you to do just that! And after you finish washing the dishes, go out in the garden and pick us a bowl of strawberries for our dessert.”
    I had to keep reminding myself that Roscoe was a harmless distraction. And right now I needed a distraction more than I needed a lover. Especially one whose bedroom skills were still at the level of a teenage boy anyway.
    Other than my estranged husband, Pee Wee, whose real name was Jerry Davis, Roscoe was one of the other two men that I was currently dating. He had lost his wife, Joyce, to breast cancer a year ago. They’d been married for thirty years, so he was having a hard time adjusting to single life again. When it came to looks, Roscoe was no Denzel Washington, but he was no creature from the black lagoon either. He had thick, silky black and gray hair, and smooth, cinnamon-colored skin. Except for a nose that looked something like a boomerang, his facial features were fairly pleasant to look at. He had been doing heavy construction work for more than twenty years, so he had a fairly nice body for a man in his early fifties.
    One of the first things that Roscoe had told me at the beginning of our relationship was that sex was not, and had never been, that high on his list of priorities for years. Then he told me one of the strangest stories that I had ever heard. According to him, when he was sixteen and still a virgin, his stepfather took him to a prostitute to “break him in.” The insensitive hooker had made fun of his clumsy performance, and it had depressed him for months. His next few times with other females had been just as traumatic. At that point, he put sex on the back burner. He didn’t attempt to do it again until his wedding night, several years later. By then, his sex drive had practically disappeared.
    Since Pee Wee’s sex drive had once slowed down because of a medical condition, I felt a lot of sympathy for Roscoe. I told myself that if I could survive without sex from Pee Wee for a whole year, I could survive without it from Roscoe for as long as necessary.
    During the drought that I had suffered through with Pee Wee, I’d turned to another man for intimate comfort, but I had done it behind closed doors. But now with Pee Wee and me being separated, I didn’t have to sneak around with other men. And just so I wouldn’t get myself into any embarrassing situations, I always made sure each man in my life knew that I was dating others.
    Even without much sex, I liked Roscoe enough to stay in the relationship anyway.
    After we’d devoured our dinner and settled onto the crushed velvet couch in his neat living room with a bottle of wine on the coffee table and Miles Davis on the cassette player, he turned to me and gave me a pitiful look.
    â€œAnnette, please don’t get mad, but I need to discuss something important with you,” he said in a shy voice. “I can’t put it off any longer.”
    I blinked a few times and shook my head. I was glad that I had already filled up a bowl with some strawberries to take home, in case Roscoe said something that might make me mad enough to leave in a huff. “I won’t get mad,” I told him.
    First, he cleared his throat, scratched the side of his head, rotated his neck, and moved a few inches away from me. He also took a long drink from his wineglass. These were not good signs.
    Roscoe began to speak like he was reading from a cue card. “I know that you