The Second Doublewide on the Right, part 18

I’m Fixin’ To present part 18 of The Second Doublewide on the Right:

It took Marthalene almost a year to figure out she was being used, so she stopped going to hair shows, but she didn’t stop taking speed. In fact, she began using it every day and it wasn’t long before she began to suffer from the symptoms of her addiction. Since she seldom ever got a good night’s sleep anymore she began to have dizzy spells, blurred vision, shaking spasms and impaired speech.

Mister Ray fired her after most of her clientele began to complain about her missing appointments and countless other unforgivable errors made by the person who grooms your hair.

She was devastated the day he demanded her key to the salon and escorted her out the back door. She had stood there in the parking lot, stunned and dismayed, alone and disoriented. Finally, she had stumbled to her little car and drove to her apartment where she cried until she fell into a sound sleep for the first time in weeks. She slept the rest of the day and all that night.

When she woke up the next morning with a gnawing feeling deep in her belly, she realized it was hunger for food and not for drugs. Since there was nothing to eat in her apartment she scrapped all her loose coins together, went to the nearby Waffle House and feasted on scrambled eggs, hash-browns, and toast dripping with butter. Afterwards, she realized she felt almost human for the first time in a long, long time.

Marthalene spent the remainder of the morning praying and envisioning what her life would be like free of the demons which possessed her.

She decided to drive home that afternoon. On the way she had to pass through Apt-To-Miss, and when she slowed down she saw the FOR RENT sign posted in the window of the building which would become her own beauty shop. She turned around and went back, and upon closer inspection saw the sign also said, “Inquire next door.”

That’s how Marthalene Benton came to know Leon Walker as her landlord and harasser.

Upon entering Leon’s dingy little office, Marthalene found him leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk where he had nodded off. She cleared her throat and said. “Excuse me, sir.”

Leon came awake with a start, reaching for his pistol with one hand and using the other to keep himself from falling out of his chair. But once his eyes had focused on the lovely creature standing in his office he immediately collected himself and said, “Uh, yeah, excuse me but I had dozed off and for a minute there I thought you was a dream or maybe an angel. Well look at you, I think maybe you are an angel!”

“No, sir, I’m no angel,” Marthalene assured him. “I just came in to see about renting the space next door. I’m a licensed hair dresser and I was thinking about putting a beauty shop in there. What kind of rent are you looking to get?”

“Well,” Leon said as he slicked his hair back, “I’m sure we can come to an arrangement which will be beneficial to us both.”

Marthalene used her new-found resolve to explain that she was only interested in the rental fee in monetary terms.

Once Leon had stifled his disappointment, he regained a small measure of his confidence by renting Marthalene the space next to his office, and also a single-wide trailer in the Shady Grove Trailer Park directly behind the little strip mall in Apt-To-Miss.

Her brother had used his truck to her move her stuff from the apartment in Macon. By the time she had paid the first months rent on the shop and the single-wide, had the power turned on and purchased enough used equipment to open her shop, she was dead broke, and nobody came into the shop for the first three days. Then, on a Friday, three guys who had just had lunch at Granny’s Kitchen next door, came in for haircuts.

That had been almost six months ago, and since then she had been making enough to survive on, while Leon continued to drop hints of how she could get a break on her rent.

There was nothing left to do but pray, and she had been doing plenty of that, when suddenly, one day, the Lord answered her prayers.

The answer to her prayers came in a form which she hadn’t expected, as they often do, but she knew the hand of the Lord had been extended to her when the Reverend Ricky Lee Jones walked into her beauty shop to be fixing to rescue her from life.