The Right Mistake Read Online Free PDF Page A

dinner would never make it to the table.”
“I’ont know, Cassie. Some men might surprise ya.”
“Forty-one years and I haven’t been surprised yet. Every man I ever met has made his way by standing on a woman’s back—a woman or a slave.”
Cassie Wheaton was tall and willowy. She possessed a slender figure and primal eyes. Her hair was matte orange in color, piled up on her head like a windswept mound of autumnal colored hay; her skin was the same hue and just a shade darker. She would have been beautiful if she wasn’t so striking. Many men, who had seen that face and figure in profile, had come up to her looking for a little play. But most of them, once they looked into her feral eyes, walked away softly, their pickup lines dying on their tongues.
“You spend too much time in court, Miss Wheaton,” Billy said. He was so much shorter than the lawyer that he had to look up to address her. “Bad element all up in there. I mean between yo’ gangbangers and police, crooked lawyers and crooks you get a cockeyed view of our gender. I mean look at Socco here. He more like a rock than a man. Shit. You could have a whole woman’s basketball team stand on them shoulders.”
Cassie glanced at her host. He did seem like the immoveable object she’d read about in college. There might have been a barb in her throat but she swallowed it; swallowed it and smiled.
“You want Darryl to come out here an’ make the rice, Billy?” Socrates asked. “He cain’t do much in the kitchen but I taught him how to make a pot’a rice.”
“Naw, baby. My mama told me that if I want to be proud’a what I cook then I got to do the whole thang. An’ you know I learnt almost everything from my mama.”
“Did she tell you to become a gambler?” Cassie asked.
“White man taught me that, Miss Wheaton,” Billy said as he wiped his hands on a damp towel hanging from a hook over the sink.
“So you blame the white man for your own failings,” the lady lawyer said.
“Who said anything about blame . . . or failin’s for that mattah? I’m proud to be called a gambler. My mama had a boyfriend took us to Vegas when I was fourteen or so. The minute I saw that roulette table it all come clear.”
“What’s that, Billy?” Socrates Fortlow, the convicted murderer and rapist, asked.
“Roulette,” Psalms stated, his eyes wide with a teenager’s amazement. “All them folks gathered ’round that wheel with so many slots you cain’t even count ’em before it come to rest. But there they were layin’ down their hard earned cash on the slender hope that their numbah comes up.” Billy shook his head and grunted. “I knew right then that that was my church. The gravity hurlin’ that wheel was my God. Oh yeah.”
“What’s that got to do with the white man?” Leanne Northford asked.
Billy hadn’t seen her because she was so small standing behind Socrates and Cassie.
“White men owned that casino, girl,” he told the seventy-oneyear-old social worker. “Maybe he didn’t invent the game but he distilled it just like he done with gunpowder and alcohol, white sugar and timepieces. White man take what’s good and makes it pure.”
“Which means it’s better?” Socrates asked.
“No, sir,” Billy replied, shaking his head. “Pure’ll kill ya. Ain’t no lie to that. Pure is yo neighbor’s eighteen-year-old wife all of a sudden see you one day and set her sights. You know bettah. You know that the wife at home the one love you and who’ll take care of you when you old and sick. But it’s that lust, that pure lust will break you down every time.”
“That’s a man for you,” Cassie said.
Leanne hummed a two-note agreement.
“You ladies can say that,” Billy said as he sprinkled the last pinch of gumbo filet into the twenty-quart pot. “You know there’s a man out there messin’ ’round for every second spot there is on the clock.”
“You got that right,” Leanne said.
“But you know for every man messin’ there got