Mama Ruby Read Online Free Page A

turned twelve. She said I was too old.”
    “Well, don’t you still have the ones she did buy you when you was a kid?”
    “Huh? Oh, my sisters’ crazy kids done either took all the ones I had, or broke off their arms and legs. I just love baby dolls, girl dolls especially. I’m goin’ to have all girl babies when I get married. Seven. Just like my mama and her mama.”
    “Well, when you have you some girl babies, you can do whatever you want with them. But I don’t like nobody messin’ with my dolls. You can come here all you want, but don’t tetch my dolls. I want them to all still be in good shape when I leave home to get married so my little sisters can have them to play with.”
    Ruby was surprised and disappointed to find out that Othella was so territorial about her things. Now she was having second thoughts about cultivating a relationship with her. But she cancelled that thought as soon as Othella’s cute brother Ike ducked into the room and offered Ruby some peanut brittle that he had just made.
    Twenty minutes later, Ruby told Ike she was ready to leave and wanted to know if he was still going to treat her to some vanilla ice cream.

CHAPTER 4
    O NE OF THE MANY REASONS THAT RUBY’S PARENTS DIDN’T want her to socialize with Simone’s kids was because Simone didn’t properly supervise them. Ike was only thirteen, but he stayed out all night if he wanted to. So did fourteen-year-old Othella and her twin brother O’Henry. Twelve-year-old Roger often disappeared for days at a time and usually came home drunk. The other kids were younger, and they came and went as they pleased as well.
    Othella’s two youngest sisters, Yula and Noreen, were only seven and eight. Her other sister, Irene, was eleven. Even though Irene was shy and somewhat slow, she was having sex on a regular basis with a fifteen-year-old boy who had already impregnated one girl. Othella had been sexually active since she was twelve. She and her siblings had access to alcohol and sometimes they got tipsy right in front of Simone. She was usually too intoxicated or too busy doing her own thing to know, or care, what her kids were up to. They had the run of the house, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.
    When school was in session, the Cartier children attended at their leisure. A thorough education was a dream, therefore not a priority. A lot of black or biracial kids like Simone’s, some as young as nine, had already dropped out of school to work in the fields. Sadly, the few who had managed to graduate from high school and attend college found out the hard way that an education didn’t really mean much when you were a person of color. They generally took whatever jobs they could get.
    One of Ruby’s sisters had married an ambitious man who had completed four years of college. He had interviewed for several jobs, and ended up stamping prices on merchandise in a feed store. No one else had offered him any other position. And then there was her father’s baby brother, Lewis. He’d completed a two-year course at a culinary school and served in the army. The only job that he’d been offered was a janitor’s position at the corner supermarket. To supplement the income that he needed to support himself and a wife and nine children, he baked pies for the same restaurant that Ruby’s mother baked pies for. Lewis had been sleeping with Simone for the past ten years, listening to her make fun of him for working for a “pie wagon,” which was how she referred to that uppity “whites only” restaurant.
    When Othella shared that piece of information with Ruby—the fact that her uncle was paying Simone to sleep with him—Ruby cringed. “If my daddy ever finds out about that, there is no tellin’ what he’ll do.”
    As off limits as Othella and her siblings were, Ruby didn’t care. As a matter of fact, she enjoyed the excitement and the risks involved in doing something that her parents didn’t want her to do. She was having