Read One Safe Place for Free Online Page A

north of Lake Washington and she dated and did the prom thing with white guys. When Darcelle met her first black boyfriend, Clarence, she latched on hoping to gain some Blackness. That she did say. Girlfriend was at the top of her class in everything including law school, yet she was naïve, and had no game. She didn’t understand game.
    â€œShe’s a darker-skinned sister and everyone automatically thinks it’s an issue when they see her with her mixed child. You know how that goes. But this is the great Northwest. You see white people with black children frequently, mixed and adopted. You’re mixed, PB, but you were raised by a black man with a parentage of white; me, many think I’m at least part black, but I’m not. I’m socially mixed with all kinds but with more black people in my life. Darcelle being dark-skinned, well—”
    â€œOkay, I know what time it is when it comes to the color line. Tell me what do I have to do with this? What do you want from me?” I can lose my patience when people don’t get to the point.
    â€œWill you let me tell you what I want to tell you? Thank you. Like I said, she married a white guy from England, and that was a fiasco of nasty. The foul piece of a man wore diapers and had Darcelle change the damn diaper while giving him head. Thank goodness he never took a dump, at least so she said.”
    None of this shocked me. I have traveled the world and met many people with oddities, but I had to ask. “Ah, Velvet, two things, did your friend know any of this before she married this English noble fool?”
    â€œShe’s a good woman, PB, and she was trying to please her man, okay? Don’t be judging anybody. Before they married, it was pretty vanilla sex. After they married, the circus-freak sex show came to town with the quickness. She admits to liking freakish sex, but then he had a huge baby bed built for adults, and wanted her to dress like a little girl. So, a year later she divorced the English punk. That was ten years ago.
    â€œNow a year ago, just as Darcelle is about to run for city office, she received a call telling her that her ex-husband is in an incestuous relationship with his mother, and always has been.” Velvet went silent, but I heard air deflate from her lungs. I let the sound of cars passing by soften the foulness that entered into my ear. “And, it was true, the woman who called, it was Mommy Dearest herself. Darcelle confronted homeboy, and he owned up to it. The dude even admitted he had a relationship with his older sibling at one time. Sickos!”
    â€œHold on, Velvet.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œHold on for a minute now, I’m coming into the building.” I enter through a private entrance in the rear of my high-rise condo building. It’s where I keep my boy toys and workshop. I had to askVelvet to stop with the ugly, messy information for a minute. People have called me sophisticated and hard assed, but my soul can feel the bombing of what people can do, and it affects me. I have silent tears when I hear about or see an ugly life on display.
    â€œVelvet, go on, finish.”
    â€œWell, Darcelle being a lawyer making a lot of money, and in the public eye, she had to give up a lot to get this dude to give her a clean-cut divorce ten years ago. Now she is preparing to run for a city office, and after all this time, this foulness comes back to haunt her. The ex-husband…PB,” her voice loses any hint of sexiness, “I am not asking you to do anything, but she needs help. The dude, he is the father of her daughter who is almost ten years old. The dude, he wants a lot of money, and he’s threatening to go to court to get visitation. He got a sweet, more than amicable divorce settlement, but now he wants more. On top of all this he has never wanted a relationship with his daughter and I doubt he wants one now. His daughter is just a pawn to his nasty, fucking twerp