God Ain't Through Yet by Mary Monroe

healthy women. Rhoda don’t watch her step and thicken them thighs of hers, she gwine to lose her husband,” Muh’Dear predicted. “Eat your food before it gets cold.”
    I bit off a tiny piece of bacon and looked toward the door again.
    Rhoda usually accompanied me to the restaurant, and I used her as an excuse to make a quick getaway. But when she couldn’t leave her house, where she ran a licensed childcare center for pre-schoolers, she called the restaurant at a time that we had agreed upon to tell me she had an emergency situation and needed my help. She was five minutes late today. I slid back the sleeve of the red silk blouse that I had on and checked my watch.
    â€œWhy do you keep lookin’ at your watch?” Daddy asked, biscuit crumbs decorating his bushy gray beard like confetti. For a man pushing eighty, my father had a lot of energy. He got up every morning at the crack of dawn and walked the four blocks from the house he shared with my mother to the restaurant. My mother got up even earlier, and by the time Daddy made it to the restaurant, she had his breakfast ready. She also had a laundry list of chores for him to do that day and a list of complaints that she wanted him to address. Today, I was on that list of complaints. “Your mama tells me that you been runnin’ all over town tryin’ to find some makeup artist to work for Pee Wee. What’s wrong with you, girl? What Pee Wee need a makeup artist for? He already look like a clown.” Daddy had a serious look on his face, but my mother snickered.
    â€œManicurist,” I corrected, stabbing one of the seven slices of crispy bacon on my plate with my fork. Despite the fact that I had shed over a hundred pounds, my mother still tried to feed me like I was Hulk Hogan. I had barely touched the feast in front of me. She had also set a coffeepot with enough coffee for eight people next to the platter. Even though I’d been taking my coffee black for months, next to it was a container full of Half n’ Half and sugar.
    The Buttercup was already busy, and it was only ten thirty. Construction workers, a few cops, people who were coming off the night shift, men and women in office attire, and a few young people from a nearby business college occupied almost every table and booth. I had left my office at nine thirty. The only way I was going to make it back in time to interview the first candidate who had applied for the manicurist position was if Rhoda rescued me within the next ten minutes. Bless her heart. She would if she could, and that was what I was counting on.
    Before I could form my next thought, Hazel Strong, Muh’Dear’s day shift bartender, motioned to me from the bar counter across the room that I had a phone call. “Annette, Rhoda’s on the phone. She say she got an emergency, but she won’t tell me what it is,” Hazel reported in her loud, nasally voice.
    â€œI’ll be right there,” I told her.
    Hazel looked disappointed, and I knew that it was because she was dying to know why Rhoda was calling me. Like with my mother and so many other people I knew, collecting and spreading gossip was a form of creative nourishment. It kept their brains and their tongues sharp.
    â€œWhere are you gwine, gal? I know you don’t think you gettin’ your sorry tail up out of here leavin’ all that good food on your plate!” Muh’Dear hollered.
    â€œBox it up for me. I have to take this call,” I hollered back, already trotting across the floor to the telephone on the counter next to the cash register. “It’s about time,” I said to Rhoda as soon as I picked up the receiver. “Where the hell are you?” I glanced around and lowered my voice to a whisper. Rhoda knew Hazel well enough not to tell her what the “emergency” was that she was calling me about, so Hazel was trying to eavesdrop. She stood a few inches from me, wiping the