Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
The Greyhound pulled into Richmond just past ten in the morning.
Zena stepped off with two suitcases, her bloody knuckles wrapped in paper towels.
When they did a bus transfer in Raleigh, North Carolina, she stopped at a pawn shop and sold her engagement ring for a measly thousand bucks and a prepaid phone.
She stood on the sidewalk outside the station, phone in hand, trying to call her father again.
She got the same message, either his number was disconnected or he’d changed it, and neither explanation made her feel better.
Instead of dwelling on this situation, she got an Uber to her father’s house. About an hour later, the car was pulling up to the house.
She knew something was wrong before she was fully out of the car.
The house she’d grown up in was a modest brick rancher on a quiet street in a small Arlington subdivision.
The house that her father had kept up with pride had a full maintenance schedule she knew by heart.
He used to mow every ten days. Mulch is refreshed every three months, and shutters are touched up every spring.
The exterior of that house was the one place Franklin Rivers had always expressed that, from the outside, it looked like love.
The house she was looking at now had grass that reached her knees.
Shutters hanging at angles. Her mother’s elephant ears are rotting in the flower bed.
The porch swing is suspended by a single chain, the other end dangling.
And on the front door, notice after notice from the city, the top reading: Final Notice Code Enforcement in bold red letters.
She stood on the brick path and looked at it.
His Cadillac was in the driveway. It hadn’t moved in a long time; she could tell from the film of pollen on the hood.
The fuck is going on
She was almost to the porch when the voice came from behind her.
“He doesn’t live there anymore.”
She turned to meet Ms. Lucille’s glare.
Ms. Lucille stood at the edge of her driveway in a black robe, her long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, looking the same way she’d always looked, youthful. She squinted at Zena for a moment.
“It’s me,” Zena said. “Zena.”
Something crossed Ms. Lucille’s face. Then she crossed the yard and pulled her into a tight hug.
“Look at you,” Ms. Lucille whispered, stepping back to hold Zena at arm’s length. “I can’t believe you’re all grown now. I haven’t seen you since graduation. Come get out of this sun, over to the porch, and relax ya feet,”
They walked over to the neatly swept porch next door, settling into a pair of cushioned lawn chairs.
“Where’s my daddy?” Zena asked.
Ms. Lucille shifted uncomfortably and talked around the question. “How have you been, baby? Your daddy mentioned Atlanta, a record deal, and said you were doing big things. I think I heard one of your songs on the radio when I was working in the garden.”
“Ms. Lucille...please. Where’s my daddy?”
Ms. Lucille ran a shaky hand over her ponytail, her eyes darting towards her front door. “I baked a pecan pie this morning. Why don’t you come inside and–”
“Ms. Lucille.”
She drew in a slow breath. Then she reached over and took Zena’s hand.
“Shortly after you left for Atlanta, your father started getting chest pain and shortness of breath.” Ms. Lucille said softly. “You know how he was… he put everything off, always so consumed with work. One day, I looked out the window and saw him passed out on the lawn.”
She paused, swallowing hard.
“It was a heart attack. They rushed him to the hospital and had to do surgery to restore flow to a blocked artery. When I went to visit, the doctors told me he was going to make a full recovery in a few weeks. But there were complications...Zena. His body just gave out. He passed away on September ninth.” Ms. Lucille said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I’m so sorry, baby. He’s gone.”
The world around Zena went silent.
Ms. Lucille’s arms wrapped around her, and she let them. She wished Ms. Lucille could hug this pain away, but she couldn’t.
September ninth.
The date echoed in her mind. She knew exactly where she had been on September ninth.
She’d been at a studio session, a label event, or somewhere she’d been required to be.
She thought about her phone during that time.
The notification she’d silenced, the calls she’d declined because she was busy, or the random numbers she’d let go to voicemail.
Her father tried to call her while she was gone. She’d seen his name on her screen more times than she could count and told herself she’d call back later, when things slowed down, when she had the energy for the conversation, when she wasn’t in the middle of something the label needed from her.
Things never slowed down.
She hadn’t called back.
He spent his last days alone in a hospital bed.
Zena shook as she thought about the last time she saw him, when he bailed her out. She had yelled at him and didn’t even get a chance to make up or apologize. To her, she still believed she had time.
She sat on Ms. Lucille’s porch for a long time after that, in silence. Eventually, Ms. Lucille brought her inside, fed her, let her shower in the guest room, and gave her a moo-moo to sleep in.
She returned to check on Zena, standing in the doorway before heading to the bed where Zena laid. She was holding a small white envelope with her father’s name on it.
“The hospital has been managing his affairs, but he left me this key for emergencies. I’m sure the estate people will need to talk to you. I have a number, but whenever you’re ready.” She slid the envelope onto the bed. “Give yourself time, baby. There’s no right way to do this.”
She got up and closed the door behind her.
Zena stared blankly in the dark, thinking about every phone call she hadn’t answered.
The probate took several weeks.
She stayed at Ms. Lucille’s, ate her food, slept in her guest room, and made the calls she needed to make. The lawyers. The bank. The city. By the end of it, the house was legally hers. All three bedrooms, two baths, code violations, and all.
She left herself in on a Thursday morning with Ms. Lucille’s key.
She checked out the kitchen first, which wasn’t as bad as she expected. It just needed a thorough deep clean to remove the dust and grime buildup. She would have to toss the living room furniture. Painting and a few other major fixes would be needed to make the home livable again.
She connected her Bluetooth to her dad’s old speaker on the counter. Jhené Aiko’s voice filled the space. She swept and mopped the floor. Next, she tackled the sink full of dishes and emptied the trash.
In the living room, she stopped at the achievement wall.
Her high school diploma was centered, flanked by her father’s matching diploma, degree, and work certifications.
At the very top of the wall, her mother’s four degrees were displayed in matching frames.
Summa Cum Laude. Double major in film and media production.
Zena stood in front of it for a long time.
Her mother had been brilliant. Her father had been dedicated. And she had left this house at eighteen with a boyfriend and a dream and spent the last year making every decision her parents would have told her not to make.
There was no college degree on this wall with her name on it. There never would be.
She picked up the broom and kept going.
She reached the last door in the hallway—her old room.
Swinging the door open, she found everything exactly as she’d left it.
Her full-sized bed with the metal frame was still neatly made.
Books were scattered everywhere, notebooks stacked on the desk, and years of song lyrics from her teenage years.
Her heart hurt for the girl she’d been before Atlanta got hold of her.
She sat on the bed. Ran her hand over the comforter.
Then she saw it out of the corner of her eye: her mother’s old camcorder on the floor near her desk. She picked it up. Dead, of course. She managed to find the charger tangled in her desk drawer. She plugged it in and waited.
An hour later, the screen lit up. She pressed play on the tape that was already inside.
Zena recognized the stage before she saw her mother’s face. A yellow brick road painted on the floor, a backdrop of painted trees.
Her mother stepped into frame.
Then the music started.
And her mother sang. Like sang, sang.
Zena had always known her mother had a voice.
She’d grown up hearing it in the kitchen, in the car, in the pew at church.
But this was different. This was her mother at twenty, before marriage, before motherhood.
Her life before she’d chosen over the life she’d wanted.
She stood on a stage in a spotlight, giving everything she had to a song.
Zena sat on the floor and let the tears fall. She wanted to blame it on the tape, but it was grief. Grief for her mother, for her father, and for the girl who wrote those lyrics in the notebooks on her desk, for everything she lost, surrendered, or had taken.
The tape ran for eleven minutes, and she cried until the screen went to static.
She rewound it to the beginning and played it again and again until the battery died.
She set it on the desk near her notebooks.
She pulled one from the pile, opened it to a blank page at the back, found a pen in the drawer, and sat cross-legged on her bed.
She thought about everything he had been through with Tate and with the label.
She wasn’t sure what would come of her career, but for now, she would focus on what she did have.
And for the first time in over a year, she wrote something that she wanted to write.
Zena woke up to her phone ringing on the nightstand. She didn’t recognize the number but answered it anyway.
“Zena.”
She knew the voice immediately. Supreme.
She sat up straight in bed.
How did he get this number?
“I’m going to keep this brief,” he said.
“You assaulted one of my artists on the label property. You abandoned your contract without notice or legal grounds. You destroyed property. The condo, the car, the studio booth. And on top of it all, you walked out owing us a significant sum against your advance. You’re done. ”
“That… was J-Rock and Tate!” Zena stammered, her voice shaking as she gripped the phone.
“I don’t give a fuck. What matters is what’s on the paper. You owe me a lot of money… Consider yourself industry poison, Zena. You’re finito. If you so much as step foot in a studio again, our legal team will strip you of every cent you make before it even hits your bank account.”
The line went dead.
Zena slowly lowered the phone, her hand trembling as it dropped to the mattress. The walls felt like they were closing in.
The man in the tan suit didn’t even walk up to the porch. He met Zena at the mailbox on a Tuesday morning, slid a thick manila envelope into her hand, muttered, “You’ve been served,” and walked back to his car without looking her in the eye.
Inside the envelope was a mountain of paperwork that boiled down to a single, devastating reality. Supreme’s legal team hadn't been bluffing.
They had filed a civil suit in the state of Georgia for breach of contract, property damage, and unrecouped advances, swiftly moving to attach a judgment to her newly acquired property in Virginia.
Because the house had just cleared probate and sat solely in her name, the label's lawyers successfully placed a predatory lien on it.
Zena spent three frantic days sitting at Ms. Lucille’s kitchen table, watching a local attorney shake his head as he flipped through the ironclad contract she had signed when she didn’t know any better.
"They’ve got you cornered," the lawyer said, his voice filled with pity.
"Between the advance debt and the damages they're claiming, the judgment is more than the market value of the house.
If you fight this in court, the legal fees alone will bankrupt you in two months.
If you don't pay, they'll force a sheriff's sale and auction it off for pennies on the dollar. "
“So what can I do?”
“There was only one viable option to keep them from pursuing this legally: you put the house on the market, sell it quickly, and use every single cent to try to buy freedom from the label.”