2
“Shit!”
Diva dropped her keys just as she was trying to lock her front door. Her phone was ringing off the hook and she already knew who it was. She woke up late and she knew that Hank was calling to see where she was. Diva sat the two big gift bags that she was holding down and picked up her keys.
Once she locked her door, she put the bags on the back seat and was prepared to speed to her destination. As soon as she started driving, her phone rang again, displaying Hank’s number. He never even gave her a chance to say anything when she finally did answer for him.
“Where you at, Diva? I thought you said you were gonna be here at seven,” Hank said.
“I woke up late but I’m on my way. It’s only five after. They don’t wake her up until seven-thirty. I’ll be there by then.” Diva rolled her eyes as if her husband could see her.
“Them dizzy muthafuckas ain’t even answering the phone. Fonzo been ringing the doorbell for the last five minutes.”
“Alright. I’ll be there in a few,” Diva yawned as she replied.
“What happened like that for you to oversleep and still be yawning and shit?”
“Nah, nigga, you no longer have the right to question how I move.”
“I have every right as long as we’re still married.”
“Yeah, well, that won’t be for long,” Diva threatened, just like always. She and Hank had been separated for about six months and she was always threatening to file for divorce.
Over the years, Hank had become a heavy hitter in the dope game and was seeing more money than he’d ever seen in his life.
He had chilled out for years but he jumped back in it headfirst when he decided that he wanted to open up a second location for his business.
Diva was okay with it at first, but that soon changed.
With more money came more problems and the streets didn’t have love for nobody.
Hank found that out the hard way when some lil niggas tried to rob him and his brother-in-law one night.
They were looking for dope and money as if Hank rode around with the shit in his car.
He wasn’t trying to lose his life behind no bullshit, so he was prepared to hand over the few hundred dollars of spending money that he had on him.
Denny was a hot head, so he had other plans.
He pulled out his gun, ready to bang it out and that’s exactly what happened.
He started shooting and it was pure chaos after that.
He took down two of the three shooters, injuring one and killing the other but not before he was hit up a few times and left paralyzed from the waist down.
By the time Hank pulled his gun, the injured man and the driver had sped away and left their deceased friend behind.
Hank’s adrenaline was pumping so hard that he didn’t even realize that he was shot twice in the arm until he tried to pick Denny up and put him in the car.
Diva almost lost it and she wanted him to be done with the dope game altogether.
Making fast money had cost them enough when Corey lost his life.
She hated that her brother would be confined to a wheelchair for life but she was happy that he was still alive.
Hank had a goal in mind and he swore that he was done with it once he reached it.
Diva swore that she was done with him and their marriage if he didn’t keep his word.
Hank was good living the square life for a while and the money from his businesses was good.
He was able to open a second location for his business and it was thriving just as well as the first.
He chilled out for years until an opportunity was presented to him that he just couldn’t pass up.
Crazy thing was, it was Dash who pulled him back in and the money was insane.
He would die before he told that to his wife though.
His last born was intelligent and every move he made always increased their revenue.
Hank never knew that meth was so high in demand, but it was apparently the drug of choice for a lot of people.
One of Dash’s professors in college taught him how to cook it and the rest was history.
True to her word, Diva packed up and left as soon as she found out what he was up to.
Hank was a man if nothing else, so he gave his wife the house that they once shared and moved into a three-bedroom townhouse not too far away with her brother, Denny.
He told her not to even waste her time filing for divorce because that wasn’t happening.
He had almost reached his financial goal and he swore that he was done after that.
The single life wasn’t for him and he loved being married.
“Yeah, I hear you.” Hank sighed.
“I’ll see you when I get there.” Diva hung up the phone without giving him a chance to reply.
“Where she at?” Fonzo asked once his father was off the phone.
“She’s on her way. Where that nigga, Monty, at?”
“I don’t even know. I called his phone but he didn’t answer. I’m going sit back in my car. I don’t have time to be playing with these two slow muthafuckas. I told y’all they wasn’t gon’ be up this early. My baby gon’ be looking for her gifts.”
“I would use my key but ain’t no telling what’s going on in there,” Hank replied, making his oldest son laugh.
“Man, hell no. I’m not ‘bout to play with Dash and Clo this early in the morning. They probably be in there fucking.”
A lot had changed over the years, but they weren’t all bad.
Hank remembered thinking that he was gonna have a problem out of his youngest son when Clover came to live with them.
Dash refused to acknowledge Clover as a sibling and, eventually, they found out why.
Dash was like Clover’s unofficial bodyguard when she moved in with them, and Diva thought it was cute when they were younger.
As they got older, it turned into something that she grew to abhor.
Clover was beautiful, and Dash wanted to fight anybody who even looked at her too hard.
Apparently, he was crushing on her and saw her as something more than a sister.
Clover was crushing on him too and they had been messing around right under their noses.
Fonzo, Monty and Clover’s two best friends knew but they never told a soul.
Clo was eighteen by the time Diva and Hank found out and she was already three months pregnant with their daughter, Kardashian, by then.
It was Kardi’s sixth birthday and it so happened to fall on the same day that she started first grade.
Kardi was the only grandchild so far and the apple of everyone’s eyes.
They always made a big deal out of everything that had to do with her, hence the reason for their early morning visit.
She was a perfect mixture of her parents and the only normalcy in their lives.
Clover and Dash had the most dysfunctional relationship that any of them had ever seen.
They got married when their daughter turned a year old and were divorced before she made five.
Six months after the divorce was final, they got a house built from the ground up and moved in like they didn’t have a bitter split less than a year earlier.
They always tried to date other people when they separated, but it never worked.
Both were known cheaters who couldn’t stay away from each other too long.
Dash hated when they said that he was obsessed with Clover, but that’s how they all viewed it.
His mood depended on her and how she behaved but he didn’t see it that way.
That sometimes concerned Hank, but there was nothing that he could do about it.
He and his wife didn’t want them to get married so young, but they were both too headstrong to listen.
He and Diva got married young too, and they both agreed that they should have waited.
Dash was smart as hell and that was proven when he started his freshman year of college at only sixteen years old.
Dash breezed through college and now had a master’s degree in business and a bachelor’s in science.
His brothers were happy with getting their high school diplomas and college was never even a second thought.
They knew that their little brother always had a plan for them to make and keep money.
They had no problem letting him take charge and make decisions.
He was the only one out of the three to have a house and they were good with that too.
He had a family, so he had to move differently.
Clover was less than a year away from graduating with her master’s degree in early childhood education and they were a young power couple in the making.
Clover wasn’t a slacker either. She used some of the money from her mother’s life insurance and opened up a daycare that she and her best friend ran.
Clover’s Kids was the best investment that she’d ever made and she had no regrets.
She and Dash had three rental properties and were looking into acquiring more.
They wanted to buy a vacation home in another state so that the family always had somewhere to go during hurricane season, which was too often for their liking.
Hank looked up when he heard the screeching of tires getting closer.
He shook his head when he spotted Monty’s yellow Corvette speeding up the street.
After being locked up for three years, that was the first thing that he asked for when he got released almost a year ago.
Dash and Fonzo went half on their brother’s car and had it waiting for him outside of the prison when he got released.
Monty always did have a passion for drawing, so he got into tattooing when he was locked up for a gun charge.
The prosecutors tried to bring him down for murder but it was classified as self-defense.
A nigga tried to rob him early one morning when he came out of the club and he left him in a pool of his own blood.
Monty waited until the police came and the entire incident was caught on camera.
Since he was on probation, he got violated for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Hank hated that one of his sons had a record but he wasn’t surprised that it was Monty.
Dash and Fonzo kept telling him to get certified to do ink, but he was too busy running the streets and chasing hoes.
He and Fonzo still worked at Hank’s construction company but he did tattoos in Dot’s bar on the weekends.
That was everyone’s hangout spot, so he always made a grip.
Dash ran his father’s second location and they sometimes worked there too.
Not long after he showed up, Diva turned the corner and pulled into the driveway.