Chapter 11 #6
“Oh, so you forgot? Girl, you wouldn’t shut up to save my damn life.
Every phone call, every time I saw you — Kylo this, Kylo that, let me tell you what Kylo did.
” I smiled at her. “You saw him. Like really saw him, and you made sure he knew it. For somebody who came up the way he did, that meant everything. You were probably the first person who ever made him feel like he was enough just as he was.”
Her jaw tightened.
“But we get comfortable,” I said, keeping my voice soft.
“We all do it. We stop doing the things we did to build it because we think the foundation is solid enough to hold itself up. And sometimes it is. But sometimes the foundation needs maintenance just like everything else does, and if you stop tending to it long enough you don’t notice the cracks until something falls through. ”
The room was very quiet.
“He’s handling everything he can. I notice how he moves around you and those kids and that man is carrying a lot and doing it without making you feel the weight of it.
Honestly, it’s its own kind of love. But he deserves to be catered to too.
He deserves to be spoken highly of, out loud, by the woman he built a life with.
” I tilted my head at her. “I know you do it in your head. Say it out loud where he can hear it.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded.
“We live in a world that makes it really easy to catalogue every mistake and really hard to acknowledge what somebody is actually doing right,” I said. “But that’s a good man, Savannah.”
She laughed, and the tension in her shoulders broke.
“Give that man some old school loving,” I said, completely serious. “The kind you gave him when you were trying to keep him. Go back to your roots, sis. Treat him like you’re still trying to win him and watch what happens.”
Layla rolled her eyes.
“I hate that everything you just said made complete sense,” she muttered into her wine glass.
“I know.”
“And I hate that you really just called me out, too.”
“I know that too.”
She cut her eyes at me over the rim of her glass, trying to hold onto the attitude and losing it by degrees. “When did you get so smart about marriage?”
I opened my mouth and then closed it.
“Ask me that again in a few days,” I said, and took a long sip of wine.
“Huh?”
“What?”
The laughter settled back down, and the room got quiet again.
Then I asked, "Did you talk to Dad about any of this?"
Layla scoffed and swallowed the rest of her wine in one long sip.
"Why not?"
She turned and looked at me like I had suggested something genuinely absurd.
"So he can gaslight me and act like he was doing my husband a favor?
Act like he was putting his son-in-law on and I should be grateful?
" She shook her head. "And what if Mom finds out in the middle of all of it? You know how that goes."
I nodded because she was right. "That's a good point." I thought about it for a second. "What if we talked to Dad together though. Without Mom. Just us."
Layla looked at me, checking to see if I meant it.
"For real?" she said.
"Yeah." I met her eyes. "I got your back."
Something in her face settled. She reached over and squeezed my hand.
"I know," she said. "Thank you for coming."
"Of course."
She let about thirty seconds pass before she tilted her head and looked at me sideways.
"Now why are you really here?"
I laughed and looked away. "What do you mean?"
"Lauren." She said. "You don't go anywhere without that iPad and you have not pulled it out once since you got here. Not once."
"Okay, and?"
"And your phone has been going off since you walked through my door." She faced me fully. "Girl. What is going on?"
"You're all in my business —"
"Ho, please. You stay all in mine. So talk, I’m waiting."
I sighed, and finished what was left in my glass. Then, I set it down on the coffee table, and decided that I was too tired to construct anything clever.
"I walked in on Malcolm having sex with his fiancée on camera," I said.
"And I was so upset that I accidentally called Big Bane, and he helped me get away from the fiancée who was trying to shoot me, put me on a first class ticket to Atlanta, and told me he'd handle my ex. He almost fucked me on the hood of my car, but I was trying to act too good for it. So, we’re probably gonna fuck when he gets back.”
The room went completely silent.
Layla had her glass raised halfway to her mouth and had not moved. She lowered it and bucked her eyes.
I held my empty glass out toward her. "More wine, please."
She was up and moving to the kitchen before I finished the sentence. I heard the cabinet open and a new bottle hit the counter. She reappeared in the doorway holding it with both hands and her eyes were enormous.
"Girl, WHAT?" she whispered, except it wasn't really a whisper.
"Chile."
She flew back to the couch, poured our glasses, and sat down so fast wine sloshed over the rim. "Malcolm is engaged? Since when? He was recording it? And who is Big Bane?"
I scratched the side of my head and looked somewhere past her left ear.
"My husband," I mumbled.
Layla leaned forward slowly. “Come again. He’s your what.”
“My husband.”
She sat back and pointed at me.
“BITCH.” She said it with her whole chest.
I tried to shush her but it was no use.
“Layla, the kids —”
“Fuck them kids! The kids asleep, start talking.” She tucked both legs underneath her and turned her entire body toward me. “From the beginning. Right now.”
I sighed and held my glass out. She filled it to the top without breaking eye contact.
“Okay.” I took a sip. “You remember when I had to do community service because I got that DUI and Mom had to clear it off my record?”
Layla blinked. “Yeah.”
“I volunteered at this soup kitchen downtown and I ran into —” I paused, trying to find the right word for what Big Bane was the first time I saw him, “— this mountain of a man.”
Layla’s eyes went wide and she slowly reached over and set her wine glass on the coffee table. She got comfortable, pulling a throw pillow into her lap, and tuned all the way in.
I had never told anyone how Bane and I met, but I didn’t care anymore.
“There was this guy who came in, and he was just — different. He wasn’t trying to be in anyone’s face, wasn’t loud, didn’t engage with anybody.
The only thing he ever took was bread and water.
” I shook my head remembering it. “It was strange to me because nobody really talked to him either, like people just naturally gave him space without knowing why.”
“Okay —”
“So one night I was taking out the trash and one of the guys out back started getting aggressive with me. Wouldn’t leave me alone.” I looked at her. “Big Bane beat that man so bad they banned him from the soup kitchen.”
Layla’s mouth fell open. “Girllll, what?”
“Yes.”
“They banned him for defending you?”
“They banned him for the level of defense he chose to provide,” I said. “There’s a difference.”
“Soo, he stomped that man out?”
“He sure did.”
She pressed her hand over her mouth.
“So I felt bad because I didn’t know his situation and he got put out because of me, so I went looking for him.” I smiled thinking back on it, on how determined I had been, on how it hadn’t even occurred to me to be afraid. “I found him on this corner, like a few blocks from Bulldogs.”
“Bulldogs in Midtown, across from Vortex?”
“Yes and he was passing out the bread he had taken from the kitchen to other people.”
Layla’s head tilted. “Wait, really?”
“Really.” I nodded. “So I went up to him and thanked him for what he did. He looked at me and said there was no need to thank him. I tried to give him money and he wouldn’t take it.
” I shook my head. “I just couldn’t walk away from him like that.
Something in my chest wouldn’t let me. So I started bringing him home-cooked meals. ”
Layla stared at me. “Hold on.” She held up one hand. “You went and sat with a homeless man. In Downtown…near Bulldogs?”
“Yes.”
“Lauren.”
“I know.”
“By yourself.”
“There was something on my heart telling me he was a good person, Lay. I can’t explain it better than that.
” I shook my head. “Turns out he had lost everything after his mother died and he was undocumented, which made everything ten times harder. He couldn’t get housing, couldn’t get work, couldn’t do anything without the right paperwork following him everywhere. ”
Layla put both hands on top of her head. “Oh my God. Where was I during all of this?”
“Living your life.”
“Lauren —”
“Anyways.” I waved my hand. “We started talking after he thanked me for the meals and it just — kept going. We talked about everything, and I mean everything. Then one day he just pulled up looking completely different. New clothes, car, all of it.”
“Wow.”
“He never told me what he did to get back on his feet and I never pushed him on it, but whatever it was worked because next thing I knew he had his own place and I was over there all the time.”
Layla’s eyes narrowed. “Over there all the time doing what?”
I looked at the wall.
“Lauren Renée.”
“We were friends,” I said. “Friends who fooled around. A lot.” I cleared my throat. “It’s a miracle I didn’t get pregnant honestly.”
“OH MY —” She caught herself and dropped her voice back down. “You were having sex with this man?”
“He cleaned up nice, and had this grin that just gave me butterflies… We were young and he was —” I stopped. “He was a lot.
“So he got a big dick?”
“That mouthpiece was something else, too. He cleaned the plate every time.”
“Hold up-“
“Do you want me to finish or not, Lay?”
She grabbed her wine glass back.