Chapter 4
CHAPTER
FOUR
LOVIE
The early morning sun cloaks Rich’s small one-story house, making its pale yellow siding glisten.
“Ugh,” I groan to myself, climbing out of Aunt Faye’s front seat and glancing down at my Old Navy jeans and Air Maxes.
I had to fold the jeans’ waistband six times and stick safety pins on the sides to keep them from falling.
Aunt Faye didn’t even fuss like she normally would when she rounded the kitchen corner and saw how I snipped my shirt’s neckline and turned it into a boatneck top.
She only smiled and dumped the rest of her coffee down the drain after glancing at the flesh-toned Band-Aids she had wrapped around my fingers last night.
Afterward, her and Uncle Kenny didn’t raise their voices at each other for the rest of the night—not even jokingly.
It’s like we all regressed back to how things were when I was six and couldn’t sleep without seeing Mama and Tony in my nightmares.
I even pretended like I didn’t hear Uncle Kenny whispering about me when I passed their bedroom door on my way to bed.
“She’s the same…but kinda different,” he muttered when I shuffled past. “I know you said to stay out of it, but you think we oughta call AJ? I’d hate for him to think he can’t talk to us just because she might be mad at him or something.”
A car door slams in the distance and Aunt Faye huffs while jingling her keys. “Get!”
I glance out of the corner of my eye at a stray dog trotting off with a downtrodden expression.
Rich lives ten blocks away from us in the Bottoms of Bayou Crest where Joliet Street intersects with Pine Lane—right behind Lockwood where the bayou splits the neighborhood in half.
It’s where Uncle Kenny hangs out when he doesn’t want to come home on Friday nights and where Mama and Aunt Faye lived with Grandma before she died.
Growing up, I only ever came this way when Terrica or Meechie were fucking a boy they weren’t supposed to or when Aunt Faye wanted to stop at Lucky’s for gas.
I shield my eyes from the bright morning sun and squint at the two metal folding chairs on Rich’s porch.
His house is the only house Aunt Faye has ever cleaned in the Bottoms. She always said she’d never clean houses over here.
I side-eye her pulling her caddy from her trunk, then glance over at the driveway. It’s white and perfect, like somebody just laid the concrete. The smell of freshly cut grass tickles my nose while I look at the little manicured bushes that line the front of the house.
“I tried calling your phone when I left to pick up breakfast. It kept going to voicemail,” Aunt Faye says, marching past me.
It sounded like something she’d been holding in since she tossed the Shipley’s bag on my bed as soon as I opened my eyes this morning.
“Oh yeah. I got a new phone. I’ll text you my new number so you can save it.”
“A new one, huh?”
“Yeah. My old phone was…was giving me problems.”
“Problems so bad you had to get a new number too?”
“It was just easier that way.”
“Is that so? Never heard of anything like that before.”
“Yeah, well, you’re the same person who called every cellphone an ‘iPhone’ up until a year ago. I even had to teach you how to send voice messages.”
“I’m also the same person who can pop you in your smart mouth if I need to.”
My shoulders tense as I wait for her to pry more or for AJ to pop out of Rich’s bushes and barrel toward me for thinking I can fly to another state and go into another man’s house without him knowing.
I gulp while Aunt Faye jingles her keys again.
“I’m gonna let you in. Call if you need something. I shouldn’t be long in Manvel. You know how I am about consults—either you need a deep or partial cleaning. Ain’t nothing difficult about deciding that,” she rambles before whipping around and staring at me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah. I’m…I’m okay.”
“Okay,” she mutters, looking me up and down. “Well, let’s get you inside.”
I follow her up the porch steps where she pushes her key into the lock on the freshly painted front door. I hold my breath because this Rich dude is really a dude—a single one I presume.
“Ignore the craziness inside. He’s renovating.” She nudges the door, and it lets out a squeal, then settles against the doorstop.
“Is this some new thing you’re starting?” I ask.
“What you talking about?”
“Getting so involved in Uncle Kenny’s projects that you’re cleaning up after them?”
She drops her caddy inside and looks at me over her shoulder. “Rich pays me.”
“In U.S. dollars?”
“Don’t be a smartass.” She huffs, rolling her eyes. “If Rich wants me to clean his house sometimes to help ease his load, then so be it. He’s a paying customer and you need to treat him as such.”
“Oh, I see. So he’s one of those projects. You said you were done with those types of projects after what happened with the AC unit.”
“Look here, those other guys ain’t have a right hook like Rich’s. He’s a true southpaw.”
I scoff and drag my hand across the wall, searching for a light switch. “I wouldn’t know. All their punches looked like they landed the same to me.”
My bandaged fingers finally brush a switch, and I flick it up, illuminating the barely there foyer.
Uncle Kenny had a lot of projects when I was growing up, but he called them “fighters.” They were very specific boys from the Bottoms that he saw heavyweight potential in because their daddies and grandaddies were the ones who fought down at Lucky’s before it got raided in the 90s.
He always said that what he wanted in a boxer was already in their genes.
So, those boys messed around in the streets until they ended up on our porch looking for Uncle Kenny.
Terrica and Meechie said most of them sold dope for Melo Barnes, but they always argued over the rumor’s truthfulness considering the man gave out turkeys on Thanksgiving and sold hay from the ranch he owned out in the country.
I saw him being interviewed in a throwback clip on the fifteenth anniversary of the sting operation that shut down the fighting ring at Lucky’s when I was watching the news with Uncle Kenny once. He didn’t look like a drug dealer, though.
“I’m a businessman with big dreams, and Bayou Crest is my home.
It made me who I am,” he said with his eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses.
“And drugs are poison to our community, just like illegal underground operations such as the one that ran out of Lucky’s.
We need to get our community under control.
We need less drug dealers and fighters in Bayou Crest and more dreamers. ”
Fighters have never left us any better than how they found us.
Uncle Kenny took out a loan to pay for Zaire’s funeral and Legend just stopped showing up to the gym one day.
EJ was the only one who made his amateur debut, but he’s the reason Worthing needs a new AC unit.
He had stripped the copper from it, sold it to a scrapyard, then ran off to Georgia with the money.
Now there’s this new one Aunt Faye is weirdly fascinated with.
“You sure he’s gonna be gone the whole time?” I ask, eyeing a pair of muddy Nikes tucked next to the coat closet.
“Yeah. Why?”
“I don’t want it to be…weird. You know?”
She howls out a deep laugh, but I can’t join in.
I haven’t been alone with a man other than AJ since I left Houston. I can’t tell Aunt Faye that, though.
“It won’t be weird. He’s a respectful man. Besides, the appointment was at nine in the medical center. I’m sure he’ll be gone for a while,” she says. “There’s traffic…parking…waiting…more waiting…the actual appointment…more traffic...and the park. He likes to walk the park on Mondays.”
I cringe as I try to picture this mammoth of a man—a fighter with a supposed perfect right hook who likes to take strolls in the park on Monday mornings.
I crane my neck, peering around Aunt Faye to look deeper inside the house.
“What you looking for?” she asks.
“You know what I’m looking for,” I mumble back.
Our eyes meet and this time we laugh together, telepathically reminiscing on all the thongs, weave, and other “interesting” things we found in other bachelor pads.
“Rich ain’t like that. He could be…but he ain’t. Just make sure you use the baking soda on his whites.”
“He has a washer and dryer?”
“Yeah, and a toilet too. Can you believe that?” she asks sarcastically, rolling her eyes.
I side-eye her like she used to do to me when one of those boys from the Bottoms would show up on our porch looking for Uncle Kenny while eyeing me up and down.
They were always tall, solid, and off-limits because they were nothing but trouble.
Uncle Kenny wouldn’t have wasted his time with them if they were anything but that.
He always said, “It ain’t no dog in the good ones.”
Every toilet in Rich’s house is spotless.
“Good aim, I guess.” I sigh, nudging the lid down on the master bathroom toilet.
I guess Aunt Faye was right.
Rich isn’t coming home anytime soon.
His little house is so quiet that I hear his neighbors slamming dominoes on a table every few minutes even though it’s still early. Aunt Faye told me to turn on the living room TV to drown them out, but I can’t.
“Gimme fifteen!” somebody yells from next door.
I laugh to myself while swiping a wet towel off the bathroom sink and walking back into Rich’s bedroom. I inhale the bleach floating off the towel before dropping it in the caddy I left next to his bed with the other towels I cleaned his dustless baseboards with.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a baseboard up close. Back in New York, Maria cleaned our apartment three times a week because AJ said I never did it right even though I’ve been cleaning houses since I was six.