Chapter 10 #2
“How’d it go last week with your homegirl—the braider?” I ask her.
“Her name is Terrica.”
“A’ight.” I chuckle. “How’d it go with Terrica?”
She looks away, shrugging.
“Well?”
Her eyes try to dart away from mine until I catch them.
“It went about as best as it can go for two people who haven’t seen each other in a while I guess.”
“Sounds like she ain’t play nice. Want me to go have a talk with her?”
Her upper lip curls and her dimples deepen before she sighs. “Don’t be annoying this early in the morning.”
“Don’t be making me get mad at Faye for getting onto you about leaving my house dirty.”
She smiles bigger. “Oh, so you have a conscience, liar?”
“Nah. I think you need a heart for that. Tin men don’t have hearts. I don’t care what The Wiz said. That nigga was a fraud.”
“Okay, Aunt Faye definitely made me watch that one when I was little.” She laughs. “I still have to Google the Myra Monkeyford reference, though.”
“Myra Monkhouse. The show is Family Matters, Slim.” I shake my head, grabbing one of her Honey Buns and tearing it open.
I take a bite.
The fake sugar makes my teeth ache and face ball up.
She giggles.
“Hm…” I push it toward her, swallowing the overly sweet bread. “Shit tastes even nastier than I remember.”
She rolls her eyes and snatches it from my hand, folding down the torn plastic. “You’re supposed to heat it up in the microwave first. Stop wasting my snacks.”
“Heat it up? Oh, you a bayou baby, fasho.”
“Never said I wasn’t. I was born at Graves Memorial just like you probably were.
” Her eyes graze my arm and dance across the first and only dumb tattoo I got when I was thirteen after surviving my first sparring session with Senior and Smitty—Bayou Boy.
Senior said that’s what we were before we were ever “fighters” or social pariahs.
Donovan leans against the counter while my measly $40.50 total flashes across the customer display.
“You wanna take care of the tabs while you’re in here?” he asks.
I look down at Slim. “You wanna take care of the tabs?”
She shrugs then nods her head.
Donovan laughs at the easy way she agrees. “Do you even know what he’s talking about?”
“No, but it sounds more interesting than being early to clean a hoarder’s house.”
Donovan reaches below the counter and slaps Lucky’s old three-spiral notebook on top of it. “I told Pops I can move this into an Excel sheet, but he won’t listen.”
“Can’t teach an old dog new tricks, D.”
“But you can’t back up paper.” He flings open the notebook, flipping through the pages. “If anything happens to this thing, so many folks will be off the hook.”
I laugh. “Nah…Lucky’s an old-school cat. They never forget who owes ‘em.”
He pushes the notebook my way, and Slim eyes me while I pull out the rest of the money in my pocket and sit it on the counter.
I crook my finger. “Come pay our tithes.”
“You pay tithes in church—not a dingy gas station.” She wrinkles her nose at Donovan. “No offense.”
“None taken.” He smiles goofily. “Dad can’t even leave it to me in his will anymore.”
“Well, in the Church of Lovelace, you supposed to take care of your people because there might be a day where they gotta take care of you. C’mere,” I say.
She shuffles closer to me, eyeing the inch of space between our arms.
Donovan drops his finger on the list of names. “These are all the people who have tabs here at Lucky’s. Pops keeps their name, number, address, and the amount they owe.”
She chews on her bottom lip, glancing at the list and then up at me. “What’s this got to do with you?”
“He settles them,” Donovan chirps before I can blurt out some silly lie to appease Slim’s nosiness.
She gives him an “Oh, really?” look. “I still don’t understand.”
“You know how sometimes folks leave their change at the counter for the next person that might need it?” I ask.
She nods, resting her head in her hands.
I shrug. “It’s kind of the same thing.”
“People usually leave nickels and dimes—not hundred dollar bills.” She raises her eyebrows with a smile and nudges the “tithe stack.”
“You know, with great power comes great responsibility,” Donovan blurts.
“Did you just quote Spider-Man?” She snorts out a chuckle, looking from him to me. “Did he just insinuate that you’re like Spider-Man?”
Redness crawls across Donovan’s face and he shrugs. “Sorry. I’m a Webhead and I thought we were still doing the whole movie reference thing.”
They smile at each other and his eyes run away from hers.
Donovan is a square. When he turned eighteen, Lucky started letting him drive from their house in Cypress four days a week to work in the store when he wasn’t taking classes at the community college.
I like that Donovan’s a square, though. Senior said there ain’t enough of them in the neighborhood so I need to respect the ones we have—but for the first time I don’t wanna treat Donovan like anything other than the nigga he is because of the way he keeps blushing when Slim talks.
I shouldn’t be like that, though.
Him and Slim look like they fit together. Not because they’re both nerds, but because Donovan is easy. Senior would say he’s what Slim needs in this lifetime—an easy man she can walk all over until they’re old and grey.
I push the stack of money toward her. “You got five hundred dollars to work with.”
She reaches out, thumbing through the bills with her head cocked. “This wouldn’t happen to have come from that jar you keep in your kitchen cabinet, would it?”
“Don’t matter where it came from—all that matters is what you decide to do with it.”
“Can I at least know why they owe Lucky?”
“Sur—”
“Nah.” I cut off Donovan with my eyebrow raised. “That ain’t none of our business.”
“I mean, it should be your business if you’re spending your money on their debts, but what do I know?” She blows out a raspberry, eyeing the names and tapping her bandaged nail against one. “What the hell did somebody spend two hundred dollars on at a gas station?”
Me and Donovan glance at each other and then at the eight-liners in the back of the store, shrugging at the same time.
“I should probably pick the women and kids, right? I mean, it’s the right thing to do.” She looks up at me.
“Whatever you want.”
“But it’s your money, you should have some say—”
I reach out, brushing back that same wild, curly piece of baby hair the wind kept blowing when she was at my house last week.
Her dimples sink deeper into her cheeks as she frowns harder and lets me rake my fingers through the rest of her tangled curls.
The brief contact satisfies the rest of those childish tingles I had leftover from the fourth grade.
“I put the power in your hands for you to decide, not for you to still ask me for my opinion. Who gives a fuck what I think? I’m just a stupid man, remember?”
She liked that.
I don’t know which part, though—the words I stupidly blurted or the way I touched her in front of Donovan when we both know I wasn’t supposed to do that. Shit, I’m not supposed to touch her at all.
Her eyes dart from me, to him, then back to the tablet.
Five hundred dollars later, she decided that only the women and children deserved to get scratched out of Lucky’s IOU tablet today.
Donovan scrapes a black marker through the very last name then pushes his glasses up. “Well, my lady, you have whittled this list down by at least sixty people.”
He slams the book closed, bags the Honey Buns up, and hands them to me.
Outside, DeRay had wandered off, leaving an empty can of Busch on the ground next to the door. The dope boys hang in his spot, smoking vapes and eyeing each car that drives into the parking lot.
They nod our way and avoid looking at Slim as we step off the curb.
“What’s goin on, Pup?” one of them murmurs, blowing out a cloud of smoke.
I toss a lazy wave their way, leading us toward Faye’s car where she sits behind the wheel with her arm dangling out of the driver’s side window. Me and Slim walk side by side toward pump two in a pace that feels too fast.
She keeps her stride while reaching into the back pocket of her baggy jeans. “Here’s a few dollars for my Honey Buns.”
She pushes a few crumpled dollar bills my way, but I nudge her hand back.
She snorts. “I think I can foot the bill for a few Honey Buns. I don’t think I’m that down bad.”
“Shit, I don’t think I am either to be begging a woman for three dollars. But if it’ll make you feel good, I’ll take it.”
“Why do you have to say it like that?”
“Like what?”
“‘If it’ll make you feel good,’” she mocks me in a corny deep voice. “As if you’re taking money that I owe you to appease me.”
I chuckle, reaching down and curling my hand over her smaller one. “I don’t know about you, but I like arguing over shit that matters—not three funky ass dollars. But if you wanna argue over ‘em, we can.”
I peel her soft fingers from the wad of dollar bills and pull them from her grasp, balling them up.
She folds her lips under her teeth, making her dimples sink even deeper into her cheeks like she’s fighting with her mouth to keep it from inching up into a smile.
“So you wanna argue over three dollars or what?” I ask.
“No, Rich. I don’t.”
“A’ight. I was just making sure.”
She laughs. “You’re a very peculiar man.”
“Peculiar?”
“Oh my God. Don’t start. It’s literally an intermediate vocabulary word you learn in elementary school.”
I cut my eyes at her. “A’ight, Myra.”
We bust out laughing together even though every muscle in my stomach hurts.
When we walk up to Faye’s passenger side, I nudge Slim out of the way and fling the door open, nodding my head toward the inside of the car.
“Lord, I thought I was gon’ have to go in there and get y’all,” Faye says, looking down at her phone while Slim gets in.
“Sorry. I…I had to use the bathroom,” she mumbles back, eyeing the plastic bag I drop in her lap with the Honey Buns inside.
“She ain’t give you any trouble, did she?” Faye asks, looking at me over her glasses.
“Nah.”
Me and Slim glance at each other.