Chapter 13 #2
A ghost of a smile dances across her face, and my dick twitches at how easily I nudged my way inside her brain when I told myself I wouldn’t do it. I’d gone from a man she liked to turn her nose up at to the one she came to anytime I wanted her just like that, and I’m not even fucking her.
Fuck.
“I didn’t spend all the money you gave me,” she says.
“But I also don’t have any income right now.
Faye stopped paying me for my help back when he started taking care of me because I didn’t need it.
If I start asking her for money every week, she’ll start asking even more questions that I…
I can’t answer right now. So I’m just trying to hold on to what I can, you know? ”
I tilt my head as she folds her lips under her teeth.
“A’ight…then hold your hand out.”
She pushes her small, shaky hand out in front of me while I slowly unravel her purse strap from my fingers and open the front pocket of my duffel bag.
“Now what?” she asks, rolling her eyes away from me.
I push my phone back into my bag and pull out my wallet while staring at her standing in front of me with her hand out…and it all falls out of my mouth before I can stop it.
“When you need some money, you walk your ass right up to me and stick your hand out just like that and say, ‘I need some money, Pup.’”
I pull a few crisp hundred dollar bills from the folds of my wallet, dropping them in her hand. “And I’ll give it. I don’t have a problem giving you what you want, as long as you open your mouth and say what it is. You don’t need to do all the mental gymnastics with me. I’m grown.”
“You don’t have to do this. I can pay you back when I get on my fee—”
“Get a Cash App and if you can’t do that, go down to Heritage Bank and talk to Ms. Beaufort. Tell her you want a checking account and put Faye’s name on the account with yours. Tell her Pup sent you and she won’t charge you nothing to open it.”
“Right…lead with Pup, huh?” she mutters to herself, looking down.
“What?”
“Mr. Copeland said if I want anything to happen around here…” She twirls her finger. “I should mention your name and it’ll happen—just like how I got that cake.”
I snort. “I told you Mr. Copeland just be running his mouth.”
“Hm… sounds like most of what he says is facts and not bullshit like you want me to think.” She curls her hand around the money, biting her lip. “So now what?”
“Now go home.”
Her upper lip twitches, and she drops her hand at her side, crumpling the money. “What if I don’t want to?”
“Hey…” Slim sighs into her phone, leaning against my truck. “Yeah, he was still at the gym, so we just dropped the cake off there. I’m…I’m at Terrica’s now. She wants to change before we head to Meechie’s. Uh-huh.”
I’m obviously a pussy. A real big pussy. Because I don’t know how to tell pretty baby birds “no”—especially not when they look at me and tell me they don’t wanna leave me. Well, that’s not exactly what Slim said, but she might as well have.
She glances up at Beatrice’s wrought-iron fence, then over at me while I lean against Beatrice’s Lexus that’s parked next to my truck in the cut beside her house.
“Terrica’s mama?” she chirps, wrinkling her eyebrows at me.
I shrug, giving her a corny thumbs up like she did to me back at the gym even though I don’t know Terrica’s mama.
I don’t even think I know Terrica. If I did, I haven’t seen her in so long that her face and name had fallen into that dark part of my brain I couldn’t get to anymore and I didn’t care. Anybody that could abandon Slim after what she went through didn’t deserve to be remembered.
Slim smiles nervously. “Oh, her…her mama’s good. She looks great. I’ll tell her you asked about her.”
She’s a bad liar, and Kenny and Faye must not pay enough attention to her to notice. Her stutter gets worse and makes her words fall out in messy clumps and she tugs her bottom lip into her mouth, giving it a light suck after each lie.
“Uh-huh. Love you too,” she says, pulling the phone from her ear and hanging up.
She blubbers out a breath, groaning and dropping the cracked iPhone back into her purse.
“Still sinning, huh?” I ask.
She rolls her eyes, snatching the cake from the top of my truck. “Who are you to judge?”
“Right…I forgot I do illicit drugs.” I chuckle to myself, pushing up from the car and stepping onto the narrow sidewalk that leads to Beatrice’s front gate.
“And fight at Lucky’s…and carry a gun,” she mutters under her breath as her heels clack against the sidewalk behind me.
I stop walking and she runs into my back.
“Ouch,” she whines.
“You talk a lot of shit for somebody following me around, begging to be my friend.”
“What in the reverse psychology? Let’s make one thing clear—Lovie Sinclair has never begged to be anybody’s friend.”
I smirk, stopping in front of Beatrice’s gate and looking over my shoulder. “Oh, for real?”
“For real.”
“You especially ain’t begged a terrible motherfucka like me, huh?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you wanted to.”
“Your insecurities are showing, Pup.”
“You better watch how you throwing that name around, Slim.” I chuckle.
“Or what?”
“Or I can take your pretty ass over to Chantilly where you supposed to be and we can pretend none of this ever happened before you get me caught up.”
She rolls her eyes and purses her lips while I pull up the latch on the gate.
“Mhmm. That’s what I thought. Behave, baby bird.” I snort.
“Whatever. Can you at least put a shirt on before we go in this nice woman’s house?”
“Nope.”
She sucks her teeth while I push the gate open, exposing Beatrice’s lush lawn that’s taller than it was last Saturday. I motion for Slim to go ahead of me. Her eyes widen as she walks up the walkway leading to the front porch.
Beatrice has the biggest and nicest house on Joliet.
It sits at the very end of the dead-end street with live oak branches draped over it.
When we were little, Arnez used to say it looked like “some southern gothic shit” every time we passed it because she was obsessed with reading the Better Homes & Gardens magazines in the checkout line at H-E-B.
She said Beatrice’s house was a classic “Craftsman-style.” It’s the only one in the Bottoms.
I suck my teeth, picking up a stray branch lying on the sidewalk from the storm that blew through last week.
I toss it off into the high grass, walking past Slim as she stares up at the winding nest of branches covering the house and yard.
A few seconds later, her heels clack against the sidewalk, and I catch a whiff of her scent as she eases beside me.
It’s wind-down time.
The porch light cloaks all the guys in an orange tint as they sit in a neat line in wheelchairs that swallow their skinny bodies. A bitter cloud of smoke floats above their heads from all their cigarettes being lit at the same time.
“Is this a nursing home?” Slim whispers, eyeing the porch as we approach it.
“Nah…just a place for the guys to go when they need a lil’ extra love, that’s all.”
“Extra love, huh? So your dad wasn’t getting enough love at home or something?”
She lets out a “hmm,” side-eyeing Beatrice’s yard and front porch. She’s so nosy that I see the questions bubbling at the seam of her lips …and here I go again answering her like a lil’ bitch.
“It started with his hand,” I mumble. “He woke up one morning and couldn’t even keep it steady enough to brush his teeth. Six months later, it was his voice. It used to be so deep it made the walls shake when he yelled. Now it’s lighter than yours. The doctor said he needs a neurologist.”
A soft croak falls from the back of her throat. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Sorry you have to witness your dad experiencing something like that. It must be difficult for you. I can’t imagine what it must be like seeing him so vulnerable.”
“They teach you that at those fancy schools or something?”
“Teach me what?”
“The perfect words to say to people that tell you depressing shit.”
“It’s called empathy, Tin Man.”
“What the fuck is that?”
She chokes out a laugh. “It means I see you just like you see me. I’m putting myself in your shoes and imagining what it would be like if somebody so close to me had to go through that.”
I cut my eyes at her. “You see me?”
“Yes.” She nods with her eyebrows raised. “So what’s the hold up? When’s he gonna go to the neurologist?”
“Ain’t no hold up. Some folks don’t wanna live the rest of their lives being burdened by specialist visits, Western medicine, and thousands of dollars of medical debt. Beatrice takes good care of him right here.”
Her arm brushes mine while she marches next to me.
The brief contact makes me miss her skin and the other parts of herself she showed me that I was never supposed to see—like her titties spilling over the cups of her bra.
They’re a light caramel brown and smaller than the palms of my hands.
Shit, I even miss that bruise that stretches across her side and makes me watch her harder just to make sure I was right about her rib not being broken.
She ain’t built like Rasheeda…or Red…or Beatrice…
or any other woman that makes my eyes linger longer than they should.
But Senior and Smitty always told me that ass and titties aren’t the end all be all, and I think I finally agree with them after watching the way Slim’s dress hugs her little body as she struts onto the porch’s bottom step with me.
Beatrice’s granddaughter, Tamryn, swats a fluttering moth from her face and scoots up in her seat beside Joe.
“Look, y’all—it’s Pup.” She tugs Joe’s cigarette from his trembling fingers, knocking it against the ashtray on the dusty card table next to her chair.
The sound of my name makes them lift their heads. They all call out for me in a low, gravelly chorus, except for Joe.
His cloudy grey eyes roam to the opposite end of the porch. “That’s you for sure, Pup?”
I climb one more step. “It’s Saturday, Joe. You know I come every Saturday.”