Chapter 17
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
RICH
The only thing Senior likes about my pussy problems is that he knows they’ll never be permanent. I’ll never be the husband Rasheeda wants, the daddy Ky needs, or the cure to Beatrice’s broken heart because he always taught me I couldn’t be.
“You might live to be thirty or you might live to be fifty. Who knows? There’s so many things that can go wrong for us.
” He shrugged one day while we sat in the backyard watching Arnez do cartwheels.
“Best thing you can do is make sure you don’t let no woman or babies get attached to you, ‘cause they love hard. They love so goddamn hard they gon’ wanna go to hell right along with you when that time comes.
Believe me, I know. You think you got the balls to ruin an innocent life, Pup? ”
But out of all of my pussy problems, there’s one that keeps poking at me despite what Senior taught me, and all I’ve tasted is her mouth.
I couldn’t even get rid of her after I dropped her off last night then picked up Red after her shift ended at Whole Foods.
I even saw her behind my closed eyes as soon as Red swallowed my dick in the parking lot.
She liked to float around in the darkness and bounce around in my head where she pressed her soft lips against mine and fussed over silly shit like my birthday.
But worst of all, she gives me that same itch I got when Arnez told me she thought she loved Jamari.
“The Knights really need to call a timeout to regroup unless they want this game to get away from them,” the sportscaster rambles from my phone sitting on the bed of my truck.
“Wanna hear a joke?” Arnez asks right when the game cuts to a commercial.
She swings her legs back and forth from my truck’s tailgate, gnawing on the banana Laffy Taffy she found in my cupholder. It’s the first one she’s had in months.
I lean next to her, staring at my hand as the bright afternoon sun stings my bare back and hovers over Lucky’s. A rough scab coats the parts of my knuckles where the skin ripped while I tussled with Wendell.
“Hello?” Arnez pushes her finger into the side of my head, digging it into the tender skin until I swat her hand away. “I asked if you wanted to hear a joke.”
“Man, what’s the joke?”
“Why did the banana go to the doctor?”
I curl my fingers into my palm then stretch them out, cutting my eyes between them and the GEICO commercial playing.
My middle finger is big—even bigger than it was this morning when I woke up with a frown while I thought about the way I gripped Slim’s thigh on the drive to Kenny and Faye’s after we left Beatrice’s last night. She didn’t even try to move my hand when I pulled in front of their house.
“Nigga…” Arnez huffs. “I said, ‘Why di—’”
“‘Cause it wasn’t peelin well.”
“Well, you’re no fun.” She balls the candy wrapper in her hand.
“You the only one that likes them corny ass jokes.” I grab the Vaseline sitting next to her thigh, but she snatches it back.
“Wait! I got another one. Betcha haven’t heard this one.”
“You been taking them Laffy Taffys from the cashier’s window and making me listen to them stupid ass jokes for years. I’ve heard ‘em all.”
“Believe me, you ain’t heard this one. It is hilarious. Let me get my phone so I can read it to you. I don’t wanna fuck it up.” She tucks the Vaseline under her armpit and pulls her phone out of the pocket of her basketball shorts.
Ms. Kathy lays on her horn as she flies by us in her midnight black Audi and whips into a parking spot next to Lucky’s F-150. Neither of us waves at her.
Arnez’s light cheeks turn a rosy red while she scans the phone for whatever stupid joke she found online that I’ll have to pretend to laugh at. Back in the day, me and Senior used to fake laugh at all of her dumb jokes until our mouths hurt.
She shimmies from side to side, then sits up straight with her phone in front of her face. “Guess what Rasheeda told me when I texted her to ask about an appointment with her boss?”
My mouth gets dry. “What the fuck you do that for?”
“Aht…aht…don’t start. It takes the fun out of the joke.”
“I told you to leave that shit alone—”
“Where is that text? I wanna read this word for word.” Her honey-brown eyes float across her phone until they finally stop. “Hm. Here it is. She said…”
She clears her throat and sits up even straighter before reading, “‘I’m gonna tell you like I told Ms. Faye when she came by the ranch last week and the week before that—Melo ain’t taking appointments about balance inquiries.
Especially not appointments for Pup. I’m trying, but Pup’s gotta start doing his part too.
I heard about what happened at Beatrice’s last night, and if I heard, then you know Melo heard.
Pup can’t do what he wants around here anymore. It’s nothing personal—just politics.”
Her nostrils flare, and she slams her phone down on the truck’s tailgate right as the brassy sound of trumpets plays and the camera pans over to the Knight’s sideline.
“So, is it true?” she grits out.
“Is what true?”
“Don’t play stupid with me. Did you really stomp Wendell Barnes out in Beatrice’s backyard?”
I turn around, trying to swallow the gust of air that blows through the empty parking lot, but I can’t catch it. One thing Smitty always said about not following those made-up rules was that just because you didn’t believe in them didn’t mean they didn’t carry consequences.
“Who told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she hisses. “Are you crazy?”
She balls up the Laffy Taffy wrapper and throws it at me. “His fuckin brother? You’re disrupting Melo’s ecosystem again.”
“And you overstepping boundaries again.”
“You would know. You’re the king of that shit. You’re fucking his assistant and still fucking his brother’s girlfriend when I told you to stop. You loveee testing boundaries—especially his. You ain’t gon’ be satisfied until he…he…” She swallows hard.
“I was fucking them before all this,” I mutter, looking off. “I ain’t changing my life because of him.”
“He’s got a whole machine behind him. Don’t you understand that this shit is bigger than us? This nigga was on the news dressed like Blade, standing next to the incumbent mayor and you’re telling me you’re not worried about what he’s capable of?”
“You done?”
“Are you?”
“Did I ask you to text Rasheeda about that? I told you to leave it alone. I told you to worry about school—worry about yourself. Move on.”
“You’re telling me to leave it alone?” She scoffs. “But you had Faye running her ass out to Manvel to ask the same goddamn question. What the fuck, Pup?”
“I ain’t ask her to do that. She ain’t say she was gonna do that.”
All she said was that she’d take care of the situation with Melo even though nobody asked her to.
Arnez belts out a sarcastic laugh, making the hairs on my arms stand up.
“But I bet you won’t give her any pushback like you do to me—just like when she popped back up on our porch again after twenty years asking about me, you …
and Daddy, and begging us to let her help.
You just let her waltz her ass back in our lives so she can play out all of her unfulfilled step-mommy fantasies.
What the fuck is wrong with you? She needs to stay out of this.
This is family business and she ain’t family. ”
I swipe my heavy hand across my face, but it doesn’t do shit. It doesn’t get rid of the headache pounding against my skull or the memories of that bone-chilling quietness that covered Joliet after I did what I did.
“She was the only one that wasn’t scared to knock on our door during that time besides Smit. It felt good to see her.”
“And because it felt so good to see her, that means we should believe her and this flop of a plan she came up with because of some guilt she’s been carrying?
She thinks turning you into a boxer is the answer to this problem?
Does that make any sense to you? You turn into a boxer and then what?
Then you’ll just be a boxer with a bounty on your head?
Melo won’t even talk to us after what happened, but she thinks because she’s so high and mighty he’ll talk to her. ”
“Nez—”
“And you’re actually letting her back in because she used to sneak you birthday cakes and…
and comb my hair…and made you feel less lonely one day?
Then she brings her self-righteous husband into the mix because he supposedly boxed with a couple of famous niggas back in the day and almost made it to the Olympics?
Do you really think he cares? You been wasting your time in that stupid gym for two months to appease her.
He won’t even put you in an amateur fight.
Hell, he won’t even put gloves on you because he doesn’t trust you. ”
I slam my swollen hand onto the tailgate. “Arnez!”
“What?” she yelps.
“Watch your mouth.”
She points toward Lucky’s. “Don’t you see what he’s doing? We’re puppets! He’s controlling us. He’s showing everybody around here what he’s capable of. We’re just throwing money into a void until he gets tired of looking at you.”
“Does it even matter? I can die in the pit any Sunday. I could’ve died before any of this happened.”
“But the difference is that you had a choice. You could’ve walked away at any moment, and all you had to worry about was tarnishing Daddy’s legacy, but Melo took that choice away, and it’s my fault.
I was stupid enough to believe he’d actually help us.
” Her voice cracks. “I don’t give a fuck what Daddy put in your head…
but…but I can’t lose you too. The more I sit in those classes at Lockwood and listen to those kids talk about their lives, the more I realize this shit ain’t normal.
Our lives aren’t normal. Their legacies are doctorates and master’s, and ours is the fuckin pit. ”
“Your legacy is a doctorate or a master’s. Mine is the pit.”
Hard breaths barrel out of her nose, and her shoulders hike up.