Chapter 25
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
RICH
“Get the fuck away from my door, Pup!” Arnez hollers.
Smitty huffs from beside me, leaning against the maple wood headboard we carried through Oak Garden’s courtyard and up the six flights of stairs to Arnez’s apartment.
I knock on the door again.
One of Arnez’s neighbors opens her door and pokes her head out, letting a cloud of smoke filter through the crack. Her red eyes float from me to the pieces of the queen-sized bed I bought, sitting on the ground next to my toolkit.
“If you would’ve told me y’all was fighting, I would’ve stayed my ass at the house,” Smitty mutters.
“We ain’t fighting,” I grunt, pounding on the door again. “Nez—”
“You can leave the bed…and Smitty, but you gotta go!”
Smitty snickers.
“Man, I just dragged this bed up a hundred stairs. I ain’t going nowhere.” I slap my hand against her door. “Open the door!”
“If she don’t want it, I’ll take it.”
I jerk my head toward the husky voice. Her neighbor had eased out, braless and barefoot, with her nipples poking through her white tube top.
Smitty lets out a low whistle. “Lord hammercy.”
He pushes off the headboard. “It’s all yours if you want it, baby. I’ll even put it together—”
“Nigga, how you gon’ give away something I bought?”
“Well, that crazy ass sister of yours obviously don’t want it. Let lil’ mama have it.”
“Hell nah!”
The girl folds her arms across her perky nipples. “Well, that ungrateful girl don’t want it.”
I suck my teeth. “Man, take your nosy ass back in your apartment.”
“Nigga, you ain’t my daddy.”
I frown, slapping the door again. “Nez!”
The deadbolt clicks and the bottom lock jiggles as Arnez flings the door open, wearing a moomoo and a bright pink bonnet.
The silky fabric of the moomoo clings to her skinny body that she’s been hiding under baggy hoodies and sweats.
I ain’t seen her this small since the summer she tried intermittent fasting just to fit into a bikini before a girls’ trip to Miami.
My stomach turns at the way her clavicles poke out.
“Smitty, you got some nerve. If you give away anything my baby brother bought me, I ain’t never buying you another pack of cigarettes or case of beer.” She slams her hand into my chest, pushing me to the side and shuffling into the breezeway in a pair of house shoes.
She curls her upper lip, eyeing her neighbor up and down. “Tell that lazy nigga in there eating up all your kid’s snacks and wearing a hole in your couch to buy you a bed. My brother ain’t Goodwill. So scram.”
The girl rolls her eyes like they argue all the time.
“Hateful bitch,” she mumbles, walking back into her apartment.
After her door closes, Arnez cuts her eyes at me in a way that makes me feel like I need to get as far away from her as I can even though she was just taking up for me.
It ain’t nobody but Jamari again.
He’s still in her head and he wants her to hate me and forget that I’m her baby brother.
I feel like we’re back to how things were two months ago when I came home and found all of her stuff gone.
She didn’t pick up my calls for a week, so I had to find out through Senior that she “moved out” after she promised him she’d keep the house and I’d leave.
She even picked out the pewter color for the cabinets and the subway tile for the backsplash in the kitchen after studying a fancy decor magazine she found at Whole Foods, because a remodeled house and a Lockwood degree were supposed to nudge her out of this Jamari-funk she just couldn’t shake.
Her eyes rove to the pieces of the queen-sized bed I overpaid for at some no-name furniture store off 45 because I didn’t wanna buy the matching nightstands and dresser.
I spent an hour trying to explain to the girl that worked there that I only wanted the canopy bed because Arnez thinks bedroom sets are tacky.
“When I gave you my address, it was for emergencies,” she says, folding her arms. “Not for you to just pop up. What you buy this for?”
I fling my arm up, shrugging. “I just thought you might need it.”
She turns around and walks back into her apartment, letting the door swing shut behind her, but she doesn’t lock it back.
Smitty smirks, holding his arm out toward the door. “You first.”
I pick up one of the slats from the ground and my toolkit and follow her.
It’s cold and empty inside.
The ten boxes she packed her life into sit stacked in the living room where her couch should be even though she moved in two months ago. Her clothes spill out the top of one of them, and her laptop sits on the floor playing Martin reruns next to a pallet.
My stomach turns again.
“The bed goes in the bedroom,” she mutters from inside the shoebox of a kitchen where all the shit she hates surrounds her, like an off white refrigerator that had lived through too many families, and a ruddy brown dishwasher that probably didn’t have a wash left in it.
“Y’all hungry?” she asks, rubbing her red nose. “There’s chicken in here.”
“Did you eat any of it?” I ask, shuffling to the side as Smitty drags more pieces of the bed inside.
She stares at me, blinking. “It’s in here if you want it. If not, throw it in the dumpster on your way out. I still have to get a trash can.”
I take a deep breath and walk deeper into the apartment.
There’s only two doors. One leads into her bathroom, and the other leads into a bedroom with more shit she hates like beige low-pile carpet that has a mysterious brown stain in the middle of it.
I hesitate, then walk into her bedroom, dropping the side rail next to the stain.
Smitty walks in after me, holding a chicken wing and one of the wooden slats under his arm.
He takes a bite, then bunches his grey eyebrows together. “Nez!”
“What?”
“When the fuck did you buy this?”
“If you don’t like it, don’t eat it!”
“Ugh.” He swallows, shaking his head. “Tastes like it was cooked weeks ago. I hope you ain’t pay for this shit!”
“I didn’t! Your mammy did!”
“Lord, she throwed off,” he mumbles to himself. “I just know that shit runs on her mama’s side.”
If she wasn’t so mad at me, I’d laugh until I couldn’t breathe and she’d ask if we wanted her to cook us something instead.
Then I’d give her my wallet so she could go to H-E-B and get us a pack of drumsticks she’d fry herself, but she doesn’t even offer Smitty a bottle of water to wash down the old chicken.
We only get two side rails attached to the headboard before she comes to stare at us from the doorway.
“You could’ve saved yourself the money and just apologized for how you acted the other day at Beatrice’s,” she says, leaning against the doorframe.
“I don’t know what you talking about,” I grumble, twisting my screwdriver into one of the screws.
“Typical.”
“What you talking in code for?”
“Ain’t nobody talking in code. See, this is the problem with you and Daddy.”
The tip of my screwdriver slips out of the screw’s head. “Fuck. Smit you brought the Robertson?”
He pats his back pocket. “Ah…I don’t know. It might be in the truck.”
I huff, tossing the screwdriver on the floor. “Shit won’t fit.”
“So you’re just gonna ignore me?” she asks.
“What the fuck is the problem, Arnez? You been begging me for a solid wood canopy bed for a year, and I got it. I drove across town, paid eight hundred dollars for a bedroom set and only left with the frame because this is exactly what you wanted. Now I’m here on my hands and knees putting it together for you while you talk to me like some motherfuckin peon because I ain’t want some random niggas delivering nothing to a place where you lay your head. ”
I reach down for the screwdriver until I hear that familiar hiccup surge from the back of her throat.
I glance up at her pale, gaunt face.
“You can’t say it, can you?” she asks.
I pick up another slat and pull it against the side rail. “I ain’t arguing with you today.”
She lets out a hollow laugh that makes the hairs on my arms stand. “You know, to say you and Daddy are fighters, y’all are some scary ass motherfuckas. Y’all run your scary asses from all the shit that makes you uncomfortable like accountability and…and emotions.”
I try to bury the words she throws at me in that dark part of my brain, but minds are funny.
All the shit I try to hold on to always slips away with ease while the hateful, ugly stuff clings to me like the sticker burrs me and Arnez used to pick from the yard and fling at each other. They even hurt the same.
“I hope that girl knows how hollow you are.”
I cut my eyes at her. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what, nigga? Don’t talk about her? What’s so special about her that I can’t talk about her?”
“She ain’t do nothing to you,” I mumble, even though I wanna yell at her that Slim ain’t do nothing to nobody.
The only thing she’s guilty of is always trying to see the good in hurt people that only ever hurt her back.
My phone vibrates in my pocket as if she knows we’re arguing about her.
She calls it her midday check-in. It’s always a short voice message that starts with some nerdy fact, like the exact minute and second Myra Monkhouse and Steve Urkel first kissed, because she’s “bingeing” Family Matters on a new Hulu account I pay for now.
The messages always end with a “just thinking about you, Mr. Lovelace” like she knows that life is a lot easier to live when I have her sitting around “just thinking about me.”
I pick up another screw while Arnez stares at me from the doorway.
“She know there ain’t no heart in your chest?” she asks.
No.
Slim is convinced that I’m her personal Tin Man because she swears the Land of Oz is real based on some shit called Quantum Mechanics.
“It means we can exist somewhere in another parallel universe. Would you want to exist somewhere else with me?” she asked me one night in a voice message.
“Let it go, Arnez,” I mutter.
She snorts. “I just wanna know if she knows there ain’t nothing there for her to hold on to—just like it wasn’t shit in Daddy’s chest for Faye to hold on to. Y’all are hollow.”
I cut my eyes at her.
She’s looking at me like she hates me again, and I just want her to mush me in my face like she used to do anytime she got mad at me, but those days are gone. I don’t even remember what her hits feel like anymore.
“Clean up your mess and get out when you’re done,” she croaks, turning and walking off.
I feel Smitty staring at the side of my face.
“What?” I grunt, glancing at him.
He shakes his head, twisting the screwdriver into one of the slats.
I huff. “Say what you gotta say.”
“Nah…you know I don’t wanna get involved in this—”
“Say what the fuck you gotta say, man.”
He sucks his teeth. “You remember when me and your daddy used to take you down to the fish creek?”
I nod.
“What I tell you the first time you caught a drum?”
I huff. “Before or after you told me you’d beat my ass for crying about having to kill it?”
“After, boy.”
I swallow the chalky taste in my mouth and the smell of that fresh water scent I still crave sometimes when I look at Senior laying in his bed at Beatrice’s. “You said ‘remorse didn’t live in a fighter’s heart.’”
“Because if it did, you’d be dead,” he mutters, picking up another slat. “She’ll get over it one day. But you better find you some solace in the meantime, ‘cause it always gets worse before it gets better.”