Chapter 26 #2
“Five,” I blurt out with a pathetic sigh.
Aunt Faye scrunches her face. “Huh?”
“No…nothing.” I shake my head, holding up the pan of beanie weenies. “You want me to put this on the kid’s table?”
“Yeah…” her voice drifts off as she stares at Rich, and Meechie grunts out a “damn” under her breath while tracing Rich’s body with her eyes.
Terrica nudges her, and they look at me. Their private conversations about me linger in the smirks on their faces.
“Rich!” Aunt Faye screeches.
He glances up with a placid expression and tells the group something that leaves Chase with a disappointed pout until he palms the top of Chase’s head and pulls Chase along toward the pavilion.
After five different handshakes with five different people, he and Chase finally stop in front of us, and I still haven’t left to drop the beanie weenies off at the kid’s table because I want Rich.
After five days and a gut-punch of a conversation with Uncle Kenny, I want him worse than I did that night in his kitchen, and the culmination of that want sits right in the middle of my belly, taunting that clusterfuck in my stomach.
He and Aunt Faye stare at each other with expressions on their faces I can’t decipher.
She folds her lips over her teeth. “What you doing here?”
“You invited me the other day,” he replies smoothly.
She tilts her head. “I did?”
“Yeah…when we were talking about that thing you told me you’d take care of.” He shakes the top of Chase’s head while they stare at each other. “You said you’d tend to it. Remember? I figured I’d stop by to see how it was going.”
Her eyes flicker over at me, and she swipes the back of her neck. “I…yeah, Junior. I remember.”
Junior?
This meeting between them feels different from the one they had at Lucky’s when he bought her gas, and I can’t tell if I’m making it all up in my head because now I know about Aunt Faye’s secret life before me and Uncle Kenny, or if it’s really just this awkward.
Rich breaks eye contact with her first by glancing over at me and the crumpled pan of beanie weenies I’m holding. Layers of tension bubble between the four of us until he tugs at the pan in my hands.
“Where this supposed to go?” he asks.
“The kid’s table,” Aunt Faye replies.
He pushes the back of Chase’s head. “Take that to the kid’s table.”
Chase yanks it from my hands and takes a step to the side, but Rich pulls the back of his shirt, making him stop as the beanie weenies slosh around in the pan.
“Don’t be doing all that motherfuckin running through here. You see all these women around,” Rich says, twirling his finger around the bustling pavilion. “You knock one of ‘em down and I’m gon’ knock you down. Now gon’ on.”
Chase grins back at his firm chastising and nods before taking a cautious step forward, and then another, until his shirt slides from Rich’s fingers.
He walks with the pan as if an officer asked him to walk in a straight line to prove he’s sober.
His little feet even tremble as he glances back at Rich after every step until Rich nods his head toward the kid’s table, silently telling him to “keep going.”
Afterward Rich cuts his eyes back to our mismatched group, and the air feels heavier in a way that only he can make it.
Meechie moves first.
She pushes her hip out and smiles up at him with new porcelain white teeth I didn’t even notice. “I think we met one time at Jazzy’s back when I used to bartend on Sunday nights. You ordered three shots of Don Julio and a grapefruit juice.”
His eyes roll over to me.
There’s nothing in them that says they’ve met or fucked.
This moment doesn’t even feel like the time I finally had the pleasure of meeting AJ’s side chick at one of the draft afterparties or the terrible times I met Rasheeda and Beatrice.
This feels like Rich and I have lived a thousand lives together where I know for sure that on Sundays the only women he has time for are me and LaTanya.
And he doesn’t even drink clear liquor—he only drinks brown.
“Introduce me,” he says, looking right at me.
My eyes widen and I cut them at Aunt Faye, but there’s no shock on her face. She raises her eyebrows and gives me an impatient look instead.
I clear my throat. “Um…Meechie, this is Ri—this is Pup. Pup this is Meechie and her cousin Terrica.”
He pushes his hand out toward them. They stare at it with bewildered expressions as if they’ve never met a man until Meechie finally pushes her hand into his.
“Nice to meet you,” he says, flinging it up and down.
“Are you sure we—”
“Never.” He shakes his head. “I ain’t been up in Jazzy’s since you was probably a lil’ girl.”
He pulls his hand from hers and shakes Terrica’s, giving her the same “nice to meet you” with no emotion behind his words.
He drops her hand just as quickly as he picked it up, then looks back at me. In fact, they’re all silently staring at me.
“Fix me a plate, Slim,” Rich says, breaking the silence and narrowing his eyes at Aunt Faye. “I’mma go holler at Lucky and D and I’ll meet you at my truck. I parked in the back by the trees.”
“He won’t eat those ribs,” Aunt Faye mutters from beside me while we stand at the BBQ table under the pavilion.
The ribs in question dangle from the plastic tongs I’m holding over Rich’s plate. I drop them back into the pan, glancing over my shoulder at Aunt Faye.
She crosses her arms and leans against the table. Somehow watching me fix Rich’s plate supersedes all the other things she has to do ever since he narrowed his eyes at her before strolling off into the crowd of people outside the pavilion.
I turn back to the table, shuffle over to the baked beans, and pick up the spoon in the pan. I nudge one of the sauce-covered sausages inside it.
I don’t know if Rich likes his dirty rice touching his baked beans or if he likes wings instead of leg quarters. I don’t even know if he eats everybody’s potato salad, but here I am “fixing his plate.”
She sighs. “He might eat the beans. It depends on what type of sausages Vera used.”
I scoop up a spoonful and dangle it over the plate.
“That’s too much.”
I drop the spoon in the pan and turn toward her. “Look, I’m…I’m not. We’re not—”
“Sleeping together?” She purses her lips. “Yeah. He told me.”
I cough out a choke. “He told you that?”
She stares down at her sneakers, then looks over at Rich sitting at the domino table with his head next to Lucky’s. Their mouths move at a mile a minute, but their eyes stay focused on the game Lucky’s playing.
“When did he tell you that?” I ask.
She snatches the plate from my hand and finishes scooping the beans onto it, then puts a few wings on the opposite side of the plate. “That doesn’t matter. He told me y’all were just friends. Is that true?”
I nod, doing my best to follow Rich’s lead in this situation, even though I don’t know where he’s taking me.
“We talk sometimes. It happened after we ran into him at Lucky’s.”
“What happened after Lucky’s?”
“We started being friends after me and you ran into him at Lucky’s,” I reply.
It didn’t feel like the complete truth. It felt like I was guesstimating—like I’ve been friends with him for so long that I can’t pinpoint the exact moment in time he altered my brain and made me long for him.
She sits his plate next to a 7UP cake and tears a paper towel from the roll sitting at the back of the table. “Rich doesn’t have friends—especially friends that are women. So I’m just gonna be frank—are y’all sleeping together or not?”
She swipes a dollop of barbecue sauce from her finger, avoiding my eyes.
She’s even more different now than she was when I first came home.
It’s not just the bags under her eyes anymore; there’s something else floating around her.
She’s never outright questioned me about my sex life—not even when she saw a hickey AJ left on my neck, but she’s practically begging me to tell her about the ways I let Rich explore me.
I glance behind her at the domino table.
Rich pushes up from it and shakes hands with Lucky.
He drapes an arm over D, leading him away from Lucky and toward his truck with a red Solo Cup in his hand, and my nipples pucker at the little glimpse I get of the Polo Ralph Lauren logo stitched onto his boxer briefs that sneak from the top of his shorts.
“We haven’t,” I blurt, staring at his muscular arm hanging off D. “We haven’t slept together yet.”
“Yet?” She balls the napkin up, nodding. “Oh, so you plan on doing it then?”
I should’ve said ‘no,’ but Rich had infiltrated my fragile mind and swaddled it in his arms. I tasted his tongue, had his fingers inside of me, and he pried things out of me that nobody else could. My legs are already open for him. I’m just waiting for him to take what’s his.
“I—this doesn’t feel good,” I murmur.
“Neither does finding out about y’all from Rich instead of you when you’re my niece.”
“I…I thought you liked Rich.”
“I love Rich, but this conversation isn’t about that. It’s about what’s going on between you and him.”
I shake my head. “I couldn’t just blurt out to you that we’re…we’re friends. Not with all the tension in the house with Rich and Uncle Kenny and—”
“The issue with AJ?”
I fold my lips under my teeth, looking away from her piercing eyes.
“What happened in New York?” she asks, picking his plate back up and opening a cooler on the table. “Why’d you leave so suddenly? You said it wasn’t the cheating. So, what was it? Just tell me the truth. I…I won’t be mad at you for telling the truth.”
Her words hang in the air while she pushes the foil back on a bowl of potato salad and scoops a spoonful onto his plate.
“In New York, I learned I needed to get far away from any man who has eyes like Tony’s.”
She takes a hard swallow. “Lovie…wha…what do you mean?”
I stare at my pink toenails. The words still won’t come out even though I see them in my head.
“Rich said he broke you,” she says.
Broke me?
My heart jumps and I exhale.
“Is that true?” she asks. “Did AJ do that?”