Juliet

Chapter 34

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FOUR

RICH

“I don’t think that piece of wood deserves the beating you putting on it.”

I swipe a bead of sweat off my nose and glance across the yard at Beatrice’s back porch where Senior takes a drag from the cigarette he snuck from Smitty as soon as we got here.

“You know of another way to get the nail in the wood?” I grunt back.

“Nah, but I know if you don’t control that swing, you gon’ end up with a bunch of bent-up nails and a limp wrist.”

“I know how to hammer.”

“I ain’t say you didn’t. I just said you swinging a lil’ too goddamn hard today.”

I toss the hammer into the grass and point toward the cup of whiskey I left on the porch’s banister as Smitty walks by it with a 4x4 in his hand. “Bring me that, Smit.”

He scoops up the cup and walks over, handing it to me. “Hm. You might wanna slow down or Beatrice gon’ have a slide instead of a ramp.”

I snatch the cup from his hand and push up from the prickling grass. “I ain’t drunk.”

“You smell like a barrel of Jack.”

I take a swig of the whiskey, swishing it around and letting it wash over the open cut I got from Primo yesterday. It seeps into my bloodstream with the rest of the liquor I threw back last night while I ran from Slim… and her calls…her texts…her voice messages…and voicemails.

I take another gulp, but it doesn’t wash away her sweet voice.

“Baby, I’m not mad anymore. I’m…I’m sorry. Answer my FaceTime so I can look at you and tell you to your face that I’m still yours or better yet just come get me so we can talk. Please.”

I can’t make her voice disappear. Every word she said lives inside of me and clings to my insides like some kind of parasite.

“Rich, listen to me. We can just leave. Just me and you. We can start over. I’ve…I’ve done it before and I can do it again. We don’t even have to tell anybody. Pick up the phone.”

A tiny trickle of liquor falls down the wrong side of my throat.

I choke, gasping for air.

“Smit, finish hammering them nails in for this boy,” Senior mutters. “Come up here and dry out, Pup.”

He feels good today.

His voice ain’t as light, and his hand is steady enough to keep his cigarette between his fingers, but every look he throws my way makes me feel like I’m a boy again.

I drag myself to the porch, holding the banister as I climb the steps.

He nods toward the empty chair Beatrice had left beside him. “Sit down.”

I try to, but I collapse instead, stretching my legs out and letting my arms fall to my sides.

“What I always tell you about them fight hangovers?” he asks.

“Not to run from ‘em.”

“So what you killing yourself on a Monday for?”

Slim’s cries crawl into my head.

“If this is how it’ll be, then block me!” she sobbed. “Please, just block me!”

“Couldn’t get no rest,” I murmur, cupping my hand over my throbbing forehead to shield it from the beaming sun.

It’s hot and muggy and doesn’t even feel like the first day of November. The sun is duller than it was yesterday. Everything I eat tastes like shit. Even the lavender in Slim’s skirt wasn’t as strong when I inhaled it this morning. Everything is different.

“Kathy been calling me. She said you left yesterday without paying,” he says. “You know, eventually they’ll send somebody by to collect if you don’t settle that.”

“She tell you how many times I took a piss yesterday too?”

He brings the cigarette to his mouth, taking another drag. “Nah. I heard you was too busy chasing Faye’s niece out in the parking lot to even do that.”

His words conjure up those last memories of Slim that I keep trying to force into that dark part of my brain, but she’s a fighter, so she claws her way to the front of my mind every damn chance she gets. Now our last moments play in a loop in my head.

My mouth grows dry, and I take another swig of whiskey to wet it.

“You must’ve talked to Arnez,” I murmur, glancing at him out of the corner of my eye.

“Well, she is my child. Just because y’all ain’t seeing eye to eye don’t mean me and her ain’t.”

“She should mind her business,” I grunt, taking another sip.

“She’ll never do that.” He ashes his cigarette on the arm of his wheelchair, staring at Smitty yanking out all the nails I had hammered into the wood and flinging them off into the grass.

He turns from Smitty and glances at the whiskey in my hand. “Faye’s niece ain’t at the bottom of that cup and that nigga you hate ain’t that piece of wood you was banging on, so you might wanna slow down a bit.”

“It ain’t what you think it is.”

“Faye ain’t been by here or called like usual. So it must be exactly what I think it is. You must’ve gone off and got yourself roped up in another one of those silly pussy problems, but this one ended up being a lil’ too close to home.”

“I ain’t mean to cause any static between y’all.”

“Oh, you’ll never do that. Nobody will ever do that.

Now you might’ve started some shit between her and Kenny.

But me and Faye-baby?” He chuckles, shaking his head.

“We don’t let outside issues interfere with what we got going on.

Kenny’s got her upset behind all this shit between you and her niece and you and Melo Barnes.

And you got her worked up with all this debt nonsense, but issues with me and her?

Nah. I know better than to stress Faye out. ”

I snort out a sarcastic laugh. “Oh, so you got it all figured out, huh?”

His hard eyes bore into mine. “There ain’t nothing to figure out. I told her Kenny wasn’t that type of man when she came running over here asking me if it was okay to have you train at Worthing. I told her she was testing his limits. I told her not to stress over you. But she’s hardheaded.”

“What you mean you told her ‘Kenny wasn’t that type of man’? What type of man you talkin about?”

“A righteous one.”

His words trigger that familiar pang in my chest that hits me anytime Lovie talks about all the ways Kenny shows her he doesn’t care to protect her.

“He thinks he’s one, but he ain’t.” Senior mutters.

I bite my tongue, then scoff. “If you knew he wasn’t that type of man, then why you even let Faye be with him?”

“Listen, ain’t no man out here perfect, but I know he gon’ keep a roof over her head, her bills paid and that refrigerator full… and he ain’t stupid enough to even raise a finger at her.”

“How you know that?”

“He knows if he does that he must got a death wish, ‘cause I live in the cracks of their relationship. I always have, and I always will.”

I drop my head against the back of the chair. “Wow. What a miserable fuckin way to live, huh? Living in the cracks of somebody else’s relationship. Tuh.”

“What’s miserable is watching your everything lose herself just because she chose a life with you. I love me, but I love Faye more, and how can I have the love of my life dealing with this?” He lifts his trembling hand, staring at it. “I can’t even bathe myself anymore. I used to bathe her.”

He scoffs. “Shit, I used to carry her around the house, open jars for her, change her oil, make love to her. I did everything for her with these hands.”

Instead of reminiscing about him and Faye, all I can think about is doing the same shit for Slim because my brain don’t care that we ain’t together anymore. That part of it she unlocked is still open.

I take another swig of my whiskey while that same ole’ tired song slithers through the crack in Calvin’s window.

Today it feels different, just like everything else does, though.

The words sneak under my skin, and the beat makes whatever this feeling is that I can’t shake hold on to me even tighter.

“Say, Cal!” I holler, sitting up. “Change that shit, man!”

Smitty laughs, pounding the hammer against a new nail he replaced my warped one with. “That’s that good ole’ Teddy P. Let the man play his music in peace.”

The haunting beat gets louder.

“Fuck you too then, Cal!” I roll my eyes, throwing back my last swallow of whiskey.

Afterward, I eye the bottom of the cup, but Senior was right. Slim ain’t there. My baby is really gone. I really made her leave.

“Lovie know what you did?” he rasps, interrupting my search for her soft eyes in the dot of whiskey that’s left in the corner of my cup.

I swallow the bitter taste in my mouth. “What I did?”

“Yeah…does she know?”

“You mean, does she know I’m a dog?” I cut my eyes at him. “Or you wanna know if she knows I’m a killer?”

He shrugs. “I guess if that’s how you wanna think about yourself.”

“How I think about myself? That’s all the shit you used to tell me I was gonna be while you broke my ass.”

“I had to harden you up, Pup. You see boys come in that pit all the time that ain’t hardened up enough and look what happens. You hear about men who couldn’t protect their families because they wasn’t hardened up enough. That boy…”

His light voice drifts off.

He can’t say Jamari’s name anymore.

He stopped saying it the day Smitty wheeled him into our backyard and showed him where Jamari took his last breath.

Hell, he can’t even call Jamari a man because he was never a man. If he was, he would’ve fought me just like Arnez said he fought her, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even stay off the ground long enough to catch his footing.

“You told me what my baby’s face looked like when she came running into our backyard looking for you.

I…I can’t even think of it without getting sick to my stomach,” Senior mutters.

“A lesson had to be taught, and I couldn’t teach it, but I taught you how to.

Imagine what he would’ve eventually done to her if he was still here?

I don’t give a fuck who he ran the streets with.

This wasn’t about drugs or political gain.

This was about a boy who couldn’t keep his hands off my child.

This shit was about principles and morals.

I don’t think you a killer, Pup. I think you just a man and you did what a man is supposed to do in that situation. ”

I gulp in a breath of humid air while flashes of that night with Jamari intertwine with Slim’s voice: “I know exactly where you’re going when you leave this Earth and I’ll go with you.”

“She knows what I did,” I reply. “And she…she knows what I am.”

“So is that why she left? That’s why you wore down and drowning in Jack?”

“Nah. She ain’t leave.” I pull my phone out of my pocket while a ball settles in my throat.

“She on here—haunting me and begging me to let her come home because she’s okay with me being the terrible motherfucka I am.

She thinks we can figure this Melo Barnes situation out together.

She ain’t even worried about her own problems anymore because she too busy worrying about mine, and I can’t even think about my own shit because I’m too consumed with hers. We’re all fucked up.”

“Well, it sounds like you finally found the killer, huh?” He blows one last plume of smoke out, then snuffs the cigarette on the arm of his wheelchair. “She know you in love with her?”

“Huh?” I choke on a wild bead of spit, and all the Jack I’ve been wading through since last night drowns me.

“I said do she know you in love with her?”

“I…I don’t know about that. I don’t know shit about loving a woman properly.”

“I didn’t either, but that don’t matter to them. They’re defiant lil’ things. I realized they’re teaching you how to love them from the very first time you look in their eyes…” His voice drifts off and I hear the acceptance in the quietness that settles between us.

He sighs while that boulder inside my stomach explodes. “Yeah…that ole’ love shit is a motherfucka.”

“So that’s it?” I choke out. “You and Faye gonna live like this for the rest of your lives? Me and her gonna live the rest of our lives like this? This how it’s gonna be? This how love looks?”

“What you want me to do, Pup? Sit here and tell you to be even more selfish than you already been? Tell you to go to Kenny’s house and make her pack her shit?

Tell you to bring her home and trust her when she says she can handle this life and live with the decision you made?

As a man and a father, I can’t. She’s innocent, and I always asked you if you could handle ruining an innocent life if you ever fell in love. I tried to steer you away from this.”

“I…I get that. I understand. But Faye said if we can get the money together, we can beat this. She said I can go off to Vegas and train with a coach that Kenny’s friend Chico knows.”

“Pup…Kenny ain’t gon’ let that happen. That nigga ain’t gon’ wanna help you.”

I swipe the back of my hand across my face. “I…I just need some more time with Lovie.”

“Pup…”

“I just need a lil’ more time to get our shit in order at least—get her to get a damn bank account, get her a car, an apartment, put her name on the deed of the house for when that time comes since Arnez don’t want it…”

Smitty’s loud hammering eats the rest of my words. The bangs pound against my aching head.

“What’d I always say your responsibility was as a man…as a brother… and to these women around here that you fuck when they call and you answer?” Senior asks, twirling his finger around.

I close my eyes and try to drown out the head-splitting bangs that come one after another. “To protect ‘em while I’m here.”

“Mhmm. And I always said you gotta be ready for any consequences that come with that protecting, and all this is a consequence of that. Being a real man is thankless, but that don’t mean you don’t do it.”

I open my eyes to him patting his chest. “That’s like me—what kind of man would I be to tell Faye to run around and try to come up with millions of dollars to hand over to this charlatan parading around here like he’s doing what’s best for this neighborhood?

There’s only two ways out of this situation, and as a man you know what they are, and you know Lovie can’t survive either of them. ”

My throat tightens and a lump forms in it. Warm wetness trickles down my cheeks.

I swipe them, glancing down at my fingers. “Fuck.”

“One day she’ll wake up and it won’t hurt as bad.

Remember what the preacher would say when Faye would make us all go to church together?

‘This too shall pass.’ I tell myself that every day—not for me, but for Faye.

I pray every day that she’ll stop hurting over me, because I’ve already accepted my fate,” he mutters, staring off into Beatrice’s backyard.

“Lovie has you in her heart now, and that’s gotta be enough for you. You doing the right thing.”