Chapter 37 #2
“I don’t know. Because her young, bougie ass can have the pick of the litter, but for some reason she likes the scrappy runt—the one that folks never really wanted—the one that took a lil’ while to grow. In her eyes, nobody measures up to the runt, so why would I look at another woman?”
She stops wiping the bar and glances up at me. “It sounds like you’re wrestling with something.”
Another crackle of thunder shakes the building. I turn, glancing through the bar’s front windows. Heavy rain pours from the sky and pounds onto the cars in the parking lot like bullets pelting into sheets of metal.
“Scared of the rain?” Mel asks.
I turn back around. “Nah. I’m just…”
“Wrestling hard with Baby in your subconscious? It sounds like she’s whooping your ass.”
“Nah.” I swipe the back of my hot neck, nudging my empty glass. “Let me get another—”
“I think you’re done. I’m cutting you off.”
“I ain’t drunk.”
“No, but you’re on your way. I smelled the liquor on you when you came in.”
She grabs the glass from in front of me, and my stuttering heart aches a little. She sets it in the sink, then grabs one of the clean ones she dried off, blasting it with a soda gun and filling it with water.
She slides it toward me. “Drink.”
I stare at the perfect, clear water.
I can’t.
It won’t sink into my burning insides like Jack and I know I won’t taste Slim in it if I take a sip.
“You know, my dad always said men only get one real love in their lifetimes,” Mel says.
My eyes dart back up to her, then down towards my fleece shorts and white tee, searching for whatever part of me that screams “I’m in love!” but everything still looks the same.
“That’s what you think? That I’m in love?”
She chuckles. “C’mon, Pup. It’s all over you. On your lips, your breath, and especially in your eyes.”
As soon as I look back up at her, she stares into them.
“My dad says a woman has the capacity to experience different types of love for different types of men until she meets the one. Then she realizes all those other men she loved were just lessons. Maybe one taught her that communication is the backbone of a relationship, and maybe another taught her that love doesn’t have to hurt.
But men only have the capacity to experience one real love, and that love teaches you everything. ”
“Hm. So your mama was your daddy’s one real love?”
She sputters out a laugh. “Hell no. If she was, I wouldn’t have spent half my childhood in one place and the other half in another.
He actually ran from his real love. She was his high school sweetheart at Wesley.
Shit, he ran his ass all the way into a miserable existence because he swore he didn’t deserve her.
I guess that explains why he could never shake this place, and now I can’t shake it either. It’s like we’re stuck.”
I swallow a mouthful of stale air as her eyes trace my face like she’s waiting for me to shout from the depths of my soul that I think I’m in love with Lovie Sinclair.
She chuckles, slapping the bar. “I can’t believe a big, strong man like you is running from love. I hope you get over this. It’s such a sad way to live.”
Another clap of thunder shakes the building.
“I think it’s time for you to go home. I’ll close you out.” She turns around but stops midway and holds up her finger. “By the way—they stopped calling your daddy the big dog around here a few months ago.”
She smirks, walking off.
As soon as I walk out of Jazzy’s, heavy raindrops nick my skin.
I look up at the dark sky, and a full moon stares back at me. Sometime during my first and last drink, the sun set, and another day slipped by while I tried to throw myself back into my old life. If Mel was standing back in front of me, I’d tell her ass I wasn’t running from love or from Slim.
I scoff to myself. “I’m just tryna get us back to some sense of normalcy—back before I found her in my kitchen—back when the only thing on her mind was putting herself back together.”
I swallow the remnants of that French 75 and walk toward my truck with wobbly knees.
A flash of lightning lights up the dark sky, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand and that part of my brain that Slim broke into, opens wider.
She might be waiting for me on my porch. She knows how I feel about the rain.
I walk faster, trying to shake those thoughts out of my head while another crack of thunder rumbles.
I pick up my pace and pull my keys from my pocket.
Throughout the heavy rain that falls I catch a glimpse of my truck’s tailgate in the back of the parking lot and a smaller car parked next to it with its lights on. I know this car—the sixteen-inch alloy wheels, the ding on the left side of the back bumper, and the license plate. I bought this car.
I walk closer and the driver’s side door opens.
Arnez climbs out in leggings and a Nike hoodie so big it falls to her knees. She stares at me with glossy red eyes as sheets of rain fall on and between us.
I let out a deep breath like I’m seven again and she had snuck out of the house and found me hiding from the storm underneath Senior’s truck.
“I been calling you…Daddy’s been calling you,” she says, pulling her hood over her head.
“Yeah…I…I been busy today.”
She glances behind me at Jazzy’s, then holds out her hand. “Gimme your keys.”
I stagger forward, dropping them in her palm.
She presses the key fob, unlocking my truck, and pointing at it. “Get in.”
I shuffle past her, pulling the passenger door open and climbing in while she rounds the truck and gets into the driver’s seat. As soon as she closes the door, she starts the engine.
Cool air blows out of the vents, soothing my hot face, and soft R&B flows from the radio because I haven’t changed the station since the night I brought Slim back to Chantilly.
Me and Arnez stare at the raindrops pattering against the windshield.
I feel even further away from her than I did during that first month after Jamari died. Back then, she couldn’t even look at me. Senior said it was grief. He said experiencing grief was a lot like learning how to fight. You didn’t go from balling up your fist to walking men down in just one night.
“One day you’re balling up your fist wondering if you’re even doing it right, then the next day you’re crying because it hurts so bad when you finally land a half-decent punch and then the day after that you experience all these crazy ass feelings at once—uncertainty, pain, confusion, and anger because shit just won’t click in your head as fast as you want it to.
The thing about grief is that you can’t master it like you can master fighting, though. ”
I drop my head against the headrest and close my eyes. “How’d you know where I was?”
“You’re my brother. Sometimes I know you better than you know yourself. I know how you are about the rain.”
I pinch my eyes tighter.
“I guess you too grown for me to hold your scary ass, huh?” She snorts.
I sputter out a sloppy laugh and open my eyes. “After all that clowning we did outside Lucky’s on Sunday, you still wanna do that?”
“I’m still the same big sister that fought Chris for pushing you off my Barbie bike you stole from me when we were eight.”
“And I’m still the same baby brother that double-backed and beat his ass for fighting you. I don’t know who the fuck he was feeling like.”
We look at each other, then burst into the type of laughter I thought we had forgotten about. We laugh so hard that my body shakes and the windows fog. Her laugh sounds like a time I never knew I wanted to get back to until this moment. She sounds like a little girl again.
“Oh my God…” Her laugh trails off.
She stares out of the front windshield with a sad smile on her face. It disappears before I can even tell her how long I think it’s been since I’ve seen her smile.
Her soft face balls into a frown, then a deep sob explodes out of her, making her body shake. She gasps for air, and I feel her desperation in my tight chest.
“We’re…we’re all fucked up. This is so fucked up.” She breathes out, swiping her wet face and red nose.
“Nez—”
“You don’t understand. Sometimes my heart hurts so bad I think I’m dying.” She gasps again, trying her best to inhale, but she chokes instead.
I curl my fingers into the palm of my hand even though I wanna touch her and pull her close to me like I used to when Senior hurt her feelings.
“I know you didn’t like him, but…but nothing’s been the same since he’s been gone. I’m not the same.”
Jamari’s ghost hovers between us.
She sniffles. “I don’t know what to do with myself or with this shit I’m carrying.
It’s like I have a boulder sitting on my shoulders.
I enrolled in school to get my mind on something else.
I moved. I even tried praying like Faye taught us to do when we were little, but it won’t go away. He won’t go away.”
Her red eyes widen. “No matter how you saw him, he was mine, Pup. And you took him away from me. I know what he did to me wasn’t right, but you didn’t even give me a chance to work through it or to…
to recognize that maybe I deserved better.
You just did it. You just took him. What do I do with the anger, the resentment, and the love that I still have for you and him?
How do I move on knowing that I know the truth while his mama walks around clueless?
I lose sleep at night knowing that I walked y’all both into a fucked-up situation. ”
Her top lip quivers in that same way Slim’s did back when I first saw through her, and my stomach twists into a tight knot as Arnez’s words make that night come alive in my head for the first time since it happened.
The sticky humidity clung to my body in a way that made me miss the summers I experienced as a little boy. The six-pack of beer I shared with Smitty had dwindled down to two, and Smitty’s raspy laugh echoed throughout the backyard.