Juliet

Chapter 38

CHAPTER

THIRTY-EIGHT

RICH

Kenny pulls his front door open and eyes my soaking wet body from top to bottom. Then he leans over, staring at my truck parked in front of their mailbox.

“Can I help you?” he asks, stepping out onto the porch in his steel-toe boots and denim overalls.

I open my mouth but nothing comes out because I’m running on whiskey, gin and the belief that my love is enough to give Lovie the life she deserves.

“It’s a lil’ late for you to be knocking on our door, don’t you think? I was just about to head to work.”

“Ken, who is that?” Faye walks up behind him, pulling her robe taut.

Her eyes get big when she sees me. “Rich, is everything okay? Your dad okay?”

I swipe my wet cheek against my shoulder. All the shit I planned to say on the way here gets lodged in the back of my throat because I don’t know how to do this.

“He good, Faye. Senior’s good.”

We stare at each other with the remnants of me and Slim’s dramatic Sunday fight in our eyes until Kenny clears his throat.

She straightens her back. “Why don’t you come in? You’re soaking wet. Let me get you a towel.”

“Faye, it’s almost ten o’clock,” Kenny grunts.

She cuts her eyes at him like she did the first time she dragged me into their house. “Yeah, but he needs to get out this rain.”

“I don’t need to come in,” I reply. “I’m good out here.”

“See.” Kenny huffs. “He says he’s good out there.”

They frown at each other, and Faye grabs her forehead. “Junior, what’s wrong?”

“I came to get Lovie.”

“What you mean you ‘came to get Lovie?’” Kenny asks.

I look at Faye and point behind her into their dark house. “Can you go tell Lovie I’m here to get her?”

Kenny throws his hands up. “This is exactly what I was talking about on Sunday.”

“Ken—”

“He’s on my porch at ten o’clock at night making demands, Faye.”

Me and her stare at each other again. Dark circles hug the bottom of her red eyes, and her shoulders droop. This endless dance she’s been doing between Kenny and Senior is written all over her face.

“Junior…why don’t you come back at a decent time tomorrow so we can talk?”

“Faye, I…” My voice cracks. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful. I just want Lovie. This don’t have nothing to do with you and Kenny. She been saying she wants to come home since Sunday, so I came to get her.”

“Home?” Kenny scoffs. “And with all due respect, this is my house, so I’m involved in this whether you like it or not. You not gon’ waltz up here and make demands like you pay the mortgage, son.”

“With all due respect, I told you I wasn’t your son.”

His nostrils flare. “Faye.”

“Rich,” she mutters. “I don’t…I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“You don’t think what’s a good idea?”

She wraps her arms around her middle, avoiding my gaze.

“You don’t think what’s a good idea, Faye?” I ask again.

I swear I see the tug of war happening with her heart in real time. Kenny’s on one side and Senior’s on the other.

“You should come back tomorrow,” she mumbles.

I shake my head, fighting with that part of my brain Slim unlocked where wild thoughts run rampant. They cloud my judgement and convince me that spending another night without her is impossible.

“I can’t do that. I ain’t leaving here without her.”

Kenny pats his pockets. “I’m calling the laws. Enough is enough. He needs to get off my porch.”

Faye sucks in a loud gasp when he pulls his phone out of his pocket. “You doing what? Have you lost your mind?”

“Nah. You’ve clearly lost yours over these past two months!” He swipes his finger across the screen with furrowed eyebrows.

She reaches out, snatching the phone from his grasp before he can press the first number. “The cops, Kenny? You’re gonna call the cops on Rich?”

“I want him gone!”

She croaks out, “But it’s…it’s Rich. It’s—”

“Senior’s son. Not my son. He ain’t no kin to me.”

She cuts her eyes at me like she wants me to beg for a place in his life and at that gym.

“Let him call ‘em, Faye.” I swipe my nose, shrugging. “When they get here, they can help Lovie move her stuff to my truck after they decide I ain’t doing nothing wrong by coming to pick up my significant other from her people’s house, just like she asked me to do.”

She shakes her head. “Don’t do this.”

“I don’t care about you, Kenny, or boxing right now. Gimme my baby so I can go home, Faye. I’m tired of all this back-and-forth shit. I’m tired of running.”

“How is this gonna solve our problem, Rich? How? This drama ain’t gonna pay this two million dollar debt we owe,” she blurts. “What about our plan?”

Kenny’s eyes grow. “Two million dollars? What plan?”

“C’mon, Faye. That was your plan.” I scoff.

Kenny flings his head back.

“How much longer you gon’ live like this?” I ask.

Kenny folds his arms against his beefy chest. “Yeah. C’mon, Faye. How much longer?”

She looks up and eyes the top of the porch like she’s trying to convince God to help her get out of this, but growing up she always said God wasn’t no genie that gave us what we wanted as soon as we wanted it. Faith didn’t work like that.

Kenny chuckles sarcastically, shaking his head. “You don’t have an answer for me? For your husband? For the man you took an oath with under God?”

“Ken I…I—”

“Answer me! What two million dollars is he talking about? What plan does he know about that I don’t?”

Tears stream down her face while she balls her lips together.

“You tryna help him get away with killing that boy, huh?” he asks. “That’s why you been rippin and runnin through here like a chicken with its head cut off? He ain’t innocent like you been saying, huh? What was that you said when I asked you about what happened—‘he was wrongfully accused?’”

A deep croak crawls from the back of her throat, and I feel it in my chest.

There’s a hardness underneath Kenny’s words that makes it seem as if I did what I did for nothing—as if Arnez wasn’t that precious girl Senior still doted on that deserved to be protected by her brother.

Faye drops her head and looks over at me.

“I want out of whatever this is, and I want out of it now. I want my life back!” Kenny hollers.

“I’m tired of the secrecy and half-truths.

I ain’t as stupid as you think I am! You think I don’t feel the distance between us, Faye?

Ever since Vera called you up in the middle of the night to tell you what happened between him and that boy down on Joliet, you ain’t been the same!

You woke up the next morning and left me in this house alone, and when you came back, I knew you’d been down there! I saw it on you. I saw him on you.”

He curls his top lip and looks over at me like he sees Senior in me.

“It took me a year to get him off you when we first got together, and all it took was one phone call for you to get tangled back in his web. He broke your fuckin heart, and I put it back together! But it’s clear that don’t matter! ”

His voice cracks at the same time the sky does, and she breathes hard while the rain falls harder behind us.

They’re falling apart right in front of my eyes, and for the second time in my life, I see how wrong Senior is.

He has Faye just as upset as Kenny does, despite what he convinced himself while he withered away at Beatrice’s.

He was tearing the love of his life apart for the second time, and she was letting him.

“Rich?”

That soft voice I’ve been replaying on my phone kisses my ears. We all turn and look inside the house where Slim stands in the living room in my wife beater and sweatpants.

She scratches at the bonnet on her head and walks toward the front door with a frown. I hold my breath until she gets closer to the door and the yellow porch light shines on her heavy eyes.

“What’s wrong?” she murmurs, pushing between Faye and Kenny. “Did…did something happen, Rich? I can hear y’all yelling all the way in the back.”

She studies my face and upper body like I might’ve fallen and hurt myself on the way here, and in a way I had. I tripped over fear and let self-doubt nick me in my chest while God picked me up and dragged me the rest of the way here.

Faye holds her arm out to stop her from coming closer. “We’re good, Loveb—”

“But I heard yelling.”

“Go get your stuff, Lovie,” I blurt.

Faye sighs. “Rich—”

“Now, Lovie.”

Her eyes bounce from me to Faye and then back to me. She swallows hard, and her fingers twitch like she wants to drag me inside with her just in case I’m bluffing.

My stomach cramps.

This is the damage I caused in five days.

I pull my keys out of my pocket and push them toward her. “I can’t go nowhere if you have these.”

She lifts her shaky hand and grabs them while studying my face. “I’m…I’m going home?”

“That’s what you said you wanted, right? Don’t I always tell you I’ll give you whatever you want?”

“But is this what you want?” She wrinkles her eyebrows. “Am I what you want, Rich? I need to know, because I wasn’t lying when I said I’ll never leave you. Once you have me…that’s…that’s it. You’re it for me.”

I step forward and reach out, swiping my fingers against her swollen eyes. “What you mean? It’s me, mama. How you gonna ask me something like that?”

“Because I know there’s a part of you I fight against every single day.

It’s the part that holds onto the violence, the pressure, and the beliefs that were beaten into you as a baby.

It all keeps you terrified and running from me because I’m asking you to do something no other woman has ever asked. ”

A sharp crack of thunder shakes the porch, making my chest tighten.

“I just wanna know if this is what normalcy is for us? Will I spend the rest of my life chasing after you, fighting that part of you, and begging you to let us do life together? Begging you to let me have all of you?”

My hand falls to her lips that blurted those words I couldn’t get out of my head: “I love you, Mr. Lovelace.”

I stroke my fingers against them while her warm breath tickles my skin and her lips graze my scabbed knuckles.

Kenny and Faye stare while our eyes dance together and our obsession with each other floats between us.

Slim puckers her lips and presses them into my skin, waiting patiently for me, like always.

“No. ‘Cause I don’t love that part of me more than I love you,” I mutter. “Go get your stuff.”

She pinches her eyes shut, and a single tear rolls down her cheek. Her lips move, and I think I hear her thanking God above all the noise from the cars speeding down the street and the thunder rumbling.

She pulls away from me and gaits back into the house with my keys balled in her hand.

Kenny scoffs. “How much more disrespect can I take in my own house, Faye?”

She holds her hand up to him, narrowing her eyes at me.

“You think this is right? Letting her move from one man’s house right into yours—especially after what’s happened?

You told me to tend to her, and the minute I try to, you bulldoze over me.

I expect this type of shit from Arnez…but not from you. ”

“How the fuck I’mma let you tend to her when you even more broken than she is, Faye?”

“And you ain’t?!”

“But I made a choice. I chose!” I stab a finger into my chest. “Now you need to make one and stand on it. Talk to your fuckin husband.”