Justice
I loved both my daughters equally but I swear, one of them made it much harder than the other. Whoever created #Girldad, ain’t have a daughter like Storie. She was my baby, but she was gettin’ on my last nerve.
I was standing in the driveway loading the last suitcase into the trunk of my Range Rover.
Storie was on the front steps with her arms crossed, her hip cocked to the side, her face arranged into an expression that her mother used to make when she was about to say something she knew would start a war.
Monica had been dead for almost four years and that woman was still showing up in our daughter’s attitude like a ghost with perfect timing.
“I’m not going,” Storie announced.
“You’re going,” I replied without even lookin’ up.
“No I’m not. I’m fourteen. I should have a say in how I spend my summer. This is a violation of my rights.”
“A violation of your rights.” I closed the trunk and looked at her. “Where did you get that from?”
“The Constitution.”
“Lil’ girl, the Constitution does not protect you from spending July in Pittsburgh with your grandparents. Get in the damn car, before I send you up there without a phone.”
“I don’t want to go to Pittsburgh, Daddy. I wanna stay here. All my friends are here. Jaylen is here.”
There the fuck it was. She finally admitted that it was some lil nigga that was the real reason behind the constitutional crisis happening in my driveway.
Jaylen was a fifteen-year-old boy from her school who had started texting her about two months ago.
She didn’t know I knew about him. She didn’t know I’d already run his name through every database I had access to, found out his parents were divorced, his father drives for UPS, his mother works at a dentist’s office in Bowie, and the boy had a 2.
5 GPA that was trending downward. I knew more about Jaylen than Jaylen knew about Jaylen.
And I was not leaving my fourteen-year-old daughter within a twenty-mile radius of a boy with a declining GPA and unsupervised summers.
“Who’s Jaylen?” I asked, because I wanted to see how she’d play it.
Her eyes flickered. Just a fraction. Just enough to tell me she was calculating how much to reveal, which told me there was more to reveal than she wanted me to know.
She was fourteen. She thought she was slick.
But she couldn’t pull shit over me. One of the reasons I was sending her away was to drive distance between them two.
“He’s just a friend from school,” she said.
“A friend.”
“Yes. A friend. Boys and girls can be friends, Daddy. It’s not 1952.”
“You’re right. It’s not 1952. In 1952, we would’ve had you married off by now, so be grateful for the progress. Get in the car, Storie.”
“This is so unfair.”
“Life is unfair. Get used to it. Car. Now.”
She didn’t move. She stood there on those steps radiating teenage fury with an intensity that would’ve been impressive if it wasn’t directed at me. I loved this girl, both my girls, more than I loved anything on this earth. But I was sick of her ass testing me.
Dream came out the front door behind her carrying a backpack that was almost bigger than she was, wearing a yellow sundress and sneakers and a smile so wide it made Storie’s scowl look even more ridiculous by comparison.
“Daddy, I packed my coloring books and my markers and the book Auntie Erika sent me and my swimsuit and my other swimsuit and my sandals and my—”
“That’s great, baby. Get in the car.”
“Okay!” She bounced down the steps, climbed into the backseat, buckled herself in, and sat there beaming like a child who had never once in her life considered staging a rebellion on the front porch.
Two daughters. Same house, same father, same breakfast table every morning. One of them made my life easy and the other one made me understand why some animals eat their young.
I looked at Storie. “You can either get in this car on your own or I can pick you up and put you in there myself. Either way you’re going to Pittsburgh.
Either way you’re spending the summer with your grandmother and your aunties who love you and who will teach you how to act like a young lady instead of a contestant on a reality show.
And either way, Jaylen is going to have to survive the summer without you, which based on his grades he’s going to need to do anyway because that boy needs to be studying, not texting my daughter. ”
Her mouth fell open. “How do you know about—”
“I know about everything, Storie. Don’t ever forget that.”
She stared at me. I stared back. I could hear Monica laughing at me because this was exactly the kind of standoff she would have found hilarious. She gets it from you, Monica. My deceased wife had the same exact attitude.
Storie sucked her teeth so hard I’m surprised she didn’t chip one. Then she grabbed her bag off the steps, stomped to the car, yanked the door open, threw herself into the seat, and slammed the door hard enough to rock the whole vehicle.
“Thank you,” I said.
She muttered something under her breath that I chose to ignore, because if I addressed it, that would set us back even more. We had a four-hour drive ahead of us and I intended on coming back the same day because I had a lot of work to do.
I got behind the wheel and adjusted my mirror.
Dream was still humming. Storie was staring out the window like I’d sentenced her to exile.
A normal morning in the Banks household.
The kind of morning that almost felt regular, almost felt like we were just a family doing family shit instead of a family connected to the kind of chaos that would make a Lifetime movie producer say nah, that’s too much.
I pulled out of the driveway and headed toward the highway.
Monica’s parents lived in Pennsylvania. Her mother, Denise, and her father, Gerald, had been my lifeline since Monica died.
They took the girls on some weekends when I was drowning in work.
They braided Dream’s hair because I couldn’t manage more than a puff.
They sat Storie down when her mouth got too grown and reminded her that her mother would not have tolerated this behavior.
Storie would cry, be sweet for about forty-eight hours, then reset to factory settings.
Monica’s sisters, Erika and Janae, were there too. They adored the girls and the girls adored them. The feminine energy in that house was something I couldn’t replicate no matter how many YouTube tutorials I watched on how to flat twist.
My daughters needed women around them. Strong women who looked like their mother and loved like their mother. And I needed a summer where I could focus on work without worrying about what Storie was posting online or what boy was sniffing around my front door while I was at the office until nine.
That was the other thing. The guilt. I worked too much and I knew it.
I was at Banks Reserve before the sun came up and I didn’t leave until the building was dark.
Q4 projections, casino revenue, Freetown development costs, liquor distribution margins, all of it living in my head rent-free while my daughters ate dinner without me four nights a week.
And then there was the extra-curricular work that came with being a Banks.
Dream never complained. She’d leave me little drawings on the kitchen counter with notes that said I love you Daddy, you work so hard and those drawings gutted me every single time because that child should not have to praise her father for being absent.
Storie didn’t leave notes. Storie left attitude. And honestly, I deserved it.
But I couldn’t slow down. The casino was making money, finally.
The liquor had rebounded. Quest was handling the big picture and I was handling the details, which was a full-time job on top of a full-time job.
Freetown was in early development and the numbers had to be airtight before we brought in outside investors.
Underneath all of the legitimate business was the other ledger, the one that didn’t exist on paper.
Money from the transport days that we’d been cycling through the casino for two decades.
That required a level of precision that most accountants would lose sleep over. I lost sleep over it regularly.
My phone rang through the car speakers and I glanced at the screen expecting it to be Erika confirming the pickup. It wasn’t.
It was my grandmother.
“Hey, Grandma.”
“Baby.” One word and I could hear it. The shake in her voice. The thing underneath the word that wasn’t sadness but was closer to fury and fear braided together so tight you couldn’t separate them. “They took Serenity.”
My hands tightened on the wheel. “Who took Serenity?”
“The police. They came to my house, Justice. They came into my house with a warrant and they put handcuffs on her and took her out of my kitchen. She’s pregnant.
I told them she’s pregnant and they didn’t care.
They put her in the back of a car and drove off and she was crying and I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t do a damn thing.”
Rita’s voice broke on that last word and something in my chest cracked with it.
Rita didn’t break. She was the foundation this entire family was built on and foundations don’t crack.
But I could hear it happening in real time and it made me press the gas harder than I should have with my daughters in the backseat.
“What’s the charge?”
“Murder. They said murder, Justice. Something about a man in Connecticut. A teacher. They’re taking her to Connecticut.”
My mind started working before she finished talking, pulling at threads I didn’t have enough of yet but knowing that whatever this was, it had Vivica’s name somewhere underneath it. Our mother had been dead for weeks and she was still detonating bombs she’d planted while she was alive.
“I’m on my way,” I said. “Don’t call anybody else. Let me handle this. I’m going to get her a lawyer and I’m going to fix this.”
“Is Auntie Serenity okay?” Dream asked in a small voice.
“She’s fine, baby. We’re just going to check on Grandma Rita first, okay?”
What the fuck did Vivica and Serenity do?