Chapter 2 #2
“Wait! Did you see her? What did she look like?”
“Fuck you mean what she look like? She looks like Solace.”
“That tells me nothin’. I mean, damn. Is she still engaged?”
I ain’t answer right away. Bellhaven might’ve been small, but the internet wasn’t, and people had a bad habit of telling me shit about Lace I never asked to know.
I’d heard about the fancy ass condo, expensive vacations, and eventually the engagement.
I ain’t give a fuck about none of that shit.
I’d just poured me a drink when I heard she was engaged and sat there staring at the wall for damn near an hour.
Yesterday, though, there wasn’t a ring on her finger.
I noticed that shit immediately, but I damn sure wasn’t about to ask her where it went.
“Ain’t my business,” I huffed.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Go to lunch. I’ll see yo’ ass later.” I hung up, and when she called right back, I declined that shit. Her text came through before I could put my phone away.
I shoved my phone in my pocket when I heard Tanya snickering behind the register. “Mind yo’ business.”
“I didn’t hear a thing.” She smiled and went back to her paperwork as the bell over the door rang. Two customers walked in, and I got back to work.
By two, I was ready to get the fuck out of there and roll up. I grabbed my hoodie and peacoat from upstairs then headed through the warehouse toward the back lot. Sometimes this shit still got me. For years, most of what I did revolved around making sure Anthony and Keyana were good.
They needed food, clothes, rides to school, somebody at the crib, and somebody they could depend on when my mama was too drunk, too high, or just gone somewhere. She’d been dead three years now from an overdose.
By the time it happened, I’d already spent years knowing that shit was probably how she was gon’ go if she didn’t get herself together. I had prepared myself for that call long before it came, so when it finally did, I was damn near numb to the shit. I couldn’t afford to fall apart anyway.
Anthony and Keyana needed me, and there wasn’t nobody else to step in. We ain’t have no other family, and my pops had been locked up since before I was born. Everything that needed to be handled fell on me, so I handled that shit and made sure my brother and sister were straight.
Anthony was grown now, and Keyana only had a few months left before she graduated.
I ain’t regret none of what I did for them, and I’d do the same shit again.
I just ain’t know back then if I’d ever get a chance to build some shit for myself too.
My life was finally straight now, though.
My businesses was good, my family was good, and life wasn’t pulling me in ten different directions every damn day.
Then Lace came back to Bellhaven, and in less than twenty-four hours, everybody was saying her name to me and bringing up shit I ain’t been trying to think about.
I climbed into my truck and started the engine.
My phone connected automatically, and Duffle Bag Trappy’s latest single, Made For This, came through the speakers.
I needed a blunt bad as fuck, so I grabbed my shit from the center console and started breaking the weed down in my lap.
I had that bitch rolled before I pulled out of the lot.
I sparked it, took a long pull, and cracked the window before putting the truck in drive.
That first hit did exactly what the fuck I needed it to do.
Bellhaven wasn’t big enough to need directions anywhere, so ten minutes later, I pulled up to Loretta’s.
I found parking behind one of my crew’s trucks while I finished my blunt.
After killing the engine, I sprayed some cologne and headed through the back door they’d left propped open for us.
I ain’t even make it all the way inside before I heard Loretta fussing about dust.
“I put the plastic up for a reason,” I called.
“I didn’t touch your plastic.”
“Then why I hear you?”
“Because this is my business, Sherrod Dennis Cole!”
I shook my head and walked through the kitchen. Darius had knocked out most of the framing, Mike was measuring drywall, and Shawn was working up front. Right in the middle of all that shit was Lace looking good as fuck and completely out of place.
She had on some tight ass black leather pants, a fitted black top, a little plaid jacket, and heels she had no fucking business wearing around my job site.
Her hair was straight down her back, laptop tucked under one arm and coffee in her other hand.
I ain’t know shit about whatever designer shit she had on, but I knew it cost some money.
Them pants had her ass sitting crazy, though.
I damn near started drooling before I caught myself.
Lace turned around and saw me looking. Her eyebrows went up because she knew exactly what the fuck had my attention, but I kept my face straight and walked over to her. “You lost?”
“No.”
“Then why the hell you standin’ in the middle of my work area?”
“I’m working.”
I looked at the laptop under her arm. “Doin’ what?”
“Things you wouldn’t understand.”
“PowerPoints?” She rolled her eyes when I walked past her, and I caught her getting too close to the ladder. “Get from under that ladder.”
She looked up and realized where she was standing. “Oh. Thanks.” I grabbed a pair of safety glasses off the folding table and held them out to her. She looked at the glasses, then at me. “What am I supposed to do with these?”
“Fuck you think?”
“I don’t need safety glasses, Smoke.”
“You in my work area.”
“This is my mother’s diner.”
“And this is my construction site ’til I’m done.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You still mean as hell.”
I kept the glasses held out. “Put the shit on.” She stared at me another second before snatching them.
“Whatever.” She slid them onto her face, and I smiled before I could stop myself. Of course her ass caught it. “What’s so funny?”
“You.”
“What about me?”
I walked off before she could keep that shit going. She sucked her teeth behind me, and when Shawn looked over from the framing, I cut my eyes at him before he could say whatever dumb shit was already on his mind. He turned right back around and minded his fucking business.
For the next hour, Lace stayed out the way for the most part.
She sat at one of the finished tables near the opening between the two spaces with her laptop while Loretta kept coming back and forth asking her shit.
I caught pieces of them talking about social media, vendors, signs, email lists, and some other shit.
It sounded like she knew what the fuck she was doing.
Eventually, she came onto my side with her phone in her hand.
“Sherrod.”
I looked up from the cabinet measurements. Lace had always been one of the few people who could call me Sherrod without that shit sounding weird. “What?”
“What’s the exact square footage of the new event space?”
“Six hundred eighty-two.”
She blinked at me. “And you just know that off the top of your head?”
“I built the shit.”
She typed something into her phone. “And the maximum occupancy?”
“Forty-eight seated. Sixty standin’, dependin’ how you set the shit up.”
Her fingers moved over the screen again. “Is the back entrance accessible?”
“Yeah.”
“Bathroom?”
“ADA.” She stopped typing and looked at me. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You doin’ that shit again.”
“What shit, Smoke?”
“Lookin’ surprised.”
She turned her nose up. “I wasn’t surprised.”
“Yeah, aight.” I went back to measuring.
“I know you’re good at your job.” My tape stopped, and I looked at her. She shifted her phone in her hands. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Didn’t say you did.”
“You clearly think I did.”
“I clearly ain’t say shit.”
She exhaled. “You’re exhausting.”
“Yo’ ass been back one day.”
“And somehow I’m already tired of this fucking place.”
“Then take yo’ PTO and go on somewhere,” I told her and went back to work.
“Asshole,” she muttered.
Twenty minutes later, a coffee cup from Harper’s Cafe showed up beside my toolbox. I looked at the shit, then over at Lace. “Fuck is this?”
She kept looking at her laptop. “Coffee.”
“I see that shit.”
“Then why did you ask?”
I picked the cup up and took a sip. The shit was black with two sugars, exactly how I drank it.
I looked back over at her, and she looked up at me at the same time.
That shit fucked with me more than it should’ve.
Eight years later, and she still remembered some little shit about me that most people wouldn’t have thought twice about.
“You remember this shit?”
“Some things are hard to forget.”
I held her eyes for a minute before taking another sip. “‘Ppreciate it.” She nodded and went back to whatever she was doing on her laptop, but my mind had already gone somewhere else.
Last time Lace made me coffee, she’d been barefoot in my kitchen wearing one of my T-shirts, bitching because I had to leave for work so early.
She handed me my travel mug at the door, kissed me, and told me to call her when I got off.
I called her ass every fucking day until I got tired of feeling stupid.
The last time I tried, I was sitting in my truck outside the grocery store because I didn’t want Anthony or Keyana hearing none of that shit.
Lace hadn’t answered me in damn near a week.
By then, I was pissed the fuck off, worried about her, and still calling because I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that this woman I’d known damn near my whole life could really cut me off without saying shit.