Prologue #2
Beretta’s mom was much different than our mom, so a lot of shit Laila didn’t agree with.
She eventually let me give Beretta lessons, and I turned her into a beast at just seven years old.
I used to take her out to the gun range, and to the woods, just like my dad would do with us, and I gave her plenty of lessons.
My kids knew how to shoot. Lil Loco, Zuri, and Oakley all had a trigger finger like mine, and all three of them knew that if somebody were to come into this house in the middle of the night, that they were to find a gun that was hidden in the special hiding spots, and to blow a motha fuckas head off, and to ask questions later.
That’s just the kind of world that we lived in.
Everyone might not agree with me, and my husband’s parenting style, feeling like we were teaching our children things that were too mature for them, but it was either a nigga run up in this house, and kill my kids because my kids didn’t know how to shoot, or a nigga run up in this house, and they get their heads blown off by a family of six.
I tell you what, I’m not picking out a casket for any of my children.
I wasn’t sitting front row at a funeral, dropping to my knees at a gravesite, watching any one of my kids get buried six feet under into the ground.
I did that with my parents. My body dropped when both my parents died, so I’ll be damned if I had to do that shit with one of my children.
“I gotta do something about this shit,” I mumbled to myself, thinking about Yolanda, and the rest of the women in Miami that innocently lost their lives this past month.
Wesson told me that I had to feed my knowledge to other people, and for the first time, I think I’m understanding what he was trying to tell me. A light bulb went off in my head, and all kinds of thoughts started pouring in.
“Now, let me would have left you in the bed by yourself, and came downstairs, you would have been ready to start a fuckin war,” the sound of my husband’s voice caught my attention, snapping me out of the deep thoughts that I was in.
I was so tuned into my own thoughts that I never heard when he came down the stairs. I was one of those people that heard every damn thing too. One of my kids could sneeze in their bedroom, and I would hear it, even with me being downstairs. My thoughts had taken me away.
“I couldn’t sleep, so I came downstairs. I didn’t want to turn the TV on, and interrupt you from sleeping,” I replied, looking up at him.
Years later, my husband was still the kind of fine that was good enough to eat.
Papi stays in the gym, and you could very much see the results.
Loco still wore his hair in his signature curly taper, which I loved because his short curls have always been so full, and healthy.
His skin still looked like glass. For a man, he had the best skin that I’ve ever saw.
His chestnut skin was perfect, and with his shirt off, you could see all the tattoos that adorned his chest, stomach, and arms. A couple of my favorite tattoos that he had was the Miami skyline that was tatted on his upper back, along with the portraits that he had of each of our children on his back as well, and of course, the portrait that he had of me on his inner arm.
My name was also tatted on the side of his hand.
Papi was in love. I was too because I had his name on me three times.
They were all in places that were visible too.
If my face wasn’t so pretty, I would have tatted it there, but I can’t bring myself to play around like that.
“What’s got you so tuned out? You looked like you were staring off into space when I walked in,” he picked up on, not shocking me in the least bit because I could never get anything past this man.
“You remember Yolanda?” I asked him.
“The one that owns the swimming boutique?” he asked me.
“Yeah. She was murdered, Loco. Some niggas tried to rob her after she shut down the store. They killed her right in the parking lot,” I shared with him, and you could tell that he was caught off guard by the news.
Loco was cool with Yolanda as well. On those Saturdays, when I would pull him along with me, so that we could get out of the house, he’s been to her boutique with me a couple of times.
He just saw her with me the other day when we were in Louis Vuitton.
He talked shit with her, telling her that he wanted an invitation to her wedding.
The news did to him the same thing that it did to me because he sat down on the couch, and he looked to have been in his own world, just like me.
“Damn. That shit is crazy. We just saw her the other day at the mall. She was cool. I could tell that she genuinely fucked with you, and your sisters. Did they get the niggas that did that shit?” he wanted to know.
“Not yet. They don’t have any suspects. It literally just happened a couple of hours ago,” I told him.
“Damn. You feel like it might have been personal? You think it was random? What’s your take on it?” he asked me. I turned my head, so that I could look at him.
“I don’t think it was random. Baby, that shit had to have been personal.
She closed the boutique at midnight, thirty minutes later, she was pronounced dead.
Somebody was watching her for sure. They probably had been watching her for a little minute.
They knew what time she was going to close that store.
Because I’ve had talks with her, I know for a fact that she was clearing a million a year easy.
She had all kinds of celebrities wearing her swimwear, and every other day, she was going viral on social media because of her luxury pieces.
They ran up on her trying to hit a lick,” I voiced, giving my theory on it, which I’m sure was correct.
“When you making that kind of money, you gotta move differently. I ain’t putting the blame on her or no shit like that, but she should have had security closing with her, you feel me?
Either that, or she should have had a nighttime crew closing the shop down.
She shouldn’t have been doing that shit on her own,” he let me know, telling me all the things that had crossed my mind as well, upon hearing the news.
“Loco, this the 4th murder in Miami in a span of three weeks. All women too,” I shared with him, and he nodded, knowing that what I was speaking was facts because he would often watch the news with me, but if he didn’t, I would tell him what I’d saw.
“Can I share a thought with you that just crossed my mind, and you can tell me if I sound crazy or not?” I asked, wanting to hear my husband’s opinion because I’ve always valued it. My husband’s input on anything that I did meant the world to me.
“Lay it on me beautiful,” he went ahead, extending his arm on the back of the couch, and putting all his attention on me.
It was nearing three in the morning, yet the two of us were up talking, as if we didn’t have to be up in a few hours to get the kids ready for school.
Well, my kids were older, and we didn’t have to physically get them ready, but we had to be up with them, just making sure they were getting ready.
Also, my kids liked home cooked meals for breakfast, so I would have to do that in the mornings.
“Seeing what just happened to Yolanda has me thinking. Mainly thinking back to a conversation that I had with my dad when I was a teenager. Wesson used to always tell me that I had a special gift. The kind of gift where I wasn’t just put on this earth to survive.
He made me feel like I had the cheat sheet to survival.
You know that I’ve dodged death plenty of times.
I’ve been shot at plenty of times, to the point that the average person would have died a long time ago if they didn’t have the kind of life skills that I did.
He made me feel like I knew what it took to protect myself, and that I had the power to teach other people how to protect themselves as well,” I started, and then I took a quick pause because I wanted to think about my words before I said them.
Although my husband would never make me sound as if anything that I said to him was stupid, I just knew that I was jumping the gun a little bit with this new venture, so I was nervous to express it.
“Back then, I thought that he was just telling me that I had the gift to teach the things that he taught me to my sisters, and to my children. Now, I’m looking at this shit a little deeper.
This the fourth murder, Loco. Murders that I felt like could have been avoided if these women had some shit on them to protect them.
So many women are green, feeling like bad shit won’t happen to them, and as if their exempt from bullets flying their way, and because of that, they don’t walk around toting a gun.
I’m not sure if I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but I want to do something about this problem.
Like, real life something. A class or something for girls.
Offer some kind of mentorship. Self- defense.
Get these women in the field and teach them how to shoot.
All the shit Wesson taught my sisters and I.
We learned awareness from him, survival, and the strategy to shoot first and ask questions later.
What if that’s the gift that Wesson had been trying to tell me all those years ago?
” I looked him in his eyes, reading his body language, trying to see if he was following where I was going with it.
He took a few moments before he responded. It’s as if he was trying to find the right words.