I scurried down the carpeted steps to the living room where I dialed my own number, forcing it to ring. I held it in the air to make sure Amir heard it going off. After two minutes, I ran back upstairs where Amir was lying under the covers. The white sheets juxtaposed against his chocolate-chocolate skin.
“Is everything okay?”
“Not really. It’s my girl, Bree. She’s on her way over. She and her husband just had another one of their drag-out fights.”
An expression of disappointment formed on Amir’s chiseled face. “She’s coming over now?”
I started to get dressed, slipping one leg and then the other back into my dress. Amir wouldn’t budge at first. He took me by the hand and pulled me back into bed, forcing his tongue into my mouth. I went with it if it meant getting him the hell up out of my house, but then he started feeling up my titties, attempting to coax me back into round two of sex.
“Babe, I really can’t. She says she’s only ten minutes away.” Amir gave me this puppy dog look in an attempt to soften my heart. “How about this right here: how about I cook you dinner sometime? I can make the hell out of some lasagna. It’ll be nice.”
Amir’s frown turned upside down. “I love lasagna. It’s a date. When?”
I grabbed his shirt off the floor and handed it to him. “I’ll call you.”
Amir took his tank top and put it on. “You don’t have my number.”
I searched the room until I saw a Post-It pad and pen on the nightstand. “What’s your number, baby?” I wrote it down as he read it off, stepping one firm leg at a time back into his underwear and jeans. I walked Amir to the door, my marble floor cold beneath my feet.
“Call me tomorrow,” he said.
“When’s the best time?” I put on a front like I gave a damn.
“I don’t go in until five tomorrow, so any time before that is cool.”
“Sounds good.” Amir leaned in to give me one last kiss. There was no tongue this time, but a light peck on the lips. “Have a good night,” he said. “Be safe.”
“You, too, baby. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.” I waved goodbye as I slowly shut the door. “Yeah, I’ll call you all right. Be sure to sit your ass by the phone until I do.” I laughed.
37
KASHAWN
“Good morning, baby,” Ma said as she walked into the kitchen, dressed in a white-and-red-rose-printed robe, her salt-and-pepper hair done up in big pink and turquoise rollers under a nylon purple scarf.
“Good morning, Ma.” I was sitting at the kitchen table, picking over a bowl of soggy Raisin Bran with my spoon.
“Coffee smells good,” she said.
“I just made some fresh.”
Ma got a cup from the cabinet above the microwave and poured herself a cup. “How did you sleep last night?” She pulled a chair out and sat down next to me.
“Not too good. I tossed and turned all night. If anything, I’ve only been able to close my eyes two to three hours at a time and when I do manage to go to sleep, I keep having this same nightmare.”
“About Bree?”
“I’m standing at the end of this long, dark hall at the jail, and at the other end is Bree with her arms outstretched, reaching out to me. I start running toward her, but the faster I run, the further away from Bree I move. I run and run, never drawing closer. She’s crying and hollering my name, but I can’t hear her. There’s no sound coming out of her mouth. Just when I think I’m getting to her, the bars of her jail cell slam closed and I wake up drenched in sweat.”
“Baby, don’t worry. Bree will get through this. She knows she’s not alone, that she has you and that she has family.”
“Thank you, Mama, but how can I not worry? I’m frustrated because I feel helpless at this point.”
“Have you talked to Kent Crump? What did he say?”
“He told me that the cops found Bree’s fingerprints on the doorknob of the house.”
“Lord, Jesus,” Ma sighed. “Did she tell you what happened?”
“She said she was going over to just talk to Katiesha about what happened here at the house that night.”
“Do you believe her?”
“I know that what someone says they’re going to do and what ends up happening are two different things, but, yeah, I believe her. Ma, you should have seen Bree. I took one look in her eyes and knew she wasn’t lying. She was scared to death, and there isn’t too much she’s afraid of. I don’t think she did it. I don’t think she killed Katiesha. Look at the neighborhood Katiesha lived in.”
“That’s true. I’m always seeing on the news about someone getting shot and killed on Pepper Drive.”
“That’s what I know, and Kent told me that the girl was on drugs and was a stripper, so with her track record, anybody could have killed her. Maybe it was a boyfriend or some pusher she did wrong.” I pushed the bowl of soggy cereal away from me. My stomach was in too many knots to eat.
Ma rested her hand on mine and said, “You just have to keep your head up and pray to the good Lord that Bree will get through this mess, baby.”
“Ma, do you believe she’s innocent?”
“Kashawn, it’s not about what I believe.”
“She didn’t kill Katiesha.”
“No, I don’t think she did it. It sounds like she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I know that things have been rough for you two, and I haven’t made it any easier with my talking bad about her. When I get in front of her today, I want to apologize for the way I’ve been acting. I want to make it up to the both of you.”
“Good morning, y’all.” Yvonne walked in, wearing one of those one-size-fits-all T-shirts with a teddy bear on the front and purple sweats. Her round, fat face was covered in this light-green goop.
“Good morning, ba—. Girl, what in the world is that mess all over your face?”
“It’s called a guacamole mask. It’s supposed to clean all the dirt and bacteria out of your pores.”
“On you, it’s an improvement. I think you should walk around with that goop on your face for the rest of your life,” I said jokingly.
“Oh, you got jokes. That’s good, I like that. Let me call Steve Harvey, tell him we got the next king of comedy right here in Tallahassee.”
“Y’all stop.”
Yvonne rummaged through my refrigerator like it was her house. She and Ma were spending the night, being that Ma couldn’t bring herself to sleep at her house without Uncle Ray-Ray. I told her that she could stay as long as she wanted. That invitation wasn’t extended to Yvonne the moocher, though. A big three-bedroom house and she’s scared to stay in it. If she got herself a man, she wouldn’t be scared of nothing. Instead, she wanted to be all up in everyone’s business because she had none of her own.
“Kashawn, you don’t mind if I go with you today to the arraignment hearing, do you?”
“Of course not, baby,” Ma said. “Bree needs to know that we’re here for her, that we’re family, and family sticks together no matter what.”
Yvonne turned to me as if she needed to get an official okay from me to be in the courtroom.
“Yes, you can come.”
“I know we have our differences and whatnot, but I want to squash all that and be there for you. For Bree, too.”
“Thank you, Yvonne. I appreciate that.”
“Is Deanthony coming?” Yvonne asked.
“I hope not,” I said.
“I want y’all to stop this, Kashawn,” Ma said. “He’s your brother and I want you to make things right between the two of you. It breaks my heart to see the two of you at odds with one another. With the loss of Ray-Ray, I have realized that life is too short for mess.”
“We wouldn’t be at odds if he hadn’t have slept with my wife.”
“And that’s the elephant in the room you two need to get from under. If it takes you two fist-fighting it out to get past this, then do what you have to do, but I’m tired of all this mess, so fix it.” Ma finished the rest of her coffe
e and placed the cup in the kitchen sink. I got up, walked over to her and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “What’s that for?”
“I love you.”
“Child, tell me something I don’t know.” She laughed. “Now y’all, come on. We have to get dressed. Bree’s going to wonder where we at if she doesn’t see us in the courtroom.”
I picked up the phone and dialed Deanthony’s number. It rang twice before he picked up.
38
MAMA LIZ
Nineteen. That’s how old I was when my mama kicked me out of the house after finding out that I was pregnant. I don’t know how she found out, but she did. Seeing how small Tallahassee is, anyone could have said something.
“Every time I try to have something, you get in the middle. He never would have done anything to you if you hadn’t have been shaking your tail in front of him. I told you what would happen if you kept acting fast.” Mama flung everything I owned out in the front yard. “So if you’re grown enough to open your legs, then you old enough to live out here on your own.”
Everyone in the neighborhood was looking and staring as I scooped my clothes off the ground out of the dirt. Mama threw a black garbage bag at me. “Here, a trash bag for trash.”
I didn’t shed a tear. I wasn’t going to give her the satis-damn-faction of her seeing that she had gotten to me. I threw my garbage bag of clothes over my shoulder and walked down the street I was born and raised on, leaving behind everything and everybody that I knew. I struggled to hold back tears, but the harder I tried, the harder they came.
My plan was to tell her nothing until I moved out with a place of my own. I was working as a maid at the time, so I used the money from my check and got a room at the El Camino Motel that was known as the place whores took their tricks. With the little money I was pulling in cleaning white people’s houses, it was the only thing I could afford at the time. I was pregnant, pretty much homeless, and barely hanging on. I paid up for a week until I could get something stable. I thought about going to Willie Patterson to tell him that I was pregnant, but decided that my babies were better off not knowing that they were conceived through rape. They didn’t need a drunk for a daddy. I figured I wasn’t the only girl he had done this to.
I told Mrs. Cozart, this white lady I was working for, that I was available to put in more hours. Her fish belly-white behind was all too eager to work me to the bone, tacking on extra work like washing all ten of her windows in her big, ugly house, to polishing her silverware and cleaning out her stove and refrigerator every other week. Mrs. Cozart paid me a dollar extra if I stayed overtime to wash and fold her and her nasty husband’s dirty drawers. Mr. Cozart was a lawyer, who was always getting fresh with me. He would sneak off to the laundry room where I would wash clothes, and start hugging and kissing on me.
“Come on, now,” he would say. “Give me some of that brown sugar.”
Twice a week I would have to claw that white fool off me. Mrs. Cozart didn’t have a clue, or maybe she did and didn’t give a damn. It was too bad I couldn’t get paid extra for Mr. Cozart pinching and grabbing all over me. I took every penny, nickel, and dime I earned working for them and stashed it away for my babies.
I dreamt of fish the week before I found out I was pregnant. They took my blood and told me what I had already known. I thought about getting an abortion, but when the doctor said that I was pregnant with twins, I knew it was a blessing from God.
I thought I would end up like Mama, a spinster, until I met Edrick.
A day didn’t go by that I didn’t think about him, especially now with his brother Ray-Ray gone. I was glad that Edrick went first because I don’t think he would have been able to handle Ray-Ray dying. I wished Edrick were here. He would know exactly what to do in a time like this. I didn’t think any of this mess with Kashawn would have been happening if Edrick was around. My Edrick had an answer for everything. It hasn’t been easy holdin’ all us together, but I did the best I could do.
The first time I met Edrick, I didn’t meet him. Not in person anyway. I was coming out of IGA when I nearly tripped over a brown leather wallet that was on the ground in the parking lot. I looked inside for an I.D. I remember his wallet was fat with all these business cards stuffed inside it. It barely closed. Along with his driver’s license, Edrick had about five hundred dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. He looked like a vacuum cleaner salesman on his driver’s license. I thought about taking it to the police station, but it was way on the other side of town. After working twelve hours on my hands and knees for the Cozarts, I was dead tired, so I held on to his wallet until I got back to the motel.
I was walking from work one hot June day when I saw a sign outside of this house over on Saxton Street that read, Room for Rent. This old, lightskinned lady, Ms. Gertie, was renting out the room. She told me that it was her son’s, who was helping starving children over in Africa. When I told her that I was pregnant, her face softened. She even waived first month’s rent. I moved out of that whore-infested motel as fast as my feet could take me. I told Ms. Gertie that my mama had kicked me out of the house, that I didn’t have anybody but my babies. She treated me so nice, cooking and washing my clothes like I was her daughter.
“It ain’t safe for a young girl like you to be out here on your own without a husband.”
She had an old-fashioned way of thinking, like Mama. One thing about Ms. Gertie was that she was some kind of nosey. Getting all up in my business, asking me about my family, if I knew where my daddy was. All I remembered about him was that he left my mama when she was a few years younger than me. I was three. I remembered him being tall and real black, like he had been double-dipped in molasses. He used to pick me up and give me big kisses on my cheek. The last time I heard his name, Mama said that he was killed, shot in the chest in a juke joint over some mess about a woman. Mama was dressed all in black with a big church hat. I wiped away tears that streaked her face. I remembered after that, men were in and out of her life. They would buy me candy, take me to the playground, trying to win my attention, all of them trying to win a role at playing my daddy. Once they drained Mama dry, none of them stuck around long enough for nothing. I swore that I would never end up like her: alone and bitter as hell.
The same day I found Edrick’s wallet, I looked him up in the phone book. I knew he must have been going crazy, looking for his wallet. There were about twelve E. Parker’s in the phone book, so I called every single one listed. After about the eighth call, I had finally reached him.
“Hello, is this Edrick Parker?”
“Yes it is,” he’d said.
I had breathed a sigh of relief. I had told him my name and that I’d found his wallet.
“Thank God. Where did you find it?”
“I was coming out of IGA yesterday and nearly tripped over it.”
“I was turning my car and office upside down, looking for it. My whole life is in that wallet,” Edrick went on.
“Surely not your whole life,” I’d said, fingering through the thick stack of business cards.
“I was about to get on the phone and cancel everything before you called, Liz.”
“Well, I know how it can be when you lose something, especially when your whole life depends on it. I was going to turn it in down at the police station, but they probably would have taken forever and a day to let you know that someone had turned it in. You can come over and get it. I live on 1412 Saxon Street.”
“I can stop by tomorrow after work to get it.”
“I should be here ’round four if that’s good for you.”
“Sounds good,” he’d said. Edrick sounded older and debonair on the phone. I couldn’t wait to meet him, match his voice to a body.
I had thought about Edrick all that day he was supposed to come by and pick his wallet up. Ms. Gertie was off running errands, so I had the house to myself. He’d come by a little after five, pulling into Ms. Gertie’s narrow driveway in a shiny green Gran Torino. He was dressed to a T in a black
suit and black wingtips. I had wondered what it was he did for a living, being so dressed up. He looked to be about in his late twenties, early thirties. Turned out, Edrick was thirty-two.
I had checked myself in one of the wicker mirrors Ms. Gertie had hanging in the living room. The whole house, even my room, was filled with wicker furniture. I had put on a little lipstick, some blush, nothing special. I’d waited for him to ring the doorbell. I’d prayed he wasn’t crazy. Didn’t sound on the phone like he was. When I’d heard the bell ring, I’d answered. Edrick had stood behind the screen door, fixing his tie. I could smell his English Musk cologne before he had even walked in the door.
“Are you Liz?” he’d asked.
“I am, and you must be Edrick Parker.”
“Yes.”
“Come on in,” I’d said as I held the screen door open for him. Lord have mercy. This man was good-looking. He looked like a preacher in his suit. He towered over me like he was seven feet tall, with dark-chocolate skin and deep-brown eyes. “Did you have a problem finding the house?”
“Well, I’m from here, so I know Tallahassee like the back of my hand.”
“You, too?” I had given a flirtatious smile.
“You from Tallahassee?”
“Born and raised.”
“Well, ain’t this somethin’, small world.”
“Small town.”
The smell of Dutch apple cheesecake Ms. Gertie had made filled the house. I couldn’t bake to save my soul. I’d tried to make a sweet potato pie once and it had come out all runny. I’d tried again and ended up burning the pies. That was the last time I’d tried my hand at baking anything.
“Oh, let me get you your wallet.” I had put it in one of the end table drawers for safe keeping. “Everything’s in there.”
“It’s fine, Liz. I trust you.”
Edrick had the most beautiful smile I had ever seen on a black man. He could have blinded me, his teeth were so white. Mama always told me to never trust a man who had teeth that white. It meant they had something to hide.
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