by Noire
“Look,” she said, all of a sudden playing like she was soft. “This ain’t fair! I don’t even know y’all like that and everybody’s tryna get all up in my head. I been through a lot in my life, okay? I wasn’t raised with all this”—she looked around the huge, beautifully decorated dining room—“fancy shit.”
Cursing in front of Selah? Slack-ass heathen! We all gave her the look. Even Barron.
“I remember one day when I was about five,” Dy-Nasty went right on talking. “I was playing in my mother’s closet and I found a little outfit balled up in a plastic bag that I thought would look good on my new doll baby. She was one of them real big dolls with blond hair and blue eyes, and the only clothes she had was a fake diaper and a dirty little undershirt.”
She swallowed hard and made her bottom lip tremble like shit was about to get real emotional. Old trick, I wanted to scream at her ass. That’s a real old trick!
“I took the clothes in my room and put ’em on my dolly, and when my mother came in and saw her she just went crazy. She slapped the shit outta me and then she snatched the doll and threw her in the bathtub and set her on fire.”
That lip was really quivering now. She was sniffling too.
“My baby got burnt up! It was all because of them clothes and I could never figure out why until I saw this.”
My mouth dropped open when she reached inside her bra and pulled out a small square of paper. She unfolded it and held it up high so everybody could see it. It was a faded color flyer of a missing child’s poster. It showed a picture of a three-year-old girl wearing a lime green jumper and a bright pink shirt, and the words on the bottom read, SABLE DOMINION. KIDNAPPED CHILD.
A tear fell from Dy-Nasty’s eye. “These are the same clothes my baby had on when she got burnt up! The only reason I even have this is ’cause my mother left it for me in an envelope when she died. There was a letter in there too. Mama’s letter said she was sorry for all the things she had did wrong, and that she hoped one day I would find my real mother. The mother she stole me from all those years ago.”
She passed the wrinkled piece of paper to Selah and started sniveling like a little kid. I watched Selah’s eyes skim over the photocopied article, and then her head dropped to her chest and her hair fell into her grits as she started crying her eyes out.
“I’m sorry, Mama Selah.” Dy-Nasty rubbed Selah’s heaving back in wide circles. “I ain’t mean to make you cry.” That trick had the nerve to look around the table and pinch her lips together and give all of us the evil eye. “Now enough with all this sad stuff! I don’t wanna talk no more about my other mother! She’s dead and gone, and it ain’t nothing I can do about whatever the hell she did or didn’t do. Besides, I took the DNA test already. It said I’m Sable, so it don’t really matter what Mama did all them years ago. A mama’s love is something a child don’t question, and I ain’t about to sit here and start questioning it now!”
I almost wanted to clap and whistle. Barron had trained this little monkey real good. Instead of letting us go hard up her ass with no kinda Vaseline, Mami was shutting shit down. She had punked us with some real good defensive moves, and it sounded like everybody at the table had all of a sudden swallowed their forks and their damn tongues too.
“Well.” Selah finally lifted her head and broke the silence. She pulled her napkin from her lap and used the end of it to wipe her eyes. “You’re absolutely right about one thing. A mother’s love is not to be questioned.” She pressed her napkin to her face again and re-dabbed her eyes. “And, no, baby.” She blessed Dy-Nasty with a warm smile. “That kind of love is nothing you should have to defend.”
CHAPTER 17
The Fourth of July barbeque at the Dominion Estate didn’t have shit on their Labor Day picnic. For one thing, there were a ton of clear people wearing Wrangler jeans and ten-gallon hats all over the place. There were shaded people and Latinos on the scene too, but they didn’t work for the oil company. Most of them had been bused up from one of Viceroy’s community centers in Houston where they ran a mentorship group called Dominion Diamonds, a nonprofit organization that took in young teenaged girls and taught them life skills.
It was a real pretty day. Huge, colorful blankets had been spread out in the grass surrounding the pond, and there were balloons, Frisbees, and Nerf balls flying around everywhere. A bunch of Viceroy’s and Selah’s hood relatives had shown up to party, but there were also a whole bunch of rich folks from the suburbs running around, and Dane told me most of them were longtime investors in Dominion Oil.
I finally dug what Bunni had said about me needing to make friends with Dy-Nasty so I could know what she was up to, but obviously Bunni hadn’t given that slick chick the memo. Dy-Nasty strolled around in the grass stuck like glue to Barron, and he grinned all stupid with his arm draped around her shoulder as he introduced her to every damn body he passed.
I was burning up on fire as I watched Dy-Nasty sashay her big booty around in a pair of ugly yellow stripper shorts and a stank little push-up bra. It was hot outside, but it wasn’t that damn hot! She looked real skankified from the back, and even though we were shaped a lot alike I knew my ass was firmer and looked way better than hers.
My lips were straight twisted as I checked out her flow. She was into wigs too, but hers wasn’t the good Glama-Glo shit like mine was. She wore some tired-looking horsetail glued to the back of her head that was way longer than it needed to be, and even though her real hair was black and curly like mine, her edges were raggedy and damn near bald.
“Mink!” Bunni yeasted me up as we watched Dy-Nasty work the crowd. “Get up, girlfriend! Get out there and show your shit too!” I jumped on Bunni’s advice, and me and that chick was out there grinning and kissing babies like hungry politicians as we both introduced ourselves to all those people as the Dominions’ long-lost daughter Sable.
The problem was, we looked a whole lot alike, and a lotta people I went up to with my hand held out either thought they was seeing double, or they just smiled at me and said, “Oh, we met already. Don’t you remember?”
The smell of grilling meat was in the air. Selah had catered all the food except for the chicken, ribs, and steak, and there were three Texas-sized barbeque grills sparked up and giving off sweet hickory smoke. Waiters and waitresses had been hired to serve the drinks and keep everybody’s stomach full, but by the time I finished working the crowd, I was so wound up I couldn’t even force a chicken wing down my throat.
“Barron is so damn stupid.” I plopped down on the blanket and elbowed Bunni, who was leaning over a big plate of food tryna inhale that shit. I hated the way my homegirl ate. While I was busy worrying she sat beside me on the blanket smacking real loud and chewing with her mouth wide open. Her grill looked like a giant damn clothes dryer with a whole bunch of colored clothes tumbling around inside.
“Barron is stupid? Why you say that?” She swallowed hard, and then stuck two fingers deep in her mouth and sucked off some barbeque sauce.
“Because. Just look at him. Pushing that busted-looking bitch all up in these white people’s faces. I know they can see how ghetto she is. The least he coulda did was told her to put on something decent before she brought her thievin’ ass out here. I bet them fingers is sticky as hell. Them rich fools better check for their wallets as soon as she walks away.”
“Oh, Barron ain’t stupid,” Bunni said. She picked a deviled egg up off her plate and pushed the whole thing in her mouth. “He’s smart as hell,” she smacked. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“Oh yeah?” I smirked. “And what’s that?”
“He’s letting the board members get a real good look at Dy-Nasty,” she said. “He wants them to see her. Raw. That way when he tells them her ass is a thief, a ho, and a low-crawling crook, they’ll believe him.”
The party didn’t get hot until Uncle Suge got there, and it seemed like everybody in the world knew it. There was music blasting from the outdoor speaker system, and beer and liquor was flowing lik
e a river. All the cowboy-looking types and their wives were either standing around drinking beer and eating, or splashing in the pond and having fun. Fallon and her little girlfriends had taken over the pavilion, and they were over there flossing their tight bodies around in their bikinis, while Jock and some of his cousins from Houston had walked up into the edge of the tree line to get buzzed and lifted.
Uncle Suge made a real big splash when he busted up on the scene, and I do mean a real big one. That fool took a flying leap off the end of the dock and jumped straight into the pond with all his clothes on, even his cowboy hat and his Cartier watch, and all the white people who were swimming and paddling around on floats laughed like that was the funniest shit they had ever seen.
He clowned around with the kids in the water and told crazy jokes that made all the men laugh and all the white girls blush, and as everybody’s mood got a lot more crunk I could tell how much the people at Dominion Oil really liked Uncle Suge.
He socialized for a good little bit, and I couldn’t help but lick my lips when that tall hunk of beef finally climbed outta the pond and walked up on the grass with water still streaming outta his clothes. His chocolate skin and lumped-up muscles was showing all through his wet shirt, and his massive build had a whole lotta female eyes checking him out.
He looked like a sexy male calendar model when he put his wet hat back on his head and grinned, and I almost melted as I stared at the natural bulge in his crotch. I stood up off my blanket and brushed a few wrinkles outta my miniskirt, and I was just about to go over there and put a lil sumthin in his ear, but Barron beat me to the spot when he rushed over with DyNasty hanging all over his arm.
“Yo, Uncle Suge!” Barron said, sounding all phony like him and his uncle was the best of friends. “My dude! I got somebody here I think you’re gonna wanna meet.”
He turned to Dy-Nasty. “Dy-Nasty, this is our Uncle Suge, our father’s baby brother. Uncle Suge, this is your niece, Dy-Nasty. She’s visiting us from Philadelphia and her DNA test came back a positive match for Sable’s.”
I wanted to jam my toe up Dy-Nasty’s stank ass when she tossed her horse mane over her shoulder and stepped up on Uncle Suge grinning all in his face. “Hey, Uncle,” she cooed and pressed her hand to his wet, rocked-up chest. “Yum.” She giggled and licked her lips. “It looks like fine runs all up in this family, now don’t it?”
“She’s a ho!” I hissed to Bunni. “That trick belongs out on the track!”
“Hold up now,” I heard Uncle Suge say as his eyeballs jumped down in the split between her nasty titties. He was halfway lit and probably smoked out too, but he was still sober enough to realize that something real funky was going down. “Where in the world did you get this delicious young thing from, Lil Bump? And how is she gonna be Sable when Mink is already Sable?”
Barron laughed. “We don’t know who the hell Mink is,” he said. “But Dy-Nasty is family. She’s my sister Sable and I’m willing to put a whole lotta money on it.”
While Mink and Dy-Nasty tried to out-show their asses in front of company, Pilar stood off to the side with her eyes on rotate, taking notice of everything that moved. Especially the two chickenheads who had come clucking in from up north. They were going at it toe-to-toe, and it looked like Mink had finally met her match. If their little throw-down ghetto cat fight wasn’t so damn disgusting Pilar would have laughed.
Instead, she sipped her chilled white wine and watched the drama unfold. Mink is a real gold-digging bitch, but I don’t like this other chick neither, Pilar admitted to herself as she followed DyNasty with her eyes. The girl was pure trash. She was even worse than Mink. Hell, if Mink was the sidewalk then this chick was the gutter. She looked real low-class, puffing on her Newport kings and walking up to every white man in sight and asking him, “So, who is you? What’s your job? How much bank do you yank?”
This fool should have stayed her grimy ass in Philly somewhere. The last thing Pilar needed was more competitive pussy camping out in the mansion and getting in Barron’s head. And this girl was a real fabulous troll. She actually made slish-glump noises as she chugged her beer from the bottle, and right now she was out there laughing extra, extra loud over every little thing that was said. It was all a ploy to get some male attention, Pilar knew, and with Dy-Nasty’s big titties and monster ass, she was getting it too. Every man at the estate—black, white, and orange—had their eyes glued to her lower body as she got up under the pavilion with Fallon and her friends and started showing them how to twerk it stripper-style. The girl had enough meat on her ass to make the cooks spark up another grill, and all the men were panting as she threw her head back, held her arms high in the air, and made her yellow booty vibrate back and forth from the left to the right.
But panting wasn’t all some of the guys out there were doing. Pilar glanced over at her fiancé, Ray, who was sitting in a lawn chair beside the pavilion because he was too fat to get his ass down on a blanket. Ray was up close and mentally fucking the shit outta this chick. He had an expression on his face that Pilar knew very well, and she recognized that glazed look in his eyes as he nutted in his drawers just from watching Dy-Nasty’s lady lumps rotate in a vicious, dizzying hump.
“Ray!” Pilar hissed, frowning in disapproval when he looked at her. “Get your ass over here!”
Ray licked the drool off his bottom lip and pushed his wide butt out of the chair and waddled her way.
Goddamn horny-ass bunch of fools, Pilar fumed as she drained the last of the wine from her glass. All it took was a stank display of jiggly tits and ass and most men would get to buzzing after some coochie like a hive of bees on some honey. She glanced at Dy-Nasty, who had dropped it down low and was squatting with her butt between her feet trying to twerk it to death. Nah, Pilar corrected herself as she smirked at the Philly chick in disgust. Not like bees on honey. More like flies on shit.
CHAPTER 18
When you crammed too many slick gutter chicks under one roof crazy shit was bound to pop off. Me and Bunni was about to go club bangin’ with Dane, when Dirty Dy-Nasty ran her stank ass outside and tried to hop in the whip.
“Wait up!” she hollered and wobbled down the steps in a pair of cheap eight-inch Payless heels.
“Oh no this trick ain’t!” I muttered from the backseat and reached over to slam the Hummer’s door. I clipped the shit outta Dy-Nasty’s big head and almost caught her nose in the crack. “Lock that shit!” I hollered at Dane, but he was moving way too slow and Dy-Nasty snatched the door open and damn near plopped down in my lap as she jumped inside.
“Watch it, goddammit!”
“Well scoot your ass over then!”
I inhaled a thick cloud of her cheap-ass perfume and started choking on the fumes. “Damn!” I coughed and sneezed as I scooted way over to the other side of the car. “What’s that shit you done sprayed all over you? Raid?”
“Uh-uh.” She laughed and dug her ass deeper into the seat. “It’s called Bugs Be Gone. So be gone, bitch! Be gone!”
That’s one, I thought quietly as she cracked herself up. This trick could laugh all she wanted to. Bunni said I needed to make friends with her but I wasn’t gonna be but so many bitches for nobody. Matter fact, I was only gonna be three bitches for any damn body, and this chick right here had two more left.
She musta took my silence for weakness because she kept right on illin’.
“Dane! My bruvvah! I know you wasn’t tryna sneak off nowhere with these jawns and leave me, Dane!” She scooted to the edge of her chair and leaned between the two front seats, crowding Bunni’s shoulder. “That ain’t how a bruvvah s’posed to do his lil sister now, boo-boo! Blood is thicker than water, ya heard? Now pass that weed back here, man! I’m tryna get lifted!”
I igged her raunchy ass and tried to get my head right on some chronic as we rode to the club. Dane cranked the music up real loud and drowned her loud ass right out, and by the time we pulled up outside the party I was feeling good again.
&nbs
p; The club was in the middle of the hood, and it had run-down, abandoned buildings on both sides of it. All kinds of shady-looking hoodlums were chillin’ on the block, and my New York radar went off as a few of their eyeballs slid sideways over us while we were hopping out the ride.
“Yo,” I joked with Dane as he clicked the door locks and they beeped twice. The last time he took me and Bunni to a party he had lost his kicks and his pants, and all three of us ended up getting robbed. “Look at all these gangsta niggas standing around here with larceny in they eyes! You sure the whip is still gonna be here when we come back out? Lemme know if you need me to fold the Hummer up and stick it in my purse, ’kay?”
I knew shit was crucial when we got up to the door and saw there were two pat-down lines we had to go through before we could get inside the club. One line was for dudes, and the other one was strictly for the ladies.
Me and Bunni both had shitty looks on our faces when we saw who was in charge of our line. She was a stud female with mad tats up and down her muscled-up arms and a big-ass clit-tickler ring hanging from her bottom lip.
Dy-Nasty stepped up to her first, and she giggled like crazy as mister girl ran her hands down her back, over her ass, back up between her legs, and across her stomach. I coulda sworn mister girl slid her hand over Dy-Nasty’s left titty, and the way her twisted ass grinned and squealed I could tell she liked it.
It was my turn next. Nope! I jumped smack over into the men’s line and pushed myself in front of Dane. Mister girl wasn’t getting none of me. “Ga’head!” I held my arms in the air and hollered at the Puerto Rican dude who had his hands out ready to put in work. “You can ga’head and feel me up, Papi! Feel all over me!”
We got up in that club and let our glow show. I had on a tight silver body-glove dress that made me look damn-near naked. It had sequins on the ass that shimmied from side to side when I switched my hips, and the top of it dipped low at the cleavage and left one of my shoulders bare. Bunni’s shit was definitely on point too. She wore a pair of classy red polyester booty shorts that showcased her round hips and high booty, and outlined the deep split in her beloved venus mound. Bunni’s stunning bowlegs were naked from the thighs down, and her calves looked sleek and shiny and her ankles were set off perfectly in her pointy-toed pumps.
