by Ni-Ni Simone
“That’s enough.” Asha gave Courtney the evil eye as she began to take the food from the bag.
“You don’t have to be lookin’ at nobody like that,” Courtney said, rolling his eyes. “Don’t make me go Ameen slash Chris Brown on you, Asha. This boa might be pink but I am a man.” He placed his hands on his hips and sucked his teeth.
“It’s cool, Courtney,” I said, hoping to end their inevitable argument before it started. “I would only allow you to get away with saying that.”
“Thank you, my sistah,” Courtney said, as the doorbell rang again.
“I’ll get it.” I laughed. I walked over and opened the door. It was my baby standing there. “Malachi.” I hugged him tightly. “I missed you.”
“Of course you did.” He laughed and kissed me on the lips. “Because I missed you.”
“Oh,” Courtney said dramatically, “how lovely. Y’all got that…that…Love Jones kinda love. Feel me? I swear that a beautiful thing. Beautiful thing.” He snapped his fingers and moved his shoulders from side to side. “Get it, y’all.”
“Could you calm all that zest down?” Samaad asked Courtney. “Like for real.”
“Or what?” Courtney placed one hand on his hip and pointed the other like a gun. “What you gon’ do, Maad? Huh? You can’t even handle Asha, now you gon’ get with me and my zestful quality?”
“We gon’ ignore you,” Asha said. “Anyway”—she turned to me—“we’re having a party. I cooked chicken, greens, mac and cheese, cornbread—”
“We get the picture, Oprah.” Courtney waved her off. “You like to eat. Well, Diva, I got the drinks and the music. Hey’yay!” He slid in a Patti LaBelle CD and started singing, “Somewhere over the rainbow…”
“Oh, no,” Malachi said, “I’m ’bout to roll.”
“Malachi, don’t be like that,” I said, tight-lipped.
“Zsa”—he pointed at Courtney—“look at him.” I turned to look at Courtney, who was singing at the top of his lungs and slow dancing with himself. His arms were crossed over his chest and his hand rested on his shoulders. “Don’t no grown man have any business watching that.”
Before I could say anything Asha hit Courtney in the back of his neck. “Stop it.”
“Oh, damn,” Courtney said, as if he’d been in a trance, “I almost forgot where I was at. Good thing I didn’t take my shirt off.”
“So anyway, Zsa,” Asha said. “Come help me set this food up in the dining room.”
“Yeah.” I shook my head at Courtney. “That sounds like a good idea.”
“Y’all do that,” Courtney yelled behind us, “and I’ma switch to some Elton John.”
“I got the music man,” Samaad said. “I got a mixed CD, ’cause this is some nonsense you playing.”
“For real,” Malachi agreed.
“Don’t y’all be ganging up on me!” Courtney shouted as we headed into the adjourning dining room.
“I’m glad y’all came over,” I said to Asha, handing her a pack of paper plates.
“I missed you,” she said. “We missed you.”
“Awwl, boo-boo. I missed you too.” I gave her a hug.
“Now look,” she whispered as we resumed to setting the table, “you know Samaad and Malachi caught Ameen.”
“What?” I blinked in disbelief and whispered back, “When I didn’t hear anything I thought they didn’t do that. I was hoping they didn’t even get involved.”
“Well, they did.”
“How do you know?”
“Samaad told me. He asked me not to say anything so don’t open your mouth.”
“I won’t. And for real I don’t even want to know the details.”
“Cool, then I’ll end the conversation right there. Let’s call the boys in here to eat.”
I walked into the living room. “The food is ready,” I said to them, and they followed me into the dining room. We sat at the table and started to eat, and I couldn’t believe how good the food was. “Asha, this food is slamming!” I said.
“And you know this.” She laughed.
“My baby be putting it down,” Samaad said.
“Now I don’t have an appetite.” Courtney sucked his teeth. “Samaad, why must we hear the details of your sex life? I mean, really.”
“You need to get your head out of the gutter,” I said. “He was talking about the food, fool.”
“You got one more time to call another fool,” Courtney snapped, “and it’s gon’ be a situation.”
“Anyway,” Asha said, “we should go play paintball next weekend.”
“Maybe,” I said. “That sounds like fun.”
“Straight.” Asha smiled.
Courtney sucked his teeth. “I’m not playing paintball. Mess my face all up. Not.”
“Ill, and what crawled up your butt?” I asked.
“Time out,” Malachi said. “Hold it.” He looked at me. “Don’t be asking him no questions like that. I don’t wanna hear his answer to that.”
“I’m just gon’ ignore you, Ma-Mal.” Courtney sucked his teeth, rose from the table, and started dancing. “This disco throwback is my jam. Come on, girls, let’s bust us a soul train line. Come on, Divas.” He started rocking his hips from side to side. “Stand on the side, so I can dance down the middle.”
I cracked up laughing. Even when we were little, Courtney knew how to be the life of the party. Me and Asha stood up, walked to the living room, stood across from one another, and started moving from side to side. A Gwen Guthrie throwback about padlocking your heart that had to be as old as Jesus was playing on this mixed CD. The beat was tight though and of course Courtney knew every word.
Courtney worked the middle of the floor with a vogue and then he ended it with some of the moves from Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.”
“Come on, Samaad and Malachi,” Asha and I insisted, and waved our hands at them to join us. “It’ll be fun,” I said, giving Malachi the puppy face.
“I’m not doing that.” Malachi waved me off.
“Yes, you are.” I walked over to him while Asha walked over to Samaad, and we pulled them to the floor. “I promise you,” I said. “You two will still be men when you finish dancing. Now come on.” I grabbed Malachi’s hand and proceeded to work the middle of the floor.
I moved my hips from side to side and bounced up and down on my knees while Malachi stood behind me nodding his head.
“Can’t neither one of y’all get with this,” Asha said as she and Samaad started to do an old school dance called da whop.
“Samaad.” Malachi laughed. “Tell me you didn’t, man. You didn’t let her break your resistance down.”
Samaad laughed. “Happy wife, happy life.” He twirled Asha around and dipped her back.
“Oh, ai’ight,” Malachi said, “you can’t touch me and my girl….”
We started working the floor like nobody’s business, and eventually we were having too much fun to even explain. Courtney was on the floor doing a spin when the front door slammed and caused us to jump. I looked up and it was Cousin Shake and Ms. Minnie. “You scared the mess outta me,” I said, holding my chest.
Cousin Shake looked around the room at the decorations, balloons, and food. “You’re having a party and nobody invited us?”
“It was a surprise, Cousin Shake,” Asha said.
“Oh, hey, Salad.” Cousin Shake nodded at Asha. “It’s cool,” he said, “now where were you? ’Cause me and Minnie got a Pop-Lock-and-Drop-It that’s gon’ put all y’all to sleep.”
I cracked up as Cousin Shake started to dance, and before I knew anything the entire living room had turned into a dance floor. The music was bumpin’, the dancing was going, and I felt like…like, I could do this. I could really somehow do this thing called life and get back to being Zsa-Zsa.
After a few hours passed, we started to wind down and I said to Asha, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being my friend.”
“You kn
ow how we do it.” Courtney snapped his fingers. “Now come on, Asha, I need to be dropped off right away. Bridezilla is about to come on, and if I miss it, it’s gon’ be on and crackin’.”
“And I don’t wanna see you crackin’ nothin’, Cora,” Cousin Shake said to Courtney. “Come on, Minnie, I’m going to bed.”
“Bye, Zsa,” Asha said, kissing me on the cheek, as she, Samaad, and Courtney left.
Once they had all left, Malachi and I began cleaning up.
“I’m so happy you guys came over,” I said.
“You feel any better?” Malachi asked.
“Yeah, I don’t think this night could’ve ended any better.”
He gave me a great big ol’ Kool-Aid smile. “Not even a li’l bit better?”
“No.” I gave him the same Kool-Aid smile back. “Why?”
“Well”—he playfully hunched his shoulders—“I guess it doesn’t matter why if you’re saying the night couldn’t have been any better. I wouldn’t—you know—want to ruin the great time you had.” He reached in the pocket of his carpenter jeans. “So I’m just”—he pulled out a red ring box with a white bow on top—“take this back to the store.”
My eyes lit up with delight. “Stop playing, what is that?”
“Nah,” he said, putting it back in his pocket, “nothing.”
I stood on the chair and playfully grabbed him around the back of his neck. “Don’t make me take you down.”
Malachi fell out laughing. “Imagine that.”
“Then tell me what it is.”
“Ai’ight, get down first.”
I stepped to the floor and Malachi pulled the ring box from his pocket. “I know you felt bad about no longer having the first one I gave you.” He popped the box open and revealed a gold ring with wifey written in white gold script across it. “I thought the magic marker might’ve been played out a li’l bit.” He gave me a half a grin.
“This is beautiful,” I said in awe.
“You like?” He smiled.
“I love it.” I hugged him tight. “And I love you.”
“You wanna be my girl?” He whispered against my lips. “Circle yes or no.”
“I circled yes.” We started to kiss. “And I’ma always circle yes.”
18
There’s something you do
That got me walkin’ on the moon…
—THE-DREAM, “WALKING ON THE MOON”
Let me put you down on this real quick: Love is a drug. Word. I’m so serious. Once you have a man like Malachi, who loves you, treats you right, and is kind and sensitive yet still able to put down his thug thizzle when needed, you will forever be addicted to being treated like a princess. When my baby calls me his girl or his wifey it actually means something. It just doesn’t sound good, it feels good…. It is good. So why I was trippin’ over telling him that Ameen had been back to calling me a hundred times a day was beyond me.
Honestly…I think…that maybe…I just didn’t want the hassle. I didn’t want to deal with the nonsense again. I’d already gotten the hint. Ameen liked to beat on women. But I couldn’t deal with Malachi exploding, going out into the street, and beating Ameen down again. Malachi had too much to lose.
So I dealt with Ameen’s calling like I dealt with everything else that bothered me. I ignored it.
Me and Malachi were chillin’ in my room. I lay across the foot of my bed looking at Courtney’s Facebook page on my laptop. “Come look at this,” I said to Malachi, who was sitting on my floor watching a football game.
“Run the ball!” Malachi screamed at the television.
“Would you pay attention to me?”
“Ai’ight, Zsa, ai’ight,” he said to me but continued to look at the TV. “Wassup?”
“Look at this.” I cracked up. I was laughing so hard that tears were falling from my eyes.
Malachi walked over to the bed and sat beside me. He looked at the computer and said, “Who is that?”
“Courtney.”
“Courtney?” Malachi said, surprised. “Why does he have his robe hanging off his shoulders and a cherry tattoo on his chest?”
I was laughing so hard I couldn’t respond. Apparently Courtney had lost his mind.
“Yo,” Malachi said, “don’t call me over here to look at another man with a dang cherry on his chest. I’ll never be able to eat cherries again.”
“Awwl, my baby’s upset? Me sorry.” I started kissing him all over his face until he started laughing and tickling me in my belly. “Zsa,” he said, sitting up. “I want to ask you something?”
“What?” I laid my head in his lap.
“When are you going to cut your mother some slack about Kenneth?”
“What?” I sat up and looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Where did that come from? Did my mother tell you to talk to me about Kenneth?” I stood up.
“You a little amped, don’t you think?” He arched his brow. “Sit down.”
I sat down reluctantly. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Would you stop that? Why do you run away from everything?”
“It’s easier that way.”
“Some things have to be faced and your mother having a boyfriend is one of them.”
“Why are we talking about this? I mean, really.”
“Because when I came here earlier, I saw him talking to your mother on the porch as if he couldn’t come in.”
“He can’t come in here.”
“Do you pay the bills?”
“No, but so.”
“Look, I’m not trying to start an argument,” Malachi insisted.
“I can’t tell.”
“All I’m saying is that at some point you have to stop interfering with your mother’s life and allow her to chill like you wanna chill.”
“Boy, please, what are you, a documentary? Both your parents are together, so that’s easy for you to say.”
“You are so hardheaded.” He laughed.
“And you love it.”
“Yeah, too much of it,” he said. “But you better learn to listen and start dealing with your problems, or one day they will blow up in your face if you don’t.”
“Whatever, Malachi,” I said as my cell phone started ringing and I tried to ignore it.
“You gon’ answer your phone?” Malachi asked me.
“Nah,” I said, returning my attention back to Facebook. “I’ll call whomever back later.”
“Well, they must want to speak to you,” he said, “because your phone stopped ringing and now it’s ringing again.”
Malachi looked at me like I was nuts. I reached for the phone and the number was restricted. I started not to answer but the cell phone numbers of a lot of people I know also comes up restricted, so I took a deep breath and took the chance.
“Hello?”
“Zsa, please don’t hang up.” It was Ameen.
I started to hang up but I didn’t. “Yeah, what?”
“I’ve been calling you like crazy to say that I’m sorry.” He spat out superfast as if he were scared that I was going to hang up at any moment.
I rolled my eyes to the ceiling, but still I didn’t respond.
“I know,” Ameen continued on, “that you probably feel like you’ve heard this a thousand times, but I’m really serious this time. And I’m not calling you to ask you to be my girl again. I know that you’ve moved on and I’m happy for you. But I couldn’t let another day go by without me saying that I was scum for putting my hands on you. No woman deserves that. And especially not you. So, that’s all I wanted to say. I won’t be bothering you again.”
When I didn’t respond, he said, “Ai’ight. One.” And he hung up.
Malachi looked at me while I held the phone to my cheek replaying the conversation in my mind, and said, “Who was that, Zsa?”
“Huh?” I said, caught off guard.
“You heard me.”
I started to tell him nobody, but lying to Malachi after everything that ha
d gone on was not a good look, so I swallowed and released a deep breath through the side of my mouth. “That was Ameen.”
“Ameen?” Malachi frowned. “Ameen was just on your phone?”
“Yeah.”
“And you were talking to him right here in my face?” he said evenly.
“It wasn’t like that. He’d been calling here over and over again for weeks and—”
“Oh, so he’s been calling here and you haven’t said anything to me?”
“I didn’t want you to get all pissed off, like you are now.”
“Nah, I’m cool. Believe me, I’m straight.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Listen,” Malachi said, “did Ameen threaten you?”
“No.”
“Did he ask you to be his girl?”
“No. He apologized and said he wouldn’t be bothering me again.”
“Ai’ight.” Malachi stood up and slid on his leather jacket. “That’s wassup.”
“Where are you going?” I said as he placed his keys in his pocket.
“I’m out.” He walked to the door and opened it. “I’ll see you when I see you.” And he slammed the door behind him. I tried to go after him but he was too fast, and before I knew anything he was in his truck and had taken off.
I swear I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what the heck had just happened. One minute Malachi was cool and the next minute he was hot, pissed off, and gone. My heart thundered in my chest and my hands started to shake. I picked up my cell phone and called Asha, but no one answered, and then I called Courtney. “Two snaps up and a fruit loop, royalty speaking.”
“Courtney,” I said in a panic, holding my hurt feelings in my chest.
“What’s wrong, Diva?”
I explained to him what happened and then I said, “I think Malachi just broke up with me.”
“Ahhhh!” Courtney started screaming. “Oh no, oh no. Jesus, no. I knew you was gon’ mess this up for us!” he cried. “Why, Zsa? Huh? Why?”