by Noire
But instead I stayed right there crouched down on my knees as my aunt continued to lay the cold, naked truth on me.
“Now, don’t get me wrong,” Aunt Bibby said quietly. “I loved me some Jude, but that heffa didn’t have a truth-bone in her whole damn body! Why you think she drove her car into that goddamn river with you sitting right there in the front seat next to her, Mink? Huh? Why you think, stupid girl? Not even the lowest, raggediest, black-hearted trash-ass mama does no crazy shit like that!”
I grilled Aunt Bibby through a watery haze of tears. Oh for true, for true, I was ’bout to clock this big beefy bitch! Just wear her ass out for calling my dead mama outta her name! But before I could come up off my knees Aunt Bibby nailed me with another gut shot when she opened her big mouth and said, “And while ya bullshittin’, Jude didn’t even give birth to y’all right there in Harlem Hospital like she said, neither.”
“What?” I squeaked. “How you know? How the hell you know something like that?”
“ ’Cause Jude told me!” Aunt Bibby barked. And then she glanced over at my scandalous-ass, welfare-queen grandmother, who sat in the corner styling her stolen Gucci gear with her long pretty legs crossed all proper.
“Tell her, Mama. Tell Mink the goddamn truth!”
My grandmother wagged her leg and nodded. She twisted up her lips like she was still twenty-five and fine and said, “Bibby’s tellin’ it right, Mink. You got a twin sister, baby. You was about three years old when Jude first brought you around here. She told everybody she went down south and had twins and put one up for adoption. So I guess you do got yourself a sister out there somewhere in the world, baby. I just wish Jude woulda told you how to find her before she drove off in all that cold water and fucked herself up!”
Cold water. Cold water. Cold water.
I was freezing inside. All the way down to my trembling bones. All I wanted to do was go somewhere where I could get warm and block out the pain and the noise, but no matter how hard I igged her, my best friend Bunni Baines just wouldn’t leave me the hell alone.
Instead of flossin’ fly and fancy in a big mansion down in Dallas, Texas, me and Bunni were right back home in the gritty town of Harlem. I was laying on my little cot in her bedroom with my face turned toward the wall and my eyelids squeezed tight. I was sniffling into a boogered-up snot rag I had pressed up against my stuffy nose, and the top of my head was banging like a drum. My breath felt hot and stank as I breathed through my mouth, and my bottom lip trembled as I slobbered and cried into my pillow.
“C’mon now, Mink,” Bunni begged me for the two millionth time. “You gots to get up outta this bed, boo! You gotta get your ass up.”
I shrugged her off, wishing she would just leave me the hell alone. Bunni was barking about how I needed to get my shit together and get back on my game, but I kept tryna tell her I didn’t have no fight left in me. It was gone. All the grime, all the hustle, and every drop of my love for the con game. Poof. It was all gone.
“Madame Mink,” Peaches jumped in with his deep, baritone voice. “Me and Bunni know what you going through right now, baby. But the funeral is gonna be starting in an hour, darling! Now, I’ma need you to get up out that bed and get yourself dressed, sugar, and ready to roll!”
I laid there and igged the hell outta Peaches too.
Shoot, I wasn’t thinkin’ about him, and I wasn’t thinkin’ about Bunni, and I damn sure wasn’t thinkin’ about going to Mama’s funeral neither!
Bunni sighed real loud, then crawled underneath my blanket and snuggled up behind me like she used to do when we was kids. She wrapped her arms around me and spooned me, rocking me back and forth as she tried her best to convince me that I needed to stand up on my feet and face what was left of my shitty little life.
And it was definitely shitty too. Just when I thought I was at the top of my game and everything flowing through my hood was damn good, I’d been blasted with a major shot to the gut that took my feet out from under me and sat me right down on my plump apple ass.
“It’s been a whole damn week, Mink,” Bunni said from behind me, “and, girlfriend, you ain’t put enough food in your stomach to feed a fly! Hmph. You ain’t combed your hair or brushed your teef.” She backed off of me a lil bit. “And you ain’t took a damn bath neither!”
I still didn’t say shit. I just laid there in igg mode.
“I don’t know why you be listening to that old crazy-ass Bibby anyway.” Peaches jumped back in with a whole lotta bass in his voice this time. “Jude was your mama. And no matter what the hell she did, or how she did it, she was still your mama!”
“Jude was a liar!” I screamed into my pillow. My whole chest ached from Mama’s lies and her low-down betrayal. “She was a goddamn liar!”
“Ermmm herrrm,” Peaches said agreeably, and even without looking at him I could tell his lips was twisted.
“Yeah, that’s right. She was a liar. But so are you, Madame Mink! Lying is what schemers like us do! So get your ass up outta that bed so we can get down to that funeral home and make sure they send your lying-ass mama off right!”
Deep in my heart I knew I had to go pay my last respects to the woman who had given birth to me but I still didn’t wanna move.
So I laid there on my shaky lil cot in Bunni’s junky room and thought about the next moves I was gonna make in my life. I had always been the type of slick, carefree diva who flounced around flossin’ like everything in my life was all Hennessy and weed, but for the first time in a real long time I was forced to take a real good look down the gutter road that I had traveled. I made myself remember all the shit I had tried to erase from my mind. All the shit that I had been running from for so many years. The kind of shit that had been way too painful for a thirteen-year-old girl to live with, so she had fought like hell to forget it.
DAFINA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2015 by Noire
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
DAFINA and the Dafina logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-6177-3491-5
ISBN-10: 1-61773-491-8
eISBN-13: 978-1-61773-865-4
eISBN-10: 1-61773-865-4
First Kensington Electronic Edition: January 2015