Lola

by Melissa Scrivner Love

  Lola steps through Hector’s kitchen on tiptoe. She can’t shake the feeling that someone is here with her. She opens the refrigerator and finds the typical trappings of a bachelor banger—a shelf devoted to forties, one devoted to condiments, another to soda. Lola feels a surge of satisfaction upon finding bottled water, orange juice, eggs, and a loaf of whole-grain bread. She has done something right.

  In the bedroom, she finds the expected lumpy comforter masking twisted sheets and pillows dented from nights of what Lola hopes involve sound sleep. She finds the dirty clothes pile in Hector’s closet, dismayed when she finds no jeans there. Hector and Garcia both are averse to laundering denim, a habit Lola finds disgusting.

  The bathroom is a different story. The toilet seat is up, not surprising considering Hector lives alone and his girl can’t be caught alive in this neighborhood. A thin layer of grime coats the tub basin and the shower tile. Lola has harangued Hector for his inability to clean a bathroom, but his defense remains constant—if the toilet’s dirty, he can put the lid down; if the shower’s dirty, he can draw the curtain. Lola has tried explaining to him that when you repress a mess, it’s still a mess.

  Now she’s the one cramming everything under a flimsy lid, telling herself she’s too busy to rescue her mother from a drug lord when she just spent five minutes inventorying her baby brother’s fridge.

  She pads down the hallway to the living room. There, she finds curtains dusted with street grime, blown through the broken window behind them. Lola kneels to find a simple cracked brick garnished with broken glass. Judging by the amount of grime, someone must have thrown it hours before she got here. Tied to the brick with kitchen twine Lola finds another half-assed ransom note: I have him, too.

  “I’ll go alone,” Lola had said to Garcia two hours ago. His protests rang obligatory, though, and while Lola considered calling Marcos or Jorge, she decided they didn’t need any more ammunition against her brother. Although there are still a couple of days to go before Darrel’s deadline comes to pass, he’s made what should have been a business matter all personal. Lola wants to finish this quickly, without her men knowing Hector has made another mess by getting himself caught.

  Now, crossing Darrel’s West Adams street at a light jog, Lola keeps her head down and tries not to attract attention. It is night. It shouldn’t be safe for her here. She’s about to hang a right onto Darrel’s walkway when she catches the corner kid she recognizes as Sherman Moore snoozing in a tinted Sentra right outside Darrel’s house. Some fucking lookout, Lola thinks, although she guesses Darrel can’t help it, if he wants to keep his mother in denial about his business. Then she remembers Sherman’s mock civility to Darrel and his mother. Maybe Sherman wouldn’t mind if someone were to bypass his snoring ass and shiv his boss.

  When she passes the car, though, Sherman’s eyes fly open. Lola can’t help looking into his deep black holes. He has seen her. And she was right—he is a killer, even if he doesn’t know it yet. She waits for him to jump out of the vehicle and pull a piece on her. Maybe Sherman would forgo the weapon and pound her unfeelingly with his fists. She wonders if he even knows he has the power not to feel, the power Darrel can’t seem to see but that Lola knew was there from the moment she saw Sherman’s face.

  But Sherman doesn’t move. Instead, he closes his eyes, and, within seconds, his mouth is hanging open in a sleep fit for the dead.

  Lola wants to believe her theory that Sherman wants Darrel eliminated. Otherwise, she must accept the more likely cause of Sherman’s dismissal. She is a woman. She is small. She is nothing.

  She makes her way up the sidewalk to Darrel’s fortress of a front door. Sprinklers hiss and churn on either side of her. It’s been a dry summer, no rain to cool tension or grow new life.

  Lola takes a moment as her finger lingers over the doorbell. It’s late. Past midnight. Only tragedy and violence ring at this time of night, but Lola wants to try for something different. Part of the reason she insisted on going alone was that she didn’t want to storm the castle. She can play the damsel in distress, she just needs a moment, here at Darrel’s front door, to let go of her anger toward Hector. At least for the next hour.

  Lola’s finger depresses the button, and she hears a chime echo through the creaking house. It takes a minute, then Lola sees a light come on over the broad, wooden staircase. A few seconds later, a woman’s painted toenails make their way down the steps, and, over the left foot, Lola sees a nightgown hitched up to expose a fleshy knee.

  “We already got religion,” Darrel’s mother says as she opens the door. But the sight of the brown woman on her doorstep leaves her at a loss for words.

  “I’m not here for that,” Lola says, letting her voice catch. “I’m here…I think my mother is here?” Lola speaks in perfect, unaccented English. She can’t let her banger slang upset Darrel’s mother, who, truth be told, frightens Lola. It’s not that she thinks the woman will pull a gun on her—it’s more her maternal spirit, her willingness to answer the door past midnight because she doesn’t want anything happening to her son. Lola knows it’s natural to fear what one doesn’t know, and Lola has never known the fierce maternal love Darrel King’s mother embodies.

  “Your mama?” It takes a second of squinting at Lola under the porch light, but Darrel’s mother makes the connection. “Oh. You have got to be Maria’s daughter.”

  “Right.” The word hurts Lola’s teeth as it passes.

  “You’re the spitting image of her.”

  Now Lola feels heat rising to her cheeks, but she knows she has to keep it together if she wants to gain access to Darrel’s house.

  “Oh, honey, you look sad.”

  “No,” Lola says, on the defensive.

  Darrel’s mother seems to have practice with surly children, though, because she ignores Lola and says, “Maria’s asleep. But why don’t you come in and I’ll fix you a plate.”

  “I don’t want to trouble you.”

  “It’s no trouble. Maria’s a hoot.”

  Lola lets the comment pass, but she feels her entire self pulsing against her skin.

  A fucking hoot.

  “I’m Lorraine. And you’re not leaving here without eating something.”

  Lola wants to pour herself into this woman’s flabby strong arms. She wants to tell Lorraine there’s a drug lord who wants Lola to kill her son, but that Lola doesn’t want to, and not just because the fat man and the cartel appreciate Darrel as a customer. She doesn’t want to kill him because Darrel had a chance to kill her yesterday, and he didn’t. He let her escape. And yes, Darrel took her only brother hostage, finally hitting the mark of Lola’s heart he’d missed when he took her mother, but Hector’s predicament is self-made. If Lola sweeps in and cleans up Hector’s mess, springing him from Darrel’s grip, she will have to punish him. She wants to plead with Darrel’s mother, to ask if her son can just do the dirty work for her.

  Instead, she leans forward, her hand lighting on Lorraine’s forearm. She is going to faint, she thinks, but Lorraine’s voice drifts down to her.

  “Come on, sweetie. You need some nourishment.” A simple solution. A mother’s way.

  Lola hears her combat boots dragging across Darrel’s hardwood floor in short stomps. Now that someone else is the adult, she is too tired to lift her feet.

  “I’ve got some roast chicken, kale with grapes and feta, Pellegrino,” Lorraine says, digging around the Sub-Zero refrigerator in the remodeled kitchen. “And you gotta have some fruit, too, but there’s nothing wrong with putting it on top of pound cake.” Lorraine winks at Lola, their little secret. If Lola were to speak now, she wouldn’t have to pretend at the catch in her throat.

  Darrel’s mother has Lola seated in front of a full plate in under two minutes. Lola looks at the nourishment, made with love and without question for the brown girl who showed up on the doorstep. Suddenly starving, Lola shovels forkfuls into her mouth, letting the chicken and kale and grapes mix there in a painful symbiosis that
sets the insides of her cheeks on tingling fire.

  “Do I know how to fix you, or do I know?” Lorraine asks with a loud, kind guffaw. She swats Lola’s knee with her manicured hand, and Lola wants it to be just her and this mother in all the world, raiding the kitchen and hugging and swatting.

  Instead, Lola finds herself shy as she replies, “Thank you.” She imagines she must look to Lorraine like Lucy looks to her: too skinny, wide-eyed, haunted. It has never occurred to Lola that she could become someone’s lost cause.

  “Now. Tell me what you’re doing coming to see your mama at this time of night.”

  “Does the time matter?” Lola asks.

  Darrel’s mother chuckles, shaking her head as if Lola is a precocious child instead of a rival gang affiliate. To Lorraine’s credit, Lola is a woman, and therefore not a threat. Also, Lola would never bring a gun into Darrel King’s house. She has settled for a small blade, not enough to kill a man unless she’s got soldiers holding him down. It strikes Lola here, over Lorraine’s plate of kindness, that she has refused backup and brought a weapon she can’t use to inflict a fatal wound. Perhaps she’s already picked her side. One thing she knows, sitting across from this mother figure—she does not want to kill this woman’s son.

  “You’re Mila’s cousin, then?”

  “Huh?” Lola asks, and the flash of disapproval in Lorraine’s eyes makes Lola sit up straight in her chair. “Sorry,” Lola says. “Who’s Mila’s cousin?”

  “You. Maria’s Mila’s aunt, so you must be her cousin. Darrel said it was the least we could do, show the grieving woman some hospitality.” Lorraine trains her sharp gaze on Lola, waiting to see if she’ll contradict her. Lola remembers Sherman Moore, and Lorraine shooing him away yesterday. But she must know her son is a drug lord—where else does he get money for the house, listed on some historical register in the halls of some L.A. government agency, the Escalade, and Lorraine’s gourmet groceries and weekly mani/pedis? Still, Lola understands a mother’s need to ignore the darker recesses of her child’s world. “Course, Maria didn’t mention she had any children. But I knew, soon as I saw you. There’s no denying you.”

  Fucking Maria, not mentioning her.

  “More pound cake?” Lorraine asks. She can sense the shift in the air, the calm turning to storm, and she treats Lola’s anger the same way Lola imagines she treats Darrel’s anger: with sugar.

  “Please,” Lola says. When Lorraine serves her a second slice of dessert, Lola shovels it in, feeling the sweet sugar mixed with the salty, nutty brown butter.

  “Course, the boy, he’s a different story,” Lorraine continues.

  “The boy? You mean the one asleep in the Sentra outside?”

  “What? Sherman?”

  “I don’t know his name,” Lola says, feeling a twinge of guilt at the lie.

  “He’s a bad egg, that one,” Lorraine says. Lola catches Darrel’s mother’s furrowed brow, the quick bite of her lip. “My son doesn’t see it.”

  “He’s sleeping on the job.”

  “What job?” Lorraine looks up, sharp, and Lola sees that for all her knowledge about Sherman and power and corruption, she is still in denial about Darrel’s profession.

  “I don’t…I’m sorry,” Lola says. “You were talking about a boy?”

  “Not Sherman. This one looked like you.”

  Hector.

  “He came here last night, said he wanted words with my son. But I could tell he wanted more than words. I called Darrel down. I don’t have to listen to any young man’s potty mouth,” Lorraine says, shaking her head, and Lola finds herself following suit, shaking her head, too, because she taught Hector to respect his elders. Still, she retraces Lorraine’s words, something not sitting right.

  “You said the boy came here?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Rang the bell, same as you, ’cept he was pacing back and forth, pullin’ his hair out wanting to talk to my son.”

  Lola thinks back to the ransom note. Darrel must have had it planted in Hector’s apartment after Hector showed up here, half cocked, demanding a meeting with Darrel to which he was not entitled. The fact that Darrel didn’t take Hector, just took advantage of her little brother’s idiocy, makes Lola want to kill him even less. But Hector—he’s a different story. Disobedient. Irrational. Acting love crazed. All for Maria, their sad sack waste of space mother.

  “Hey, Momma.” Darrel King’s smooth baritone fills the whole kitchen like a warm blanket. Lola wants to ask him a question just to hear it again. “You give her all the pound cake, or we got some left over?”

  “Well, aren’t you being silly? You know I always make two.”

  Of course she does, Lola thinks. The gentle banter between mother and son surrounds Lola, smothering her in light and comfort right here in rival territory. She and Garcia haven’t yet made their house a home, as Lorraine has made Darrel’s. One day, Lola thinks, then remembers her pending death. Well, shit.

  When she looks up, Lorraine has disappeared into the depths of the house, and Darrel is sitting across from her with a slice of pound cake the exact same size as Lola’s. Lola loves Lorraine for that—giving a woman an equal piece of the pie.

  “Guessing you’ve come to talk business,” Darrel says.

  Lola can drop the damsel-in-distress act. Darrel must have cracked Hector, gotten him to reveal the inner workings of the Crenshaw Six. But Lola sits over her half-eaten pound cake, wanting to draw out the moment of daughterhood just a little longer.

  Then the moment passes, and Lola says, “Yes.”

  Darrel sets a shot of tequila on the overturned milk crate in front of Lola. He has led her to a detached garage about a hundred feet from the house. Inside, the night air has chilled the structure so much that Lola pulls her hoodie tighter and wishes for a puffy coat. It’s late summer in Los Angeles, and the daytime temperature often climbs to the high nineties, but the night is a separate animal—cooler and darker. Lola tries to guess at the temperature tonight. Low sixties. Too cold for Lola to leave the house without a coat. She is a true Angeleno.

  Lola slings back the tequila and feels the comfort of alcohol burning as it slides down her throat. Darrel doesn’t know from tequila—this brand is something advertised on American television as being suitable for players, athletes, and rap stars. Still, in the cool dark of this particular Los Angeles night, when Lola must decide who’s going to kill her, it’ll do. No matter her decision, she knows the man sitting across from her is not her killer, and the certainty brings a cozy feeling in her stomach. She can enjoy this conversation with Darrel King.

  “Good stuff, huh?” Darrel asks.

  “Not really,” Lola replies, and Darrel throws his head back in a loud laugh that lets her see the two rows of straight bright white teeth in his mouth.

  “Maybe I put something in it,” Darrel says. “Maybe that’s why it’s no good.”

  “You a rapist now?”

  Darrel draws back into his own puffy coat. Her accusation has struck a nerve.

  “Didn’t say shit about rape.” So that’s it. She’s insulted him by insinuating he’s trying to rape her. Fair enough. “I meant poison. Arsenic or some shit.”

  Lola shrugs and holds out her empty shot glass. A gaudy gold stencil of the Vegas skyline sticks out of the green glass background. It has the wannabe retro feel of something purchased in a cheap souvenir shop on the outskirts of that gambling town, the one Lola will not live to see.

  “I gotta frisk you.”

  Lola stands, and Darrel does, too, and for a moment they are facing each other like two shy teenagers about to slow dance. Then Darrel’s hands are on her waist, and her arms are lifted out of the way, letting him at the core of her. She has to remind herself to breathe with his hands on her like this. Then he digs the ineffective blade from her pants pocket, and his touch is gone.

  “Nice try.”

  Lola shrugs. Darrel places the blade on the table in front of them, and his confidence that she won’t be
able to get to it before he does annoys her.

  “Your brother says you don’t care for your mama,” Darrel says as he pours Lola more burning liquid strength.

  “It’s complicated,” Lola says.

  “She seems nice.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s clean. For now.” Lola downs her second shot, the alcohol cooling off her nerves enough for her to ask, “She didn’t say she had kids?”

  “Don’t know,” Darrel says, looking toward the dart board, the pool table with one broken leg, the buzzing ancient refrigerator that Lola knows is full of beer. The whole place screams man cave. The cool temperature is the only thing that keeps it from reeking of salty dry sweat and faded gas.

  “I was straight with you. You be straight with me,” Lola says.

  “Look, I didn’t wanna hurt your mama.”

  Lola shrugs again—what’s it to her?

  “I just wanted to get Garcia’s attention.”

  “Really did your research. Thinking Garcia was the one you needed to get to.”

  “Hey, I got it right in the end. Turns out your brother likes it when someone listens to him.”

  “Hector likes Maria. It’s a weakness,” Lola admits. She crosses her legs, taking tipsy pleasure in watching one toned calf bounce off the other in perfect rhythm. Sitting like this, leaning forward to be closer to Darrel, she craves a cigarette.

  “And you like your brother.”

  “I love my brother,” Lola corrects Darrel.

  “Looks like I did find your weakness.”

  Lola laughs, and Darrel follows suit. He is mirroring her. She is pulling his strings. He is her ripped gangster puppet. Lola feels a pang of sadness—she wants to be sitting across from a man who is her equal. She feels respect for Darrel, sure, but Lola also pities this banger, huddled in his man cave out back while his mother serves pound cake to strangers like they’re family. She can’t kill Darrel, Lola thinks. It wouldn’t be right. It would be a lioness ripping apart a gazelle. An unfair fight. Then again, isn’t that nature’s way? Lions don’t hunt other lions.