by Tracy Brown
“Okay,” Camille said. “So far, he sounds good.”
“But she said he’s ugly,” Misa reminded.
“Beastly!” Toya clarified. “This muthafucka is … ugh!”
They all burst into hysterics again. When they got it together, they listened as Toya described the rest of the night. Russell had paid the bill and left an exorbitant tip in order to sufficiently impress her. Then he and Toya had gone to a local bar and had a couple more drinks.
“Long story short, I got twisted and went home with him.”
“Did you go because you were having fun with him or because you were tipsy?” Misa asked.
Toya thought about it. “I think it was the liquor. I was vulnerable after seeing my father and I was distracted by the fact that he managed to hold my interest during the date…”
“He hit it, Toya?” Camille asked incredulously. She couldn’t believe it.
“And it was fabulous!” Toya bellowed. “I mean I was seeing stars, bitches!”
Laughter and hollering erupted all around and the ladies talked all over each other with a million questions about Toya’s beauty-and-the-beast love story.
Despite the turmoil unfolding in each of their lives, the women found solace in laughter and in Toya’s shenanigans for the rest of the night. And once again, together they faced a new day.
Motives
Frankie came bursting through the door of Sugarcane like a gust of wind. Gillian sat at a corner table near the back and watched as he stormed through the small but popular Brooklyn restaurant. He reached her table and sat down across from her, leaning in close so that she could hear him over the loud music and chatter from other diners.
“What the fuck!” he hissed. “You put a hit out on Jojo without telling me?”
Gillian sipped her rum punch and stared back at Frankie over the rim of her glass. “It needed to be done, Frankie.” Her voice was soft and light. “I knew that you were preoccupied with what’s going on. So I just took care of it, that’s all.”
He watched her with his jaw clenched in anger. The waiter approached their table and Gillian cleared her throat. “I took the liberty of ordering for you,” she explained. “I know how much you like their jerk chicken.”
Speechless, Frankie sat back as the waiter set the steaming plate of food before him. When Gillian’s red snapper was placed before her, she said a quick and silent prayer before digging in. Frankie was becoming increasingly aware that Gillian was taking her new position of power and running with it. As if ordering the hit on Jojo without his knowledge wasn’t bad enough, now here she was ordering his food for him. When the waiter was gone at last, Frankie leaned in closer to her.
“You’re acting like this is no big deal, Gillian. But since when do you not talk to me about shit like this?”
Gillian chewed her fish and looked at Frankie. Swallowing at last, she said, “Well, you haven’t been talking to me much either, lately.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin and took a long sip of her drink before continuing. “You come in the house late at night, hoping that I’m asleep. You think I don’t realize that’s what you’re doing, but I’m not stupid. You go about your day-to-day business and you act like you’re handling everything just fine. But you’re not. You don’t talk to me. Instead, you spend your whole day talking to Tremaine about business, or talking to the DA about the case against Misa. When I try to talk about what’s going on, you make excuses for why you don’t want to discuss it. You’re shutting me out.”
“So you pay me back by doing something like this behind my back?”
Gillian shook her head. “I didn’t do anything behind your back.”
“So why didn’t you tell me about it? Why did I have to read about that shit in the newspaper? And why won’t any of the goons own up to it? Who did you put on it?” Frankie was pissed. He felt that his control of the crew was nonexistent if no one would tell him who had actually done the hit.
Gillian was pleased that Biggs had kept his mouth shut. She knew now that she could trust him. “Maybe I did it myself, Frankie.” She smirked at him, hoping to make him laugh. He didn’t find anything funny. Gillian sighed. “Listen, I took care of it. If things weren’t so crazy, you would have done the same thing. We’re a team, aren’t we? Bonnie and Clyde? We’re supposed to be in this together.”
“So why did you give the order by yourself?” Frankie was just as mad at himself as he was at her. He felt that it made him look weak in the eyes of the crew. He should have been the one to take care of Jojo, not Gillian. By her giving the order, she had made him appear to be too preoccupied by his grief to lead the crew effectively.
Gillian watched Frankie sulking, his pride wounded since she had gotten to her father’s killer before he did. “I should have told you,” she allowed. “I just didn’t want to stress you out any more than you already are.” She reached for his hand and stroked it. “I love you,” she said. “And I’m worried about you. I just want to do my part to keep things moving forward for all of us. Maybe then you’ll stop shutting down on me.”
“I’m not shutting down on you,” he said defensively.
She nodded. “Sure you are. You’re doing the same thing to me that you were doing to Camille not so long ago. You’re keeping busy so that you don’t have to talk to me. You’re throwing yourself into your work in order to keep yourself from thinking about what’s really on your mind. I don’t even think you realize that you’re doing it,” she said. “But I’m not Camille. And I’m not gonna keep pretending like I don’t see what’s happening until it’s too late.”
Frankie looked at the woman he loved and wished he could be more open with her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just got a lot on my mind.” He sighed.
Gillian nodded. She smiled at him, reassuringly. “I understand. But you can’t deal with what’s on your mind by pulling away from me. It’s not healthy for our relationship.”
He knew she was right. “I know,” he acknowledged. “It’s just the way I’ve always been. But I’ll try to change that.”
She smiled again, nudged his plate closer to him. “Eat,” she said. “It’s delicious.”
Frankie put his napkin in his lap, picked up his fork, and picked at his chicken. He glanced at Gillian once again. “No more ordering hits without talking to me.”
Gillian nodded. “Deal.”
Frankie shoved some chicken into his mouth and winked at her. Gillian winked back. She knew that he could never stay mad at her for long.
* * *
Dominique sat in her freshly detailed Lincoln and waited for Jamel to come out from his mama’s house. It was the place he’d been paroled to at the ripe old age of thirty-one. She reflected on that as she waited. She had gotten to know Jamel’s family during his time away and had a lot of love for his mother. Still, she saw the situation clearly for once and noticed the contrast between her world and his.
She glanced at her fox jacket tossed across the backseat, looked down at her wrist and saw the tennis bracelet she’d gotten for herself last Christmas. Looking up, she saw him coming. He approached her car with the same sexy walk she’d always swooned over. This time, though, it seemed more childish than attractive; more pathetic than it had seemed before.
As he neared her car, she took him all in. He wore the sneakers she had bought for him, a pair of baggy jeans that were at least four sizes too big for him, a white tee and black hoodie that were equally as large. His black winter hat sealed the look and it seemed to Dominique as if Jamel had come home and stepped right back into his uniform as a soldier in the same mean streets that kept swallowing him.
“This nigga…” she mumbled. She was most bothered by the fact that today he was accompanying her to a community outreach program that was supposed to encourage inner city kids to embrace the arts rather than criminal alternatives. Here Jamel was looking like a recruiter for the wrong army.
“Hey, stranger!” he opened the passenger side door and greeted her, smiling from
ear to ear.
Dominique smiled back, gave him a kiss when he leaned in for one and decided to keep her mouth shut about his outfit. After all, what had she expected? Surely, he wouldn’t be caught dead in anything that fit him right. They set out for the venue in Far Rockaway and the tension was palpable as they crossed the Verrazano. Jamel turned up the radio and Dominique said nothing, wondering why he was being so distant all of a sudden. Finally, he spoke up.
“I didn’t want to call and bother you while you were dealing with Octavia’s situation,” he explained. She glanced at him briefly and kept driving. “I know that must have been hard for both of you to deal with, you feel me?”
Dominique didn’t answer, she simply nodded.
“And I came home that first night, kicked off my shoes and sat on my mother’s couch and it was lights out. I woke up and ate, and fell back asleep. I woke up and Shonda was there with J.J.”
Dominique almost skidded to a halt on the Belt Parkway. She looked at him in surprise. Shonda, his son’s mother, had seen him first.
He continued quickly—just a little too quickly. “That’s how I felt. I was like, wow! So anyway he was so happy to see me, ’cuz you know it’s been months since the last time she brought him up north. He got so big.”
Dominique plastered on the fakest smile.
“So, you know my moms had cooked, everybody ate, and it got late. Shonda went to take J.J. home and he lost it! He didn’t want to leave me. So I went back to the house with them.”
“You went to Shonda’s house?” Dominique asked without taking her eyes off the road. The speedometer crept to the right.
Jamel knew this wouldn’t be easy. “Yeah. But just to play with J.J. Anyway, so J.J. falls asleep and I go to leave. That’s when she started with her bullshit. She tried to stop me from leaving, telling me how she’s sorry for not being there for me while I was gone.”
Jamel noticed that she swerved a little. He cleared his throat. “You okay?”
“Mm-hmm. Continue.”
He knew what that meant. “So I tried to leave, she blocked me.”
“She blocked your big ass from leaving, Jamel?” He was six two, nearly three hundred pounds.
“She was running her mouth. I told you how Shonda is. So before I knew it, my curfew had passed. Now she’s holding it over my head that if I try to leave, she’s gonna call and tell the cops to pick me up on my way to my mother’s house ’cuz I’m out past my curfew.”
Dominique had to laugh. She had to hand it to him. He had worked out the perfect scenario in his mind.
Jamel thought Dominique was laughing with him at Shonda’s tactics. “Word!” he chuckled. “So I stayed there on the couch. I didn’t really sleep, though, ’cuz all she did was run her mouth all night.” He looked at Dominique sincerely. “I didn’t touch her. I swear on my son.”
Dominique listened in silence as he filled her in on the rest of the events that had occuppied the past two days since he had been released from prison. He had reported to his parole officer within twenty-four hours as required, gone looking for a job but nobody was hiring. He had spent the morning “babysitting” his son while Shonda went to work.
Dominique noticed that despite his grim circumstances, Jamel had a cell phone. She stared at it and rolled her eyes, let out a sigh.
“Jamel, you know you don’t have to lie about—”
“See? I knew you would think I was lying!”
As Jamel pleaded his case, insisting that he was through with Shonda, that his mama had given him the phone, that he didn’t even know the number to it, that’s how little it mattered, Dominique said nothing.
She was too close to the venue to turn back now. If she went home, she would have disappointed the kids who had put together an entire musical repertoire to impress the “Def Jam exec” coming to see them. She tuned Jamel out as he babbled, listened instead to the CD playing. It was Amy Winehouse.
“Kept his dick wet, with his same old safe bet.”
She turned it up. Jamel stopped talking midsentence and looked at her. He knew then that she wasn’t trying to hear him.
They arrived at the Queens high school and were met by airport-level security. Metal detectors and handheld scanners were necessary to gain entry. Dominique looked at Jamel questioningly, praying that this fool hadn’t brought anything illegal with him. She had already made up her mind that he had fucked Shonda. She wondered now if he was back to all of his old habits or just one.
Thankfully, the search went without incident and they proceeded to the next level of security at the poorly performing school.
“May I see ID, please?” a security guard asked.
Dominique fished in her purse and pulled out her driver’s license, explained that she was there as a guest for the assembly. The security guard nodded and looked to Jamel. He looked like he had swallowed a lemon.
The only ID he had was his prison ID card. Reluctantly, he pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to the security guard.
The guard’s eyes flew open and she looked at Jamel suspiciously. She handed him back his card and waved them on, but the damage was done. Dominique’s world and his had collided embarrassingly.
The assembly was wonderful and Dominique did her best to motivate the young people present to know that they could do everything they had ever dreamed of. The whole time, she was glancing at Jamel, sitting in the corner looking like one of the students—and a bored one at that. She knew then that it was over.
When the long day was over and the two of them climbed back into the car, Dominique stuck the key in the ignition and started the car, letting it warm up.
She looked over to the man she had wanted so badly to be the one. She had convinced herself that he would be ready to grow up this time, that he was done with the lifestyle of a hustler. She had convinced herself to accept him even though he had no job, no ambition, and no experience being anything but a drug dealer. And he couldn’t even believe in himself for a full three days. She shook her head.
“I’m so mad at you,” she said. “You let me persuade myself and everybody else that you were different and the whole time you knew you weren’t.”
“Can I speak?’
“No,” she said. “I heard what you had to say. I thought you would at least try, Jamel. You talked all that shit while you were locked up about being in it to win it this time. You fuckin’ loser!”
He looked like she had sucker-punched him.
“Yo, I hate you.” She put the car in drive and argued with Jamel for most of the ride back to Staten Island.
By the time they pulled up in front of his mother’s house, he had finally come to grips with the fact that his scam was over. Dominique had cried, yelled, cried some more, and rambled on and on about how much she had trusted him, loved him, believed in him. He knew that she was right. He was a loser. He had lost his desire to be anything more than what he already was, and lost the willingness to try something new. All he had ever been was Shonda’s baby’s father, Betty’s son, Jay from around the way. And Dominique wanted him to be a whole lot more.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really wanted to do what we talked about. I wouldn’t have wasted your time if I didn’t want to change. And you’re acting like I did something I didn’t do and I respect it,” he said, lying till the end. He shrugged. “But I want you to know that I really do love you.”
Dominique wanted to spit in his face and tell him that his dick was smaller than she would have liked, that she had cum all over Archie’s while he was away. Instead, she hauled off and slapped the shit out of Jamel, leaving him looking like he wanted to hit her back. Instead, he climbed out of her car and watched as she sped out of his life for good.
* * *
“He’s dead?”
“Word, son. I can’t believe nobody told you. They found that nigga’s body slumped over in the driver’s side of his S-Class with three shots to the face.”
Baron was sitting in a wheelchair in his
hospital room waiting for his mother to finish handling some paperwork at the nurse’s station. He was being released from the hospital today and had been talking to Tremaine on the telephone about his plans to settle the score with Jojo as soon as he was back on his feet.
“What’s Frankie saying about that?” Baron asked. He was careful about what he said on the telephone these days, but Tremaine still understood the question. He was asking whether Frankie was the one who handled it.
“He ain’t sad about it,” Tremaine said. “But your sister’s the one who really does most of the talking these days.”
Baron couldn’t believe his ears. Gillian? “Word?”
“Yeah,” Tremaine confirmed. “Gillian’s been holding her own lately. Frankie has his hands full with everything going on in his family. But your sister still has her eyes on the prize. Seems like she has everything under control.”
Baron sat and chewed on that for a moment. Gillian had ordered the hit. Now that Jojo was dead, and Nobles’s death had been avenged, Frankie and Gillian had no loyalty to Baron anymore. Baron knew that both his sister and Frankie blamed him for what Jojo had done. Truth be told, Baron blamed himself. His father had warned him that shit had gotten out of hand. But hothead Baron was never one to back down from a fight. He had gone too far in his war with Jojo and it had cost him his father’s life, had nearly cost him his own, and had apparently cost him his status as the head of his family. While he sat crippled in a wheelchair, Gillian had rushed in and saved the day and was riding off into the sunset with Frankie and the Nobles family’s loyalty. Baron seethed.
“What about Camille?” Baron asked. “Frankie just deaded her?”
Tremaine sighed. Even he thought that what Frankie was doing to Camille was grimy. “Yeah,” he said. “He cut her off altogether. No money, no nothing. She’s out there in Shaolin by herself in that house and Frankie just said fuck her. He’s with Gillian now.”
“Damn,” Baron said. It sounded like losing Nobles had turned Frankie’s heart to stone. He was cutting everybody off who he felt had crossed him. Baron wondered how Camille was handling that. She always seemed so meek, such a doting wife. He wondered how she was dealing with the fact that Frankie had left her for Gillian. If what Tremaine said was true, then Camille was broke and had nothing. Baron thought about Misa then, wondered how she was getting by since he’d paid to spring her from jail.