by Tracy Brown
“Because I don’t want it, Baron” she said honestly. “Daddy’s gone, and it’s your fault. You might as well have pulled the trigger yourself as far as I’m concerned, because you killed him!” Gillian hissed into the phone with such venom that Baron could hear her anger. “I’m glad you’re out of the hospital,” she said, trying to calm down. “I’m happy to know that you’re gonna make it and go on to fuck up some more before you die. But my father is dead because of you. And I can’t forgive that. You’re on your own now. Keep the fucking money and go away.” She turned her cell phone off, tossed it in her bag, and stormed over toward her mother.
Mayra was seductively sipping on a drink through a skinny straw while eyeing Phillipe. Glancing over his shoulder, she saw Gillian heading in her direction and got a glimpse of the steam coming out of her daughter’s ears.
“Excuse me for a moment while I see what’s wrong with my Gigi,” she said, dismissing the sexy help. He nodded and walked away just as Gillian approached. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Mayra said, smiling at her child in order to cut the immediate tension. “You look like you’ve got somewhere else to be.”
Gillian glared at her mother. “Just take him in the back and let him hit it, Ma,” she said. “You might as well.”
Mayra stood speechlessly and stared at her daughter.
“I came here to talk to you over half an hour ago. I waited patiently, sitting over there and watching you flirt with this guy and bend over in front of him and—”
“I was picking up a piece of—”
“Fucking spinach, yes, I saw you, Ma!” Gillian yelled. “And I saw your black thong and your tramp stamp.”
“Gigi, don’t make me slap you in front of all these people.”
Gillian laughed.
Mayra didn’t. “I’m your mother and you will show me respect. I don’t care how old you are. You watch your tone when you speak to me.” Mayra looked around at her staff busying themselves nearby and eavesdropping. “Especially here,” she said.
Gillian shook her head, smirking. “You don’t even own this place anymore. That’s what I came to tell you.”
She watched the blood drain from her mother’s face. Mayra tried to smile and laugh it off as an insane notion. “What are you talking about?”
Gillian took her phone out of her bag and turned it back on. She then pressed send and waited. She looked at her mother and had to hand it to her. Mayra was still a beautiful woman at the age of fifty-six. She could easily pass for a woman years younger—smooth skin, lovely Cuban features, and a great body that women half her age often envied. Gillian had inherited her mother’s eyes—bottomless wells of seduction that lured any man in deeper. She watched her mother’s expression as she reached for her BlackBerry and read the message Gillian had just forwarded to her.
Did you ever love Daddy?
Mayra scrolled down to see a picture of her and Guy London locked in an embrace on her doorstep at two o’clock in the morning. She looked at her daughter, but found no words to say to her as the next message came through—this one a picture of Guy palming her ass near the window, as they had been careless enough to leave the curtain ajar. Mayra’s and Guy’s lips were inches apart as he gazed into her eyes—those same eyes that Gillian now realized had the power to turn any man, even the father she thought was smarter than any other, to mush.
“I don’t want you to think that I hate you,” Gillian said. “ ’Cuz I don’t. But you know Guy was Daddy’s friend—at least Daddy thought so.” Gillian shook her head. “I’ve tried to put myself in your shoes, Ma. Maybe you married him when you were younger and he was Doug Nobles. That must have impressed you back then.”
“Gigi—”
“No, no, I get it. And then he went to prison, came home and got multiple sclerosis, lost his stamina. Maybe you got bored or you felt like you didn’t bargain for this.”
“Gillian—”
“But of all the men you could creep with … Guy? He’s my godfather, Ma! Damn!”
“I didn’t mean for this to … I did love your father.” Mayra was choking up. Gillian couldn’t stick around to watch that.
“I just thank God that Daddy was on to you before he died. At least I think he was. Frankie told me a few weeks ago that Daddy took this restaurant out of your name, that he signed it over to Frankie. He told me that Daddy was suspicious that someone close to him was out to get him. I narrowed down the short list of people who were close to Daddy. Me, Baron, Frankie, you, Guy, Celia … that’s a pretty easy list. There wasn’t much digging needed. I thought about the fact that Daddy chose to share his suspicions with Frankie and not with me. I figured he must have thought I was too close to a particular person to be impartial. So I started watching you. I imagined that Daddy might have suspected that you were fucking around and maybe he told Frankie about it. Turns out that I was right.” Gillian shook her head at her mother. “He took the restaurant out of your name and put together a new will with a new attorney and even fired his old accountant. He knew something wasn’t right, that it had to be someone close to him who you were creeping with. He may have even wondered if I knew about it.” Gillian’s jaw clenched as she pondered that thought. If she knew for sure that her father had questioned her loyalty to him because of her mother’s treachery and deceit and died not knowing the truth, she would never have been able to forgive Mayra. It seemed, based on Nobles’s actions in the days and weeks before he died, that he had no one he felt he could trust one hundred percent besides Frankie.
“Anyway, the new lawyer filed Daddy’s will in probate court this morning.” She handed her mother some paperwork. “Two hundred thousand is what you’re getting, plus you can stay in the house. You pay Greta and any other staff you decide to keep out of your own pocket.” Gillian dusted her hands off demonstratively. “That’s it.”
Mayra erupted in sobs and the staff kept on preparing to open up the restaurant for the night. Gillian turned on her heels and walked away from her mother, unable to stomach the drama Mayra was unleashing—crying, clutching her chest as if she were having an immediate heart attack.
“Tell Guy not to try to fight it or we’ll show the pictures to his wife, and to all the magazines, too,” Gillian called out over her shoulder.
She walked out of her mother’s restaurant—out of her mother’s life, she hoped, and Baron’s, too—and into her destiny. She was right where she always knew she’d be—at the helm of her father’s empire. He may not be around to see her do it, but she was going to make him proud of his baby girl.
* * *
Mary watched Frankie eat his sandwich and she smiled. He still chewed the same way he did when he was a kid.
He smiled back, feeling a little awkward with her watching him this way. His mother was different this visit than he had ever seen her before. She seemed more attentive, more focused on him than she ever had been previously.
He swallowed and sat back. “How come I never see you eat when I come over here?”
Mary seemed to blush a little as she fanned her hand at the question. “I eat,” she said. “Mostly soups, black-eyed peas, ham hocks. You don’t eat all that.”
Frankie nodded. “You’re right. I never liked stuff like that.” He smiled, comforted by the thought of his mother knowing his habits and preferences. She had been such a silent character in his upbringing that he wondered at times if she had been paying attention.
“I made some chicken soup the other day,” she said softly. “Put it in a thermos and took it on down there with me to sit with Steven.”
Frankie stared at her. “You went to the cemetery?”
Mary nodded.
Frankie frowned a little. “When?”
Mary seemed to whisper to herself. “I go all the time.”
Frankie thought about that. His mother didn’t drive, had never ventured out much past their neighborhood without his father. Yet, she must have taken two trains and walked a couple of blocks each time she went to the cemetery
to visit Steven’s grave.
“Why go see him now?” he couldn’t help asking.
She looked at him, her eyes sad and despondent, and then looked at her hands. She wrung them together before placing them in her lap in an attempt to calm her nerves. She had been a mess ever since her youngest son’s death, haunted by it in a way that no one understood but her.
“I think about him,” she said, “every single day.”
Frankie sat rapt and was grateful that the volume on the television was low. His mother’s voice was so soft as she spoke.
“I dream about him. He calls my name, and I wake up and go looking for him around the house.” Mary chuckled as if she knew it sounded crazy. “And when the morning comes, I go there. I sit with him.”
She closed her eyes and smiled a faraway smile that Frankie had never had the pleasure of witnessing before. He thought his mother looked so pretty that way, so youthful with her face happy for once.
“Sometimes I even see his face in my dreams. I see him as a child, just a little boy running around laughing. He was a happy baby.”
Frankie watched as she opened her eyes and blinked a few times, her usual demure expression returning to her face, smile fading ever so slightly.
“He loved you, Frankie. He would clap his hands whenever you stepped in the room and smile so bright. You were his hero from the second he could see straight.”
Frankie smiled, remembering. He had almost forgotten fun times like that.
“He loved your pancakes,” Frankie recalled. “And you would always sneak him extra ones behind Dad’s back.” The minute he said it, he knew he shouldn’t have. Mary folded her arms across her chest, lowered her chin, and hunched her shoulders. Her body language conveyed exactly what was happening inside. Every time she thought about her husband—her sons’ father—and the horror he had subjected them to, she cringed. She had allowed it. She had allowed all of it.
Mary didn’t say another word until Frankie coaxed her back from the place she had gone in her mind.
“I wish you wouldn’t slouch like that,” he said. “You should sit up straight, ’cuz neither one of us blamed you for what he did.” It wasn’t true. Frankie actually did blame his mother, at least to some degree. But seeing her so wounded now, he wanted to hug her but didn’t know how. “You can look me in the eye and know that I’m not mad at you.”
“I’m mad at myself,” she said softly.
Frankie sat in silence for a few moments, surprised to hear his mother talking about this. Like Steven, she had never wanted to before.
Mary found the courage to look at her son. “You stayed away all these years … you and your brother.” She tilted her head thoughtfully. “Feels a little like I don’t know who you are … as a man. To me, you and Steven are both still my boys.”
Frankie felt bad for that. It had been so hard for him to see his mother this broken down and sad. In fact, the conversation they were having now was the most he’d heard her speak in years. She had become a recluse, a willful prisoner in her own home.
“Well, I’m here now,” he offered. “It’s not too late.” He took another bite of his sandwich.
She smiled again, though her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “It’s too late for Steven.”
Frankie lost his appetite midchew. It seemed like his mother was being tormented by what had happened to Steven. Concerned that she was already emotionally fragile, he needed her to talk about it before she did something crazy. Frankie clasped his hands together and looked at Mary directly.
“What’s on your mind, Ma?”
She looked at him, her eyes full of sorrow and longing. “He’s gone, Frankie. I can’t ever see him or talk to him again. I can’t tell him I’m sorry.”
Frankie watched her staring absentmindedly at her hands, her voice clear but low.
“You know what I pray for?” she asked.
Frankie shook his head.
“That my soul won’t burn in hell for all these years I kept my mouth shut.” She laughed cryptically, her head thrown back and her hands splayed across her lap. When she was done, Mary looked at her only remaining son and told the truth. “Steven can never defend himself. He can never stand up in court and tell his side of the story because he’s dead. That girl killed him, but he didn’t deserve it, Frankie.” She shook her head and looked like she wanted to cry but had run out of tears after spending countless nights crying. “I’m the one who deserves to be laying in that grave, not Steven.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” Frankie asked. “You said the same thing at his funeral.”
She shrunk back into her seat. “Because I didn’t speak up about it. I didn’t stop the things your father did to him, the things your father did to you. I didn’t talk about it even after your father was dead, I just … stayed quiet. That makes me just as guilty.”
Frankie frowned. “What happened when we were kids don’t have nothing to do with what happened to Steven.” He thought his mother was losing her mind. “Misa thought—”
“She thought he was abusing her son. That’s what you told me.”
Frankie nodded. “But we know that he wouldn’t really do something like that.”
His mother shot him a look that sent chills up his spine. “Do we know, Frankie? After all the years of what your father did, all the things Steven watched him do to me and—”
Frankie stood up off the couch and walked toward his mother. In that moment, he was so angry that he surprised himself. He didn’t know why he wanted to slap the taste out of her mouth for even suggesting what Steven had been accused of could have been true. He just knew that he wanted her to stop talking.
Mary shrunk away, but she kept her eyes fixed on Frankie’s.
“He didn’t do nothing to that little boy!” Frankie’s voice was louder than he meant for it to be.
Mary choked back a sob and Frankie felt instantly sorry for being so mad. Standing over her, watching her shrink away from him the way he had seen her do when his father was in one of his rages, Frankie softened. He knelt before Mary and pulled her into a hug, stroking her back and comforting her as she cried. It felt almost as if she were the child and he were the parent, comforting her, assuring her that her nightmares were nothing more than just that.
“He didn’t do it, Ma,” Frankie whispered to her. With his whole heart, he believed that it was the truth.
* * *
“My God!” Jeanie shrieked, gripping the phone tightly.
Toya heard her mother yelling and rushed from her bedroom to the spare room where Jeanie was supposed to be asleep. It was early—just past nine o’clock on Saturday night—but Jeanie had turned in already, exhausted after a long day of shopping in New York City.
As Toya entered the room, she saw her mother sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand covering her mouth in apparent shock, the other gripping the telephone tightly.
“Yes,” Jeanie was saying. “Yes, okay. Okay. Yes.”
Toya grew impatient and stepped closer to her mother. “What’s wrong?” she whispered.
Jeanie held one hand up as if to silence Toya and listened to whoever was on the other end of the phone. “Oh my God,” Jeanie said, sighing. “Was he alone?”
Instinctively, Toya knew that her father was dead. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but there was no doubt in her mind that Nate was gone and her mother was shaken by the news.
Toya watched her mother scribble an address down on the back of a Macy’s receipt and listened as she thanked the mystery caller. The second she hung up the phone, Toya asked if her suspicions were correct.
“He’s dead?”
Jeanie’s eyes flooded with tears and she nodded, sending them pouring down her face.
Toya hugged her mother, rocked her as she cried. “I’m a widow,” Jeanie wailed and Toya had to fight the urge to laugh at her melodramatics. Her parents hadn’t been together for years, yet her mother was carrying on like she had lost her soul mate.
“Swe
ets, it’s okay,” Toya told her. “He made his peace with everyone before he died. He’s in a better place now.”
She waited a few minutes for her mother to calm down before she probed further. “What happened?”
Jeanie took a deep breath and looked her daughter in the eye. “He was renting a studio apartment and the landlord lives upstairs and hadn’t seen Nate for a few days. Then he didn’t show up for work at his job as a porter. Finally, the landlord rang the bell, knocked on the door, and called his phone. When he got no answer, he called the cops and they went in there—found him lying dead on the floor.”
Toya gasped.
“They think he had a stroke, but they won’t know until they perform an autopsy.”
Toya’s emotions got the best of her as she wondered how long her father had lain there before anyone found him. Even an animal like Nate didn’t deserve to die alone on the floor like that.
Together, she and her mother prepared to go down to the medical examiner’s office and formally identify the body. As Toya got dressed and thought back on her recent conversations with her father, she felt chills run down her spine. Her father had come back into her life to seek her forgiveness and had died without receiving that. She couldn’t help feeling somewhat relieved that they hadn’t been forced to begin the tough work of reestablishing a relationship as father and daughter. She knew that it would have required her to confront some painful parts of her past, and she hoped now she would be able to bury that painful history along with him.
She paused as she pulled her shoes out of her closet. She recalled something Nate had said to her during their last conversation at Junior’s.