by Tracy Brown
“Doesn’t she have girlfriends she can call at a time like this?”
Frankie looked at Camille and frowned. “Not every woman has a group of nosy chicks she has dinner with every Friday night to talk shit about the men in their lives, like you do,” he teased.
Camille wasn’t laughing, and she was done talking. She turned over and closed her eyes as if she were going back to sleep. In her heart, she hoped that Frankie would continue to plead his case so that she wouldn’t go to sleep angry at him. But to her chagrin, he turned over also and fell asleep before she did. She lay there in the dark and silently cried herself to sleep.
Family Matters
Dominique’s black stiletto Mary Janes mashed the gas in her MKX as she zipped down the FDR on her way to drop her daughter, Octavia, off at her prestigious private school. She was late, and that was never a good thing. Not only did Octavia’s school frown upon tardiness, but today Dominique had a long list of tasks ahead of her at work. It would be another long night, which meant that Dominique’s dad would be “babysitting” thirteen-year-old Octavia. Normally, she and Octavia rode the train together each morning as they set out for their separate destinations. But since they had gotten off to a late start (the result of Dominique hitting the snooze button on her alarm clock one too many times), today she was navigating the busy streets of Manhattan.
“Make sure you go straight to your granddad’s house after school. You don’t have dance class today so it should only take you twenty minutes to—”
“Ma, I know!” Octavia turned toward the passenger-side window and rolled her eyes. Her mother got on her nerves sometimes. Octavia loved her mother, but she hated the way Dominique constantly smothered her. Octavia’s every move was supervised and mapped out for her ahead of time. And Dominique kept close tabs on her daughter’s movements—calling and texting periodically throughout the day to make sure that she was safe. Octavia took tap and modern dance classes after school three days a week, and even those had been coordinated to coincide with the days her grandfather attended kidney dialysis. Octavia was sick of being treated like a little kid.
She glanced at her mother and lightened up. Dominique was such a pretty young mom, unlike the old, wrinkly white parents of most of the students at her elite all-girls school. Today, with her hair blowing in the breeze of the open sunroof and her D&G shades perched on her nose, Dominique looked lovely, and her daughter softened slightly.
“Ma, I get sick of going to Granddad’s house all the time after school,” Octavia admitted. “All the other kids hang out at the park across the street or at the pizzeria down the block, and I’m never there.” Even on weekends, Octavia spent most of her time at her grandfather’s house while Dominique traveled upstate to visit her jailbird boyfriend. Octavia was sick of it.
Dominique was grateful for the sunglasses she wore because they masked the fed-up expression on her face. She was so sick of her child yearning to be ordinary when she was such an extraordinary young lady. “Octavia, you should think before you speak.” Dominique glanced at her daughter briefly and then turned back to the road ahead. “You have the nerve to say you’re sick of going to your grandfather’s house . . . do you know how much he does for you?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think you do, baby girl. The time he spends with you after school is more valuable than anything you could learn from those rich white kids at the pizzeria.”
Octavia got defensive. “It’s not just the white kids. You always say that. There’s black kids in my school, too. Spanish ones, Indian ones, even Asians. Segregation is over.”
Dominique pressed her lips together and gripped the steering wheel tighter. Her reflex was to pop her smart-ass daughter in the mouth for the sarcastic tone in her voice. But that urge was overpowered by the pride she felt that her daughter was obviously getting a great education at her stuck-up school. That was all that Dominique wanted—for her child to have a great education and excel in every possible way.
“Just take your behind to your grandfather’s house after school. No detours.” She drove in silence for a few minutes, thinking about how ungrateful her daughter was. On days like this, when her schedule was so overcrowded, Dominique often got home in the wee hours of the morning. Her father was a godsend, not just on these occasions but every day. He looked out for Octavia when Dominique’s hectic schedule forced her to be elsewhere.
Her mother had passed away when Dominique was only seven years old. She had suffered a fatal and unexpected heart attack, which devastated the entire family. Dominique had an older sister, Whitney, who was fourteen at the time, and the loss of their mother had changed things dramatically. Somehow their dad had managed to make ends meet. When he was laid off from his job at an auto body shop, he took every civil service exam until he scored high enough to be hired by the City of New York Parks Department. It was a meager living, which meant that there was little room for extras. But what he lacked in legitimate salary, he made up for in his side hustles—running numbers, gambling, shit like that. He kept food on the table and clean and stylish clothes on their backs, and he did the best he could to keep them from falling prey to the bullshit that awaited them in New York City’s mean streets. When Whitney turned eighteen, she went away to school and never looked back. But Dominique’s road to success hadn’t been so smoothly paved. Because she had Octavia while she was in high school, she had been forced to stay close to home in order to continue her education. Her father, in fact, still lived in the same project apartment in Mariners Harbor in which he had raised his daughters. Despite the success that Whitney and Dominique enjoyed, he was happy staying in his humble apartment, surrounded by neighbors who loved him and familiar faces in all the neighborhood stores. Dominique loved her father and had inherited his desire to stay close to their humble roots. Bill was definitely a huge influence on her. Without her father’s help, she had no idea how she would have made it.
She pulled up now in front of the school and looked over at her daughter, the ingrate. Dominique shook her head, trying to recall if she had taken things for granted as much when she was that age. “Call me when you get home,” she said. She gave Octavia a kiss and watched as she climbed out of her car.
Octavia shut the car door, wishing she could slam it and get away with it. Knowing that her mother was not above opening a can of whoop ass right in front of her prep school friends, Octavia decided against it and stormed off to class, late and pissed off.
Dominique arrived at work thirty minutes late for her meeting with a new girl group called StarTrak. She was excited about these four young ladies with heavenly voices; she had big plans for them to be the next Pussycat Dolls or Danity Kane. After apologizing for her tardiness, she got down to business, laying out her vision for the ladies’ success. By the time she was done, they were sold on her ideas, and Dominique had to admit that she had impressed herself.
She returned to her office and began checking her e-mails, throwing her hands up in exasperation when she read one from her boss. He needed her to travel out of town this weekend, when she had hoped to visit Jamel instead. She started composing a response to her boss to explain that she had other plans for the weekend. But as she prepared to send it, she thought of her coworker and arch-nemesis, Lizz Robbins, who was doing her best to take Dominique’s shine. If Dominique didn’t go on the trip her boss had laid out for her, Lizz surely would. She discarded her e-mail and sat back in her seat, frustrated. No matter how much she missed her man, he wasn’t worth losing her coveted job over. Jamel would have to wait another week.
“Good morning,” Gillian said, smiling. She held the door open and ushered Frankie inside as the rain poured down around him. With raindrops drumming a steady beat on the massive house, Frankie stepped into the foyer, towering over her. Water dripped from his jacket, and Greta, the maid, appeared out of nowhere to remove it from him. She scurried away with it as suddenly as she’d appeared, causing Frankie and Gillian to laugh.
“She takes her job so seriously,” Frankie said.
Gillian nodded. “She better, for what my father pays her.” She couldn’t help noticing how good Frankie looked standing there, wet from the storm outside. His long eyelashes contrasted with the rugged, chiseled features of his handsome brown face. Gillian’s gaze rested on Frankie’s lips before she caught herself staring and snapped herself out of her momentary daze. “Come on. He’s in the living room waiting for you,” she said, before leading the way to her father.
Frankie followed, watching Gillian’s ass the whole way. She was wearing a body-hugging pair of Guess jeans, and each sway of her hips was like a pendulum rocking Frankie into a blissful trance. When they got to the grand living room, he watched as Gillian crossed to where her father sat dozing off in his recliner and kissed him on his forehead. “Daddy, Frankie’s here.”
Nobles opened his eyes and smiled at his beautiful daughter, nodding. Nobles himself still looked good for a man who had to be at least seventy years old. He was bald and clean shaven, and today he wore a pair of black leather house slippers, baggy black pants, and a wifebeater—all that beneath a plush navy blue bathrobe. He sat up in his seat and gestured for Frankie to sit on the couch across from him. Frankie crossed the room and sat down, stretching his long legs out and getting comfortable. Nobles poured himself a drink from the bottle of cognac on the table beside him, looking at his young protégé. Frankie noticed that today Gillian didn’t leave them alone for their weekly discussions as she normally did. Instead, she took a seat beside him on the sofa, crossed her legs, and folded her hands in her lap in anticipation of what her father was about to say.
“Frankie, I got a situation I need your help with,” Nobles said, wasting no time in getting to the point.
Frankie nodded slowly. “Whatever it is, you know I got you.” He meant it. There was not very much that Frankie wouldn’t do for this man.
Nobles smiled. He loved Frankie’s loyalty, something that was hard to come by these days. “It has to do with my son.” Nobles sipped his drink and exhaled.
Now Frankie wanted to eat his words. He had been careful over the years not to interfere in family matters. He made sure never to cross the line. Despite her flawless looks, Frankie had never been more than friends with Gillian—not because he didn’t have the opportunity to be more than that, but because he never wanted to complicate the delicate tightrope he walked each day with her family. He knew that Nobles trusted Frankie with his daughter. That meant a lot to him, because Nobles rarely trusted anybody with shit. At times Frankie wondered if Nobles was testing him, putting gorgeous Gillian in his care on numerous occasions to see if he would take the bait. And he never did.
His relationship with Baron was no different. There was a line that Frankie didn’t cross with him as well. Baron was one of his only true friends. In fact, their relationship was deeper than friendship because of their mutual respect for the man who sat before him.
Nobles had been a father to Frankie when his own was nowhere around. And, in turn, Frankie had looked out for Baron like a brother would. Still, Frankie never lost sight of the fact that he wasn’t really family to Baron, or to Nobles, for that matter. He steered clear of interfering in family politics. So he wondered what Nobles had in mind.
As he watched the aging hustler sip his drink, Frankie smiled. Nobles was the last of a dying breed—a true OG who got paper back in the day with the best of them, did time, came out wiser, and flipped the script. He did nearly twelve years for murder and came home and never got his hands dirty again. Instead, Nobles had groomed his son, Baron, to follow in his footsteps, a move that he was often criticized for. But few could argue the fact that the enterprise they’d built was one of the only criminal organizations still thriving in tough economic times. They had so far managed to remain under the radar. And that was due to Nobles’s guiding hand over both Baron and Frankie.
Nobles leaned his head to the side and looked Frankie in the eye. “I need you to convince Baron to take a break.”
Frankie frowned. “Take a break from what?”
“From being in charge.”
“Why?” Frankie asked, confused. He noticed Gillian playing with her hands.
“He’s getting a little ahead of himself.” Nobles shifted slightly in his seat.
“That’s nothing new.”
It was true. Baron handled all of the family businesses—drugs, guns, credit cards. It was a lot for any man to juggle. Gillian helped out, but not nearly on the same scale as her brother. And Frankie and everyone else knew that Baron was a young man drunk off power and understandably arrogant. But that had always been the case. He wondered what was so different this time.
Nobles laughed. It certainly wasn’t new. But lately his son’s antics were costing him money and more. “Tell me about the situation with Dusty and Jojo.”
Frankie froze, stunned that news had traveled back to Nobles so quickly. Frankie had personally helped Baron see to it that everything was handled swiftly and kept quiet. Then he looked at Gillian. “Damn,” he said out loud, realizing that she had told her father something. Was she ratting out her own brother?
“Tell me what happened,” Nobles repeated.
Frankie was still staring at Gillian. She stared right back. “Baron’s doing a good job for you,” Frankie said, turning to face Nobles at last.
“But he’s not listening to good advice, is he?” Nobles sat his drink down on the table. “Back to Dusty.”
Frankie shook his head. “Gillian already told you,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and looking at her again. She stared back, so Frankie turned his eyes away from her before she could lock him in her gaze again. He looked at Nobles instead. But Nobles didn’t respond. Gillian did.
“I think he wants to hear your side of the story, Frankie.” She tried to make eye contact, to no avail. “I already told him my side.”
Frankie was stunned speechless. She didn’t even deny it. He was still confused, but he knew Nobles wanted to hear something. “Me and Baron got ourselves in a tight situation.”
Gillian sucked her teeth. “You had nothing to do with—”
“You said you told your side already.” Frankie cut a glance at Gillian out of the corner of his eyes. He cleared his throat and continued. “Couple of days ago, we ran into Dusty and some other character at Roseland. Dusty was talking real reckless and Baron was talking back. It got out of hand. You know the rest.”
Nobles sipped his drink. “Continue.” It didn’t sound like a request.
Frankie felt uncomfortable. “That clown threw a drink in Baron’s face, on some bitch shit,” he explained. “So Baron cracked a bottle over his head. Things escalated and it spilled outside. We left then and I got Baron home and everything got squashed. I haven’t heard from him in a few days, but when I left him, he was out of harm’s way.” He exhaled. “That’s it.”
“And what happened to Dusty?”
Frankie looked at Gillian. He wondered how much she’d actually told her father. The truth was, he and Baron had squashed things that night. But they had caught up with Dusty two days later and Baron had shot him. They had disposed of Dusty’s car in the wee hours of the morning, and it had been Gillian who picked them up from the remote location at the very tip of Brooklyn, surrounded by woods and weeds, where they’d dumped Dusty’s remains. The spot was one they’d used before in situations like this. Times when Baron’s temper had gotten the best of him and Frankie, true to form, had been on point and cleaned up the mess. This time it was a fool with a mouth just as loud as Baron’s and a point to prove. Baron had mirked him. And now Frankie looked at the beauty before him and wondered if she had really been tainted against her brother all along.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Gillian told me something different.” Nobles watched Frankie’s reaction, and noticed that he was careful not to show any clues of what he was thinking. “She said that you all went to the party and everybody was having f
un. She said Baron threw a drink in Dusty’s face. Not the other way around. That Baron broke a bottle on the muthafucka’s skull. Gillian said that you tried to calm the situation, tried to get my son to leave quietly. But he kept talking shit. Then it spilled outside.”
“That’s when I left,” Gillian said quickly. She looked at Frankie, hoping again to make eye contact.
Nobles watched the exchange between his “son” and his beloved daughter and cleared his throat. “Don’t cover for him, Frankie. Tell me the truth.”
Frankie said nothing.
“I think you know exactly what Baron did.” Nobles was hoping he could coax Frankie to tell him everything. But part of him admired the man’s obvious loyalty to Baron. It made him respect Frankie even more.
“I dropped Baron off at home that night. And Dusty was still breathing the last time I saw him.” Frankie was looking at his hands now.
“So neither one of you knows what happened?”
Frankie looked at Nobles and breathed a quiet sigh of relief. So she hadn’t told him everything. When he looked at Gillian again, he could read the expression on her face. With her eyes, she was saying, Follow my lead this time.
Frankie spoke up at last. “I’m telling you what I know, Pops. They did have a fight, and we all got tossed out. Once we got outside the party, we squashed it and everybody drove off peacefully. I got Baron to let me drive him home. Gillian left right before we did.”