That night Michael and I talked for hours. He asked me about my mama and I told him how she’d take us to a different church every Sunday to get baptized so we could eat. Michael kept shaking his head in disbelief. “Golly,” he said. “I never heard anything like that before.”
Michael had grown up with his two parents in Cascade Heights. The neighborhood was only fifteen minutes away from where Duck and I sold dope on Baldwin Street, but it might as well been a different planet. Around that way, you never saw women walking out the house in a roller set and their bedroom slippers, and nobody parked their broke-down hoopties in the yard. Michael didn’t know shit about caseworkers, eviction notices, or eating ketchup sandwiches for dinner.
“So you never had your lights cut off?” I asked him.
“Well,” he said, trying to remember, “one time there was a storm that knocked out the electricity for a couple of hours. I had to use a flashlight.”
I don’t know if he was trying to be funny, but that shit cracked me up. I guess Michael liked talking to me, too, because the next day he came back to hang out, and again the day after.
Then one day I needed a favor: my car wouldn’t start and I wanted Michael to give me a ride home. I called him from the pay phone and asked him if he could come get me.
“Sure,” he said. “Where you at?”
“Working,” I told him, and gave him directions to Ashby Grove.
Michael worked at the Simmons mattress factory. When he told me about his job, he was real proud of his “benefits,” and his 401(k) savings plan. I told him nobody in my family had a bank account. “Then where do you keep your money?” he asked.
“My granddaddy put his cash in a gym sock and hung it down by his balls,” I told him. “He didn’t get robbed once.” Michael looked totally confused everytime I talked about my family. I didn’t think he could handle any more tales from the hood, so when he asked me what I did for a job, I kept it breezy. “Part-time entrepreneur,” I said, with a wave of my hand.
I was standing halfway up the block, near the laundromat, when Michael pulled up to the curb across the road in his grey Nissan Maxima. I started heading his way, but before I reached him, JaMarcus, one of my regulars, ran over and stuck his head in the passenger-side window of Michael’s car. JaMarcus had cracked lips and matted hair and stank like stale piss. He was holding a pair of brand-new Air Force 1’s.
“Yo, my man!” JaMarcus said, shoving the sneakers in Michael’s face so he could get a good look. “Twenty dollars! If you don’t like these, I got some of them Dennis Rodman joints. You know, with the pump. Pump up the jam, pump it up a little more . . . ! I can get them right quick. Those going for thirty. But you can have ’em for twenty-five. What size you is, brotha?”
“Nigga, get to stepping before I stomp a mudhole in your ass,” I called to JaMarcus as I crossed the road. “He don’t want none of that stolen shit.”
JaMarcus swiveled to face me, with his hands up, like he was surrendering to the cops. “No doubt,” he said. “My bad!”
“But what ’bout you, Rabbit?” he continued. “Girl, you need new kicks? A Guess watch? How about a brand-new coffee pot?”
I ignored JaMarcus, opened the passenger-side door, and slid into the seat. Michael turned to me, his hands gripping the steering wheel, his eyes wide. “What the hell is going on over here?” he asked.
I looked out onto the street. JaMarcus was standing in the middle of the road, cradling his stolen sneakers in his arms. Butterfly’s skinny ass was strolling the block trying to make some money, in Day-Glo orange bicycle shorts. At the end of the road a middle-aged couple, both of them higher than kites, were hollering at each other, ignoring the baby boy who was crying his eyes out and clinging to the woman’s legs. There were dope boys, crack fiends, and prostitutes all up and down the block doing deals, hanging out, and trying to get high. I didn’t know what Michael was talking about. The street looked fine to me.
“What you mean?” I asked.
“All these crazy-looking people out here . . .” he said, shaking his head. “I been living in Atlanta my whole life. I’ve never seen anything like this street before.” He paused, like he was taking it all in. Then he turned to me: “What are you doing out here, anyway? I thought you wanted me to pick you up at your job.”
“Yeah. This is where I work.”
Michael twisted his neck trying to see up and down the street. “Where do you work?” he asked. “In the laundromat?”
“Nah,” I said, laughing. “I work in front of the laundry.”
“Doing what?”
“Hustling.”
He looked at me, confused.
“Michael,” I said, taking a breath, “I sell drugs.” Most people I knew did drugs, sold drugs, or lived off drug-dealer money. But Michael was different. I didn’t know how he would take the news. I held my breath and waited for him to respond.
For a couple of seconds he just stared at me, his eyebrows in knots, not saying a word. Finally he opened his mouth. “You pulling my leg?”
“No,” I answered. “This is my trap. I run this whole block.”
He let out a long whistle. “Wow,” he said, shaking his head. Then he started the car and pulled away from the curb. We drove for a few blocks in silence, with Michael staring straight at the road and me wondering what the hell he was thinking. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “You think I’m a bad person?” I asked.
“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just . . .” He trailed off.
“What?”
“I guess I never thought you’d be doing something like this.”
He went on to tell me about his cousin. The boy had been fine when Michael joined the army. But by the time Michael came back home, his cousin was hooked on crack. “He started stealing from his mama, and it just broke my auntie’s heart,” he said. “So you know . . .” He trailed off again.
The sad look on his face while he talked about his cousin made me think for sure he wasn’t gonna like me anymore. And why would he? I thought to myself. I wasn’t anything special. I sold drugs. He could probably get any girl he wanted. Like one of those bougie girls who worked the makeup counter at Macy’s, or even a dental hygienist. But a few days later he showed up at my door. “You came back,” I said, letting him in. “I didn’t think you would.”
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “I guess I like you.”
We’d been dating almost four months when Michael decided he wanted to introduce me to his mama. “What if she don’t like me?” I asked, lying in bed beside him. I imagined a church lady who’d stare at me with her church-lady eyeballs thinking about how I’m not good enough for her boy.
“Of course she’s gonna like you,” he said, laughing.
After a while he added, “Maybe don’t say your name is Rabbit.”
Michael took us to Red Lobster for dinner. I was so nervous, I couldn’t think of a thing to say, so I just put my head down and ate in silence. When the bill came Michael pulled a Visa card out of his wallet. I recognized it at as the same card Hood had shown me that day we’d talked in his office, the one with the high limit. “You can’t get anywhere in this life without good credit,” I said suddenly. Michael’s mama just gave me a funny look.
After dinner, Michael dropped his mama off then drove me back home.
“So listen,” he said when we got inside. “There’s something I want to show you.”
“Okay.”
“But I don’t want you to get mad.”
“Okay.”
He led me to the kitchen, opened the drawer, and took out a knife and fork. “Now don’t get mad,” he said again, handing them out to me.
“Just say it, I won’t get mad!”
“Okay, the thing is, you’re holding the silverware all wrong.”
“What you mean? How am I holding it?”
“You got it in a fist. You were gripping that fork at dinner like you were about to dig a hole and plant some flowers.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Baby. Trust me.”
I looked down at the fork clutched in my hand. I felt my face burning hot with embarrassment. I wanted to punch Michael in the face for insulting me. I wanted to stick him in the chest with the fork in my fist. But instead I took a breath. “Okay,” I said. “So how am I supposed to hold it?” He took my hands in his and showed me the right way.
We moved in together not long after that.
Chapter 22
Four More
I got the call at three thirty on a Tuesday afternoon. Michael had worked the early shift at the mattress factory and was coming in the door as I picked up the kitchen phone. On the other end of the line, my sister Sweetie was yelling like her house was on fire. “Rabbit! Girl, you gotta come over! The lady from DFACS say she gonna take away my kids!”
The last time I’d seen my sister was almost a year before, not long after Michael and I started dating. He said he wanted to meet my family, so I’d taken him over to Sweetie’s place because she was the only one who wasn’t in jail. We’d driven out to Lynwood Park, past streets lined with luxury homes, crossed an intersection, and suddenly we were in the hood. Sweetie lived with her three daughters in a broke-down house that reeked of stale Newports and dirty diapers. When Michael and I stepped inside I could see him, out of the corner of my eye, gagging from the smell. The floor was littered with overflowing ashtrays and dirty dishes crawling with roaches. In the middle of the room, turned on its side, was a wooden chair missing three of its legs.
I’d heard a rumor that Sweetie was hooked on crack. When I saw her that day with Michael—the way she stood at the window scratching and twitching and searching the road with paranoid eyeballs—I knew the rumor was true. Now here she was on the other end of the phone, begging for my help.
Talking a mile a minute, Sweetie explained that her caseworker had come by and told her the Department of Family and Child Services was taking her kids and putting them in foster care unless Sweetie could find a family member to take them. “She says I have until six o’clock, or else she’s gonna get the police.” Sweetie started to cry. “But I ain’t an unfit mama. I’m a good mama. Rabbit, you gotta come get my kids.”
“Don’t you go get those kids,” Michael said when I hung up the phone. He’d been standing in the doorway, listening to my call.
I ignored him and started pulling on my sneakers, my mind racing as I tried to remember how old Sweetie’s kids were. There was LaDontay, who was a few months older than Ashley, so that put her at eight. And then two younger girls, Destiny and Diamond, who were two and three. But Sweetie had also been pregnant when Michael and I had seen her last. I did the math in my head and figured the baby couldn’t be more than six months old.
I ran into Nikia’s bedroom; I knew I had a box of old baby blankets in there, somewhere. Michael was right on my heels. “We can’t take care of four more children,” he said, watching me throw sneakers, water guns, and headless G.I. Joe action figures out of Nikia’s closet, searching for the blankets. “You know that.”
I turned around to look at Michael. “They’re family,” I said. “Where else they gonna go? Anyway,” I added, turning back to the mess in the closet, “you like kids.”
Ever since we’d been living together Michael had been acting exactly like a daddy. One day I came home after picking up Ashley and Nikia from school and found Michael had cooked us all dinner: fried pork chops, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese. Then he sat at the table and helped the kids with their homework.
“Your daughter can read,” he said later that night. “But your son needs some help.” I already knew Ashley was smart as a whip. Nikia was a different story. He was repeating kindergarten because he was so far behind.
“That boy takes after his daddy,” I told Michael. “Derrick’s stupid ass can’t read, either.”
“Let me try,” said Michael. “I bet your son just needs a little extra help.” He came home the next day with a bag from Kmart filled with a stack of reading books. “Come here, little man,” he called to Nikia. “I got something for you.” The two of them sat at the dining room table, Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop cracked open in front of them. I stood in the doorway and watched Michael point to the words on the page. “Sound it out,” he said gently. “Just take your time.”
At the back of Nikia’s closet, I finally found what I was looking for, a clear plastic box filled with Nikia’s old baby clothes. I grabbed a blue flannel blanket and headed to the door. Michael was right behind me. “We need to talk about this,” he said, following me out of the apartment, down the front walk, and over to my car. “I didn’t sign up for all this . . . I’m serious. We got to think this through.”
I opened the car door, slid behind the wheel, and turned on the ignition. I didn’t understand why Michael was getting so worked up. Everybody knows that when your crackhead sister says DFACS is about to snatch her babies, you don’t waste time thinking it through, you just go get them.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said as I pulled away from the curb. “I gotta get those kids.”
In my rearview mirror I could see Michael standing in the road with his hands on his head. For a second he looked exactly like Curtis the day Mama put her dentures in the road and drove over them with her car.
Sweetie’s house looked worse than I could have imagined, it was like a tornado had lifted up a trash heap and dropped it right in the middle of her living room. My sister was standing at the window, holding a tiny baby and peering out the dirty bedsheets she’d hung up as curtains. On a sagging sofa against the wall were Sweetie’s older girls. LaDontay was dressed in a grimy T-shirt and boy’s shorts, but the other two wore only sagging diapers. All of them were covered in crusty silver-dollar-size sores.
Sweetie’s caseworker was already there, standing by the front door, a manila folder in her hand. “I think the children may have ringworm,” she said when she caught me looking at their scabs.
“My kids ain’t got no worms!” shouted Sweetie from across the room.
The caseworker ignored her and turned to me: “Would you mind if we stepped outside for a moment?”
On the front porch, she cleared her throat. “I’ve offered to help find your sister a drug treatment program,” she said. “Unfortunately, she’s been very resistant.”
“Okay.”
“At this point, we are seriously concerned about the welfare of the children . . .”
“Yeah.”
“My understanding is that you’ve offered to take them.”
“Uh-huh.”
“All four of them?”
“Yes, ma’am. They can stay with me until Sweetie gets herself together.”
The caseworker lifted her eyes from her folder, looked at me, and smiled. “Wonderful,” she said. “That’s just wonderful.” We made a plan that I’d take the girls for the night and the caseworker would come by my place the next day to walk me through the paperwork for getting temporary guardianship. As she turned to go back inside she added, “It’s usually so difficult to find someone willing to take four kids at once. The girls are very lucky.”
In the living room Sweetie was spinning around like a wind-up toy, picking up filthy baby clothes, mismatched flip-flops and broken toys, and shoving everything into a garbage bag. “I got the kids’ things together,” she said. “Clothes and whatnot.”
“I don’t need all that,” I told her. “I’ll get them some new clothes.”
“But I got everything right here.” Sweetie held out the trash bag and I watched a cockroach make its way up the side. “Take it!”
“Okay,” I sighed, setting the bag down by the front door.
Then she handed me the baby. “Her name’s Jonelle,” Sweetie said. The girl was tiny, with milky eyes and dried mucus crusted around her nose. She smelled like she hadn’t been changed all day. Sweetie turned to her older daughters on the sofa. She knelt down in front of them and opened her arms wide like she wan
ted to give them all a hug. LaDontay pushed the younger ones toward their mama but hung back on the sofa, her eyes darting between me, the caseworker, and her mama, like she was trying to figure out which one of us she should trust. She bit her lip and her eyes filled with tears.
Sweetie didn’t notice. She clutched Diamond and Destiny. “Y’all be good for your auntie,” she said, her voice cracking. “I’m gonna see y’all soon. I just need to clean up the place a little. That’s all. I just gotta clean up.”
“Okay, c’mon, let’s go.” I held out my hand for the girls. “Tell your mama you love her. We gonna go see your cousins now.”
I left the trash bag full of filthy clothes and took the dirty kids. Sweetie stood in the middle of her living room, surrounded by garbage, and watched us go.
When I walked in my front door, I was relieved to see my niece Cece had come by and was sitting on the sofa, watching TV. “Thank you, Jesus,” I said under my breath. Then I called to her, “Girl, get over here. I need some help.”
Cece stood up, holding her nose. “What’s that smell?”
I didn’t answer, I just handed her Jonelle, whose shit-soaked diaper was hanging off her like a second booty. “These are Sweetie’s kids,” I explained. “They’re gonna stay with us a while.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” Cece asked, holding Jonelle away from her body like I’d handed her a ticking bomb.
“Use your head!” I answered. “These babies need a bath.” I told Cece to put all the girls’ clothes in a trash bag and tie up the top. “And make sure they don’t touch nothing,” I added. Then I went to look for Michael to ask him to run to the store for diapers and formula.
I found him in our bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on his shoes. On the floor in front of him was his khaki green army-issue duffel bag, packed up and cinched at the top, like he was moving out.
I knew Michael was mad when I left for Sweetie’s, but I figured he was just being dramatic, like Denzel, putting on a show to make his point. “What the hell?” I said eyeing his packed bag on the floor. Michael didn’t say a word. He just stood up, grabbed his duffel bag, and slung it over his shoulder.
Rabbit Page 16