It took Trudy half an hour to pick me up in her 2016 Chevy Malibu and another half hour to get us back to the house. Trudy was a fifty-year-old woman with a head full of gray hair that she kept cut in a bob. I learned not to let her size fool me because she was a strong little lady when need be. A million and one thoughts played a game of tag with my brain when she pulled up to her two-story white house that we lived in with five other women. After I was released from prison, I just knew they were going to put me in the sleaziest halfway house known to man. However, the first time I walked through Trudy’s front doors, I became aware that it wasn’t like the nightmare other inmates said. We all called it Trudy’s Place because it was the most well kept spot on the block. She took pride in having a clean home, and she treated us all like her children. We all had chores, mine being watering Trudy’s beloved petunias that she kept in a small garden at the front of the house.
Petunias? Why was I thinking about flowers at a time like that? My heart was beating fast, just like it had when I stood before the judge and got my sentence. I got out of Trudy’s car and walked hesitantly to the burgundy front door of the house. I didn’t know what to expect when I walked through the threshold, so I just stood in the foyer for a few seconds. Well, until Trudy came through behind me and pushed me forward.
“Girl, if you don’t go in that living room!” she told me in a hushed voice. “It’s women in here that wish they had family to visit them. And when you’re done talking to her, take my damn suit off and put it on my bed! I’m about to go make sure Hannah and Bernie cleaned the hallway bathroom like I told them to!”
She shut and locked the front door and headed toward the staircase to go upstairs to check on the girls. I looked down at myself, suddenly embarrassed by my appearance. At age thirty-five, I was definitely nothing to sneeze at. My body was still intact, and I had curves that would put girls ten years my junior to shame. Still, I was ashamed because I had gone from living like royalty to having to answer to someone like a child. I sighed deeply before making my way to the living room down the hallway. The lights were on in there, and I heard the voice of Steve Harvey coming from the flat-screen television Trudy had on her wall. When I rounded the corner, I saw that it was a rerun of his hit show, Family Feud, playing quietly in front of a woman sitting on one of Trudy’s flowered embroidered couches.
“I was starting to think you weren’t going to show up.”
I swear I had entered the living room quiet as a mouse, but somehow, she’d sensed my presence without even looking at me.
“Aunt . . . Aunt Patricia?” I asked moving closer to get a better view of her.
She turned to face me, and her lips spread into a wide smile on her round caramel face. She had to be at least in her midfifties, but she didn’t look a day over forty. She was beautiful, and although she was seated, I could tell that she was in good shape. She should have been a poster child for the phrase “Black Don’t Crack,” because she was over there giving me a run for my money. Her skin was smooth, and she looked as vibrant as a model on a magazine. She rocked a neat wand curled sew-in with a middle part closure, and she was dressed casually in a black Gucci T-shirt, a pair of light blue jeans, and a pair of all-black Nike Roshes.
How is she older than me, but is looking way better? I thought to myself, suddenly wishing that I’d gone upstairs to change first.
“Jackie!” Aunt Patricia stood up and rushed to wrap me into a tight hug. “Oh my God, baby, it’s been too long!”
“Fifteen years,” I said trying to muster up a smile, but I couldn’t.
“Yes, indeed. Fifteen long years that I’m so sorry about!” she pulled away and looked me up and down. “Well, I don’t know why you have on this granny suit, but you’re looking good, girl. I guess you ain’t have much to do in prison but eat and work out, huh?” She motioned for me to have a seat beside her on the couch, and I obliged, sitting on her right side.
“Actually, now that I think about it, I haven’t seen you since you and my dad got into it a long time ago.”
“Yeah, that mean devil kept me away from you. You and I, we were so close.” Aunt Patricia’s round brown eyes grew dark for a split second before coming back to the light. “He knew I couldn’t have kids, so you were always the closest thing I’d get to it. He got mad at me and removed you from my life completely.”
“And then he threw me out,” I finished.
“He always had such a mean side,” she shook her head. “He’s probably the devil’s favorite demon in hell right about now.”
I didn’t have to speak to let her know I agreed with her. I hadn’t seen either one of my parents since the day they threw me to the streets, so when I was told he was dead while in prison, it didn’t move me very much. Word on the streets was that when he died, my mother really lost it to her drug habit and had gone missing. Good riddance, because I wasn’t going to be the one to find her.
“Why did you and my dad fall out in the first place?”
“Money issues,” Aunt Patricia sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “I was in a position where I was making money, a lot of money, and he wanted some of it. See, I already had honed in on his drug problem and the fact that he and his wife were treating you badly. I knew if I gave him a penny, he would spend it on a rock before he spent it on you, sooo, I told him that. I told him to tell me what you needed and I’d get it myself. Well, he didn’t like that. Felt like I was looking down on him, so he took you away from me. Told me that you didn’t need me and filed a protection order on me filled with bogus lies.”
“Wow.”
“Yup. And you did. You needed me a whole lot. If he hadn’t thrown you in the streets, you would have never met that slimy mothafucka that got you locked up! Fifteen years of your life down the drain!” Aunt Patricia turned to me and took my hands in her soft cocoa butter-smelling ones. She looked deeply in my eyes with tears welling up in her own. “Oh, Jackie, it broke my heart to know you ended up where you did. It was my guilt that left all the money on your books, but it was also my guilt that kept me away. Do you forgive me?”
So that’s where all the money I had in prison came from. That was always the biggest mystery to me. Aunt Patricia looked so miserable sitting beside me. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who had suffered the past fifteen years, but I had to wonder. If her guilt was what kept her away, why was she here now?
“Aunt Patricia,” I said kissing her hands, “it’s nobody’s fault but my own that I ended up in prison. Regardless of how my parents did me, those were the cards I was dealt, and I just played them all wrong. I lost the little that I did have left behind a nigga, and you know, maybe that was because of some daddy issues I had buried deep inside of me. But if being locked up for fifteen years taught me anything, it taught me to stand behind my decisions. It taught me that nobody made me stab that nigga. I did that on my own.”
“That’s my baby,” she said and pulled me into a deep hug. “You get your smarts from your auntie, did I ever tell you that?”
“All the time when I was little,” I smiled, drawing back from her, and she stood up like she was preparing to leave. “Are you leaving already? What time is it . . . five o’clock? We eat at six. You’re welcome to join us if you’d like.”
“Yes, I’m leaving,” she said grabbing up her Gucci tote from the table beside the couch. “And that brings me to the meaning of this visit.”
“What?” I didn’t understand.
“I have a question to ask you before I leave, and it is a question that will determine your future.”
“Okayyy,” I said raising my brow at her. I hoped she hadn’t started doing the same stuff that led my father to an accidental overdose.
“Do you hate him?”
“Hate who?”
“Demarcus Lancastor.”
“Yes,” I answered without having to think about it.
I didn’t need fifteen years to tell me that. Although my time allowed me to accept my fate, it was one that I would ne
ver forgive Marco for. While I was in there rotting away, he was on the outside getting richer and richer. He’d caught a few cases for drugs, extortion, and money laundering, but he beat them every time. I used to be in the cafeteria of the prison seething in anger whenever he walked out of the courtroom wearing a glorious smile. With each passing day, my loathing for that man grew until it turned to a passionate hatred—A hate that burned a hole so deeply in my heart that love could never grow again.
“Do you have any regrets?” she asked, looking down at me.
“Yes. Only one.”
“And what is that?”
“That I didn’t kill that son of a bitch when I had the chance.”
“Good answer.” Patricia gave me an approving smile and nodded her head before reaching in her purse, pulling from it a large stack of money. “Now, let me go pay dear Ms. Trudy so we can get you out of here and into some clothes that suit you. My niece can’t be walking around looking like she got dressed from a grandma’s closet!”
“W-what?” I asked trying to grasp her words.
She leaned down and kissed both of my cheeks before placing her hands on them.
“Twenty thousand dollars for your freedom.” She was so close to me that I could smell the minty freshness on her breath as she shined her white teeth in my face. “I would have paid ten times that, because, you, my dear, are priceless. Go upstairs and grab anything you need, then meet me in the black Maybach parked at the end of the street. We have much to discuss.”
Chapter 3
If anybody would have told me that my aunt Patricia was the head of an underground drug cartel, I would have laughed in their face and called them stupid. But that was before I rode in the back of her Maybach with her, and way before I pulled up to her mansion in Towne Lake.
“Auntie, you live here?” I asked in amazement.
“Yes,” she said proudly as the driver pulled into her half circle driveway in front of her tandem garage. She grinned and grabbed my hand to pull me out of the car when the driver opened her door. “This is my two-story, four-bedroom, four-bathroom, 4,000 square foot home. Correction, this is our home. Come on so I can explain some things to you.”
Without a question, I followed her to the front door, but not before getting a peek at the other houses in the neighborhood. Everybody who lived there had to be millionaires or something because I’d never seen houses that big before. The one I lived in with Marco all those years ago could fit inside one of those houses, and that was saying something because his house was big. The moment I stepped foot inside Aunt Patricia’s, I mean our, home, I felt my stomach drop. She had a fountain with a naked angel spewing water from his mouth into water filled with—
“Are those fish?” I leaned down and saw live fish swimming carefree in the clear water of the fountain. “Oh my God, Auntie. You have to be rich to have some shit like this in your home.”
“Come on,” she told me. “Let me show you around before I take you upstairs to your room.”
She gave me a quick rundown of the house and introduced me to the help. Her main housekeeper’s name was Gloria, and she was a nice chocolate-skinned older woman who looked to be in her upper sixties. Aunt Patricia then took me to the basement and showed me her home theater and the dance floor she had built next to it.
“I always wanted a dance floor in my house,” she admitted to me when she showed me the bar room in the basement. “And now I have someone to shake my old ass with!”
“I’m old now too,” I giggled and sat on a bar stool while she was on the other side acting as bartender. “Or at least I feel like it after being holed up with all those old drug heads.”
“Girl, stop!” she exclaimed, pulling out a full bottle of Patrón from the fridge. “You don’t even look a minute older than twenty-five!”
“That’s how old I was when I got locked up,” I said watching her pour both of us shots of the liquor. “Like you said, I didn’t have much to do but work out and eat. I put on some pounds but curved them out. I guess I do look good for my age, huh?”
“Damn right! And once we get you out of those clothes, you’re gon’ show these little heffas what you’re working with. But right now, you look like somebody named Edna!”
“Anna Mae!” I joined in on her clowning me. It was like no time had passed between us. I felt like I was a teenager, and she was my cool-ass aunt all over again.
“Girl, shut yo’ crazy ass up!” she said, howling with laughter. “Take this damn shot so we can celebrate you finally being back home!”
We took one shot, and then followed it by three more. Before I knew it, we were both on the dance floor stepping to R. Kelly’s “Step in the Name of Love” like two best friends finally reunited. We danced and laughed until finally the song went off and we sat along the mirrored wall worn out. I figured that would be the best time to ask her the questions swarming around in my mind. The last time I saw her, she was living in a one-bedroom apartment not far away from our house in the hood. How could she afford all of this? Not only that, how was she able to pay Tru $20,000? She had held the stack of money in her perfectly manicured hands like it wasn’t nothing. Also, how had she pulled the strings to get me out of the halfway house without anyone stinking their noses in my business?
“Auntie, how can you afford all of this? And what did you mean when you said we had business to discuss?”
“I guess it’s time for me to do some explaining, isn’t it?” she said, leaning back on the wall behind her. “I wished you would have asked me this before I had all those damn shots, child.”
“Auntie—”
“OK,” Aunt Patricia said. “I’m going to give it to you straight, just like that Patrón. I got all of this,” she waved her hands around, “because I am the widow of a drug kingpin. The best drug lord to ever bless the state of Texas.”
“Who?” I asked, trying to think of any other names that I knew of but drew up a blank. I could only pinpoint one. “The only kingpin I knew of was Antonio Lancastor, Marco’s father.”
“Ding, ding, ding! Boy, you are bright, aren’t you?”
“W-what? Auntie, you were married to Antonio?”
“Yes,” she answered, and her face became dreamy. “I was. We were just getting to know each other around the time your father started his mess, and although it hurt me to stay away from you, I had my own life to live. We were married five years after that, the same year you went to prison. I kept my last name, though, only because his ex-wife was spiteful enough to keep his. He was the best thing that ever happened to me. He was loyal, honest, and always took care of home. It never bothered him that I could not have children. He always said it didn’t matter to him, and that he could have me all to himself.” She stopped to smile happily to herself before continuing. “He was a good man, and I just wish I could say the same about his son.”
“So you guys were together while Marco and I were?”
“Apparently, but I found out about your relationship with Marco too late,” she said nodding her head. “But around that time, Marco had many different women, and I’m sorry to say, that house he had you living in was not his only home. His outrageous spending habits were one of the many things that used to drive Antonio up a wall. Marco was supposed to inherit the throne, but every day, he showed his father that he was not ready. When the cancer hit, Antonio had just remade his will. Nobody knew it, but he had appointed someone he knew in charge of his empire.”
“Who?”
“Me. You see, I was more than a housewife. Yes, I could clean and cook the best chicken that man ever tasted in his life, but I knew how to flip a brick too. I have always been good with math, so the drug game was nothing to me. My innovative business ideas marketed his product in ways he never thought possible. I helped him bring in more green than he’d seen in his whole career as a dope man, and the fact that I have the aim of a marksman was an added bonus. That’s why when he died last year, I became the queen of Houston. It wasn’t the most des
ired lifestyle, but I would ride to the moon and back with that man if he needed me to. You would have loved him.”
The look on her face was such a happy one that I was sure she was telling the truth. The smile she had on her face as she went down memory lane was the same one she wore when she saw me for the first time in fifteen years.
“I bet Marco wasn’t too happy about his father choosing you over him.”
“No.” The smile wiped instantly from her face. “And that brings me to why we’re here. That boy is like the tack in the elephant’s foot, too small for me to reach. His father wasn’t even in the dirt for three months before he started a war with me.”
“War?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know y’all had the news in prison and in the halfway house. There is a new gang running around wreaking havoc on the city called DBD.”
“Yeah, I watched a few stories about them while on the inside. ‘Death Before Dishonor,’ right?” I nodded my head. “The stories were always running while an episode of some ratchet reality TV show was on, so I never saw too many of them. But last week at the house I saw they held a couple people hostage at a hair salon.”
“Just Right.”
“Just right what?”
“That’s the name of the hair salon. I know because I own it, along with the six other businesses they terrorized. They killed five people at the salon that day, trying to send a message, one of them being one of my closest friends, Tamika. DBD is a gang full of handpicked soldiers whose sole purpose is to shut this empire down.”
“Handpicked by who?”
“Demarcus Lancastor,” she said, looking me square in the eyes. “He is a cold, bitter man who will stop at nothing until my husband’s empire is in shambles at my feet.”
Girls from Da Hood 12 Page 18