Kismet 3

by Raynesha Pittman

  You have plenty of enemies out here. I’m just waiting for your funeral information because I wouldn’t miss being there for the world. That day that you lay in your casket will be the day you pay off your debt to me and Big Ant. You took him from us at the peak of his career and at the start of a new chapter in his life. I wouldn’t miss the opportunity to be on the page where the last chapter of your painful life ends. Karma is a bitch, but Kismet is the only bitch Karma backs down to. You better figure out which bitch is coming for you, then beg for forgiveness—twice!

  —Melinda

  On the day of her funeral, I had overslept from spending the night before in a bottle of Rémy with beer as the chaser. If it weren’t for the limo service picking the family up from our house, I wouldn’t have woken up. One by one, the family of Savannah piled in, dressed in all white as previously agreed. The Jeffersons and Sade only planned on attending the church service so they could get back here and prepare the food for the repast. I filled up the largest flask I owned with Rémy, then made my way to the limo that trailed the coffin in the hearse with Savannah’s family.

  “Good morning, family, friends, and loved ones. Today, we come together in celebration of a beautiful woman who was blessed with a beautiful, but short-lived life, our sister, Ms. Savannah James. Due to embalming issues, the family has requested a closed casket service, but we don’t need to see her face to remember what we felt for her in our heart...” the pastor said as he took his place next to her casket.

  I was listening, but I wasn’t feeling anything, and the truth is, no one else seemed to be feeling anything either.

  Even though it was a funeral, everyone looked more relieved by Savannah’s death than saddened. I don’t recall seeing tears fall from anyone’s eyes except Sade’s. It almost pissed me off that Savannah’s death didn’t sadden anyone, but look at the woman she was and the life she had lived. She had to have been a sweet and innocent girl before she chose her direction, this I had to believe. It just had been so long since anyone had seen that side of her that they must have forgotten it. I didn’t expect any of her childhood friends to attend because Savannah had wronged them, and none did except for Melinda for the reasons she had written in her letter, and Will.

  “Hey, Dre, I didn’t want it to end like this for her. Man, my heart is with you and your baby girl. We are family. If you need anything, I’m right here like I’ve always been. Security.” He smiled at me, and I pulled him in for a hug.

  “I appreciate it” was all I said in return.

  Besides the blood-related family, no one else came to pay their respects besides her colleagues and ex-lovers that remained friendly. I was surprised to see Stephanie at the service, but I think she was only there because she was a partner at the firm since she didn’t make it to the cemetery or the repast. She didn’t cry, but the way she rocked as she held my son, I knew she was hurting.

  “Can you introduce me to our son, please?” It took everything in me to walk up to her, but I wouldn’t be in the same place as my child and pretend I didn’t see him.

  “Andrew, this is your father, Mr. Andre Burns,” she said as she handed him to me. If he was born on Savannah’s birthday, he was now six months old and a big boy for his age. Looking into his face, it took everything in me not to let a tear fall. He was my twin. He didn’t look like Stephanie, not one bit. I tried to find one thing that would make him hers, but there wasn’t anything there.

  “Hey, big boy, look at you. You’re handsome, just like your daddy. Your mama and I have some stuff to work out, but I want you to know I’m never leaving your side. Where you live, Daddy will live nearby, and if I can’t, then you will just have to come live with me.”

  “Dre—”

  “Don’t ‘Dre’ me, Stephanie. You didn’t take those morning-after pills for a reason, so you will have to deal with the consequences that come with it. I love kids, and I’m a damn good daddy.”

  “I know you are. You know I do, but you can’t just sit here and think I’m going to give him up because of the games that were played around him.”

  “Come up with something to make it right. I can’t leave Nashville for four years. Tell me what we are going to do to make it work. You still have my number?”

  “Yeah, I still have it.”

  “Then use it every day so that I can talk to my son, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “When do you leave Washington?”

  “Tomorrow night at 7:00.”

  “Can I keep him until you and I can meet for breakfast in the morning?”

  “Dre, I don’t think—”

  “You don’t have to say it,” I said, cutting her off. “Well, after this stuff right here is over with, can I swing by your hotel with Sade so she can meet her brother and maybe come back later and stay the night with him? I won’t touch you nor will I try to. It’s all about him.”

  “Let’s see how it goes when you and Sade come, and I will decide from there, okay?”

  “Cool.”

  The rest of the day was filled with joy as we listened to Savannah’s father, uncles, and brother recall her childhood before all the bullshit began. As I had previously assumed, Savannah was once her father’s angel. As he told story after story, all I could think about was preserving my daughter’s innocence’s to the harsh reality of the world as long as I could. The day flew by fast, and I never had the urge to reach in my coat to take a swig of my flask. I was drunk from all the love and support that filled the house.

  Like all good things, they come to an end as the doorbell rang. Dressed in all black with a veil over her face, Savannah’s mother, Peaches, walked in. No one knew who she was, but being the only one in all black caused her to stand out and get the guests whispering around the house until she had grabbed the attention of not only Savannah’s brother, Memphis, but of his father as well. The three of us must have asked her in unison, but all I could hear was the sound of my own voice.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Fellas, what kind of question is that to ask a grieving mother? I’m here for the same reason as everyone, and that’s to mourn the death of my baby girl, Sa... Savannah. Oh my baby girl, Savannah.”

  She fell on her knees and pretended to be bawling her eyes out, crying. For half a second, I thought Mr. James was falling for it as he made his way to her side. Instead, he snatched her up by her left armpit and starting pulling her to my bedroom.

  “Dre and Memphis, come on.”

  He wasn’t asking us to join him in the back; he demanded it. All the guests in the house went silent without a clue of what was going on, and I could hear the Jeffersons wrapping up the gathering as we entered my bedroom. Mr. James released his grasp on her by slamming her onto my bed.

  “What the fuck are you up to now, Trisha?”

  She snorted like an overweight pig at the man she should have been addressing as husband. “Don’t call me Trisha, Dwight. I prefer Peaches.”

  She unruffled her clothes and sat up tall. After months of being around Peaches, I had finally figured her out. She was in a huge identity battle with herself, and the name Trisha vs. Peaches belonged to two different women. Both of the women were snakes in the grass, but Peaches was supposed to be the calmer one of the two. This identity crisis she was going through meant nothing to the rest of us.

  Memphis spoke up. “Peaches or Trisha, it doesn’t matter what we call you, because a dog of a different breed is still a dog, and you’re still a bitch.”

  Mr. James looked at his son as if he was going to correct him for disrespecting his mother, but he snatched off Peaches’s veil and repeated himself. “What the fuck are you up to now, Trisha?”

  She removed her black glove off her hand, revealing a wedding ring with a rock the size of a quarter in it. “I don’t have to respond to you anymore, Dwight. You’re not my husband. Like I told you in my letter, I’ve married me a real man.”

  “How could you have married a real man when you’
re not even a real woman? And you will respond to me if you want to make it out of this house alive.”

  So much pain and anger blazed in Mr. James’s eyes that I took his threat to be serious, so I intervened. “Stop the bullshit, Trisha, and tell us what you want. You don’t come around without panhandling.”

  She looked offended by my words, but we all knew they were true, and she did too. She went straight into her spiel.

  “I came for my piece of the insurance money that’s coming to you, Mr. Andre Burns, sole beneficiary listed on all of Savannah’s insurance policies, and from you, Mr. Dwight James, owner of a $300,000 policy that you paid off on Savannah and Memphis by their twenty-first birthdays. I also was lucky enough to get a million-dollar policy going once I tracked her down in California and saw the lifestyle she was living. The problem I’m running across with that policy is that the United States still has us listed as married, Dwight, so the company wants us to come in together and sign some papers. Don’t worry. I’m not that selfish. I’m prepared to give you $25,000 for whatever trouble that causes you to help me get it done, although I am the only one who paid those premiums. The way I see it, between the two of you, I should be 1.5 million dollars richer before I leave Washington again.”

  “Even in death, you only see your daughter as a cash register,” I yelled as Trisha began pulling paperwork out of her purse and sorting it out on the bed like she hadn’t heard me.

  “You know my original plan was to have Savannah kill myself and then blackmail Dwight for his insurance payout.” She nodded her head toward Mr. James. “I thought I could get you to do it for me for free, Dre, and then you let me down. I watched your drunken ass break the lights over the door at Royce’s hotel room, plotting to get him but hoped you waited and decided to kill them both instead. I called your phone from the parking lot urgently asking you to meet me down the street to go over our plan. If I hadn’t, you would have killed him, and my backup plan wouldn’t have worked.” She then nodded at Memphis as to say he was the backup plan.

  “You see, when we all met up at the hotel, Savannah wasn’t supposed to sign over the money to me, which would have pissed you off and caused you to kill her and Royce. My idiot of a son here was supposed to come in the room and kill you, avenging his sister’s death, but his scary ass sent me a text from the car saying you were still in the hall when he got off the elevator, and he had changed his mind. The little bitch went walking off.”

  “Fuck you, bitch!” Memphis snapped at her, this time hushed by his father.

  There wasn’t a need for me to say a word about anything that she had said because Mr. James had directed me differently. “Andre, make sure the house is clear for me, will you, son? I want you to get my son, Memphis, here, and y’all head over to the police station. Report what you heard here tonight and everything else you know she’s a part of, like that big wire transfer from Savannah’s account, and how she had you break in your sister’s house by blackmail, Memphis. When y’all are done reporting it all, tell them the reason why y’all are telling them everything.”

  It wasn’t just Memphis who was lost by his father’s last words, because I felt confused by them too. Mr. James snatched Trisha’s purse that she had tightly at her side and retrieved a gun from it.

  “Tell them you gave them all of that information because you needed to report a homicide. I’ll be outside sitting on the curb when the police arrive.” He pointed the gun at Trisha’s head.

  I grabbed Memphis by his shirt, tugging him out of the room.

  “Let me go, Dre. Let me go. She isn’t worth it, Daddy. Please, no!”

  I couldn’t protest against Mr. James’s choice, especially not after committing homicide on my own future wife. He had enough information on the evil that Savannah’s mama was running around committing to get off with manslaughter, and I knew just the lawyer we’d hire to ensure it, that’s if they didn’t force Royce to be a witness. Before I left him to commit one of the biggest sins we as flesh could commit, I said my last few words to him as a free man.

  “I’ll make sure to tell them how she held us at gunpoint trying to get the money we are getting from the insurance companies, Mr. James. So, try not to get blood on all those papers Peaches took the time to dig up. Memphis and I will have your lady friend waiting on you at the house when you get released. After I tell Royce about what went down with Savannah, I know he’ll get you off your charge.”

  “Thanks, son, and one more thing. I’ll need you to be at my side when I bury my wife. I guess I will know what that feels like after this.”

  “I’ll always be there when you need me to be. Let’s go, Memphis.” Mr. James smiled at me in understanding, and I got Memphis into the hallway without any more hassle. He knew his dad would be all right after this, and the way he looked at his mother as he soaked up one last look at her alive said he wouldn’t miss her, nor would he be holding anything against his father for deciding to lay her down. As I closed the bedroom door behind us, I said, “Rest in piss, Trisha.”

  Epilogue

  It had been weeks since leaves had fallen to the ground, and snow now covered them and their deaden tracks. It was freezing out, but Sade had made a pact with herself that no matter where she found herself in the world or what she was going through, she’d return to her parents’ graves every year on Valentine’s Day. The day itself had no significance to her parents’ relationship, but she enjoyed the irony of it. It helped coat the pain that was already disappearing and acted as a reminder on why she’d never allow herself to fall in love. It had been sixteen years since she had heard her mother’s voice and three years since she felt her father’s last loving embrace.

  Although her parents weren’t the ideal couple, she felt a bond with them both, so she had them buried side by side. It was hard for her to place flowers on her father’s grave after being a daddy’s girl for so many years. But that all changed on Sade’s eighteenth birthday when her father confessed something that she wasn’t ready to accept, and she didn’t. Just thinking of his words made a tear fall from her eye, which she was sure had frozen before it would make its way down her cheek. After checking her surroundings for other mourners, Sade began talking to her parents.

  “Hey, you two, it’s been a year since our last visit, and I can’t pretend that I’ve missed you, but I’m here. It’s our third anniversary all together as a family and my third therapy session. I’m sure if I were ever to tell anyone I came out here and did this every year, they’d swear I was crazy, but, honestly, what did they really expect me to be with the two of you as parents? All my life I was told of my sex-crazed mother who had given me up to foster care to prevent my father from raising me properly, and how she died of an accidental shooting trying to prevent her plotted-out death. Your story, Mama, always sounds like something you’d read in a fiction book or see on a daytime soap opera to me. I mean, what kind of bitch screws her child’s life up to pursue a life of meaningless sex?

  “I’m sure if you could speak up, you’d be trying to defend yourself right now, but I wouldn’t listen. I’m a daddy’s girl. Always have been, always will be. It broke my heart, Mama, when Daddy sat me down on my eighteenth birthday and smoked that blunt with me. He knew I had been sneaking and smoking weed, just as I knew he smoked heavily, but he had never asked me to join him in smoking. I guess we needed to, huh, Daddy? Or else, you wouldn’t have been able to tell me how you were the one who had killed my mother and calling it an accident was just an alibi for the truth. You told me you wanted her dead because, in a split second, you realized you wouldn’t want to spend life without her. Oh, don’t mind these tears that fall. They fall at the memory of hearing you confess, Daddy, not because I’m hurt from your death, Mama. I know it had to have taken you years to decide when the perfect time to tell me was, and even though you thought eighteen would do, you were still wrong. It hurt me to hear that my daddy and hero was a cold-blooded killer that my mama had fallen victim to.

  “But I go
t over it.

  “As I watched you drink that whole bottle of poison that I dressed up as punch, I felt the forgiveness flow right through me. I didn’t think I could pull it off. I had to get the bottle of poison in your hands, then get five hours away with my foster parents and make sure I called to check on you, Daddy. After a day or so of you not answering my calls, my other daddy, or Mr. Jefferson, as the two of you liked to call him, called the police and asked them to check on you. My God, Daddy, Ryan, being the good friend that he was to you, took his time to tell me in person that you were found dead after committing suicide. I was so heartbroken and had told the police of your confession the day before you took your own life. You were saddened by what you had done to my mother that you killed yourself on her death date to make the shit symbolic. You see, the two of you weren’t meant to procreate, because the combination of DNAs created a monster. While other twenty-one-year-olds are planning their futures, I’m already living mine. Don’t worry. I’m going to school, and my grades are fine. It’s what I do in my free time that should worry you. All I’ll say is I’m definitely my mother’s child and a daddy’s girl for life. Happy Valentine’s Day, you lovebirds.”

  “Are you coming, or do you plan on moving out here with them? Just let me know so I can drive off,” her oldest brother, Andre Jr., yelled at her from his car. They weren’t siblings by blood but had been raised together at her father’s wishes. Although he believed his sister was completely out of her mind for making the annual trip, he always volunteered to make it with her because he knew why she had to, but that wouldn’t make him join her at their graves.

  “Yeah, hurry up, sis. It’s cold out here. I’m ready to get back to Nashville, where it’s warm. My nuts are freezing.”