“She’s going to tell us later anyway,” Berkeley said from her spot behind me on the couch. She was doing a word search and humming old songs.
“Exactly,” I agreed. “So, you may as well just spit it out.”
“Don’t spit,” Clarke said, shaking her head. “It’s unhygienic.”
“It’s a figure of speech, Clarke,” Berkeley said as she continued to work. ‘It means to say what you have to say.”
“I’m aware,” Clarke nodded. “Tulane has a habit of spitting when he’s upset, though.”
I looked over at Tulane to see him glaring at us. His facial expression went from annoyed to confused. He was used to dealing with people who did what he said and feared him. None of us did either. Most of the time, we argued with him to see how mad he would get. I had to give him his props; he hadn’t yelled at us yet.
“I don’t spit,” he grumbled as he walked into the living room. He looked at Berkeley’s feet that were on his white couch, and he rubbed the back of his neck. “Berkeley, your feet are on my couch.”
“They are,” she nodded. Berkeley sighed loudly, peeked over her book, and smiled at him. “You don’t like feet on your couch, Tulane?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” she said, then went back to looking at her word search. To annoy him further, she used her feet to shift the pillows and get more comfortable. “You should work on your control issues. Especially since you have four strangers living in your house.”
“You’re family, not strangers,” he sighed as he sat in the empty chair across from us. “I know what I need to know about you all.”
“You know the information you’ve collected from having us investigated or when you’d lie to us when doing business,” Spelman corrected him. She was on the other side of the room, lying under the skylight, watching the rain fall. “You don’t know us; there’s a difference.”
“I’m not here to argue,” he sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m here to talk to Yale about what I found out.”
“What did you find out?” I moved my bishop, then turned to look at Tulane. “And why are you just waiting to tell me now?”
“Because you’ve finally calmed down,” he answered with a chuckle, and I shrugged. “You went from not saying a word to cussing me the fuck out to back to not talking to calm.”
“Shock,” Berkeley interjected. “Every emotion she displayed was classic shock.” She gently tugged on my hair and laughed. “We’ve been working on her anger.”
“You’re using your sister as your therapist?” Tulane asked in disbelief, and I nodded. “Do you realize how off Berkeley is?” he asked, looking at Berkeley and shrugging. “No offense, but you know it’s true.”
“None taken,” she said, waving him off. “It’s a reason my license is suspended for the next three months.”
“Your license is suspended?” Spelman asked. “What the fuck did you do?”
“One of Berkeley’s patients filed a complaint stating that she stalked and even killed her patient and staged it to look like a suicide,” Tulane answered.
I turned around to look at Berkeley, “Did you do it?” I asked, and she shrugged. What I learned about Berkeley early on was that if she did something that could later incriminate her, she never gave a straight answer. “Yeah, you did it.”
“There are some people who don’t need to walk this earth,” she said, patting my cheek. “Some good, others bad, and then there are some that are beyond that.” She pointed to Tulane. “He taught me that the moment he walked into my office pretending to be a lost father.”
“I wasn’t pretending,” Tulane said. He sat forward, resting his elbows on the arm of his chair, and watched us closely. “I fucked up with each of your mothers. I know that, you all know that, and so did your mamas, but I never denied how I felt for each of them. I loved them to my fullest capabilities.”
“Yet, you left them to be single mothers,” Clarke said as she studied the board. “You loved them enough to impregnate them and walk away. Your fullest capabilities sucked.”
“My fullest capabilities allowed me to walk away so my lifestyle didn’t catch up with them or y’all,” he countered.
“Looks like that happened anyway,” Clarke reminded him. “We’re here in your home because of your fullest capabilities.”
“You’re here because I’m doing my job as your father and protecting you while Amethyst handles something from their past that’s come back around,” Tulane said, shaking his head.
“Which is?” Spelman asked.
Tulane looked at me, lifted his brow, and silently asked for permission. He nodded, ran his hands over his face, then sat back. “I don’t even know how to start this fucking conversation,” he sighed. Tulane’s eyes bounced between the four of us before he settled on me.
“From the beginning, Tulane, always start your stories from the beginning,” Clarke said, then looked up at me. “Checkmate.”
