My plan was to get Crew over here today so that he could spend time with me and King. I cleaned up the house, or the apartment, I should say, and made sure King had on the cute little outfit I got him from the Gucci store yesterday. Brushing his hair was always difficult because it was so straight that it would never lay down. I put baby oil in it, added lotion and kept working at it until it finally stayed, making him look like a little Hispanic Papi with a part on the side.
I walked around the apartment, making sure everything was in place before I called Crew and demanded that he came over. Just as I was about to reach for my phone, it rang on the counter. I was a little irritated because it disturbed my little Papi, and he didn't like being woken up from his sleep.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said softly as I rushed over and grabbed the phone. When I saw the number, my irritation doubled. It was Nurse Alana who I’d already paid for her services, so what more could she want from me at this point?
“Hello?” I answered.
The way she took forever to speak let me know some shit was about to go wrong.
“Hey, can you talk?”
“Yes, I am alone. What’s up, girl?”
“I just looked over the office reports, and y’all are on the retake list.”
“What do you mean retake list?”
“Apparently, your test and results got flagged. The DNA profiles came back too similar to one another.”
“What, so you’re saying it didn’t actually work?”
“I mean, it worked for the time being. Yours was flagged when the system reviewed the submitted DNA profiles. I pushed your positive results email through on my end, but I wasn’t aware that the lab flagged it and it bounced back for retesting until I saw your name on a call back list this morning. The retesting has never happened since I been here the past year. I thought I could send the samples off and days later mark them as a match manually in the system. I didn't know that they would pick up on that and flag them.”
“That is complete bull shit. So, you got paid, and nothing actually went through?”
She got quiet on the phone.
“So, what does that mean about the payment you received from me? Since everything is fucked now? I paid you fifty thousand dollars for this. You said it was going to work.”
“It did work. I mean, I don’t really know what to do at this point. I've already paid the tuition for my daughter’s school, and you can’t get a refund for it. I called you as soon as I saw the the callback list.”
“Fuck a heads up, you need to figure out how the fuck this is about to work, because once they call us in for a retest, if Crew decides to go through with it, then I’m fucked.”
“Yeah, I know. I'm sorry.”
“Listen, I know you didn’t mean for this to happen, but you need to figure this shit out ASAP or find a way to get me my money back!”
I hung up the phone.
Why is it that every time I hire somebody to do some snake-ass shit, it ends up fucking me in the long run? I swear, being dirty is almost just as hard as being clean. Maybe that’s the whole point. It takes more effort to be a snake than to actually be decent.
I sat down on the couch, mad as hell that my opportunity didn’t turn out how I thought it would. Here I was, preparing for family day, and Alana was calling to tell me this whole shit could blow up in my face any day now.
“Fuck,” I muttered. “I can’t let another bitch think for me.
What can I do? What can I do?”
I rocked back and forth on the couch like King was in my arms, only he wasn’t.
I knew the only way this shit was going to work was if they didn’t do the test again at all, but how the fuck was I supposed to stop that?
“Man, all of this is literally about to blow up in my face.” I kept speaking to myself out loud and that’s when it hit me.
Blow up in my face.
They can’t contact us about retesting if they don’t have an office to do it in. And they can’t care about what’s flagged if the entire place is up in smoke.
I grabbed my phone and dialed Tech’s number, and it rang a few times before he answered.
