“Lock his door and come on,” she mouths, rolling her eyes.
I whirl around and yank it closed without bothering to check the lock.
On my walk to the car, I make myself look forward, and as soon as I pull the passenger door open, Aunt Faye asks, “Where’s all my stuff at?”
“I…I uh. I forgot it in the living room?—”
“Lord,” she grumbles. “I’ll just get it when I come back next week. Rich’ll put it up for me.”
I swallow to soothe my dry throat, then get inside.
Rich’s neighbors watch us while she pushes the car into drive. She tosses a lazy wave at them and they all wave back. I avoid their gazes for the second time and scour Rich’s driveway for any evidence he’d been parked there, but there’s nothing. The driveway is still as spotless as his toilets were.
“So, how was it? Easy, right?” Aunt Faye asks, rolling to a stop at the stop sign on Joliet.
“Yeah. It…it was easy.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
RICH
Slim is skittish.
Faye told me her name in the voice message she sent me while I was on my way to Dr. Borrowitz’s office, but I can’t remember what she said it was, and when I went back to replay the message, it was gone. All I remember is her apologizing for the loud humming in the background from their washing machine.
I ain’t never been too good at remembering little shit like random women’s names anyways. Some stick and some don’t. I figure it’s because taking so many hits to the head don’t do a brain any favors, so I make up shit on the fly sometimes. Lil’ mama at Whole Foods with the red curly hair is “Red” because she never wears her name tag, baby girl with the fat ass that does security at the bank is “Sweetheart,” and now Kenny and Faye’s pretty niece is “Slim.”
Slim can’t weigh more than a buck twenty, and she moves around all gracefully when she thinks nobody is watching her. She walked around my kitchen like she’d been here before me oreven anybody—like she was the first woman that ever walked on Earth.
Women that look like Slim are the type that aren’t perfect but their imperfections make them sexy—like the tiny scar that stretches through the front of her left eyebrow, the little gap between her front teeth, and the dimples that sank into her cheeks even while she frowned at me.
She looked out of place in my kitchen with a fat rock sitting on her left ring finger. Shit, she looked good…. and terrifying with a pair of soft eyes as brown as a bottle of good whiskey. Senior always said soft eyes on a woman were dangerous because it meant they saw the good in everybody.
“Hmph,” I grunt, sweeping a shard of glass into my dustpan.
She ain’t even apologize for breaking my shit. Instead, she looked at me like I was gon’ snatch that ring off her finger before taking off like a bat out of hell.
My front door creaks open.
“That was Faye’s niece running up out of here?” Smitty asks, clunking through my kitchen in steel-toe boots with a cigarette dangling between his dark lips.
He ain’t never believed in knocking. As long as the front door is unlocked, he’ll walk right in.
“Mhmm,” I hum back, bending down to scoop a purple-green nugget in my hand. “Guess so.”
“Ooh-wee…” He whistles, spinning around. “What happened in here?”
“Jar in the cabinet was too heavy for her.”
I push up from the floor and toss a nugget on the kitchen island.
“I ain’t know she was back from New York,” Smitty says.
“What you mean ‘back from New York?’”
“That’s where she been living—in the Bronx…or Brooklyn… or Crooklyn. Whatever. All that shit the same up there anyhow,” Smitty rambles. “Dirty ass place.”
