Slim staresat the dust that Wendell’s pickup truck kicks up while I stare at the way her soft curls blow in the wind.
She’s a lot like Faye, and I don’t think either of them realize it. Faye showed up on our porch one day asking for Senior with a duffel bag hanging off her slender shoulder and tears in her eyes. She was pretty in a sad way that a wilted rose is, and Arnez used to say she must ain’t have any family because why else would she wanna be with us? No other woman Senior fucked ever wanted to just be with us—except for Faye.
“Who was that?” Slim asks, turning around.
I shake my head, nudging her in the back toward Worthing. “It was nobody.”
Wendell Barnes is just like his brother, Melo, minus the tenacity. They’re like that annoying piece of gum that won’t come off the bottom of your shoe no matter how many times you drag it across the concrete.
He’s somebody Slim didn’t need to be smiling at and giving her name to, but I had no right to tell her that because she ain’t mine no matter how good her hand felt in mine, or howmuch she hated when I told her to go. Her brain is still fused to that ballplayer’s. If it wasn’t, she wouldn’t still be protecting his reputation. Arnez is the same way with Jamari even though it’s been two months since he left her, though. She even keeps his picture in her car.
“Well, he’s obviously somebody to you if he came looking for you,” Slim says.
“Right…he said he was looking forme,not you, nosy girl.”
Her cheek lifts and her eyes dart away as I pull the cake she brought closer to my side.
If Kenny had big nuts, he’d kill me for tricking her into coming to find me again. He’d walk right up to me and bust my ass, but I don’t think his nuts even hang like that for real.
“So, is you good or what?” I ask, pointing to the black bag hanging off her shoulder. “Or you already spent the money I gave you last week?”
Her cheek falls in a way that makes my stomach drop as if she’s my irresponsible girl who burns through my money faster than I can make it.
“No…I…I just…”
“You just what?” I reach inside the front pocket of my duffel, feeling around for my phone.
I pull it out, waiting for her to give me whatever excuse pretty girls like her dole out after burning through a man’s money. I open Cash App just as the lamppost above us flickers on. Crickets chirp out in the distance while my thumb hovers over the numbers and another car speeds by, honking.
I look up at her. “You just …what?”
“Nothing. Forget it.” She huffs, crossing her arms over her middle.
“C’mon, tough girl. You ain’t got all night, remember? So what is it? What’s the problem?”
She looks down the street and her upper lip twitches, and I think this is slowly turning into one of those “tact” situations.
I look away with her just like we did last week on Joliet. This time Iknowwe look stupid as hell, but for some reason I don’t mind looking stupid with her.
“What that nigga do with your money, Slim?” I ask, staring out onto the empty road.
“His money was never my money, Rich.”
“None of it?”
“None.”
It’s a concept I can’t understand even though I ain’t never been engaged, married, or committed to a woman. In my world, money had always just been… money. It was hard-earned and well spent.
Rasheeda took it out of my wallet to do shit like reload Ky’s lunch account because her husband stopped doing it when they separated, and Red liked for me to pick out her hairstyles and pay for them. There’s just something about a pretty ass woman sticking her hand out in front of me that makes me feel like Ihaveto put something in it.
Slim gulps in a breath of air, glancing down as a tiny gust of wind kicks up a cloud of dirt. It swirls around in a circle next to her foot.
“Everythingwas his,” she says.
I glance at her boots that made me question my sanity and point at them. “Even those?”
“Yeah…even these.”
