“What?”
“Mr. Copeland said if I want anything to happen around here…” She twirls her finger. “I should mention your name and it’ll happen—just like how I got that cake.”
I snort. “I told you Mr. Copeland just be running his mouth.”
“Hm… sounds like most of what he says is facts and not bullshit like you want me to think.” She curls her hand around the money, biting her lip. “So now what?”
“Now go home.”
Her upper lip twitches, and she drops her hand at her side, crumpling the money. “What if I don’t want to?”
“Hey…” Slim sighs into her phone, leaning against my truck. “Yeah, he was still at the gym, so we just dropped the cake off there. I’m…I’m at Terrica’s now. She wants to change before we head to Meechie’s. Uh-huh.”
I’m obviously a pussy. A realbigpussy. Because I don’t know how to tell pretty baby birds “no”—especially not when they look at me and tell me they don’t wanna leave me. Well, that’s not exactly what Slim said, but she might as well have.
She glances up at Beatrice’s wrought-iron fence, then over at me while I lean against Beatrice’s Lexus that’s parked next to my truck in the cut beside her house.
“Terrica’s mama?” she chirps, wrinkling her eyebrows at me.
I shrug, giving her a corny thumbs up like she did to me back at the gym even though I don’t know Terrica’s mama.
I don’t even think I know Terrica. If I did, I haven’t seen her in so long that her face and name had fallen into that dark part of my brain I couldn’t get to anymore and I didn’t care. Anybody that could abandon Slim after what she went through didn’t deserve to be remembered.
Slim smiles nervously. “Oh, her…her mama’s good. She looks great. I’ll tell her you asked about her.”
She’s a bad liar, and Kenny and Faye must not pay enough attention to her to notice. Her stutter gets worse and makes her words fall out in messy clumps and she tugs her bottom lip into her mouth, giving it a light suck after each lie.
“Uh-huh. Love you too,” she says, pulling the phone from her ear and hanging up.
She blubbers out a breath, groaning and dropping the cracked iPhone back into her purse.
“Still sinning, huh?” I ask.
She rolls her eyes, snatching the cake from the top of my truck. “Who are you to judge?”
“Right…I forgot I doillicit drugs.” I chuckle to myself, pushing up from the car and stepping onto the narrow sidewalk that leads to Beatrice’s front gate.
“And fight at Lucky’s…and carry a gun,” she mutters under her breath as her heels clack against the sidewalk behind me.
I stop walking and she runs into my back.
“Ouch,” she whines.
“You talk a lot of shit for somebody following me around, begging to be my friend.”
“What in the reverse psychology? Let’s make one thing clear—Lovie Sinclair hasneverbegged to be anybody’s friend.”
I smirk, stopping in front of Beatrice’s gate and looking over my shoulder. “Oh, for real?”
“For real.”
“You especially ain’t begged a terrible motherfucka like me, huh?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you wanted to.”
“Your insecurities are showing,Pup.”
