I thumb through the bills and count them once, twice, and then a third time even though there’s a whole line of dudes behind us nursing bloody lips and swollen limbs just like me. The hot skin around my eyes is so tender that it throbs every time I blink.
Ms. Kathy narrows her eyes at us over her cat-eye glasses. “Y’all holding up my line.”
Arnez backs away first with her eyes set on the line of hair above Ms. Kathy’s lip.
“Don’t…you…say…shit,” I mutter, yanking her arm and pulling her off to the side of the line while shoving the money in the pocket of my shorts.
She snatches out of my hold. “That old bitch been counting money behind that counter for over thirty years and you believe she can’t see how much more we owe? They even gave her ass a whole computer. She can see something.”
The fucked up part about having Arnez as my mouthpiece is that she doesn’t think before she speaks sometimes. Senior was always getting on her about it.
I pull one of her long braids until she snatches it from between my fingers and slaps my sore chest.
“Do you see me trippin?” I garble the words out because I can’t open my mouth all the way.
“It’s the principle. How’re we supposed to know what we owe if he never tells us or gives us anything in writing? Are we supposed to pay fourteen hundred to the fuckin house until we die?” she yelps.
The rest of the line looks over at us.
I pull her arm again and hold it tight this time. I yank her all the way past the line, back through the dank garage and out to the parking lot. I don’t stop until we get to my truck’s tailgate.
I pull the money out of my pocket and peel off ten hundred-dollar bills. “Hm.”
She frowns at it. “Tell me you’ll talk to Rasheeda and make that appointment with Melo.”
I nod.
“Pup…” she whines. “Don’t lie to me.”
It’s times like these that remind me that Arnez is still a woman no matter how comfortable she is in a garage full of men or how baggy her clothes are. She still has that air of naivety about her that women carry no matter how old they get. She still doesn’t understand that some things in life are permanent and crying won’t change a damn thing.
Her eyes well with tears and a ball forms in my throat.
She ain’t used to cry like this back when shit first went down. But then the shock wore off, and we kept paying fourteen hundred dollars to the house like we were told, then all the Sundays started blurring together. Now she cries every time we leave Lucky’s like she wasn’t just telling me to end somebody.
I push the money out toward her again. “Take it.”
She swipes her red nose and looks away while the setting sun shines on the tiny mole next to her bottom lip.
She doesn’t look anything like me or Senior. He always said she looked just like her mama, Denise. He met Denise in Galveston at The Kappa in ‘93 and she asked him if she could give him a baby as soon as they brushed arms on East Beach. Shesaid he “looked like he needed some love.” He put Arnez in her that same night in the back of Smitty’s Mustang.
Her family called him nine months later to pick Arnez up from CHRISTUS so she could go back to school at Wiley and forget about him and the mistake she made. Denise ain’t even bother naming Arnez, so Senior and Smitty did when they got to the hospital. They named her after Smitty’s older brother. Senior always said Arnez was the best mistake he ever made.
She wipes away a tear.
I try to tell her to take the money again, but my jaw locks.
The week after Dr. Borrowitz wired it shut, Smitty taught me how to relax my muscles long enough to spit a few words out. Now I can grunt out a sentence without feeling like I’m gonna rip my teeth out, but Arnez was pushing it.
“Take,” I murmur with a grimace.
She snatches the crumpled bills then stomps toward the passenger side of my truck.
CHAPTER
THREE
LOVIE
