Page 5 of His Four Leaf Clover

Hank was good living the square life for a while and the money from his businesses was good. He was able to open a second location for his business and it was thriving just as well as the first. He chilled out for years until an opportunity was presented to him that he just couldn’t pass up. Crazy thing was, it was Dash who pulled him back in and the money was insane. He would die before he told that to his wife though. His last born was intelligent and every move he made always increased their revenue. Hank never knew that meth was so high in demand, but it was apparently the drug of choice for a lot of people. One of Dash’s professors in college taught him how to cook it and the rest was history.

True to her word, Diva packed up and left as soon as she found out what he was up to. Hank was a man if nothing else, so he gave his wife the house that they once shared and moved into a three-bedroom townhouse not too far away with her brother, Denny. He told her not to even waste her time filing for divorce because that wasn’t happening. He had almost reached his financial goal and he swore that he was done after that. The single life wasn’t for him and he loved being married.

“Yeah, I hear you.” Hank sighed.

“I’ll see you when I get there.” Diva hung up the phone without giving him a chance to reply.

“Where she at?” Fonzo asked once his father was off the phone.

“She’s on her way. Where that nigga, Monty, at?”

“I don’t even know. I called his phone but he didn’t answer. I’m going sit back in my car. I don’t have time to be playing with these two slow muthafuckas. I told y’all they wasn’t gon’ be up this early. My baby gon’ be looking for her gifts.”

“I would use my key but ain’t no telling what’s going on in there,” Hank replied, making his oldest son laugh.

“Man, hell no. I’m not ‘bout to play with Dash and Clo this early in the morning. They probably be in there fucking.”

A lot had changed over the years, but they weren’t all bad. Hank remembered thinking that he was gonna have a problem out of his youngest son when Clover came to live with them. Dash refused to acknowledge Clover as a sibling and, eventually, they found out why. Dash was like Clover’s unofficial bodyguard when she moved in with them, and Diva thought it was cute when they were younger.

As they got older, it turned into something that she grew to abhor. Clover was beautiful, and Dash wanted to fight anybody who even looked at her too hard. Apparently, he was crushing on her and saw her as something more than a sister. Clover was crushing on him too and they had been messing around right under their noses. Fonzo, Monty and Clover’s two best friends knew but they never told a soul.

Clo was eighteen by the time Diva and Hank found out and she was already three months pregnant with their daughter, Kardashian, by then. It was Kardi’s sixth birthday and it so happened to fall on the same day that she started first grade. Kardi was the only grandchild so far and the apple of everyone’s eyes. They always made a big deal out of everything that had to do with her, hence the reason for their early morning visit. She was a perfect mixture of her parents and the only normalcy in their lives.

Clover and Dash had the most dysfunctional relationship that any of them had ever seen. They got married when their daughter turned a year old and were divorced before she made five. Six months after the divorce was final, they got a house built from the ground up and moved in like they didn’t have a bitter split less than a year earlier. They always tried to date other people when they separated, but it never worked. Both were known cheaters who couldn’t stay away from each other too long.

Dash hated when they said that he was obsessed with Clover, but that’s how they all viewed it. His mood depended on her and how she behaved but he didn’t see it that way. That sometimes concerned Hank, but there was nothing that he could do about it. He and his wife didn’t want them to get married so young, but they were both too headstrong to listen. He and Diva got married young too, and they both agreed that they should have waited.

Dash was smart as hell and that was proven when he started his freshman year of college at only sixteen years old. Dash breezed through college and now had a master’s degree in business and a bachelor’s in science. His brothers were happy with getting their high school diplomas and college was never even a second thought. They knew that their little brother always had a plan for them to make and keep money. They had no problem letting him take charge and make decisions. He was the only one out of the three to have a house and they were good with that too. He had a family, so he had to move differently.

Clover was less than a year away from graduating with her master’s degree in early childhood education and they were a young power couple in the making. Clover wasn’t a slacker either. She used some of the money from her mother’s life insurance and opened up a daycare that she and her best friend ran. Clover’s Kids was the best investment that she’d ever made and she had no regrets. She and Dash had three rental properties and were looking into acquiring more. They wanted to buy a vacation home in another state so that the family always had somewhere to go during hurricane season, which was too often for their liking.

Hank looked up when he heard the screeching of tires getting closer. He shook his head when he spotted Monty’s yellow Corvette speeding up the street. After being locked up for three years, that was the first thing that he asked for when he got released almost a year ago. Dash and Fonzo went half on their brother’s car and had it waiting for him outside of the prison when he got released. Monty always did have a passion for drawing, so he got into tattooing when he was locked up for a gun charge. The prosecutors tried to bring him down for murder but it was classified as self-defense. A nigga tried to rob him early one morning when he came out of the club and he left him in a pool of his own blood. Monty waited until the police came and the entire incident was caught on camera.

Since he was on probation, he got violated for being a felon in possession of a firearm. Hank hated that one of his sons had a record but he wasn’t surprised that it was Monty. Dash and Fonzo kept telling him to get certified to do ink, but he was too busy running the streets and chasing hoes. He and Fonzo still worked at Hank’s construction company but he did tattoos in Dot’s bar on the weekends. That was everyone’s hangout spot, so he always made a grip. Dash ran his father’s second location and they sometimes worked there too.

Not long after he showed up, Diva turned the corner and pulled into the driveway. Hank walked over to the car and opened the driver’s side door. He took a moment to admire Diva’s beautiful chocolate complexion. That was one of the first things that drew him to her, even before her shape did. Just like his father, Hank had a light caramel complexion and so did all three of his sons. He had a preference when it came to women and he always had a taste for chocolate. His mother was dark in complexion and he seemed to have followed his father’s lead. Dash, like his father and grandfather, preferred the same, and Clover looked like a black baby doll. She could have easily passed for Diva’s daughter and they got asked that question quite often. Hank loved his wife more than anything and he missed living under the same roof with her. He had to get his shit together fast before she really got fed up and moved on.

“I can’t believe that y’all are still sitting out here. I’m not about to play with Clover and Dash today. They probably in there fucking,” Diva fussed as she got out of the car.

Fonzo’s girlfriend, Amina, was with him, but that was no surprise since you rarely saw one without the other. She was, however, shocked to see that Monty’s lazy ass girlfriend, Caprice, had tagged along. Her messy, complaining ass usually didn’t wake up until noon or later.

“I wasn’t trying to go busting up in nobody’s house this time of morning.”

“Well, I am. I told my baby that she could open up some of her gifts before she went to school. I’m not trying to go upstairs but I’m not waiting on them to let me in either.”

Hank grabbed the gifts from Diva’s car and followed her to the front door. Fonzo and Monty were right behind them, but their girlfriends stayed put. Diva rolled her eyes when she saw Caprice go stand by Fonzo’s car to talk to Amina. She was more than likely about to start gossiping, but that was nothing new. Diva really didn’t care how she felt. Her one and only grandbaby turned six and nothing or nobody was gonna put her in a bad mood.

“I can’t believe that we had to get up out of our beds just to come see a fucking six year old off to school,” Caprice rolled her eyes as she whispered to Amina. Neither woman had any kids, but she was sure that their child wouldn’t get treated the same way that Clover’s did anyway.

“Why didn’t you stay home? Fonzo wants to go to breakfast after we leave, so I didn’t mind coming here first. She’s the only grandchild and niece. You already know she was gonna be spoiled.”

Amina liked Caprice but she complained and gossiped way too much. She was always saying how they favored Clover more than the two of them, but Amina disagreed. Clover was more than Dash’s ex-wife and girlfriend. Hank and Diva raised her as their daughter and they treated her as such. Amina thought it was sweet after all that Clover had been through, but everything was a competition with Caprice.

Amina got along great with her man’s family, and they treated her well. That was a plus, but Fonzo was all that mattered since that was who she was in a relationship with. Her family loved him too and they always said so. After being in a crazy, abusive relationship for over a year, they were happy that she had a good man who loved and cared for her the way he did. He treated her right and that was all that her parents wanted. Her ex almost drove her to the brink of insanity. She still felt like she was gonna catch a panic attack whenever she saw him on the streets.

Amina wasn’t like Caprice in any way. She came from a loving, two-parent home and all she had to do was go to school and get her degree, which she did four years ago. She met Fonzo when her family hired Hank’s company to do some renovations to their home. She came home from class one day excited about passing one of the hardest exams that she’d ever taken. He noticed how happy she was and spoke on it. When she told him why, he offered to take her out to dinner to celebrate. Amina was skeptical since the man that she was with before him gave her pure hell but she was happy that she gave him a chance.

Three years later, they were still going strong and talking marriage. Both her parents were anesthesiologists, but she wasn’t interested in entering the medical field. She loved computers, so she happily made six figures a year in software development and she never had to leave home to do it.