'Yeah. I'll catch up with you,' Lady G reassured her. 'You be at the bank squat?'
'Uh-uhn. I don't want every motherfucker knowin'.'
'I know a spot,' Percy said.
'All right then.' Rhianna relaxed.
'You sure?'
'You giving me a choice?' Rhianna asked. Lady G shook her head. 'All right then.'
Dismissed, Rhianna and Percy walked toward the bus stop. She turned around one last time to make sure her friend was OK only to spy Lady G leaning into King's casual embrace.
Big Momma sat on a plastic bench with her neighbor from across the way. Freshly coiffed gray hair, Big Momma's sculpted dignity was undercut by her ashy elbows. The slight heft to her gut actually matched her neighbor's. They didn't say anything, merely sat there. The night wind bit at them, unexpectedly cool for an August night. Lady G assumed a posture designed to keep her warm: arms pulled within her T-shirt. A security porch light lit the court of townhouses. They sat in white plastic lawn chairs. Bent over, King slowly rocked back and forth on the cooler that was his makeshift chair — letting Lady G have the last seat.
'Who was that one girl who came up here halfnaked?' King asked.
'Who? Alaina?' Lady G felt a pang of regret at belittling her dead nemesis.
'Nah. Some spot girl, strolling on up talking about how she just got through letting another woman eat her coochie.'
'Around the kids?' the neighbor asked before taking another drag from her cigarette. That usually signaled a brewing shit storm if she built up a big enough head of steam. She had been married for six years to her high school sweetheart. After the birth of their daughter, their marriage had hit a rocky patch. He had simply had enough at playing grownup. The lure of whiling away his days running the streets proved easier than holding down a straight (read: boring) nine to five gig, but she had bills to pay. So she put his ass out. And took up smoking.
'Ain't no kids around here anymore,' King said. 'Folks have to grow up too quick.'
'She had to have been high,' Lady G said almost to herself, her mind still mulling over Alaina suddenly bugging out the way she did. 'Tweaked out on something. She could be bad, but she don't wild out like that.'
'She like that?' King asked.
'Just saying. I hear they've got new stuff coming in, got some folks acting up.'
After his father, Luther, died, his moms, Anyay, went off the rails. He lost her in degrees, so no one noticed for a long time. She moved out her momma's house, declaring it time further to spread her wings. More to let the streets seep into her, to find a connection to Luther. Love was a cancer which crept into you unsuspecting, and by the time you realize you have it, it had metastasized into every part of you. And Anyay sought her own brand of chemo, breaking her mother's heart. She died not too long after.
Two kids later, from men fueling her chemotherapy, it was a short jump to living in their car. They maintained as best they could: school in the morning, cutting out early so that King could do lawn work and odd jobs to get enough money for hotel rooms at night. King thought that his mother would get her act together if she only had the little ones to worry about. A good woman still lived within the fiend she'd become, she just needed a push. The chance to gain her footing in life and she'd pull it together. He knew she would. So he left them.
She and the kids froze to death that winter, a spike still stuck in her arm.
'Where she stay at?'
'Over at the Phoenix.'
'Hmph.' Big Momma was a trip. Hers was the only name listed on the lease, her daughter's baby staying with her most of the time so that she could go to a better school. Which was fine with Big Momma. She'd done as much as she could for her own girl. Raised her, put some Jesus in her, prepared her for the world as best she could. But all the good training in the world couldn't trump the ways of the heart and her baby girl kept trying to fill the hole in her spirit with a man. Big Momma was one of those women who had a lot of love to give and hated an empty house. She believed Prez had a good heart but fell in with them boys before she could get a hold of him. She feared she'd lost him for good.
'I hear the police scooped up Prez,' King said as if reading her thoughts. He still rocked on his cooler.
'His cousin is bonding him out.'
'How much?'
'Two thousand. I hate dealing with him cause now every time I ask him for something, he's gonna be like 'that's coming out of the money to get your boy out'.'
''Your boy'. Like they ain't cousins,' the neighbor added.
'OK,' Big Momma amen-ed. 'Still, I'm lucky that he has that much. The first is around the corner and he could've started crying 'rent's due'. I tell you what though, when Prez gets out, we gonna have a barbecue for the whole neighborhood.'
'I guess that means I'm cooking,' King said.
'That's why I'm telling you.' Though she smiled a rueful grin, she wasn't fond of having her business discussed on the street. Of course, neither did King. 'How's Nakia doing?'
King's eyes narrowed, moving from Big Momma to Lady G. Lady G turned toward him, eyebrow arched. His eyes softened as a stratagem of how to play the situation to his advantage sprang to mind. And he wasn't going to give Big Momma the satisfaction of seeing him sweat or scramble. 'Let me ask you something. If your baby's momma was with some dude, would you ask to meet him?'
'Yeah. I'd want to know who my baby was spending time around.'
'That's what I'm saying. I don't want Nakia up around just anybody, but her momma says that I'm too ghetto to meet him.'
'So what'd you say?'
'I said that 'I'm over you, so it's not like I'm gonna fight him or start anything. I just need to meet him.''
'Yeah, but she's still your baby's momma,' Lady G said. She found herself wanting to tease out more information from him.
'So?'
'So… you always gonna have feelings for her.' The statement sounded more like a question to his ear.
'Not true. I just need to meet him cause if I see my daughter walking down the street with some dude I don't know, then I'm gonna jump on his face for real.'
King couldn't make up his mind who he was mad at the most. His baby's momma for getting pregnant. Himself for dropping out of high school to support her. Big Momma for floating his business. Or God for letting all this mess happen to him.
King always had a path. Too many folks wanted everything handed to them, but he knew what he wanted, but all paths had the occasional bump. King had no reason being with his baby momma, especially for as long as he was. They knew each other from around the way and hooked up for no more reason than they were there. Then she turned up pregnant. King didn't know what it was, maybe the idea of being a father, but he saw things differently. He wanted to be there to hold Nakia, be a part of her life, show her how a man was supposed to be, so he tried to make it work with her momma. Like an arranged marriage, they had nothing in common except Nakia, he wasn't sure they even liked each other all that much. It was a relationship of convenience: he could be with his daughter and his baby momma had someone to pay the bills. Duty held them together. All this 'being in love' bullshit was for poets and chick flicks. Real love went beyond the passion and hype and he had real love.
For his baby girl.
Eventually the relationship got old and his baby momma, bills or no bills, came to the point where it wasn't working and threw him out. Despite her getting on his last nerve, he had gotten kind of used to her. He almost missed her sorry ass, though mostly the empty space in his life, and that distant ache he felt was the absence of his daughter.
'Man I wish next Wednesday would hurry up and get here,' the neighbor said, trying to change the topic.
'Why? You don't get paid till Friday,' Big Momma said.
'Wednesday's the first.' Welfare check day.
'I couldn't handle it if I got paid every other week. I couldn't budget right.'
'Me either. Had to learn.' The neighbor flicked her cigarette butt in the bush just past King's head. 'Still wish it would hurry up and get here, though.'
With the conversation devolving into the travails of budgeting, King nodded to Lady G and she followed him
