"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 inside. Big Momma eyed them. Their court of opposing townhouses lived by its own code. Folks minded their own business as long as they were good neighbors. Even drug dealers: as long as they brought no drama to the court and were polite, a blind eye was conveniently taken. Them throwing the occasional barbecue spurred goodwill also.
Dragging his cooler inside, he had a chair. Walls painted white, though they required a second coat of paint to cover the graffiti of folks who'd broken in previous. He left the condo unlocked. The back door and window King secured once he moved in. Upon entering, he locked the deadbolt behind them. The water still ran, but the power and gas had been cut off. King unfurled his bedding to form what passed for a couch. In the corner a stack of books propped up a large, quite full, backpack.
The quaver of sexual ache shocked her. Her pulse quickened at his nearness and it turned her stomach. There was no mystery to boys. Simple creatures that delighted in the friction of lust. Rhianna's constant quest to bask in their attentions baffled her. To be the object of their desire, their conquest, was no difficult feat. She feared that part of her wanted – and feared even more that she needed – their attentions. Her sense of needing to belong. Perhaps to be owned. And wasn't that what relationships were? Two people owning one another, chained by the heart, the genitals, or however they chose to define love in the breathless moments between sheets. The content capture of heat and presence and temporarily satiated need. King must've stood six-six easy, half a foot taller than her. His goatee-framed lips – both pouty and sure – like a confident model. He wore his black shirt with two too many buttons undone, revealing a necklace of Mary and Jesus, except both were black. That was what she stared at when King's eyes caught hers.