The problem was, if you liked pretty boys, and she did like pretty boys, then Anhell was it. You couldn’t do no better. She looked okay—damn good, when she got all dressed up, her hair and makeup tight. But Anhell was pure Spanish butterscotch. Lightskin, gray eyes, cornrow hangtime to the middle of his back. He answered the door in a towel, naked and wet from a quick shower. Hickies on him she ain’t put there.
There’s rules to whooping your man’s ass. He tries to catch and hold your fists, dodge your knees and elbows and kicks, but accepts in his heart that every lick you land he deserves. You don’t go grabbing a knife, or yanking at his hair, either, as the electric fear or pain those inspire will make him lash out with blind total force, turning this rough game real in a way nobody wants. Stay in bounds, babygirl, and you can whale on him till you’re so tired you ain’t mad no more, and his cheating bitch ass is all bruised up and crying. But fuckit. She wasn’t really feeling it today. After getting in a few solid hits, she let Anhell catch her wrists. They were on the floor by then and he hugged her in close and tight, starting up with them same old tears and kisses, same old promises and lies.
“’Nisha, what can I do? Whatever you need, just tell me what I can do. I’ll do it.”
Stop laying with them hoes! With them faggots! But this was just the little sin, the one convenient to throw back in his face. She might not even give a shit anymore, if she ever bothered to check. What couldn’t be fixed was his big sin. The one they’d cried about, fucked and fought about all the time with fists and screams, but not once ever just said the words out loud, plain and clear. Now that a couple years had slipped by it was obvious they were never going to say the words at all.
You know what you did, she said. You know what you did. And Anhell did know, and so for once shut up with all the bullshit. They lay for a while just breathing, just embraced, their exhausted resignation like a mysterious disease presenting the exact same way as tenderness. “My aunt died and left me all her shit.”
“¿La bruja?”
“Yeah. I need you to come out to Brooklyn with me, see if there’s anything worth something.”
“My case worker coming by tomorrow.” Anhell felt good, smelled good, left arm holding her, right hand stroking her shoulder, back and ass in a loop that made everywhere he touched gain value, feel loved. “You know I gotta be here.”
“We just going out there,” she said, “look around, and then come straight back. It ain’t no all-night kinda thing.”
“Well, lemme get dressed and we’ll head out.” He let her go and sat up.
“Wait,” she said. “Hol’ up.” She hooked her thumbs under her panties and leggings. “Eat me out a little fowego?” She rolled em to her knees.
It’s gotta be hard, right, when they keep asking for what you can’t give, but so good, when they want exactly the thing you do best? Anhell grinned. “I got you, mami.” He pulled her leggings down further, rolled her knees out wide. “Lemme get in there right…”
Somebody suicide-jumped at Grand Central, so the 5 train was all fucked up. They were more than three hours getting out there.
Block after block of projects like brick canyons, a little city in the City, home to thousands and thousands and not one whiteface, except for cops from Long Island or Staten Island doubled up in cruisers or walking in posses. It was warm as late summer, the October rain falling hard enough to where you’d open your umbrella, but so soft you felt silly doing it. Anhell walked just behind, holding it over her, the four-dollar wingspan too paltry to share. Drop by drop his tight braids roughened.
Aunt Esther’s building was over a few blocks from the subway. Not one of the citysized ones, but big enough. The kind, you know, with the liquor store-style security booth at the entrance, somebody watching who comes and goes.
“Excuse me,” called the man behind the plastic. “Hey, yo, Braids—and you, Miss? Visitors gotta sign in.” Behind the partition, he held up the clipboard.
They went over to the window and scribbled their names. Though basketball-player-tall, up close you could see he wasn’t grown. Just some teenage dropout on his hood brand cell, Youtubing bootleg rappers.
She tapped the plastic. “It should be some keys in there, waiting for me,” she said. “So I can get into my aunt’s apartment.”
“Nobody tole me nuffen about that.”
“What’s that right there?” she said, pointing to the desk beside the boy’s elbow, where an envelope lay with her name written across it.
He gave this revelation several blinks and turned back. “Well, you gotta show some ID, then.”
She got out her EBT and pressed it to the partition. Squinting, the boy leaned forward and mouthed the name off the card, Tanisha Marie Jean-Louis, and then, slower than your slow cousin, compared this to what was written on the envelope, Tanisha M. Jean-Louis.
Although allowing, at last, that these two variations fell within tolerance, the boy still shook his head. “Naw, though… I on’t think I can give you this. You suppose to show a driver’s license.”
His stupidity flung her forward bodily against the partition. She smacked her palms on the plastic to lend the necessary words their due emphasis. “Nigga, this New York. Ain’t nobody out here got no fucking driver’s license. You better hand me that envelope!”
To the left of the elevator the hall continued around the corner, but 6L, Aunt Esther’s apartment, was in the cul-de-sac to the right.
Stink rushed out as the front door swung in. Week-old kitchen trash. Years of cigarettes. Old ladies who piss theyself. Ole Esther had caught her heart attack on the bus, so at least there wasn’t that, not the funk of some bloated mice-nibbled corpse leaking slime.
On a corner table inside the door was a huge, nasty religious mess. Ugly dolls, rat bones, weird trash. If all Satan’s blue-black devils had wifed all God’s blue-blond saints, then a gaudy likeness of their brats was painted on the clutter of seven-day glass candles. She went over to take a look. Breathing through some open window the moment after Anhell followed her in, a breeze slammed the front door shut. The sudden breathless dark had him slapping at the walls desperately until he found the lights. She sneered. “Come peep this. She was on some real hoodoo shit.”
“No, mami.” He came over reluctantly. “This ain’t Voodoo or Santería, ni nada parecido. Your Auntie ain’t bought nunna this at no botánica. Look at that.”
“Yeah? A cross—so what?”
“You don’t see nothing weird about it?”
Though fancy and heavy-looking as real silver, it was just cheap ass plastic junk when she thumped a finger against it. Rather than about-to-die, the face of Jesus looked more like a man nutting, but apart from the crucifix being upside down she couldn’t see what had Anhell all freaked out. She shrugged.
Anhell was superstitious. His grandma had wanted him to go to Miami for some expensive Catholic thing, accepting his saint or some shit like that. But his trifling ass had just bought tracksuits, Jordans, and smoked up all the money she’d left him. Now, he touched the bare skin of his neck as if there should’ve been beads hanging there, some guardian angel to call on today of all days. Her pretty babyboy, so full of regret! She saw how she could fuck with him.