Aftermath (24 page)

Dominique smiled. “All I know is the hard way,” she said, though she wished now that she had heeded Toya's advice.

“So, okay,” Misa said. “Did Michael ever get caught?”

Toya smiled and nodded. “Unfortunately, he did. We both did.”

Camille shifted in her seat, tucked her legs underneath her and rested her chin on her hand as she listened intently. She couldn't believe what she was hearing.

“We were home one night and the police raided our apartment. One of his boys snitched on him and they found everything. Drugs, guns, everything! I got arrested right along with him and spent a few weeks in jail because my mother wouldn't accept my calls. It was bad enough that her son got arrested for drugs, but her daughter?” Toya shook her head in dismay. “That was the last straw.”

“So how did you get out?” Dominique asked anxiously.

“Eventually, one of his cronies posted my bail. Michael was denied bail because he took the fall for everything. He told them that it was his shit, that I had no idea all that stuff was in our home, that I was blind to the fact that he was hustling. The police didn't believe him, but they had to let me go. They had no evidence against me, I had no priors and he was admitting being the one who did it. So I got out, while he got sentenced to fifteen years.”

Dominique's chin dropped. She had been struggling with Jamel being locked up for three years. Fifteen sounded like an eternity!

“So now, you had to visit him
and
your brother in jail,” Misa assumed.

Toya frowned, shook her head. “I guess you haven't been listening,” she said. “I had seen all that I needed to see by then to convince me that men in jail don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves. I wasn't going to be traveling for hours to visit him, spending my last money on packages for him, when he was bound to play me just like the rest of them incarcerated niggas do to the women in their lives.”

Camille frowned, sat up. “What are you saying? You left him while he was locked up?”

“I sure did,” Toya said, with no hint of regret or remorse. “It was one thing to do all that for my brother. But I wasn't about to do it for just some ordinary man. Husband or no husband, Michael knew I wouldn't be willing to put my life on hold for that long. He loved me, but he knew that I wasn't built for that life. I could never be some prisoner's wife, running upstate every weekend for a nigga who would ultimately give me his ass to kiss.”

Silence filled the room until Mary J's “Take Me As I Am” filled the speakers.

“So what ever happened to him?” Dominique asked.

“He did his time and as soon as he got out, they deported him.” Toya crossed her legs and looked at her friends. “I took the money the police hadn't seized and put a down payment on my brownstone. Been living there ever since.”

Everyone was floored. Dominique stared at Toya wide-eyed. “So all this time you've been talking shit about what we
need
to do,” she said teasingly. “You were speaking from experience. You've been married to a drug dealer like Camille, been locked up like Misa and—”

“And I was
still
smart enough to know not to waste my time on a convict like you did.”

Dominique threw an olive at Toya playfully. Their giggles lightened the mood somewhat.

Camille felt that Toya had been a little heartless, though. “Do you ever feel bad for turning your back on your husband? Ever wonder where he is now or how he's doing?”

Toya sighed. The truth was that she often wondered that. She thought about Michael all the time, about the patient love he had given her, allowing her to feel protected and adored after all that she had been through. And in the end, she had walked away from him without thinking twice about it. She realized, as she thought about it now, that she had been able to shut her emotions on and off so easily because she had never allowed herself to believe it was all real in the first place. Even now, part of her believed her father—men could never be trusted with her heart. “I don't feel bad,” she lied. “But I do think about him sometimes. Then I think about something else.” She refilled her glass and Dominique and Misa held theirs out for refills, too. “Oh, and I divorced him while he was in prison. So he's not my husband anymore.”

Camille's head was spinning after all she'd just heard. “Wow,” she said. All along, Camille had thought Toya hadn't been through the kinds of the things that the rest of them had endured. Now she realized that Toya had been through all of what they were dealing with and more.

“Let me tell y'all the new drama in my life,” Toya said, eager to change the subject. Thinking about Michael always made her heartsick.

“There's more?” Misa asked. Hearing about Toya's past had been enough of a shock.

“Yeah,” Toya said and sighed. “Lately, this guy named Russell has been bothering me, begging me to go out with him. He comes to my house and brings me flowers, gives me compliments every time he sees me. But he's as ugly as sin.” Toya shuddered for emphasis. “Anyway, the other night, after I had dinner with my father, I ran into this son of a bitch and he asked me out for the hundredth time.”

“Did you go?” Camille sat up slightly.

Toya nodded. “I did. He took me to a nice restaurant and we had dinner. I ordered the most expensive shit on the menu hoping to turn him off and make him mad. But he paid for it with no problem. In fact, every time I ordered something expensive, he ordered something even more expensive than that.”

Dominique raised an eyebrow, intrigued. “Nice!” she said. “So, what was the conversation like over dinner?”

“It was interesting,” Toya admitted, somewhat reluctantly. “He's a fireman, no kids, no wife, no baby-mama drama. He lives on his own—rents an apartment across the street from my house. He says he likes to travel, that he likes a challenge, and he noticed me as soon as he moved into the neighborhood.”

“Okay,” Camille said. “So far, he sounds good.”

“But she said he's ugly,” Misa reminded.

“Beastly!” Toya clarified. “This muthafucka is … ugh!”

They all burst into hysterics again. When they got it together, they listened as Toya described the rest of the night. Russell had paid the bill and left an exorbitant tip in order to sufficiently impress her. Then he and Toya had gone to a local bar and had a couple more drinks.

“Long story short, I got twisted and went home with him.”

“Did you go because you were having fun with him or because you were tipsy?” Misa asked.

Toya thought about it. “I think it was the liquor. I was vulnerable after seeing my father and I was distracted by the fact that he managed to hold my interest during the date…”

“He hit it, Toya?” Camille asked incredulously. She couldn't believe it.

“And it was
fabulous
!” Toya bellowed. “I mean I was seeing stars, bitches!”

Laughter and hollering erupted all around and the ladies talked all over each other with a million questions about Toya's beauty-and-the-beast love story.

Despite the turmoil unfolding in each of their lives, the women found solace in laughter and in Toya's shenanigans for the rest of the night. And once again, together they faced a new day.

Motives

Frankie came bursting through the door of Sugarcane like a gust of wind. Gillian sat at a corner table near the back and watched as he stormed through the small but popular Brooklyn restaurant. He reached her table and sat down across from her, leaning in close so that she could hear him over the loud music and chatter from other diners.

“What the fuck!” he hissed. “You put a hit out on Jojo without telling me?”

Gillian sipped her rum punch and stared back at Frankie over the rim of her glass. “It needed to be done, Frankie.” Her voice was soft and light. “I knew that you were preoccupied with what's going on. So I just took care of it, that's all.”

He watched her with his jaw clenched in anger. The waiter approached their table and Gillian cleared her throat. “I took the liberty of ordering for you,” she explained. “I know how much you like their jerk chicken.”

Speechless, Frankie sat back as the waiter set the steaming plate of food before him. When Gillian's red snapper was placed before her, she said a quick and silent prayer before digging in. Frankie was becoming increasingly aware that Gillian was taking her new position of power and running with it. As if ordering the hit on Jojo without his knowledge wasn't bad enough, now here she was ordering his food for him. When the waiter was gone at last, Frankie leaned in closer to her.

“You're acting like this is no big deal, Gillian. But since when do you not talk to me about shit like this?”

Gillian chewed her fish and looked at Frankie. Swallowing at last, she said, “Well, you haven't been talking to me much either, lately.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin and took a long sip of her drink before continuing. “You come in the house late at night, hoping that I'm asleep. You think I don't realize that's what you're doing, but I'm not stupid. You go about your day-to-day business and you act like you're handling everything just fine. But you're not. You don't talk to me. Instead, you spend your whole day talking to Tremaine about business, or talking to the DA about the case against Misa. When I try to talk about what's going on, you make excuses for why you don't want to discuss it. You're shutting me out.”

“So you pay me back by doing something like this behind my back?”

Gillian shook her head. “I didn't do anything behind your back.”

“So why didn't you tell me about it? Why did I have to read about that shit in the newspaper? And why won't any of the goons own up to it? Who did you put on it?” Frankie was pissed. He felt that his control of the crew was nonexistent if no one would tell him who had actually done the hit.

Gillian was pleased that Biggs had kept his mouth shut. She knew now that she could trust him. “Maybe I did it myself, Frankie.” She smirked at him, hoping to make him laugh. He didn't find anything funny. Gillian sighed. “Listen, I took care of it. If things weren't so crazy, you would have done the same thing. We're a team, aren't we? Bonnie and Clyde? We're supposed to be in this together.”

“So why did you give the order by yourself?” Frankie was just as mad at himself as he was at her. He felt that it made him look weak in the eyes of the crew.
He
should have been the one to take care of Jojo, not Gillian. By her giving the order, she had made him appear to be too preoccupied by his grief to lead the crew effectively.

Gillian watched Frankie sulking, his pride wounded since she had gotten to her father's killer before he did. “I should have told you,” she allowed. “I just didn't want to stress you out any more than you already are.” She reached for his hand and stroked it. “I love you,” she said. “And I'm worried about you. I just want to do my part to keep things moving forward for all of us. Maybe then you'll stop shutting down on me.”

“I'm not shutting down on you,” he said defensively.

She nodded. “Sure you are. You're doing the same thing to me that you were doing to Camille not so long ago. You're keeping busy so that you don't have to talk to me. You're throwing yourself into your work in order to keep yourself from thinking about what's really on your mind. I don't even think you realize that you're doing it,” she said. “But I'm not Camille. And I'm not gonna keep pretending like I don't see what's happening until it's too late.”

Frankie looked at the woman he loved and wished he could be more open with her. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I just got a lot on my mind.” He sighed.

Gillian nodded. She smiled at him, reassuringly. “I understand. But you can't deal with what's on your mind by pulling away from me. It's not healthy for our relationship.”

He knew she was right. “I know,” he acknowledged. “It's just the way I've always been. But I'll try to change that.”

She smiled again, nudged his plate closer to him. “Eat,” she said. “It's delicious.”

Frankie put his napkin in his lap, picked up his fork, and picked at his chicken. He glanced at Gillian once again. “No more ordering hits without talking to me.”

Gillian nodded. “Deal.”

Frankie shoved some chicken into his mouth and winked at her. Gillian winked back. She knew that he could never stay mad at her for long.

*   *   *

Dominique sat in
her freshly detailed Lincoln and waited for Jamel to come out from his mama's house. It was the place he'd been paroled to at the ripe old age of thirty-one. She reflected on that as she waited. She had gotten to know Jamel's family during his time away and had a lot of love for his mother. Still, she saw the situation clearly for once and noticed the contrast between her world and his.

She glanced at her fox jacket tossed across the backseat, looked down at her wrist and saw the tennis bracelet she'd gotten for herself last Christmas. Looking up, she saw him coming. He approached her car with the same sexy walk she'd always swooned over. This time, though, it seemed more childish than attractive; more pathetic than it had seemed before.

As he neared her car, she took him all in. He wore the sneakers she had bought for him, a pair of baggy jeans that were at least four sizes too big for him, a white tee and black hoodie that were equally as large. His black winter hat sealed the look and it seemed to Dominique as if Jamel had come home and stepped right back into his uniform as a soldier in the same mean streets that kept swallowing him.

“This nigga…” she mumbled. She was most bothered by the fact that today he was accompanying her to a community outreach program that was supposed to encourage inner city kids to embrace the arts rather than criminal alternatives. Here Jamel was looking like a recruiter for the wrong army.