Eviction Notice (13 page)

“Trusting you is what’s got us all fucked up now,” Sahara said.

“And what’s that supposed to mean? Look, don’t be coming in here trying to pop fly when I was looking out for y’all bitches by letting you sublease the crib. Shit, I could’ve rented it to a cracker and got double what y’all are paying.”

“Yeah, but if you had rented it to somebody white they would’ve sued your ass for this fraudulent shit you’re trying to pull,” Frankie huffed.

Debbie leaned forward and looked Frankie dead in the eye. “I see somebody ate a bowl of courage this morning. If that’s how you feel about it then feel free to take it to court, but the first thing they’re gonna wanna see is proof of what you’re accusing me of and you ain’t got it.”

“Bitch, we been paying you rent on the apartment!” Frankie shouted.

“Yes, and because your ass was too lazy to go to the post office and get money orders, you’ve been paying me in cash. Without receipts it would be your word against mine,” Debbie said with a sly grin.

“Debbie, how you gonna play us like that?” Sahara asked.

“I ain’t trying to play you like shit. Ya homegirl wanna come in here throwing her ten-dollar words around and act like I’m stealing from y’all or something. Do you see my crib?” Debbie motioned around at her living room. “What the fuck I look like, doing some crackhead shit like stealing your bum-ass rent money? Like I said, y’all can either wait for me to fix it or get up whatever paper they say y’all owe. From the way y’all came at me, I don’t even give a fuck at this point.” Debbie flicked the ashes from her blunt and crossed her legs victoriously.

Frankie sat there with her head down, running her fingers through her braids, while Sahara kept trying to reason with Debbie. Frankie thought of all the things that were already going wrong in her life, and the pending eviction was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Before she had even realized what she was doing, she was on her feet and rushing Debbie. Debbie tried to pop up from the chair but Frankie cracked her in the jaw and sat her right back down. She managed to get two more punches up before Debbie hit her with a crushing uppercut that sent her sailing across the room. She tried to move in to finish Frankie off, but Sahara tripped her.

“Oh, so you want it too, bitch?” Debbie rushed Sahara. Sahara was a more skilled boxer but in such close quarters she was no match for the brutish Debbie. Debbie wrapped her fingers in Sahara’s hair and began using her head to punch holes in the wall. The only thing that stopped Debbie from beating Sahara unconscious was Mookie and Fish coming out of the bedroom to break up the fight.

“What the hell are y’all out here doing?” Mookie asked once they had gotten the girls separated. Normally he would’ve just smashed on a chick for trying to get at his lady, but he knew Sahara and Frankie from the hood.

“This Alice the goon-looking bitch robbed us!” Frankie raged, trying to get around him to get to Debbie.

“I got your bitch, you fucking dyke!” Debbie spat back.

“Hey, ain’t no need for name-calling,” Mookie warned both of them. “Come on, y’all got to go.” He ushered Frankie and Sahara toward the front door.

“Nah, keep them bitches there, I got something for both of them.” Debbie darted into the kitchen. They could hear her rummaging through the drawer for a knife.

“Fish, get her while I get them outta here,” Mookie ordered as he pushed Frankie and Sahara into the hallway. “Man, why y’all gotta be disrespecting the pad?” Mookie asked them once they were out of harm’s way.

“Mookie, we didn’t mean no disrespect, but Debbie is wrong,” Frankie said before giving him the short version of why they were beefing.

“Damn, so they trying to put y’all out?” he asked sympathetically.

“Yeah, if we don’t get up the money Debbie deaded us on,” Sahara said.

Mookie shook his head. “My heart goes out to y’all, but you know I can’t let y’all go about it like this. I got a good li’l thing going on with shorty and y’all making my spot hot right now.” He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening. “Look, y’all know how Debbie gives it up so you should’ve known better than to pay her in cash.”

“But we’ve known Debbie for years so we didn’t expect her to try and beat us,” Sahara explained.

“And that’s what makes it worse: you’ve known her for years and still didn’t have the good sense to cover your asses. Y’all ain’t new to this so y’all know how the game goes, it’s a dog-eat-dog world.”

“So what the fuck are we supposed to do now?” Frankie sighed.

“That’s a damn good question,” he said honestly.

“Mookie, I know you ain’t still out there talking to them hood-rat bitches!” Debbie screamed from inside the apartment.

“Hold the fuck on,” Mookie shouted back. “Let me go in here and take care of this. I’ll holla at Debbie and see what’s good when she calms down, but my advice to y’all is to get that bread up or find somewhere else to crash,” Mookie told them before going back into the apartment to deal with Debbie.

*   *   *

“That amazon bitch
is lucky I ain’t have my hammer with me, because I’d sure have popped her ass,” Frankie said once they were back on the elevator.

“We are fucked with no Vaseline.” Sahara pressed her head against the elevator door.

“Don’t fold on me now, baby girl. We still got a few days to make something happen, so this shit is far from over. I think I got about three hundred dollars put up. You got anything in the stash?”

“No. I planned to crack on King but never got the chance because them bitches was hating,” Sahara said.

“Damn. A’ight, let’s get back to the crib and plan our next move. We’ll come up with something.”

When Frankie and Sahara got off the elevator, they saw that a crowd had gathered in the lobby and a police car was parked outside. No doubt someone had reported the noise coming from Debbie’s apartment. They blended in with the crowd and made their way outside. They thought they were going to make a clean getaway until they saw the man they’d gotten into it with earlier talking to one of the officers and motioning in their direction.

“There they are! I want those bitches locked up for what they did to my Holly,” he shouted, pointing in their direction. “I told you this wasn’t over!”

“Ladies, could you step over here for a minute please?” the officer called to them. They thought about running, but something about the way his hand was resting on his gun made them think it was a bad idea, so they did as they were told. The girls were handcuffed and placed into the back of a patrol car. Settling into the seat to get as comfortable as she could with her wrists shackled behind her back, Frankie spared a glance over her shoulder and saw the man still pointing and laughing.

“This ain’t over,” Frankie mumbled as the patrol car whisked them away.

CHAPTER 20

Gucci wasn’t sure
how long she had been sitting in the car with the engine running but it had to have been a while because the sun was starting to set. Her mind was whirling with a million thoughts that she couldn’t make heads or tails of but they all came back to the same person, Animal. Her chest tightened with the ball of emotions welling within her and threatened to pop if she didn’t calm herself. Tiring of sitting in the shadows of the projects, Gucci put the car in gear and pulled off. She didn’t have a destination in mind but driving always helped her to clear her head. She hit Play on her CD player and the sounds of Soul II Soul’s “Keep on Moving” filled the car. It was a fitting song, considering the way she was feeling.

Gucci liked to tell herself that she was over Animal, but the truth beneath the lie was exposed every time someone so much as mentioned his name. For, as twisted as it may have sounded, Gucci wished that Animal had gone to prison—at least then she would still have had him in her life, or if his body had been discovered she would’ve had some kind of closure. Instead, he had vanished without a trace, leaving Gucci with nothing but heartache and questions.

She drove down Broadway, doing a little light window-shopping at red lights, and then cut over and drove up Central Park West. She could remember riding the number-ten bus with her mother as a little girl and marveling at the beautiful park-side real estate. She would close her eyes and imagine pulling up in front of one of the plush buildings and having the doorman open the car door for her. She would ride the glass elevator to her penthouse apartment and look out at the sprawling green trees of Central Park. When she was a girl there were only daydreams, but when she got older the lifestyle had come to fruition.

Gucci’s mother had taught her the value of a dollar at an early age, so Gucci made sure she always had a job or a hustle to maintain whatever lifestyle she chose. Granted, she was in no way balling out of control, but if she saw something in the store that she wanted, she would find a way to get it, even if it meant putting it on layaway and paying it off a piece at a time. When Animal came into the picture and landed his record deal, he tried to encourage her to live outside her means, but Gucci refused. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to burn the malls down on the regular, but because she had been raised to be an independent woman and didn’t want to get used to leaning on someone to do everything for her.

Gucci’s mother, Ronnie, had always stressed to her the importance of having her own, even when someone else offered her the world. The reason for her thinking this way was that she knew that men came and went, but if you relied on yourself you’d never have to deal with the pain of disappointment when and if the man decided to leave. Animal had always promised not to leave her, but in the end it was a promise that he couldn’t keep.

Animal’s getting arrested and eventually becoming a fugitive from justice set off a snowball effect of events. The government had swooped down and tried to freeze Animal’s assets because of a law that said an inmate could not profit from his crimes and because Animal’s lyrics were a depiction of his capers in the streets. Their claim was eventually thrown out, but because Gucci and Animal had never gotten the chance to get married, she wasn’t legally entitled to anything, so everything had been deposited into a trust for his heirs or next of kin—but the only relative he had left was his brother Justice, and he was doing life in prison, or so Gucci had been led to believe. Don B. tried to look out for her every so often, but she didn’t like taking money from him. There was something about accepting gifts from Don B. that made her feel like she was making a deal with the devil, so she avoided him as best she could. Once again Gucci was left on her own, but she hardly walked away empty-handed.

Gucci owned an apartment in a nice building on the east side of Manhattan, where she and Animal used to crash when they were in the city. The house in Houston and all the vehicles they’d purchased were in her name. When it became obvious that Animal wasn’t coming back, Gucci had sold the house and all the vehicles except the white X5 he’d bought her, which was the car she was currently driving. Her friends had tried to persuade her to keep it all, but to Gucci it didn’t make any sense to have five cars when she was only one person. She took all the money she’d made off selling everything and dumped it in the bank with what she’d already saved. One thing about Gucci was that she knew how to squirrel away money. Over the years she had banked all the money Animal had given her, so when it was all said and done, she was sitting on some paper. Gucci might’ve been a lot of things, but a fool wasn’t one of them.

She pulled to a stop at a red light on Ninety-fourth and Central Park West and for the first time noticed that she was in a familiar neighborhood. She looked at the clock on the dashboard and saw that it was after five, so she knew she’d be home from work by then. She coasted through the light just as it turned green and made a left on Ninety-fifth Street. She had some free time on her hands so she decided to pay a visit to the one person other than Animal who could pull her out of her melancholy mood.

*   *   *

“I don’t know
whether to let you in or call security,” Tionna said, standing in the doorway and looking at Gucci. She had just come in from work so she still had on her suit skirt and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

“Is that anyway to greet your BFF?”

“The same BFF who gets me shot at or arrested every time she shows up on my doorstep? Bring your trifling ass in here and give me a hug.” Tionna snatched Gucci inside the apartment and gave her a tight hug. It had been a minute since Tionna had seen her best friend and she missed her dearly. “So what’s up, tramp?”

Gucci shrugged and flopped onto Tionna’s love seat. “Same shit different toilet, you know how it goes.”

“No, I don’t, since my so-called BFF never calls me anymore.”

“I’m sorry, T, but I’ve been dealing with a lot lately, so if I don’t call as much as I should, blame it on my head and not my heart,” Gucci said sincerely. “So how’s my favorite attorney been?”

“Ha, I wish. My dumb ass has taken the LSAT twice and failed both times,” Tionna confessed.

“You know you never were quick to pick up on anything, T. Didn’t you get left back in the third grade? Maybe the third time will be the charm for you on this,” Gucci joked, but Tionna didn’t laugh.

“I’m serious, Gucci. I went to school all year around, including night courses, and still haven’t been able to pass the test, and without that LSAT, all this time I’ve put in will have been for fucking nothing. I’m starting to feel like it’s not in the cards for me,” Tionna admitted. The usual bravado in her voice was gone, which worried Gucci.

“Tionna, you’re a lot of things but a quitter isn’t one of them. I’ve never known you to put your mind to something and not get it. Remember when we were in the eighth grade and they came out with those short-cut North Faces?”

Tionna’s eyes lit up a bit with recognition. “Yeah, I remember Ronnie copped you the pink one and I was tight because my moms couldn’t afford to get me one.”

“But that didn’t stop you from getting one, did it?”

“Hell no, I scraped up two hundred selling weed for Li’l B then gassed his boss Bubbles to trick off on the other four hundred. That was a decent winter for the kid,” Tionna laughed. “I bust up in school the following Monday rocking the purple one.”

“That’s exactly my point. Tionna, one thing that’s always drawn people to you was your determination to get what you wanted. From surviving the game, to bettering your living situation”—Gucci looked around the apartment—“you’ve always made it happen for yourself and this punk-ass test shouldn’t be any different,” she said seriously.

“Damn, Gucci, you’re better than a championship coach!”

“Because all my team does is win.” Gucci popped her collar. “A’ight, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get into some grown shit. What you got to drink in this piece?”

Tionna looked at her watch. “Damn, lush life, ain’t it kinda early to be sipping?”

“Girl, with the way my day has been going I should’ve started drinking hours ago.”

“Oh Lord, I gotta hear this one.” Tionna disappeared into the kitchen. She resurfaced a few seconds later, holding a half-empty bottle of Moscato and two glasses.

“What, no yak?” Gucci teased her.

“Bitch, knock it off, you know I can get on my grown shit when I want to.” Tionna set the glasses on the coffee table and began rummaging through her purse. “While you’re busy running your mouth, why don’t you roll this up.” She tossed Gucci a bag of weed, followed by a Dutch Master.

Gucci sniffed the bag and frowned. “Smells like you dipped this in diarrhea.”

“You know mama smokes nothing but the best.” Tionna winked.

Gucci proceeded to roll the weed while Tionna filled their glasses. As soon as Gucci put flame to the L she could smell tart buds burning. It didn’t take long before both girls’ eyes were hooded, and the stress they’d carried in them suddenly seemed to ease up, as it always did when they were together. Tionna and Gucci had been best friends since grade school and the bond had only gotten stronger with time. From schoolyard fights to Internet sex scandals to happy endings, Tionna and Gucci had been through it all together.

“Damn, I just realized what’s wrong with this picture.” Gucci looked around the room.

“And what’s that?”

“Noise! Where are your big-headed-ass kids?” Gucci was referring to Tionna’s sons Duhan and Duran.

“Oh, they’re with their grandma. She keeps them for me a few nights per week if I gotta study or work late.”

Gucci smiled at the news. For quite a few years Tionna and her mother had had a strained relationship. Throughout most of their childhood Tionna’s mother had been on and off drugs, which had contributed to Tionna’s spending so much time caught up in the streets. Over the last few years her mother had started to put the pieces of her life back together and rid herself of her addictions so that she could be a better grandmother to her grandsons than the mother she had been to Tionna. Gucci and Ronnie had tried to coax Tionna into reestablishing a relationship with her mother, but Tionna wasn’t so quick to buy into Yvette’s recovery. The wounds of her childhood were deep and slow to heal, but Gucci was glad to see that they were finally making progress.

“On the real, T, I’m glad y’all are finally making peace. You know Yvette has worked really hard to stay clean for y’all,” Gucci said.

“I know, Gucci. It’s just that I was so afraid that I was gonna let her back into our lives and she was gonna pull a dope-fiend move that it made me act kinda like a bitch.”

“Kinda?” Gucci raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, okay, I was a
super
bitch!” Tionna admitted. “But it feels good to have my mom back in my life.”

“Aw, so you guys can do mommy-daughter dates?”

Tionna twisted her lips. “Damn a mommy-daughter date, I’m talking about free babysitting!”

“Tionna, your ass is so trifling.” Gucci laughed. “But what good is free babysitting if all your ass does is sit in the crib?”

“I do not just sit in the crib.”

“So when is the last time you went out?” Gucci quizzed her.

Tionna thought on it for a second. “I went out last Friday to see the new Tyler Perry movie with Zeda.”

Gucci sucked her teeth. “Bitch, please; going to some dry-ass church movie with the dizzy bitches you’ve taken to hanging with down here doesn’t count. I mean go
out,
like how we do.”

“I haven’t partied like a rock star in a hot minute. But then again, who the fuck am I gonna party with when my BFF is in hiding?” Tionna eyed Gucci.

“Tionna, ain’t nobody hiding. I live back in New York now, remember? So I’m always around.”

“Gucci, just because you live in New York don’t mean you stay in New York. You talk about me not getting out, but you’ve been harder to catch than a cold. You’re either traveling somewhere doing God knows what or holed up in that damn apartment like an old-ass widow.”

“See, now you’re about to go there,” Gucci said as if she was about to catch an attitude, but Tionna didn’t care.

“Damn right I’m about to go there, because I can.” Tionna snaked her neck. “Gucci, for the last two years I’ve watched you deal with your grief by running from it.”

“I’m gonna tell you like I keep telling everybody else: I’m not grieving.” Gucci folded her arms.

Tionna gave her a disbelieving look. “Gucci, I know you better than anyone except probably your mother, so save that tough shit because I ain’t buying it. I know you’re hurting over what happened to Animal, and there’s no shame in that.”

“I keep telling you, I’m good. The past is the past and I’ve moved on with my life,” Gucci told her.

“That’s what your mouth says, but your eyes say something else.” Tionna reached out and placed her hands over Gucci’s. “Gucci, I know you’re strong, but even the mightiest shoulders get tired after carrying a load for so long, and there ain’t no shame in that. I loved Animal, maybe not as deeply as you, but we gotta be real about this, he’s gone and he ain’t coming back.” Gucci opened her mouth to say something, but Tionna raised her hand for silence. “Ma, I’m not telling you it’s wrong to miss him, but it’s wrong to hold on to him so tight that you begin to fade away with his memory. For you to truly begin to heal, you have to let him go.”

Gucci looked up at Tionna and there were tears dancing in the corners of her eyes. “I just miss him so much, T,” she whispered before breaking down in tears. She had suffered in silence for so long that a well of pent-up emotions began to pour from her as she opened up to Tionna. “I got so used to having Animal around that I don’t know how to function without him.”

“Then you learn.” Tionna used her thumbs to wipe the tears from Gucci’s cheeks. “It’s okay, Gucci. I ain’t gonna sit here and front like I know what you’re going through, but I ain’t gonna let you go through it alone.”