Apple Brown Betty (8 page)

Mildred waved her off, turned toward Nancy. “A gat-damned toothless crack ho.” George's daughter moved forward and tried to gather her mother's arm, which Mildred brushed away. “Get off me, Georgette. I'm speaking the truth up in here.”

“No, Mama,” Georgette said. “This isn't the time or the place.”

Mildred grabbed Cydney's shoulders and wheeled her to face her mother. Nancy rocked back and forth in her chair, her head bowed, unmoved by the commotion happening just feet from her. “Look at her!” Mildred shouted to Cydney. “And tell me you see something other than a toothless crack ho.”

Everyone in the room directed their attention to Cydney. Cydney looked at her brother in the far corner, turned and looked at the other folks in the room, and then turned back to Mildred. “You're right,” Cydney acknowledged, tears dropping in heavy clumps from her eyes.

Mildred raised her chin high, snorted in a pompous manner and turned back to the urn, singing that unknown tune again.

Cydney looked toward Slay; he sighed and looked away.

C
ydney walked through the doors of her apartment and immediately fell to the couch. Her brother stepped in behind her, closed the door and latched the locks. He eased his way into the living room, found a spot next to the bookshelf and CD tower.

Cydney was exhausted from the wake. Exhausted from the mental strain of dealing with the loss of the only man she'd ever recognized as a father. Exhausted from the mental strain of dealing with the loss of the woman she called mother.

“I'm tired,” she told her brother. He'd been eerily silent.

“Get some rest.”

“Are you upset with me?”

He shook his head. “You called it how you see it.”

“You think I'm wrong.”

“I was ready to hit that lady for what she said about Mama,” Slay offered.

“So yes?”

Slay nodded toward the couch. “Get that rest.”

Cydney bit into her lip and then settled into a curled-up position on the couch. Before long, she was in the peace only sleep could give her; even her brother's presence in the apartment with her wasn't stopping her from chasing down slumber.

Slay ran his fingers over the spines of the books on Cydney's bookshelf. All of them were hardcover, the majority of them thick. He pried a particularly thick one from the shelf and opened the cover. The photographs inside startled him. Pictures he'd never seen before of Cydney in a bikini. He guessed they were from one of her trips. The trees and the background looked nothing like New Jersey. He flipped through them one by one, spending a considerable amount of time studying her features in each photo. She was beautiful, smart, a Theresa—no, scratch that—
Pamela
type of female. The type of woman who didn't have time for gat-damned toothless crack hoes or the sons those hoes gave birth to. He wondered who took the photos. Some dude Cydney hadn't told him about? Slay bunched the photos back as he'd found them and placed them in the crease of the book, placed the book on the shelf. He shook his head and pawed at his temples with his hands.

He moved from the bookshelf and pulled Cydney's ottoman to the edge of the couch. He sat down on the ottoman and undid the strap of her shoes, slid them off her feet. He took her foot and started massaging the underside, then the top, then the toes. Love coursed through him.

“Hmm,” Cydney murmured, breathy, sexy and still fast asleep.

He moved his way up to Cydney's ankles, then her calves, both of his hands working the knots from her muscles. Cydney shuffled her position, turned her head the other way and twisted her torso in the same direction as her head. Slay hiked up her dress and started to massage her thighs.

Cydney's eyes opened at that point. “What are you doing?” she calmly asked, though her heart raced in her chest.

“You were tense and shit. I was giving you a massage,” Slay said, pulling her skirt back down.

“I wish you hadn't done that,” Cydney told him. She wanted to scream but decided remaining calm was her best option.

Slay stood and moved the ottoman back in place by her chair. “I was thinking…You really feel that way about Mama?” he asked without turning to face Cydney. He spotted some anger in her voice and wanted to move quickly past it by putting guilt in its place.

Cydney pulled her legs up on the couch and crossed them under her.

He turned to her and sat on the chair, his eyes probing her for an answer.

“Hard seeing her like that,” Cydney said. “She wasn't even coherent.”

“A lot of Nyquil to keep her calm. Only thing I could think of,” Slay said.

“Nyquil?”

Slay nodded. “Otherwise she would have been jumpy and out of control the whole time, and right about now, without me watching her like a hawk, she'd be out on the Ave trying to get her fix on.”

“Unreal.” Cydney sighed.

Slay leaned in. “How it make you feel knowing that's your mother? That her blood runs through you.”

Cydney didn't quite know how to respond. Here she was, a college student studying sociology, and her street hoodlum brother was analyzing her. Well, it would take a mind deeper than he possessed to figure out a mind as complex as hers.

“Easier not to answer,” Slay said. His mouth turned up in a lopsided smile. “I'm feeling you though. I know what you thinking. Thinking there ain't any of that skuzzy glass dick worshipping shit up in you.”

“You read minds now?”

Slay leaned back in the chair, scratched at his scalp, that lopsided smile still on his face. “She shames you—you think you so much better than her.”

Cydney got up from the couch, stomped to the kitchen, the carpet swallowing the echo of her footfalls. Slay got up and followed on her heels.

“Always were a runner when the heat was on,” he said.

Cydney opened a cabinet above her stove, the door swinging hard against another cabinet. She pulled down a box of hot-chocolate mix, slammed the door shut again and tossed the box of mix on the counter. Then she opened the refrigerator and plucked out a carton of milk.

“You ain't gotta use milk, you can make that cocoa with hot water,” Slay told her.

“I like to make it with milk, okay, motherfucker?” Cydney barked.

Slay's tone softened. “You're cursing. Damn, I upset you?”

Cydney huffed, waved the carton of milk at him like a sword as she spoke. “Just because I wanted to better myself and not stay—” She stopped, shook her head, sighed and moved to her lower cabinet to get a boiling pot.

“Not stay what?” Slay asked as she stood upright again, boiling pot in her hand.

Cydney didn't answer.

“Not stay what?” he repeated. He thought back on his experience at Mainland University, stung by the memory, stung by the look of disgust on his sister's face now. It was the same look that stupid trick bitch Pamela shot his way. Seeing it again made his blood boil. “You better answer me, Cydney.”

Cydney rinsed the pot, poured the milk in it, ignoring him. She placed the pot of milk on a burner and lit the flame, then turned to grab the cocoa mix. Before he knew he'd done it, Slay had knocked the pot of milk onto the floor. Cydney wheeled on him, started throwing punches into his chest. His muscles easily deflected the punches. He wrapped his arms around his sister and she began to shake in his clutch. He could feel her wet warm tears on him. They felt good, like an unexpected flash rain during the heat of summer. He thought all was recovered between his sister and him. But he was wrong.

Cydney pried herself from his grip. Her eyes were streaked with black smudges, but she was still so beautiful to him. “You are right, you know,” Cydney said. “I am ashamed of her—can't even say Mama without my insides churning. I don't want anything to do with her, as awful as that might seem. I want to go on with my new life and pretend you guys don't exist—just erase you away.”

Slay laughed nervously. “You said, ‘you guys.' You meant Mama, right?”

Cydney shook her head. “You too,
Slay.
That's who you are, you know. You're Slay. I try to make you out to be Shammond, but you're Slay.”

He moved a step toward her, but she pointed a knife at him that stopped him in his tracks. Where did that come from? “Watch yourself with that, sis,” he said. “Your head ain't clear right about now.”

“My head is very clear,
Slay,
” she mocked, sounding like Pamela again. “And if you come near me I will cut your sorry ass from ear to ear.”

“Oh, I'm sorry now?”

“Always have been,” she said matter-of-factly.

Slay sighed, looked around the kitchen as if it were his first time here. “You forget a lot of shit, Cydney. My loot's helping you with college, and this place. I've been good to you.”

“Blood money,” she said. “I never should have taken it. You think you own me now because of it.”

Slay gazed at her again. “We're family. I ain't looking to own you. I love you. Truth is, all we've got is each other.”

“I hate you! Do you know what you've done to me? One moment in my life and you've managed to take that and…”

Slay moved forward. She raised the knife again. He stopped. “Look, this is getting out of hand. You don't hate me,” he suggested.

Cydney shook her head. “Oh, but I do. I want you out of here, out of my life. Please leave.”

“Cydney, come on,” Slay begged. “It's been an emotional day for the both of us.”

“Leave!”

“Aiight, I'll chill for a moment out in the living room and let you get all this shit out. Then we'll laugh it all off and go on biz as usual.”

“Do I have to get someone to get you out?”

Anger returned to Slay. “Who you gonna get, huh? Ol' dude you was locked in your room talking to that night? The motherfucker took them bikini shots you got tucked in that book in there?”

Cydney crinkled her forehead. “I'll get someone,” she said, waving the knife. “Go, before I have to do it.”

Slay pointed his finger at her, his eyes narrowed. “You making a mistake, sis. Big mistake. I'm already pissed at you for that shit at the funeral home. This is a big mistake.”

“Just one in a long line of mistakes,” Cydney shot back at him.

Slay's head moved up and down like a bobblehead doll as he sized up the situation, sized up his sister. “Right, right,” he said. “And I guess I'm one of those mistakes?”

“The biggest,” Cydney said.

He pointed his finger at her again. “Remember this.”

And then he left.

Gone in a flash.

Cydney bolted the door behind him, turned and pressed her back against it. Free at last?

 

Desmond made the familiar turn onto Cookman Avenue but at the last moment bypassed his restaurant and continued driving up the block. He came to the end, the dance club bordering the ocean in front of him, and made a left turn. The go-go bar, with the silhouette of a curvy beauty on the signage, lured him in. He parked his truck on the street, across from the bar. He rubbed his hands together, thinking of Miss Wonderful, thinking of Nora, thinking of his inadequacies in the romance department. This was so much easier. Instead of flashing his heart, his soul, he would be expected to flash nothing except his dollar bills. He stepped from his truck, engaged the alarm, looked both ways along the mostly abandoned thoroughfare and crossed.

The bar was like a large matchbox, with no windows, and no adornments other than that delicious sign with Hot Tails embroidered below the woman's silhouette. Desmond could only hope the dancers inside had the same dimensions as the woman on the signage.

Desmond walked in. The human wall at the entrance greeted him without a smile.

“Two-drink minimum,” the wall informed him. “Make sure you order the first before you get yourself a permanent seat.”

Desmond nodded, headed for the bar. The bartender was an attractive young woman dressed in black spandex shorts and a little white shirt, Nasty in black lettering across the front. She had the shirt tied up in a knot that rested just below her small chest.

“Wha'chu having?” the female bartender asked Desmond.

He focused his eyes to get a close look at her name tag. “Screwdriver, Wendy.”

She subtly smiled and quickly prepared the drink. “Six,” she said, handing him a small glass of mostly orange juice.

Desmond gave her a ten.

“Enjoy…everything.” She smiled again, nodded her head to another patron who'd just walked in.

Desmond moved, with drink in hand, to the adjoining room, where the stage and the music were. A woman with deep dark skin was onstage, grinding some imaginary lover. She was pretty about the face, with lips that could swallow even the most endowed of men whole. Her body was her real commodity, though. Desmond did a double take when she turned and bent over. She wiggled that bottom for all she was worth, had a couple of the men in the room gasping for oxygen. Desmond moved closer. She turned around, and in one smooth motion, yanked her top off. The temperature rose as she executed the strip-down. Her breasts were more than a handful, natural, firm against her chest. She tried without success to keep her fingers covering her nipples. Desmond blinked his eyes, thinking that those things could poke out an eyeball. He looked at his watch, sighed, sipped his drink and settled into a seat. The young lady onstage pounced on him like a vulture. Desmond had a few bills in hand almost as quickly.

“Hey, Papi,” she cooed, pressing her breasts up to his face. “You like?”

“Yes, I do,” Desmond said, struggling to remove the refinement from his voice. He wanted to take it to the gutter with this girl. “No doubt.”

“Tell them,” she said.

Desmond smiled, played along. He shifted his eyes to her breasts. “I'm feeling you guys.”