For the Strength of You (8 page)

“Yeah,” he said, licking his lips.

“He's not . . . I mean, I don't know. We had a big argument. He said he could set his trap someplace else.”

“Oh.” Anshon brushed his lips across Fe-Fe's, and she responded by wrapping her arms around his neck.

“Damn, I been wanting to do this for a long time,” Anshon said as his hands roamed all over her ass.

“What about Monica?” Fe-Fe asked, feeling Anshon untie her sweatpants.

“She ain't here right now.”

“And neither is Teck,” Fe-Fe whispered.

“Can I fuck you?” Anshon said, now lifting her shirt above her head. Unsnapping her bra and freeing her breasts, he took a step back.

“What?” she asked, not sure if she should be embarrassed or not.

“You are beautiful.”

Before Fe-Fe could respond, Anshon's cell phone started ringing. He looked at the caller ID and saw that it was Monica. He pressed IGNORE and continued to undress Fe-Fe.

“Anshon . . .” Fe-Fe moaned as she lay on the couch, naked and spreading her legs. “This is wrong.”

“No, this is all right.” He started sucking on her clit. “This feel too fuckin' good to be wrong.”

Hours later, Anshon and Fe-Fe had fucked every way imaginable. Anshon lay on the floor and looked at the ceiling, Fe-Fe could tell that he still had a lot on his mind.

“What's wrong, baby?” she said, placing her head against his chest.

“Everything is coming down at once.” Anshon turned over on his stomach, and she started to rub his back. “My sister practically cussed me out because she don't want me in the game anymore. Niggas is gettin' robbed all over Selma. Wallo tells me that he used to fuck Monica . . . and she gon' tell me it was when she was fifteen so the shit don't count. What the hell kinda shit is that?”

“Anshon,” Fe-Fe said, taking a deep breath, “Monica loves you. Don't hold that against her.”

“Yeah, maybe you're right.”

“I can't blame Tammy either for wanting you out the game, even though me and Teck making mad money.”

“Really?” Anshon frowned. “Teck ain't been to re-up for two weeks. I thought maybe y'all were taking it slow.”

“He hasn't been to re-up?” Fe-Fe smirked.

Then she thought,
Maybe he really is selling in Durham.

“Maybe you should deal wit' Teck on that.”

“Oh, best believe I will,” Anshon said.

“So, Fe, what's up with all of this?” Anshon asked, turning on his side to feel on her ass again.

“Nothing.” Fe-Fe unwrapped Anshon's arms from around her. “Not a thing. We can't let this happen again. As much as I wanna keep fucking you, I can't.”

Anshon sat up and reached for his clothes. “Yo, I respect that. I just thank you for being here. I felt like I was going out of my mind.... Oh, shit.” He snapped his fingers and looked at his watch. It was nine o'clock in the morning. “Tammy! Shit, I forgot that she's coming.”

“She is!” Fe-Fe's face lit up. “I can't wait for her to see me clean! Maybe we can be best friends again.”

“Slow down, Fe-Fe.” Anshon laughed. “Go put some clothes on and then you can come with me to my house and meet her.”

“Okay!” Fe-Fe said, laughing on her way upstairs. “I can't wait to see her!”

Anshon ran in Fe-Fe's small bathroom downstairs and showered. As soon as he made sure his pants were straight, he saw Teck standing in the doorway. He jumped.

“Damn, nigga, you scared the shit outta me!” Anshon held his chest.

“It's all good, dawg. Where Fe at?”

“Upstairs.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Anshon said, giving Teck a pound. “I just stopped by to see if Fe-Fe wanted to ride with me to meet Tammy.”

“Tammy?” Teck frowned.

“Yeah, she's coming back in town.”

“Oh.” Teck thought about the argument he and Fe-Fe had the other night. “Naw, she don't wanna go.”

“A'ight,” Anshon said, feeling a strange vibe from Teck. He couldn't tell if Teck felt as if some-thing was going on with him and Fe-Fe, or if Teck was just acting funny.

“Fe-Fe, I'll catch you later,” Anshon hollered.

Fe-Fe stood at the top of the stairs, out of Teck's sight, and mouthed to Anshon, “Call me.”

Anshon nodded his head and then left.

“Come here, Fe-Fe,” Teck ordered.

Reluctantly, she walked down the stairs. “What?”

“I'm sorry about the argument we had. You forgive me?”

Fe-Fe rolled her eyes. “Nigga, please. I ain't seen you in a week. You've been disappearing and shit. Humph, and I don't like the way you've been acting lately. Therefore, I don't know who else you been fucking, so—”

“Fe-Fe, please.”

“You ain't gotta lie to me, Teck. I don't give a damn. You know what, Teck?” Fe-Fe said, as if an idea had just come to her. “Get your shit and go! Don't come back. The trap is closed.”

Teck really wanted to kick Fe-Fe's ass. As far as he was concerned, he'd made her. “Fuck you! Crackhead bitch!”

“Whatever,” Fe-Fe huffed. “Come on so I can lock the door behind you, please.”

After Teck left, Fe-Fe didn't even drop a tear. She cleaned up her house, took a shower, and lay down to sleep. When she woke up, it was because Monica called her around two o'clock and gave her the good news that she had a job now and that she would start the next week.

Fe-Fe was happy for Monica, but she felt a little sting knowing that her money was running low. Thank God for Section 8 or she would've lost her home a long time ago.

Refusing to fall on her face, Fe-Fe did something she hadn't done in years: She picked up the paper and looked through the classified section. Finding an ad for a bank teller job, she picked up the phone answered the ad. The bank scheduled her an interview for nine o'clock the next morning.

Afterward, she picked up the phone and called her twin sons.

“I wanna see you, Ma,” Fe-Fe's son, Jason, said to her. “I miss you and I wanna get to know you. Please, Ma?”

“Yeah, me too,” said Jamal, who was on the line as well.

Fe-Fe broke into tears when they asked her if she could talk to their cousin that had legal custody of them. No matter what, they wanted to be with their mother.

“Yes,” Fe-Fe said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I'll be up there next week to talk with her.”

As Fe-Fe hung up and was wiping her eyes, the phone rang again. It was Monica. Fe-Fe felt guilty about fucking Anshon. She and Monica were so close, but Fe-Fe made herself be at ease, as she convinced herself that she would never sleep with Anshon again.

* * *

A few days later, around eight in the evening, it was a full house at Anshon's place. Anshon, Monica, Tammy, Fe-Fe, some of the guys Anshon played ball with—Wood C, Deck, Otis, Don, Tremain—and the two sisters from next door, Dee and Plum, were there. They were playing cards and listening to some old school hip-hop like MC Lyte's “Paper Thin,” which was playing at the time.

Tammy was at the table with Don, playing spades against Otis and Tremain.

The small card party they had going on was good for Tammy, because she'd been crying non- stop since she found out that Tom-Tom was dead and her house had burned down.

When she had come to Selma, she wanted Anshon to take her directly to the site of her house, but instead she changed her mind and wanted to place flowers on Tom-Tom's grave. Anshon felt like the Grim Reaper when he stepped foot on Tom-Tom's fresh soil.

He didn't sweat Tammy about the time she wanted to spend at Tom-Tom's grave. The way Anshon saw it, he felt it was better that Tammy be standing over Tom-Tom's grave than Tom-Tom be standing over hers.

Three 40-ounce bottles of Old Gold rested on Anshon's dining room table. In the living room, Anshon sat on the floor next to Monica playing X-Box, as Deck sat between Dee and Plum, knocking down a forty of Old Gold. Fe-Fe sat on the couch, kicking it with Wood C.

“Stop cutting my damn books!” Tammy yelled at Don.

He had a drunk-ass, glassy look in eye. “That wheelchair got hydraulics on it?” He belched. “If not, I could hook ya up. My brother is a bad motherfucker in his two-wheeler!”

Normally Tammy's feelings would've been hurt, but because she knew that Don didn't mean any harm and that he was half drunk, she ignored him. “Shut the hell up and play cards.”

Don was so drunk that after a while Dee had to play his hand. Tammy was beatin' Dee's ass. She was running Bostons all over the place. Dee started to get annoyed with Tammy kicking her ass, so she quit the game.

“Sore loser.” Tammy laughed.

Fe-Fe was bobbing her head to the music as she peeped Don and Deck creep out behind Plum.

A few minutes later, Anshon asked, “Wood C, where the hell is Deck at?”

“Wit' Plum.”

Anshon could only smile. He could only imagine that they were getting ready to run a serious train. And not to be out-done, Dee somehow got Otis and Tremain to follow her next door. She said something about needing a dresser moved. It was quiet, with only Wood C on the couch, along with Fe-Fe and Anshon changing the CDs.

Tammy looked around the room. “Damn, what happen to them cats?”

Fe-Fe laughed. “They next door freakin' Plum and Dee.”

Tammy shook her head. “Them girls might as well go into porn.”

Don, Deck, Otis, and Tremain didn't come from next door until two hours later. Wood C gave Fe-Fe his cell number then rolled out with Deck.

Otis got behind the wheel of his '79 Cadillac Seville, with Tremain slumped in the passenger seat and Don stretched out in the back. He blew the horn and then rolled out.

“Anshon,” Fe-Fe said before she got ready to leave, “I got a job at the bank. I went for my interview yesterday, and they hired me on the spot.”

“Get the hell outta here!” He smiled at her.

“Yeah,” she said. “My first day is tomorrow.”

“That's wassup, Fe-Fe. That's wassup.” Anshon kissed Fe-Fe on the cheek before she left. One good thing about Teck was that before he started acting up, he'd bought Fe-Fe a car for her to get around in.

“I'll holla at y'all in the morning. I'm going to bed,” Tammy said, heading for the bed.

“Good night, big sis.”

Monica closed the bedroom door and started to undress. “I had fun tonight, baby.”

“Yeah, me too. My sister's cool, right?”

“Yeah, she is,” Monica said, throwing her arm around him. “She really is.”

* * *

Early the next morning Tammy was out and about. Her first mission was to stop at the bank in Raleigh to make a withdrawal to do some serious shopping. She made a withdrawal for $400.00, but a glitch in the system added an extra zero and made it look as if she had withdrawn $400,000. As soon as the teller saw the withdrawal slip, Kristi, Teck's baby mother, nearly broke her neck to call her sister, Constance.

“Constance,” Kristi said, breathing heavily, “this is it. We 'bout to strike gold. This chick just made a withdrawal for four hundred grand. Where's Teck and Wallo?”

“I'll call them,” Constance said in a hurry.

“They better hurry before she leaves.” Kristi looked out the window. “She's driving a white Mercedes truck with a handicap license plate.”

“Let me call them now. Damn, Kristi, we struck gold! Maybe I can leave Selma after all.”

Kristi turned around smiling, and Fe-Fe was standing there. Fe-Fe couldn't believe what she had just heard. She didn't know who the person was in the white Mercedes, but she knew for a fact that whoever it was, something was getting ready to go down that included this girl Kristi and whoever she was talking to.

Kristi handed Fe-Fe the statement. “Process this,” she said.

When Fe-Fe saw Tammy's name, she knew something was wrong. “Oh God, no!” It only took a six-second call to confirm that the computer had made a mistake. Only four hundred was taken out of Tammy's account, not four hundred grand.

Fe-Fe walked over to Kristi's desk, but she wasn't there. Fe-Fe started to panic. She called Tammy on her cell phone, but there was no answer. Then she tried Anshon, and still no answer. Fe-Fe felt like she was going to have a panic attack. Her palms were sweaty, and she was panting. She picked the phone up and called Tammy's cell phone again.

“Hello?” Tammy said.

“Tammy.” Fe-Fe was breathing heavily. “Please don't stop and talk—”

“Wait a minute, Fe-Fe,” Tammy interrupted her. “It's Te—” The phone went dead.

Fe-Fe took off running out of the bank like a bat outta hell. At that point, she didn't give a damn about her job. Saving Tammy was more important.

* * *

Anshon started to worry about his sister when 4:30 p.m. rolled around and she hadn't called. She was supposed to head back to Atlanta that morning, and he knew she wanted to be on time because Q'mara, her daughter, had a school play that Tammy wouldn't dare miss.

For the last hour, Anshon had been dialing Tammy's cell phone non-stop. Then he thought to check his voice mail. Maybe she had called.

He had two messages. The first message was from Tammy.

“Hey, big head. It's your big sis. I want you to know that I love you, and that no matter what, you will always be my heart. I'm heading over to the bank now to take out some money. By the way, I like Monica, but it's kinda obvious that you and Fe-Fe have a thing goin'. Are you tappin' that?”