Dime (11 page)

*  *  *

Two days after none of us said anything about Stone, Daddy came home holding Brandy's sandal by the broken strap. He marched right over to her and used it to pop the back of her head.

“The hell is this?”

“My shoe.”

He shoe-popped her again. “You got something to tell me, ho?”

“No sir.” I'd never heard her call him
sir
before.

“Stone say you been out of pocket.”

“No sir.”

I looked at L.A. She was the Bottom, and it was her job to set Daddy straight. But L.A. didn't say a word.

Daddy slapped the back of Brandy's head with his palm this time. “Explain yourself, bitch.” I still wasn't used to it, but somehow, in the past few weeks,
bitch
was mostly how he referred to us.

“Stone was trying to talk to me.” I hated speaking up, but it wasn't fair, otherwise.

Daddy turned around. “What?”

“The other day he was trying when I was out working with Brandy, and we were running away from him. Her shoe broke, and we left it and got in a car with some dates. We never talked to him. We never even looked at him.”

Daddy eyed me for a long time. He dropped the sandal. “You expect me to believe that garbage?”

“It's the truth.”

“Word,” Brandy added.

“What do Stone want with you?” Daddy said. “You so fresh, you hardly know how to do nothing. You not making anybody's quota. I'm the only fool who keep you.”

“Ask L.A.,” I forced myself to say. Brandy crossed her arms and threw me a look to tell me to shut up. “We told her and she said not to tell you.”

“What you knew?” Daddy asked L.A.

“I didn't know nothing,” L.A. said. “Did I, Brandy?”

Brandy shrugged.

“Better not have known and not told,” Daddy told L.A. “Or you in serious trouble.”

“I didn't know shit,” L.A. said. “Damn.”

Daddy turned around and whomped Brandy again. She had to move her feet to keep from falling down, but she kept the tears in. “If I have cause to suspect you been out of pocket in any kind of way with Stone or anybody else, you better pray for your life.”

He reached over and whomped me, too. “And that there for telling lies on Stone.”

The back of my head hummed.

*  *  *

When he took me the next time, he was gentle. Gentle with his body and gentle with his voice. He held me close, using his remote to turn on slow, relaxing music and wrapping those liquidy sheets around us.

“You the best,” he said. “You so fresh and beautiful. You smart and mature.” He kissed my forehead in that way I loved. “You going to have a big place with me, Beautiful.”

“What do you mean?” I looked at his split eyebrow scar, wondering how he got it. “You always say that, but what does that mean?”

He smiled because I almost never asked questions, and when I did he thought it was cute. He held me tighter, and that was all I ever wanted. “You going to see,” he said. “You going to see.”

*  *  *

There wasn't anything to read because Daddy wouldn't let me go to the library. I tried telling him that if I didn't do the assigned summer reading for school and failed the tests in September, somebody was going to come looking at Janelle's, and then there would be issues. I didn't think this was true, but I hoped Daddy wouldn't know. It didn't work, though, because he said he'd let me check out those books later, right before school, when they'd be sharper in my mind, anyway.

So after I woke in my sleeping bag, but before I slid out of it, I would try to remember a book I liked and read it again in my head.

L.A. GRABBED MY arm. “Come on,” she said. “We going home.”

It was only eleven thirty. We weren't even halfway into the night. “What for?”

“Shut up and walk.”

Nobody was there when we got to the apartment. Sometimes Daddy picked one of us up early and took us home to be with him for a minute. But never this early.

“What happened?” I asked L.A. Where was Daddy? Where was Brandy?

L.A. put the stove on for her tea, even though it must have been ninety degrees. “Brandy got herself locked up. Daddy left out. I got to change and go get her.”

“Can I come?”

“No.”

“What did she do?”

L.A. actually stopped to stare at me. “You stupid?”

I guess I was. I knew girls were arrested. I saw it happen twice. And I saw them come back, too. I saw Stone and Whippet beat their girls for it. I saw George give one of his the day off. You never knew how your Daddy was going to react.

“Stay here, and don't go out,” L.A. said. “Make some food for when we get back.”

I made roast chicken just like that first night. That was a long time ago. I made a cold string bean salad and some macaroni salad too. I kept an eye on that back burner. I mopped the kitchen and changed everybody's sheets, except for Daddy's. I dusted. I straightened up all the clothes boxes and L.A.'s dresser drawers. I didn't touch Daddy's room since we weren't allowed in it unless invited.

Then I sat on the couch and waited. I wanted something real to read so much, but there was nothing but an old
People
magazine and an
Ebony
magazine. I wanted a book. Something fat and long.

When I finally heard the door, I jumped. It was Daddy. He was on the phone. “. . . got the other one coming soon. Going to have forty toes down. Nah. If that bitch rolls over, I'll . . . What? Yup. Switch it to indoor is what I'm saying. New little one going to show . . . what?” He stopped talking long enough to motion to me to pack up some food. I packed it up quickly while he listened and then talked some more. “Russian bitches make you . . . That's what I'm saying. . . . North Carolina and then we changing . . .” He took the bag I held out and grunted something, then tapped off the phone.

“I'm out,” he told me. “L.A. going to call me when Brandy back home. Nobody leave. Not until I get back. Only you go out for food. Tomorrow at four. I got eyes watching you. Shop and home under a hour. Get enough to last three, four days. Understand?” He handed me thirty dollars.

What about L.A.? “Why aren't you giving L.A. the money?”

“L.A. ain't here, is she?”

“No, but—”

He tap-slapped my cheek. “Don't give me no attitude. Just be happy I trust you and do what I say.”

*  *  *

Brandy couldn't have gone back out to the track anyway. Her lip was swollen twice its size, and she had a black eye. She was walking funny too.

“Cop,” she said. “Soon as we got in eleven, he put his stupid handcuffs on me, told me I'm under arrest for solicitation, and then did it to me anyway.” She shook her head. “Damn.”

“Where Daddy?” L.A. asked me for the tenth time in under thirty minutes.

“I told you. I don't know. He said stay in three or four days and he'll be back.”

“What about food?” L.A. opened the refrigerator. “We got hardly nothing.”

I didn't want to answer that.

“We supposed to starve?”

Somehow Brandy knew. “He gave you coins?” she asked me. She spoke softly, but L.A. whipped around anyway.

“He said I should go at four.” It was five thirty in the morning. Still dark out.

“He gave you his money?” L.A. tilted her head at me. “He gave it to you?”

I shrugged.

“How much?”

I showed her the three tens.

“Why he gave it to you?”

I didn't have an answer.

L.A. slammed her bedroom door behind her.

I made Brandy a plate of eggs. She examined her face in her round makeup mirror. “I need a shower.” She hadn't sat down since she got back.

“You okay?” She was standing strange. It hurt us sometimes, and I guessed with handcuffs on and a cop like that, probably it hurt more.

She didn't answer my question. “Why Daddy gave you the money?”

“I don't know.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don't know.”

“He mad at me?”

“I don't know.” I trusted Brandy, but I didn't trust anybody enough to repeat things Daddy said to me in private. I wanted to tell her about that Brother Down South and the Russians, but I was afraid he would know if I told. Daddy had some sort of magic like that: He knew everything.

Instead I made myself eggs too. For Daddy's sake, I called out: “L.A.!” But she didn't answer or come out. So I didn't make her anything.

“This lady came,” Brandy said quietly. But not too quietly. She didn't want L.A. to hear us whispering and think to listen, so she said it loud enough it was like regular conversation, but not so loud L.A. could hear the actual words. “A different cop brought me to her in some room. Cop was cool. The lady say they could give me a program to get me out of the life instead of a regular court date.”

“A place to stay?”

“Yeah. School. HIV test. A lawyer.”

“A lawyer?”

Brandy was eating standing up. She was leaning against the counter. “They don't know, though. Daddy would find me. Probably kill me.”

I thought about his guns. He had two. He said one of them was broken, but after George laughed so hard his beer sprayed out his nose over it, I thought Daddy just didn't like how that one looked. It had a pearl handle and was small enough that he could hide it in his palm. He kept it in one of the shiny black drawers in his bedroom. The other gun was always on him somewhere. It was black all over. I thought it was a glock, but I wasn't sure. He used it once to hit L.A., but I never knew what for. It left a bruise on her shoulder.

“Anyway, you wouldn't leave us, would you?” It would be hard without Brandy. Partly because she and I were cool together and partly because being the only other one with L.A. would be stressful.

Brandy shook her head. She put her plate down and pulled something out of her front pocket. A little rectangular card. She turned it around on the table so that I could read it.
Pamela Terrence, The North Star
. There was an 800 phone number and a different number to text. We heard L.A. opening her door. Brandy slid the card back into her pocket and picked up her plate again. She wasn't eating much. “I'd leave L.A. in half a heartbeat,” she mumbled. “Not Daddy. He save my life every day.” Her face got soft like I almost never saw it, underneath all that swelling and purple. “He take care of me.”

What about me?
I wanted to ask, but L.A. interrupted, appearing from her room.

She sat down and took my plate. “Get me a fork,” she ordered Brandy.

Brandy got the fork. She moved slowly.

*  *  *

Now the interesting thing,
Money would add to the note,
is that a ho is not supposed to handle me except for the time it takes to do her business and then drop me to her Daddy. Of course, the Bottom Bitch is sometime called on to take care of me when the Daddy is out hurt or, say, locked up. But for the most part, I don't touch a ho's fingertips more than a minute. It just doesn't look good and it's not wise practice. They better know me well, but hos are not meant to be the boss of me.

*  *  *

We followed Daddy's instructions. We played poker for Fudge Stripes and watched some TV. I liked TV, but I wanted books. By midmorning, I closed my eyes against the heavy heat and reread what I could remember.

Alec, nearly drowning in the middle of the churning ocean, clinging to the black stallion in order to survive. Charlotte Doyle, desperate to prove herself to the pirates, climbing down the ship's ratlines, losing her footing and nearly dying. And that attic. Filled with handmade paper flowers and little Cory's deadness and Cathy, growing up hidden away, with hardly any sunlight to brighten her days.

When I ran out of book memories, I tried some of my own. Janelle's maple brown sugar turkey for Christmas dinner and then all of us singing carols as loudly as we could on the house's roof, looking for Santa, even Jywon, who brought the binoculars that got sent to us from Amazon by mistake and Janelle let us keep. Me going with my friend Angelica and her mother to buy her new pink boots, and her mother buying me a pair of pink socks, too. The man in the store thought we were sisters, and he gave us each a Dum Dum, which we hated, but we saved, and I gave them to Vonna later. Me, curled in a ball reading in the corner of the school library beneath a table and next to a cluster of three potted plants, and I was so inside my book, I couldn't hear them calling, and getting detention for causing trouble, and Ms. McClenny winking, saying,
She can serve it with me
, as if that were a punishment. The firefighters who came to our classroom and let us touch their breathing masks and taught us to stop, drop, and roll. Rocking inside of somebody soft and big who smelled like barbecue potato chips and whose watch scratched my left shoulder each time she turned a page.

*  *  *

We sat around. We were tired. It felt good to sit so much. Brandy didn't sit. She lay down. When L.A. made her get up so there was room on the couch, Brandy borrowed my sleeping bag to lie on the floor.

“At least take Advil for the pain,” I told her. Advil was allowed.

“What pain?” She grimaced, her head resting on my blue pillow.

Daddy forbidding alcohol or drugs made him different from other pimps. Stone kept his girls in heroin, and Whippet and George gave theirs beer and liquor, too. Brandy said it felt good to be drunk or high most of the time. She knew about the feel of drinking because somebody who used to take care of her when she was small made sure she drank a lot. She said it made the work easier but living harder. They made her use smack later, which she loved more than anything ever except for Daddy. She said stopping cold for Daddy when he first found her was a million times worse than the worst trick she'd ever had to turn, but Daddy helped her do it. She said he was like a living angel.