After school, when Lewis went to pick his daughter up from day care, he noticed someone at the curb, staring at him from a car. The woman sitting in the big old Ford did not look away. Lewis squinted against the sun to get a better look at her and realized that he recognized her.
The car door opened and the woman stepped out and stood on the street side of the car, still staring at him from over the hood of her automobile. The woman was older, in her later fifties. Her graying brown hair looked like wire, held back with a rubber band. She was thin, almost gaunt, and wore a sweater despite the already warm afternoon weather.
“You promised us,” the woman called out. “You can’t say we can have her then just take her away.”
Lewis looked over his shoulder, then quickly walked across the lawn, closing the distance between himself and the woman.
“It’s over,” Lewis said, his voice hushed, as if someone were listening in. “Do you hear me? I’m not going to tell you again. I’ve changed my mind.”
“But you promised!”
Again, Lewis looked back toward the day care building, wary of anyone stepping out of the front door. He then started around the car toward the woman. She quickly pulled open the door, tried to sink back into the car, but Lewis caught the handle first.
“I told you, forget about that,” he said, dipping his head into the cabin.
The woman sat, wide eyed, cowering behind the wheel.
“I’ve changed my mind, and it’s over. Don’t come around me no more. You hear me?”
The woman continued staring defiantly, saying nothing.
“You hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now get out of here.”
Lewis stepped back, watched the car drive off, and then walked back to the building to pick up his daughter.
Next, Lewis headed to his best friend Freddy’s house. Since Lewis wasn’t working that day, he wanted to ask how the rehabbing was going, see if there was anyone interested in buying the house.
Lewis hadn’t expected to hear that Freddy’s house had been broken into this morning and that Freddy had to damn near kill somebody.
As Layla sat playing in the next room, Freddy filled Lewis in on everything that had happened.
“And that’s it? You ain’t heard nothing back from the police yet?”
Freddy looked at Lewis like he was crazy, then flipped the grilled cheese sandwich he was frying. “And ain’t gonna hear nothing back. You know how it goes around here. I’m going to put those bars up, buy some more bullets, and dare somebody else to come back up in here. That is until we sell that house, buy another, and do it again and again, until we’re millionaires.”
Those were the plans Lewis and Freddy had. Start buying and flipping houses. They often sat around and dreamed of starting their own real-estate company, making the kind of money that would get Freddy out of the hood he was living in and earning Lewis the respect he felt he wasn’t getting from Monica.
“You think that’s ever going to happen?” Lewis said.
Freddy turned, the spatula in his hand. “I ain’t got no choice. I been living like this all my life, and I’m not bringing my child into this nonsense. I’m getting my people out of here. And I don’t care what I have to do to make that happen.”
Freddy scooped the sandwich out of the pan, set it on a saucer, and halved it with a butter knife.
“You sure Layla ain’t hungry? I can give her this one.”
“Naw,” Lewis said, his head down. “They fed her at day care.”
“Then go on take half. I been doing these the same way since we was ten. Two pieces of cheese and a slice of bologna in the middle.”
“I’m cool.”
“What’s up? My crib is the one that got broken into this morning, not the castle you live in.”
“I ain’t living there no more.”
“What you do this time?”
“I proposed again last night.”
“Why you keep doing that? I told you to stop doing that. She just got divorced. You ain’t even been living there a year. She probably still asking herself if she made the right decision in leaving her husband, and you trying to force her to take a new one?”
“She ain’t going to play me,” Lewis said. “I’m living there, taking out the garbage, making her dinner, giving her the dick whenever she want it, telling her I love her. She got it made with me, but she don’t want to commit.”
“Don’t even lie to yourself, Lewis. You two go at it like everybody else. You walk in late, not cleaning up after yourself, do the stupid shit that all men do, but she don’t give you a hard way to go.”
“She does,” Lewis said. “She always complaining. Do this, don’t do that. Just because she makes the money, half the time she thinks she can treat me like a child. Got me going to school when she know I can’t stand that shit.”
“That’s because she trying to make you better,” Freddy said, grabbing half of the sandwich and taking a bite. Then he grabbed the back of Lewis’s chair and yanked on it. “You need to get out my house and patch things up with Monica before she comes to her senses.”
Lewis stood. “I ain’t going back there until she tell me we getting married.”
“And if she don’t, where the fuck you gonna go? You ain’t got shit, Lewis.”
“I got the job with you. We got the house we gonna sell, and the house after that, and the house after that, like you said.”
Freddy just shook his head at his friend.
“I feel like I ain’t got no say,” Lewis said. “Ain’t nothing stopping her from kicking me right out her crib, whenever she feel.”
“Now she doesn’t have to, because you walked out first.”
“We get married, I know she making a promise to me. I know she’s not seeing me as a child no more or just something to do no more, but a man she plans to be with her for the rest of her life. I know Layla gonna be taken care of. So if she can’t do that for me,” Lewis said, smirking a little bit, “I’m just going to have to wait till Waters and Ford Realty makes us enough money so I can buy my own castle.”
Freddy smiled, gave Lewis some dap, and pulled him into a half hug. “Alright, man. You the one who’s going through it, so I ain’t gonna comment no more. I just hope you know what you doing.”
“Yeah, me too.”