Promise Kept, page 22
“Do that.” Sin gave him dap before heading for the elevator. During the ride to his floor, Shake’s words played over in his head. Sin could identify all too well with what he was going through. That feeling of helplessness while watching someone you loved sacrifice so you didn’t have to go without. He would help Shake if it was within his power to do so. He was a good kid and didn’t deserve whatever fate running with Darryl and his gang held in store for him. Of course, Bone was going to scoff at him bringing in an outsider, but this wasn’t something that would be up for debate. Saving one young soul would hardly balance the scales for all the evil Sin had done in his young life, but it was a start.
When Sin entered his apartment, he found it dark and quiet, as it should’ve been, considering the hour of the night. Still, sometimes you never know. On any given night, you could find either occupant of the apartment pacing the floor like the ghosts of Christmas Past. The thing about carrying around demons was, they rarely let you rest. That curse didn’t afflict everyone under the roof that night. The soft glow of the living room television illuminated the face of a sleeping figure on the couch. She was a light-skinned girl of about twenty or so if one had to guess. Her thick lips were hung open, and there was a trail of slobber running from her mouth and onto one of the couch’s cushions. She was down for the count, but her eyes fluttered behind her lips. Sin watched her for a time, wondering if her sleep was as fitful as his.
“Yo.” Sin nudged her with his finger, making sure to keep a safe distance. It was the gentlest of touches, but she was immediately up with her hand sliding under the cushion she’d been slobbering on. “It’s Sin, baby girl,” he identified himself.
The sleep still hanging heavily on her brain caused her to look at him as if he was lying about his identity. When she was finally awake enough to recognize Sin, she sucked her teeth. “Why you creeping through here like a cat burglar?” She sat up on the couch, rubbing her eyes and stretching.
“I wasn’t creeping. Your ass was just slumped, and I see why.” Sin’s eyes went to the plastic cup on the coffee table. “You know how I feel about you getting sloppy when you’re over here, Bubbles.”
“Nah, it wasn’t even that type of party. I had a half-glass of wine, but after the night I’ve had, I deserve it,” Bubbles told him.
“That bad?” Sin asked.
“Wasn’t the worse, but shit getting harder. You got your hands full, big bro,” Bubbles said with a shake of her head.
“I know,” was Sin’s response.
“What time is it?” Bubbles grabbed her phone from the coffee table beside her drink. It was after 3:00 a.m. and she had ten missed calls. “Damn, Sin. I told you I couldn’t make this a late night. My baby daddy is with the kids, and I know his ass gonna trip off the time I’m coming in.”
“My fault, Bubbles. The night went a little longer than I expected it to. If your dude gives you an issue, I’ll talk to him. And I’ll throw something extra on top of what I owe you for the night.” He pulled some money from his pocket and started counting out bills.
“I’ll gladly take the extra, but that nigga ain’t my daddy, so you don’t owe him no explanation.” Bubble snatched what she felt like she was owed for the night. “Just be straight with me.” She waved her cash before shoving it into her purse.
“You got that,” Sin agreed. He waited for Bubbles to grab her things and walked her to the door. “You need me to call you an Uber?”
“Nah, I’m only going to the next building. I’m already late and in the doghouse, so I may as well make a night of it,” Bubbles told him.
“You love walking on the wild side, baby sis.” Sin leaned against the doorframe of the apartment while Bubbles stepped into the hall.
“That’s the only side I know.” Bubbles winked and disappeared into the staircase. Her life moved too fast for her to wait on elevators. She never knew what could be waiting on the other side of that automated door.
Once Bubbles was gone, Sincere secured the apartment. He locked the door, put away the wine glass, and checked the lock on the door again. He made his way down the hall and stopped at the first bedroom. The door wasn’t completely closed. From inside he could hear soft snoring. He let himself into the darkened room. On a queen-sized bed a woman slept. She lay at a fitful angle, one leg thrown off the bed and the blanket hooked around the other. He moved softly across the room and perched himself on the edge of the bed. She stirred when he adjusted the blanket to cover her but didn’t wake. When she shifted positions, the moonlight coming through the window illuminated her face, soft and still beautiful, even at her age and after what she had been through. The only signs of her suffering were the small scar on her forehead and the dark circles beneath her eyes. She’d carried her burdens and everyone else’s for so long that the least Sin could do was shoulder some of that weight.
His eyes fell to the picture on the nightstand. It was of a younger version of the sleeping woman, hair all done up in long black braids. She was standing in front of what used to be a recording studio in downtown Manhattan, hugging a little boy to her chest. He had long hair and the smile of an angel, but something darker lurked in his eyes. The woman in the picture was smiling, but you could see the worry on her face. It was a look that Sin wouldn’t learn to recognize until he was older. Had she known that far back the tragic turn that her life would take? Or would the demons who would eventually ride her into her current condition already have taken hold?
“Sincere?” A soft voice tore his eyes from the picture. She was awake now and looking at him quizzically.
“Hey, Lil Lady. How you living?” Sin touched her face gently with the back of his hand. Her given name was Cynthia, but Lil Lady is what everyone called her, including Sin. It was the only moniker that he ever felt comfortable using when it came to her.
“I’m okay. Just having a hard time sleeping. The way your girlfriend snores ain’t help either,” Cynthia told him.
“You know Bubbles ain’t my girlfriend. I keep telling you that,” Sin reminded her.
“She’s your something. Don’t no woman look at a man the way she looks at you if he ain’t been inside her,” Cynthia said with a sly chuckle.
“Go ahead with that, Lil Lady.” Sin nudged her playfully.
“I know that look. It’s the same look I used to give your father when I wanted him. That man’s love was like a drug, and I was strung out.” Cynthia laughed, her mind going to some memory that Sin didn’t want to hear about. “Speaking of that snake. He come by here earlier. Said he wanted to drop some money off for you children, but of course, when he left, all I had to show for it was a wet pussy and an empty purse.”
“Ma, you and I both know he ain’t been nowhere but the prison yard for damn near a decade,” Sin corrected her, but she ignored him and kept with the broken memory.
“Boy always came like a thief in the night, and gone just as fast,” Cynthia said with a suck of her teeth. “Your daddy got a whole church of kids out here that he poisons as it suits him. But that ain’t nothing you don’t already know. Your sister, Carol, is the only one still running around with blinders on about him. Where she at? Out there parked in front of the television?”
Sin didn’t answer at first because he wasn’t sure how to. “Ma, Carol ain’t here no more, remember? She been gone a while now.”
“Gone where? I just seen her this morning? Fixed her some breakfast before she went to school,” Cynthia insisted. “Let me go check her room.” She made to get up, but Sin stopped her.
“Ma.” His grip on her arm wasn’t aggressive, but firm. “Carol died in a car accident thirteen years ago.” He hadn’t meant for his tone to be so sharp. The doctor had encouraged Sin to be patient with her, but the worse her condition became the harder it was. Cynthia was suffering from dementia, so sometimes she slipped between what was and what is. If she had it in her genes, it’s possible that it would’ve started to show signs as she got older, but to attack her at the young age of forty-two seemed cruel. It showing up so early was attributed to a head injury she had suffered on the night Carol was killed.
Carol was Sin’s sister. She was younger than Sin, but older than Bone by a year or so, a product of one of their parents’ many break-ups. Every few years, Sin’s dad would get his mother pregnant, they would break up, and then he would disappear to live his best life before returning to repeat the process. Carol had been the result of one of those breaks. Sin’s father fucked other women. That’s just who he was, but he crossed a line he could never really come back from when he fathered a child during one of these brief affairs. For years Cynthia wouldn’t so much as utter Carol’s name. It was too painful. So, one could imagine Sin’s surprise when he discovered that Carol’s mother had overdosed, and the toddler would be coming to live with them. The first few months weren’t easy, with Carol being a constant reminder to Cynthia that her man had given himself to someone else. Cynthia made it work, and even when Bone came along and there was an extra mouth to feed with a daddy that couldn’t sit still long enough to do right, Cynthia still treated Carol as if she had come from her womb.
Sin’s words brought back memories that settled on Cynthia’s shoulders like bricks. She sagged back on the pillows as if she could no longer support her own weight. “She shouldn’t have been there . . . shouldn’t have been with me . . .” Cynthia dragged the admission out. “Proper place for her that hour of the night was in the house, but she cried so bad every time I tried to leave. I was only going there and coming right back, so what could it hurt? Then . . .” Her words trailed off as the memories came back. She crumbled in on herself and began crying.
Carol’s last night on earth had been spent in the company of Cynthia. She was having some issues with her boss over her paycheck and had to go to the office and straighten it out. Sin was about nine, and Bone five or six. So this landed Carol in the middle, at seven or so. Cynthia had intended to leave her in the house with just the boys, but the girl wouldn’t stop crying for her, so she took her along. They drove to midtown so that Cynthia could hash it out with her boss. It was to be a short trip that would take a tragic turn. Years later Sin began to put the pieces together what happened. To that day, he still didn’t have all the details, but just thinking about it made him physically ill. Based on her boss’s reputation, which he later discovered through the grapevine, he didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what had gone down. There was only one thing his mother’s boss could’ve done that would have put her in such a state. When Cynthia left the office, she was damn near in hysterics. She was in no condition to drive, but that didn’t stop her from jumping back behind the wheel. She was so caught in her trauma that she neglected to check for traffic when she gunned the small Ford Hatchback from its parking spot and out into the street. She never even saw the SUV that hit them coming. All Cynthia could remember was waking up with a cracked skull, two paramedics pulling her out of what was left of the car, and Carol nowhere to be found. In her haste, she had forgotten to put the little girl’s seatbelt on. Carol went through the windshield and was dead before she hit the pavement. Things changed in their family after Carol was killed. Sin’s dad stopped coming around as much, and Sin started hanging in the streets more. Cynthia’s guilt pushed her into depression and eventually drugs. Between the head trauma and her getting high, Cynthia’s brain had begun to deteriorate at a rapid pace, and before Sin knew it, he had moved from the role of a child to that of a parent. He didn’t mind taking care of his mother, but it hurt him to know that there was nothing he could do to stop what was happening to her.
“That was an accident, Ma. That wasn’t on you.” Sin gathered his mother in his arms and tried to soothe her.
“Might as well have been,” Cynthia said sadly, reliving those last few moments before she pulled out into traffic. “I’m gonna have to pay for that one day.”
“No, you won’t. The sins of this family are mine to carry now, Lil Lady. The scales are balanced, and your soul is clean.” Sin tucked Cynthia back under the covers and kissed her on the forehead.
“My sweet Sin.” Cynthia smiled up at him. The only time she called him that was when she knew that he had done something she wouldn’t approve of but understood why he had done it. She was in her right mind again. At least for the moment.
Sin waited until he had finally coaxed Cynthia back to sleep before leaving the bedroom. He closed her door behind him and pressed his forehead against it. A lone tear rolled down his cheek. It wasn’t out of sadness, but joy. Though he hadn’t been the one to off him, Don B. was dead and his family finally had justice. The promise he’d made standing over the grave of his little sister had been kept.
Sin made his way to his bedroom, stripped down to his boxers, and laid down for what would be yet another fitful night’s sleep. As he was dozing, he heard the sounds of gunshots coming from outside. He barely stirred. It was just another night in the hood that he and his mother called home. It wouldn’t be until he read the paper the next day that he would find out who the victim had been, and that the opportunity he planned to provide for Shake would never come to fruition.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Promise felt like she had just drifted off to sleep when her eyes snapped open at the sound of a door slamming. She sat bolt upright on the lumpy couch, which had served as her bed when she graduated from the air mattress on the floor a few weeks prior. It had been a long night for her, and all she wanted to do was sleep the entire day away, but whoever had slammed the door was preventing that. She was pissed and planned to let whoever was responsible know about it.
A few seconds later, Vaughn came marching into the living room. He was a medium-height brown-skinned dude, with a handsome face. He ran his hand over his braids, anxiously, as he often did when he was irritated over something. A few steps behind him was the object of his irritation: his pain-in-the-ass baby mama.
Candice was Keisha’s twin sister. She was tall and dark, with Keisha’s good looks, but not her body. Having two kids in two years had put a few extra pounds on her. She was nowhere near close to fat, but thick as hell in all the right places. That would explain why Vaughn couldn’t seem to stop pumping babies into her.
“Don’t walk away from me, Vaughn!” Candice was on his heels.
“G’on with that, Candice. This paranoid shit with you is getting old.” Vaughn paced back and forth across the living room. He wasn’t trying to hear whatever she was talking about.
“Paranoid is me asking why ya balls smell clean while the rest of you is musty. I caught you coming out of the bitch’s building! Just come clean!” Candice insisted.
Vaughn stopped his pacing and composed himself before responding. “Candice, I sell drugs. I go in and out of a lot of buildings. The only difference with this one is, a chick you think I’m fucking happens to live there.”
“Used to fuck,” Candice corrected him. “I asked around about the lil whore and heard y’all had a thing before I came along and upgraded your life.”
“First of all, you didn’t upgrade shit. I might not have been up like I am now when I met you, but I wasn’t no slum-ass nigga trying to run up your food stamp card either,” Vaughn checked her. “A’ight, so maybe, once in a while, I used to knock shorty down, but don’t act like you ain’t got a past either. I’m sure there’s a few niggas around here that you let pipe you out before we got together.”
“You calling me a ho?” Candice asked defensively.
“No, I’m saying that wasn’t neither one of us no saint,” Vaughn clarified. He moved in to wrap his arms around her. She put up a bit of fake resistance before letting him hug her. “Dig, wasn’t none of them bitches I rocked with in the past held me down like you do. Why would I risk fucking this up over a bitch who didn’t mean nothing to me, even when I was still fucking her?”
Candice’s resolve wavered. There was something about the way Vaughn looked at her that always made her weak. “I told you before I had our son that I wasn’t trying to be nobody’s baby mama.”
“And I told you that this thing between us is bigger than that.” Vaughn cupped her chin with his finger and kissed her lips softly. “You gonna be my forever, girl. I keep telling you that.”
“I’m waiting for you to show me,” Candice countered.
“I will. With this new situation I got, things are about to change for us. No more forty-dollar eighths. I’m stepping our shit up. Just give me some time and trust.”
Candice knew that he was bullshitting. This was the same line Vaughn always ran on her when he came up with a new hustle that likely wasn’t going to work. The one thing she loved about Vaughn was that he wasn’t afraid to go after it. He just never seemed to be able to catch it. The routine was getting old, but she loved him and wanted to have faith. “I ain’t gonna wait forever,” she replied instead of saying what was really in her heart. The two lovers traded kisses and intimate touches. They might’ve gone the extra mile had Promise not cleared her throat and reminded them that she was in the room. “And what the fuck is your ass doing over there ear hustling like this is some type of entertainment?”
“Ain’t nobody ear hustling. I was sleeping until y’all came in here making so much noise.” Promise sucked her teeth.
“Don’t be trying to tell me how much noise to make in my fucking house. The last time I checked, you were the squatter around these parts.” Candice snaked her neck. “And why the hell are you still sleeping this late in the afternoon like a damn crackhead off a bender, anyhow?”
Promise picked her phone up off the floor and double- checked the time to see if Candice was exaggerating. She wasn’t. It was 3:05 p.m. “Damn.” She threw her legs over the edge of the couch and sat up.
“Heard you had a busy night,” Candice said with a smirk.
“I wonder where you got that from?” Promise asked sarcastically, knowing it was Keisha who had told her business.
