Like I said, I would do anything for my parents.
Benito got up off the sofa and hugged me. Mom hadn’t said anything about hugging that fool.
“Hey, bro,” he said. “You dump Lace yet? I told Mom all about Lace’s past. Take it from me, I keep telling you I dated her for three years. She’s bad news.”
Pushing him away, I said, “Her name is Honey, and I’m positive she’d plead temporary insanity for the entire three years.” Distancing myself from my brother, I followed my dad into the dining room.
Benito was right behind us. “Whatever you wanna call her is cool, but I’m tellin’ you—”
Dad interrupted him. “Benito, that’s enough. Why don’t you stop all the madness about that woman and tell us the truth about what’s going on with you? We haven’t seen you for twelve years, since you went off to college. And your mother just mailed Tyra a check for ten thousand dollars to pay your son’s tuition. You haven’t been home in a long time, but I raised you better. Even if your relationship with her is over, you need to go see your son. Now, why’d you come back here?”
Thank God. I wanted to keep the focus on Benito, so I asked him, “Yeah. Why?” I smiled, waiting for my brother to answer. Benito was two years older than me, but he looked forty. His years of partying and drinking were etched on his face. I wasn’t having any kids until after I got married. I wanted two, maybe three. All boys.
“I told y’all I kinda made a few bad investments, lost all my money. Then Lace kicked me out. I just need to stay until things settle. A few months. No longer than a year or two,” that fool said. Problem was he was serious.
My mother walked into the room, sat a plate in front of my dad, then me, and went back into the kitchen.
“What about me?” Benito yelled. “Why does Grant always have to be first?”
“’Cause I check on my parents every day I’m in town,” I said. “Your behind didn’t call after you left, not until you needed us.” I really wanted to say, “Nigga, your sorry black ass need to get up outta here and stop leeching,” but my parents wouldn’t have approved of that.
“Thank you, dear God, for this wonderful bounty, my mother, and my father. Amen,” I said. I blessed my stack of pancakes, strips of peppered bacon, and scrambled eggs and started eating. I had a business to run. Benito didn’t have shit else to do all day but lay up on my parents. I couldn’t believe my mother had paid his cell phone bill. He knew better than to ask me to do anything for him.
Staring at my brother, my dad didn’t blink once. Dad said, “You have one more time to disrespect my wife and you’re outta here.”
Benito was stupid, but not that stupid. He knew when to shut up. Mom walked back into the room and sat Benito’s plate in front of him. No thank you, no grace, no comment. Benito started chewing with his mouth open.
“Man,” I yelled at him, shoving his plate to the floor. “If you don’t stop disrespecting my mother, I’ma beat your ass! Show some fucking appreciation for her. She ain’t your damn maid!”
I stood over him, wishing he would push his chair back. My fists were tight. I wanted to punch him in his face. My dad scurried out of his chair and held my arms behind my back.
“Son, calm down. Sit. Finish your breakfast,” said Dad.
Benito slid my plate in front of him and started eating my food. Through a mouthful of my pancakes, he said, “You not mad at me, bro. You pissed because you didn’t know your sweet Honey baby was a hooker. Pass me the syrup, would ya?”
CHAPTER 3
Honey
The morning was three hours away from noon. The sun was too bright to go back to sleep. The red potatoes were in the trash, my finger was aching, and I was still in the kitchen.
I texted Grant again. I give. You win. I stared at my phone until the time and date confirmed exactly when my message was sent. I waited five minutes, then an additional ten minutes, for his reply.
“Ughhh. Motherfucker! What or who are you doing that’s more important than me?” I yelled. Again, he had refused to answer. He was lucky I lived in Atlanta and not in D.C., or else…or else…What was his fucking problem? “Forget you, too, Grant. You’re too old for this childish bullshit. A real man would have the decency to give closure to his relationship.” Who was I fooling? I was angry because Grant was a real man. A real man with parents who loved him.
Lionel Richie’s voice resonating through the kitchen’s intercom created a much-welcomed distraction. One of the girls upstairs had decided to play songs, and since I insisted on the best, we had speakers in every room of the house, including the bathrooms. Softly, Lionel sang, “I do love you…still.”
As Lionel’s voice faded, I heard Luther singing, “Time rushes on. And it’s not fair. When someone you used to love, is no longer there…now you’re running back to me, to forgive you your mistake. Kinda makes me sad to say…it’s a little too late.”
Rushing into the spacious white-marbled foyer, I yelled up the U-shaped stairways. “Turn that shit off!”
Grant had helped me find this eight-thousand-square-foot home in Buckhead, which I’d paid cash for, so my escorts could quit fucking men for a living and for once be comfortable and focus on what they really wanted to do with their lives, and this was how they thanked me?
Whosoever had decided to play Luther Vandross at nine o’clock in the morning was lucky I hadn’t raced upstairs and slapped the hell out of ’em. They knew Grant and I had recently broken up. I didn’t need to hear that depressing-ass music right now. The feelings of rejection palpitating in my heart fluttered up to my throat, suffocating me. Fanning myself, I could hardly breathe.
“Damn,” I whispered, wishing I had the courage to hop a flight to D.C., show up unannounced at Grant’s front door, and make him talk to me. But I didn’t. What if a woman opened his door? I’d kill ’em both. For real.
Clenching my teeth, I scratched my neck. I was so frustrated, I felt like taking my damn iPhone, raising my arm high above my head, then slamming the iPhone on the ceramic floor and watching it shatter, like my heart, into tiny splintered pieces. What good was a communication device when I couldn’t get a response from the main person I wanted to hear from? Trembling, I exhaled heavily, then quietly sat my PDA on the counter and resumed cooking breakfast.
Flipping bacon in the frying pan, feeling lonely, I stood in my new home, inhaling the sweet aroma of thick strips of sizzling pork and watching grease specks splatter onto the stove. I hadn’t had a normal appetite in almost two weeks. The burning energy in the pit of my stomach had melted away ten pounds in the fourteen days that I hadn’t seen or spoken with Grant. I had gone from a size ten to an eight.
Outwardly, I struggled to appear calm so my girls wouldn’t think I was going crazy, but inside, I’d lost control of the hatred raging through my body, knowing I could easily slap or curse, for no rational reason, the first person that said, “Good morning.”
Onyx, my personal assistant, peeked her head inside the kitchen. When my eyes narrowed and shifted to the corners, I caught a glimpse of her disappearing into the foyer.
“Let me know when breakfast is ready,” she blurted, quickly trotting upstairs.
After my favorite escort, Sunny, Onyx, with her sweet black-cherry pussy, had earned me the most money when I was their madam. Men of every nationality had lost their fucking minds when they saw Onyx in my lineup of whores. I was glad I wasn’t exploiting women anymore.
I wasn’t proud of my past, but I was one of the few lucky ones that had got out of the escort business before it