“Emergencies.”
Hood must have seen the confusion on my face, because he went on to detail exactly how his emergency plan worked: “Say if I need a house repair, or my car breaks down, or my wife takes ill, I got this high-limit card to cover me. You gotta hope for the best but plan for the worst. This credit card is in case the worst happens. It’s my safety net.” I’d never heard anything like this before. When I was growing up, there was never a plan for those days when the food ran out or the electricity got turned off. Life was a string of one emergency after another, with no kind of net to break the fall.
“How do you get one of those cards?” I asked Hood.
“You gotta have good credit,” he said. “You can’t get anywhere in this life without good credit.”
Every night at 6 p.m., I’d get the kids some dinner at Lilly’s Soul Food and the four of us would sit in Hood’s office while he watched the evening news. I don’t know why Hood even bothered, all it did was give him bad nerves. Hood got worked up about everything: the recession, Rodney King, Anita Hill, and Mike Tyson going to jail. “Back in my day,” he said one evening, “we had cats to look up to, like Jackie Robinson and Dr. Martin Luther King. Now it’s like we on a highway to hell.” He added, “At least we have Bill Cosby.”
As much as Hood worried, nothing raised his blood pressure more than fretting about me and my kids. One night when I was working late and Hood had Ashley and Nikia in his office, I noticed he kept coming to the window and looking out onto the street. It took me a while to realize he was checking up on me. Hood was afraid I was gonna get hit by a stray bullet in a drive by, or that some other dealer was gonna stick me up. He said he wished I would quit hustling and find something safer. But the only idea he ever came up with was winning the lottery. “Imagine you hit the jackpot,” he said. “You win the lotto, you could get off these streets for good.”
The way Hood worried about me, I probably should have known better than to show up at the laundry with a thick white hospital bandage wrapped around my head. But I wasn’t used to having somebody care the way he did, so I didn’t think it through. When Hood saw me standing at his office door one morning looking like I just came home from war, he clutched his chest like he was having a heart attack: “What the hell happened to you?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “I’m fine.”
Hood came around the side of his desk to help me into a chair. He took a seat across from me and held my hands in his. “Who did this to you?” he asked softly. I felt so bad about the way he was looking at me—like I was a little bird that fell out of a nest—I could barely bring myself to tell him the truth. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath.
The day before, Derrick had come by my apartment with a giant hickey on his neck. It wasn’t the first time, either. Derrick stayed cheating on me. It was the number one thing we argued about. “Who the hell been sucking on your neck?” I demanded. “What bitch you fucking now?”
I guess Derrick didn’t have a good comeback, because instead of answering he picked his loaded gun off the kitchen table and smacked me across the face. That’s when the gun went off.
Derrick said it was an accident. “The gun made a mistake,” he insisted. But he took off before the ambulance arrived, leaving me bleeding on the kitchen floor. I guess he didn’t want to explain to the authorities that his gun had a mind of its own.
Hood knew Derrick and I fought like cats and dogs. We’d yell at each other in the street and sometimes Derrick would follow me into the laundry. Hood ran him out of the place plenty of times hollering, “You better leave up outta here before I put my foot up your ass.”
Hood hated Derrick. And seeing me that day with my head in bandages and a bullet graze on my skull was too much for him to take. He covered his face with his hands. “Rabbit,” he said, his voice cracking, “you know I care about you and those kids like you’re my own. Every day I pray you find a good man. But God as my witness, you need to quit that piece of shit Derrick or you’re never gonna give nobody else a chance. That’s how it works, Rabbit. You gotta let go of the bad to make way for the good.”
I told myself Hood didn’t understand my love for Derrick. For weeks, I tried to push his words away. But they kept repeating, like a bad chili dog: You need to leave that piece of shit. Hood’s words popped into my head while I was lying in bed and while I was hustling on the corner. I thought about them while I was giving the kids breakfast and when I was putting them to sleep. I couldn’t shake what Hood had said because deep down I knew he was right.
I could make a list as long as the Mississippi River of all the ways Derrick had done me wrong: he beat me with a roller skate, he kept getting other girls pregnant, and now, on top of everything else, he’d accidentally on purpose shot me in the head.
One night Derrick and I had been out driving and had run out of gas. It was storming with thunder and lighting, and we were blocks away from a filling station. Derrick refused to get out of the car; instead he made me go get the gas. An old man, seeing me walking with a five-gallon gas can in the rain, picked me up and gave me a ride. When he saw Derrick sitting in the passenger seat, sucking his thumb, the old man turned to me: “This young nigga made you go get the gas?”
“Yes, sir.”
“With all this rain coming down?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Girl, that ain’t no kind of man.” Even a complete stranger could see Derrick was a piece of shit.
I’d always thought it was love that made me stay with Derrick, but I couldn’t name a single thing I loved about him. And I always said we were a family, but we weren’t any more together than the day he showed up at the hospital to meet our newborn baby with another girl by his side.
Staring up at the ceiling one night, I kept asking myself, Why? Then it hit me. It wasn’t love that kept me hanging on; it was fear. I wanted a Leave It to Beaver–style family, but I was a teenage mama with two kids, no education, and a blown-off nipple. I couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to make a family with somebody like me. I was afraid Derrick was my only chance. But maybe I was wrong.
I climbed out of bed and knelt on the floor, clasping my hands in front of me. “Dear Heavenly Father,” I whispered. “I know I been asking you to get Derrick to act right and stop beating and cheating on me so we could be a family. Well, Lord, I changed my mind. Fuck that nigga. Take away my love for that lying piece of shit. Don’t change him. Please, God, change my heart.”
Chapter 21
Mr. Nice Guy