Thick Love (Thin Love, #2)
Eden Butler
Prologue
February, 2014 New Orleans
Everything I owned had fit into a twenty year old avocado green suitcase with a pink and white striped ribbon along the front. Six bucks at the thrift store on Camp Street, and I had something that would take me from my father’s tiny cottage in Tremé to the loft above the dance studio where I worked part time.
I carried two pictures in that small suitcase, slipped in between a manila folder and the few twenty dollar bills I had to my name. One of them was of my mother when she was eighteen, beautiful and full of the belief that her love for my father would silence any argument her family had about “taking up with the wrong kind of man.” She had died six months after that picture was taken.
The other was a Polaroid of me at six sitting on my grann’s lap at Café Du Monde. There was powdered sugar on my Tweety Bird tank top and my hair was held tight in pigtail braids. Grann died two years later, leaving me alone with a father who blamed me for both their deaths.
In my heart, those two women had been the only family I’d ever need. The photographs had been stashed in the kitchen junk drawer; my father would not miss them.
Seventeen and scared that my father had plans to marry me off, I’d done the only thing I could think of—I up and left without telling him. Rather than living with my high school friends in the Quarter—he would have expected that—I paid nightly for a dirty room at the Motel 6 on Old Gentilly Road and ate Dollar General brand Fruit Loops at night because they were cheap. But my boss could read the lies that lurked behind my excuses, and the tears that seemed to come so easily. When she figured out I had left home, she offered me the vacant loft above the dance studio. For now.
So there I was, with my pathetic green suitcase, looking around the loft, wondering if I’d be able to sweet talk my boss’s son, Tristian, into taking me dumpster diving to find a sofa, when a car horn sounded outside. At the familiar sound of it, the small inkling of ease I’d felt for the three days I’d been free from him started to die. That horn turned my insides cold.
Two more loud shrieks on the horn and I stepped out onto the landing, staring down the stairs at my father in his refinery work shirt. He stood next to the ’79 Chevy truck with peeling blue paint and rust on the underside of the bed. When I didn’t move, when his silent finger pointing at the empty space next to him in the parking lot went ignored, he laid on that horn again.
“Me zanmi, Papa! Enough,” I said, coming down the stairs. “They’ll call the police.” The area wasn’t residential, but there were small, upscale offices that kept late hours and a few of the accountants the next lot over had complained about the music and teenage girls’ squeals from the studio just a few weeks before.
“Dous, cheri, you come with me. I have no dinner, two days now.”
“Don’t you ‘sweet’ me, Papa.”
My father’s lip curled and he made a loud noise in the back of his throat that sounded like a grunt. “Petit se pa manti non!”
I didn’t care if he wasn’t lying. I only knew that I had left his home and there was no way in hell I would ever go back.
“Learn to feed yourself. I’m staying.”
My father was not a large man. But his slight stature hid the muscle beneath ill-fitting clothes. I knew the arm he flexed as he stepped toward me was corded and strong. I knew the grip of his hand, how tight he could hold on to someone when he was angry—and he was always angry.
Yet Papa wouldn’t touch me, I knew. He’d never needed a slap or punch to keep me afraid of him. He had never so much as spanked me. The fear I always felt in his presence came from that low, burning glare in his eyes and the tight, disgusted twist on his lips. His words were worse than any slap, and left deeper marks.
Now he approached me, frowning, angry, his expression lethal and threatening. “Ou ban m manti,” he said, stepping so close that I could just make out the heavy bags under his eyes, as though he had not slept in days. His complexion wasn’t its normal light brown, but flushed and splotchy.
He was right. I had lied to him. Telling him I had a dance retreat for work was the only way to keep him from following me when I left. “Yes, I did, Papa. And I don’t feel bad about it.”
And then, for the first time I could remember, my father reached out and grabbed a hold of me. The tight clamp of his long fingers on my bicep hurt. “Ungrateful, disrespectful…”
“Is there a problem?” A voice came from behind me and I cursed under my breath as Ransom approached, glancing between my father’s hold on my arm and his stubborn, suspicious expression. “You need to let her go,” he said, still with the same smile he’d worn when I met him earlier today.
No, that was wrong, it wasn’t the same smile. This smile wasn’t happy. There was nothing welcoming in it. This smile was a threat, one that my father seemed to understand. He dropped my arm, but didn’t step back from me.
Ransom’s gaze was still directed at Papa, but he tilted his head toward me. “You alright, sweetheart?”
Before I could respond, Papa clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth, disgusted once again. “Modi, tifi, this your man?” Papa looked Ransom over, seeming to find nothing to approve of in once glance. His mouth tightened further and then he shook his head. “He’s a boy.”