Page 63 of Priest

“I called that nigga and told him to meet me almost two weeks after he took you. I told him that I had his guns and the money. He upped the price, September. He demanded that I get him drugs too. Then when I finally got that shit a few days later, he told me that he wanted me to suffer the same way I made the families of those women I took suffer. He said some vile shit about what he would do to you while I sat and waited. I was a man of my word. I came through on everything he fucking demanded of me!” my daddy shouted.

That was a surprise to me because I had never known that Priest changed the request. He had been holding onto me all that time, and my daddy had met his demands. What the hell did that mean?

“So, what did you do, Daddy?”

“What do you mean? The only thing I could do. I sat and waited for him to call me back and let me know what he wanted in exchange for my child.”

I sucked my teeth and shook my head. “Wrong answer, Daddy.”

“What do you mean wrong goddamn answer?”

“You were supposed to fight for me. You were supposed to run his ass down and find him wherever he was and take his ass out. You weren’t supposed to walk away and let me suffer in fear like that,” I replied with accusation in my shaky voice.

“You act like this was easy. You act like you would have known what to do if the roles were reversed.”

“I might not have known exactly what to do, but I would have pulled out all the stops to save you.”

“Yeah? Well, it seems to me like you got what you wanted out of the deal anyway.”

“What? You think I wanted to be held by some stranger and threatened to be violated in the worst types of ways? You think that my dignity didn’t mean anything to me?”

“I know what women say, September, but I also know what they do.”

“Oh, you mean like Katherine Guillebeaux?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

The deadly look that took over my father’s eyes scared the shit out of me. He took several steps toward me and asked, “What the fuck did you just say to me, little girl?”

Tears streamed slowly down my face for the woman’s story.

“I heard you and Mama argue about her several times growing up. I heard her talking to Aunt Diane about it too. She told her about how she knew she should have left you when she saw the first red flags all those years ago when you cheated with a younger girl named Katherine Guillebeaux. She said that when you tried to break it off, the girl didn’t take to that too well, and that it not only jeopardized your relationship with mama, but with your job too. Mama told Aunt Diane that she demanded that you ‘fix your problem,’ but she had no idea that fixing it meant that you would go get that girl hooked on drugs. You purposely did that shit to make her go away. Only she didn’t go away, did she, Daddy? That’s the part Mama never knew. She didn’t know that Kat never went away.”

“Shut your filthy mouth!”

“She didn’t know that Kat returned to your job demanding that you give her more drugs and that she embarrassed you on the job.”

My father spoke in slow, clipped, and measured tones.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. She didn’t come asking for drugs. She came asking for money. Shewas pregnant, and she claimed the baby was mine. I didn’t want your mother to know that I’d been screwing that whore again. I chased her off the job, but I did go back that evening to visit her and warn her to stay away.”

“And when she wouldn’t agree, what happened, Daddy?” I asked.

My father’s eyes took on a faraway look, although he stared at me.

“She threatened to tell your mother about the baby she was carrying and that it was mine.”

“Was it, Daddy?”

He shook his head and replied in a distant voice. “I don’t know. There was a possibility, but she wasn’t nothing more than a crack whore.”

“No, Daddy. She was somebody’s mother. Two children’s mother, one of whom you killed when you pushed Kat down the stairs while she was holding her baby.”

My daddy’s eyes cleared, and he stared at me. “How the fuck do you know this?”

“I met her only surviving child recently.”

“Who?”

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