Crimson Footprints (26 page)

CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN

When Grandma Emma and Deena
were ushered into Principal Williams’ office, the man brightened at
the sight of his former pupil. He’d aged in the years since she’d
last seen him, sprouting a belly where a tight stomach once sat,
and white speckle in his crop of thick black hair. But his smile
was the same, big and congenial, eyes nearly shutting with the joy
of seeing Deena.

He gushed over her
momentarily, eager to know about her life and career, before
ushering them to the hard-back plastic seats in front of his desk.
Lizzie sat in a corner donning a fitted white t-shirt that failed
to reach her waist and had “Hot and Bothered” printed on the front.
Not even in hell, would this shirt and skirt be within the dress
code.

“
What are you wearing?”
Deena hissed.

Principal Williams shot her
a sympathetic look. “Ordinarily we send students home when they
dress like this, but quite frankly, we’d be sending Elizabeth home
every day if we did.”

With everyone seated,
Principal Williams folded his hands and gave a tired
smile.

“
I wish we were here under
better circumstances. I am so proud of you, after all.”

“
Thanks,” Deena said
quietly.

She shot Lizzie another
reproachful look. There wasn’t a lot of time to dawdle, considering
she’d taken Tak’s car and left him back at the firm. Despite what
he’d said, she didn’t want him to have to catch the bus on her
account.

“
Mr. Williams, I know you
told my grandmother over the phone that you wanted Lizzie out of
your school, but isn’t there any other alternative?”

The principal frowned. “I
know it was quite some time ago that you were a student here, but
do you remember the zero tolerance policy I had?”

“
You mean about illegal
activity?” Alarmed, Deena looked at her sister. She wouldn’t meet
her gaze.

“
Illegal activity is
exactly what I mean,” Principal Williams said.

He reached into his desk and
pulled out a sheet of folded paper before sliding it over to
Deena.

The first set of handwriting
was in pencil, scrawled in haste, but clear nonetheless.

What can I get for
$25?

The answer was small,
careful, tightly written. Lizzie’s handwriting.

A bj.

Deena dropped the
paper.

“
She also offered her
services to me,” Principal Williams said too loudly. “When I told
her that I would have to withdraw her from school.

“
She’s troubled, Mr.
Williams,” Deena blurted, pushing back the hot and sour feel of her
stomach. “Don’t kick her out. You—you know my family. You’ve had
them all here! My aunts and cousins! You know better than anyone
how troubled we are!”

“
Yes, but—”

“
So give her another
chance! I’m begging you!” Deena glanced at her sister, gum popping
and indifferent, then back to the stern face of her former
principal, singularly aware of the momentousness of the fight she
now faced alone. You know my family. We have babies in high school
and go to jail before we’re 21. I’m trying to teach her what’s
right, but all around her are bad examples! She needs you around.
She needs to see people who are educated and self-respecting, who
look like us.” Her eyes filled with tears. Nearby, both grandma and
Lizzie were stone silent.

“
Deena, I have to treat
this with an even hand. If I found a male student pimping out
girls, everyone would expect me to deal with him harshly. I can’t
appear light in this matter.” He sighed. “I can’t have her
prostituting herself.”

“
It’s not the same.
Exploiting others is not the same as exploiting yourself.” Deena
turned to her sister. “And she won’t do it again.
Right?”

Lizzie nodded as if
bored.

“
Yeah, sure
thing.”

Principal Williams gathered
Kleenex from the box on his desk and handed them to
Deena.

“
Stop crying. I can’t have
you in here crying.” He gaze skated reluctantly to Lizzie. “If she
promises…” he hesitated. “I guess I’ll let her stay.”

“
Oh, thank you!” Deena
cried.

“
But not today. Take her
home and get some sensible clothes on her. Tomorrow we start again,
and I expect to see a new attitude.”

“
Yes, sir,” Deena was
already standing. “Thank you so much. God, thank you.”

Williams nodded. “Alright,
alright. Go on now. And no more crying.”

Outside, Grandma Emma strode
right past Tak’s Ferrari and kept moving. She clutched an oversized
black pocketbook in both hands and her feet moved faster than Deena
had ever seen.

“
Grandma, where are you
going? It’s this car, remember?”

She whirled on her, like
thunder and fury.

“
What? You think I’m so
ignorant I can’t remember the fancy car you drove up here
in?”

Her mouth creased to a
single trembling groove, dark eyes now slits. Around them, high
schoolers poured out the double doors to mill in the
street.

“
No, I—”

“
The next time you want to
go somewhere to bad mouth my family, you leave me at home. You hear
me?”

Deena paused. “Bad
mouth?”

“
Yeah!” Grandma Emma took a
step closer. “Or do you talk like that so often you don’t even know
when you doing? Talking bout how we uneducated and what
not!”

“
I didn’t mean it as a
slight. I just—”

“
If we shames you so, why
don’t you go back to that other family you got? The white one that
likes to kill people? Or don’t they want you?”

Deena’s lip trembled. “I
never said I was ashamed—”

“
You didn’t have
to!”

“
Grandma—”

“
I takes you in. I clothes
you. I feeds you. And you bad mouths me and my family.”

She started off again, an
angry gait ailed by arthritis. But Deena call. Didn’t
follow.

“
Me and my family,” she’d
said.

Her family.

Her’s.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT

Tak turned to Deena, smiling
at the sight of wild brown locks framing her heart shaped face as
she lay on the pillow. She was frowning. It was the end of the
summer, August, and he knew what occupied her thoughts at this time
of year.

“
You don’t have to do this.
They can’t make you.”

Tak propped up on an elbow,
his tanned skin contrasting with the stark white of the bed
sheets.

Deena sighed. “They’d die if
I didn’t. I’d never hear the end of it.”

“
You’d hear the end of it
if you stopped listening.”

“
Anyway, I’m the reason
they do it every year. I came up with the idea.”

He couldn’t fathom why she
would want to not only attend a banquet honoring the life of her
grandfather, but plan one. Yet she’d done so year after year,
celebrating a man who’d spent years grinding her into dirt. She
owed him nothing. In fact, she owed him more than nothing. She owed
him hatred.

Deena stared at him until a
smile cracked her sullen expression. “Maybe it won’t be as bad as
last year.”

Last year, he thought, God
help us if it were.

She’d planned her menu with
care, calling it a ‘veritable smorgasbord of the safe and daring.’
It included cracked crab and caviar, shrimp cocktail and pâtés,
canapés and imported cheeses; and all that was before the rosemary
lamb chops and herb crusted salmon she’d serve as the main
course.

Tak and Deena had argued in
the caterer’s office and in the car afterwards, and she started to
cry. He couldn’t understand this, he’d shouted; wouldn’t understand
this. And she dashed tears, trying to explain.

“
You think I don’t know how
my grandfather felt about me? Do you think I need you to constantly
remind me?” She shook her head.

“
It isn’t for him,” she
said finally. “It’s for my grandmother. The only person in the
world that wanted us. Eight days we sat in that foster home, before
Grandma Emma and Grandpa Eddie came. They took one look at me and
disappeared for another two. Later on I found out that my grandma
used that time to convince him to take us in.”

He was treading in deep and
treacherous waters, he knew; where a banquet was no longer a lavish
dinner but gushing gratitude for crumbs kicked her way. So he
backed off, and let her be. And the result had been a sobbing and
heartbroken Deena, returned from the banquet with a stain on her
dress and stories of how they made fun of her, of her food, her
clothes, her everything.

This year she stayed firm in
not planning the event. Tak suspected part of that was due to the
fight she’d had with her grandmother following the visit to
Principal Williams’ office. At the last minute, when the Hammonds
realized that Deena wasn’t going to be footing this year’s bill,
they threw something together, and it was this something that she
considered attending.

Tak sat up with a
thought.

“
Tell you what,” he said.
“Let’s stay busy today. Then you won’t have time to think about
it.”

Deena shook her head. “I
have to at least go, Tak. My grandmother’ll be
disappointed.”

He shrugged. Last he’d
heard, she still wasn’t speaking to Deena.

“
Disappointed in what is
the question, Deena. And maybe the answer is in not having you to
bully.”

He swung legs out from the
bed and stood. “Not sure how sad you need to be about that
one.”

Deena closed her
eyes.

He knew what she was
thinking. They could be a cruel bunch, those Hammonds, and not
going could be worse than enduring. She’d go, he thought, because
in the end, that was easier.

She opened her
eyes.

“
What’ll we do
instead?”

Tak grinned in
surprise.

“
Whatever you want. Large
or small. Name it and it’s yours.”

Somehow, that didn’t seem
enough. An idea occurred to him.

“
Hey, let’s redecorate your
place. Looks like the inside of a mausoleum, anyway.”

Deena pouted. “That’s a bit
strong.”

“
No, not really,” He
reached for the pajama pants he’d discarded by the bed the night
before and pulled them over his naked torso. “Listen, I’m an
artist. You can’t possibly expect me to spend so much time in such
drab surroundings.”

Deena stood. “Hmph. I
wouldn’t have thought you’d notice. Your eyes are closed so
often.”

Tak stared at her. “What was
that? A sex joke?” He snatched a pillow and heaved it at her. “That
was terrible. Now get dressed so we can get to work.”

Like everything else about
her, he found her pension for bad jokes adorable.

They spent the morning
shopping and the afternoon redecorating. Sunshine yellow curtains,
goldenrod paint, a cream throw rug, several pieces of his artwork
and a crystal floor lamp were all in tow when they finally returned
to her apartment. Deena never knew a man could be so fussy about
shades of color.

At the furniture store she’d
balked at the idea of a living room set, crying poverty and the
like, only to have him spring for the one she showed the most
interest in. When she complained about the amount of money he was
spending, he threw in an entertainment center as well.

They changed clothes, moved
the old futon to the center of the room, and went to work layering
the floor with newspaper and cracking open cans of paint. They
worked in silence for a while, with nothing but the slick sounds of
wet paint being slathered onto walls to entertain them.

“
You’re making a mess,
Dee,” Tak scolded, scowling at her poor painting skills. She looked
at him baffled, then down at herself. In an effort to paint higher
than her wingspan allowed, she’d leaned against the wall, lathering
paint all over the torso of her t-shirt. She stuck her tongue out
at him.

“
Sorry,” she
mocked.

He frowned at her, knowing
he was only being particular because they were painting. Even this
was art to him. He turned back to the wall, then rounded on her
suddenly.

“
Hey! Isn’t that my
shirt?”

Knowing that it was, Deena
began to whistle innocently as she returned to painting with
renewed vigor.

“
That is my
shirt!”

She whistled even louder and
made bold, dramatic sweeps of the brush to demonstrate how busy she
was.

“
Can’t talk right now, Tak.
Got a lot of work to get done over here.”

“
What! You’re gonna give me
back my damned shirt!”