New Orleans Noir

ever fought about was keeping a gun in the house. Rita knew having a weapon went hand in hand with being a security guard, but she just didn’t like the idea of one in the house with a child who was always snooping into everything. Finally, Tyronne hit on the idea of keeping the gun in a lock box. She had a key and Tyronne had a key. Rita could live with that.
    Rita slid Tyronne’s gun into her purse, closed the box, covered it back up with clothing, and slid the second dresser drawer fully closed. Then she turned around in the dim bedroom. It would soon be dusk. She had no words to tell Tyronne about Sammy, about his father—well, she had told him that Sammy was the result of a brief fling when she was seventeen years old and that she had never told the man that he was the boy’s father. That was true. However, Rita hadn’t told Tyronne that Silas Moore was the father, or that Silas was in prison. Nor, of course, had she told Tyronne that Snowflake was Silas’s baby brother. New Orleans was such a small town, all the poor people knew each other, or knew somebody who knew some …
    Her past wasn’t pretty and there was no way she wanted to share the foolishness of her youth with Tyronne. He wouldn’t be able to deal with it. It would haunt him. He was a good man but … well, it would hurt him too much to hear certain details of her life. Plus, he had no way of understanding some things. Rita remembered a conversation about a news show on Channel 4.
    “Well, goddamn, look at that. That girl can’t be no more than sixteen or seventeen and she caught up in a drug ring.”
    “Tee, when it’s all around you—”
    “It was all around me when I grew up. But I mean, she’s a girl …”
    “Well, the drug dealer is probably her pimp. But sometimes it ain’t even about being no prostitute or nothing. Those girls just be starved for affection and those guys give them dresses and jewelry and stuff and they think they’re in love.”
    “Yeah, and after they get pre—”
    “You mean like I got pregnant with Sammy?”
    The question hung in the air for a long time.
    After about a minute of silence, Tyronne spoke up: “So, I guess you’re telling me you’re like that girl.”
    “No, I’m telling you I understand what that girl is going through and I don’t think you do. I think you see the condition she’s in only from the outside, and me, I feel the condition she’s in on the inside.”
    “I guess I’m thinking of how we used to mess over them young girls in Vietnam and it’s hard for me to imagine them growing up and coming out okay after all that stuff …”
    “Well, if you live, you grow up. You got no choice about that. As for it being okay, who’s to say what’s okay?”
    After another long pause, Tyronne looked at Rita. “Baby, there’s a whole lot I don’t know, but I know you’re okay and I love you.”
    Tyronne’s love was disarming and sometimes uncomfortable. He was so honest about his own shortcomings and so accepting of hers. Rita used to wish she could start her life over with Tyronne, wish she had met him when she was fourteen instead of meeting Roger, wish she had gone with him in high school instead of Sherman and Bekay, wish she had waited for Tyronne to father Sammy. But what was the use of wishing? Life was what it was, not what you wished it to be. She should just count her blessings and feel lucky she and Tyronne had eventually hooked up.
    The whole time they were discussing the girl on Channel 4, Rita had been standing next to the chair where Tyronne liked to sit while watching television. She bent and kissed him lovingly. “I love you back, Tee, with everything I got. I love you too.”
    Everything I got, Rita thought to herself. The rub was, there were things she no longer had because they had been taken from her. Rita wished she had those missing things so that she could love Tyronne with everything, just like he loved her. But that was only a wish. The reality was both more complex and much more repulsive.
    Clearly, Tyronne had never been molested as a child, so he still had some innocence in his loving. Rita had no innocence left. To Rita, the fierce reality of her childhood was unsparing and unforgiving. Rita was certain if Tyronne knew all the sad and sordid things that had happened to her and all the silly and stupid things that she had done to herself, no matter how much he loved her, he would probably leave her. Everything in Rita’s life told her, no