Free Baby Brother's Blues by Pearl Cleage

soon her grandfather could be released, and headed back to Atlanta to make the necessary arrangements.
    Every place she called was expensive. The ones that were in her price range were overcrowded, smelly, and depressing. At the last place on her list, she seemed to be the only one bothered by the roaches that were everywhere. She cut the tour short and called Bob on her cellphone. He arrived at her apartment less than an hour later with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash. She told him it was a loan and she told herself it was a loan, but week after week, she accepted the envelopes he offered, and after a while, they didn’t discuss it anymore. Not even when Poppy died two years later and Lee no longer had to pay almost thirty thousand dollars a month for his care. She had rationalized it by telling herself that there had been no cocaine-related murders in her precinct for almost five years, but she knew that was no excuse for what she was doing. Not anymore. She also knew she had enjoyed a long streak of good luck in a very risky business and every gambler knows the odds are always with the house.
    It was clear that Bob didn’t want the hassle of breaking in a new cop to run street interference for him, but Lee knew it wouldn’t be difficult. Somebody always had bills to pay, or a kid on the way to college, or a taste for the high life. She hoped Bob wouldn’t get ugly about her decision, but ultimately, his displeasure wouldn’t matter. Bob wasn’t the first mentor to have outlived his usefulness. The challenge was to find a way to dissolve their partnership with the least amount of acrimony so everybody could move on without leaving any bad feelings behind.
    Lee smiled and sipped her wine. The bad feeling had now been replaced with a new sense of calm and clarity. She already had an appointment with Precious Hargrove that she’d been trying to schedule for a month. Lee knew that meeting was going to be the first step into the next phase of her life. Senator Hargrove was the future. Bob Watson was the past. Too bad he didn’t know it yet, she thought, closing the drapes and picking up the remote control. She sank down into the cushions of her cream-colored couch and clicked the television into life.
How could he know it?
He had no frame of reference. Women didn’t leave men like Bob. He left them. Finding himself standing all alone with his dick in his hand would be a new experience, she thought, smiling at the image.
    She had to admit she’d miss the sex, but not enough to miss the boat. Bob was good, but not that good.

11
    K wame Hargrove was pissed. It wasn’t his daughter’s fault that her mother was acting like a spoiled brat again, but it was taking all Daddy’s patience not to be short with Joyce Ann, age two and a half going on twenty, who was chattering away about what adventures she’d had today in the preschool world. Normally, he loved sharing this end-of-the-day time with his daughter, but tonight Joyce Ann was supposed to be her mother’s responsibility, not her daddy’s. Except it was now the appointed hour, and Mommy was
missing in action.
    Taking a deep breath, he tried to focus on what his daughter was saying. Joyce Ann was his heart, a sweet-natured little angel who seemed unaffected by the increasing tension between her parents. Kwame had been present at her birth and cut the surprisingly spongy umbilical cord in one swift move that made his daughter an independent human being. It had been a profound moment. He had felt like he should apologize for separating her from her mother. He knew it was a mean old world, and once you’re out in it, you’re on your own.
    Joyce Ann’s birth was the culmination of what could only be described as a whirlwind year, filled with courtship, marriage, pregnancy, and birth, not necessarily in that order. Only two short years before, he had planned to take his newly minted Howard University architectural degree and accept a job at a firm in Washington,