Free Sexy Little Liar by Noire Page A

was feeling was to get all loud and start a knockdown drag-out fight with one of her attendants.
    But I was past all that useless fighting now. Mama’s care was something that I couldn’t do a damn thing about, and even though I still wrote letters to the state sometimes and I barked on the staff when I needed to, for the most part I had learned to roll with it and hope for the best.
    But there was some different kind of shit waiting for me at the nursing home today, and I got the shock of my life when I came around the corner and walked into Mama’s room.
    â€œWhat the . . .” I muttered under my breath as I froze in the doorway. My mother had company. In the eight damn years that she had been laying up in here I could count the number of visitors she’d had on three damn fingers, and when I saw this chick sitting on the side of Mama’s bed and brushing her hair it messed me up and sent hot sauce shooting through my veins.
    â€œWhat the hell are you doing here?” I spit as the light-skinned woman with the buzzed stud haircut and the plaid dress shirt leaned over Mama and wiped some dribble from the corner of her mouth.
    â€œSup, Mink,” my aunt Bibby LaRue said real casually, like me and her had just been hanging out together yesterday. She was my father’s favorite sister, and the last time I’d seen her was four years ago when the cops was dragging her manly ass off to jail. “How you doing, baby?”
    â€œDon’t worry about how I’m doin’,” I snapped. I knew my moms and Aunt Bibby had been real tight back when I was younger, but after my father died all of that had changed.
    I walked up on her real close. “Why you up in here alone with my mother?”
    She glanced at me. “What you tryna say? Jude is my friend. I can’t come see her?”
    â€œYou ain’t been coming.”
    I was posted up ready to defend my mama with my last damn breath. And I needed to be too, because Aunt Bibby was cutthroat and would pop off on your ass in a Harlem minute. Back in the day she was known to be good with a straight razor. She had carved up plenty niggas on the streets of Manhattan, and right now she looked kinda aggravated, like she was tryna keep herself from getting slick with me. But instead of jumpin’ funky, all Aunt Bibby did was grill me a little bit. Like I was still some kinda child she could whip with an extension cord, or a roach that she could smash with her house shoe.
    I grilled her right back. I wasn’t scared of Aunt Bibby but I didn’t trust her ass neither, and just like the rest of Harlem’s “Bad News LaRues” I didn’t want her hanging around my mother. At least ten of my aunts, uncles, and cousins still lived in a three-bedroom project apartment with my grandmother, and every last one of them grimy fools had blamed my mother for causing my father’s death.
    Aunt Bibby shrugged. “I just got out the joint not too long ago and I wanted to see Jude,” she said. “That’s all.”
    â€œYou wanted to see her for what ?”
    Even though my lip was poked out I couldn’t help but notice how much the two of us favored. We had the same light complexion, the same soft hair, the same big smile and the same hazel eyes. It was a LaRue thing. We got our looks from my grandmother, except most of the females in our family were shaped up like wide-bottom Coke bottles, and Aunt Bibby and all the dudes were big and tall and built like battleships.
    â€œChill out, little girl.” Aunt Bibby shrugged her man shoulders. “Mama told me Jude be laying up in here by herself all the time. I just figured somebody should come by and check on her.”
    â€œI don’t know how Granny told you that lie,” I said, swelling up as I stepped to her, “because I’m always up here checking on my mother!” I didn’t give a damn how many niggas Aunt Bibby had carved up on