"Oh, my God, that's
"She wanted sex, too, just
not the kind that she hadn't had yet."
"Did she sleep with you?" "She did sleep with me,
but we didn't have sex."
Brandy threw her banana at him. It landed on his face, but luckily it fell on his lap as he turned his face when it hit him. "Ah, you bitch!"
He gave the banana back to her. "I'm a bitch and you're a wuss!" she said. "How could you not have gotten the ass? It was right in front of you, man, ready for you to take it!"
"I promised to respect her morals and values and not make her mine until we were married."
"And you say that you're not good," said Brandy.
"I'm good to women but I'm a bitch to everyone else."
"Oh, so you're saying that you're only good when you want to be."
"That's correct." "You're something else.
Am I being loud?"
"No, you're talking just
fine."
The baby woke up and
started crying. He wasn't crying because his father and his best friend woke him up, but because it was seven twenty and he was hungry. Paola had just started her period, so she couldn't get up. "Ah," she said and turned around. Henry got up, walked out of the dining room, into the living room and then walked the hallway back to his bedroom. Brandy followed him. She wanted to meet the baby. The baby lied in his crib, a crib that Henry saved in some other bedroom that he had prepared for his first son or daughter, and Paola lied on his bed. He went in. "Enrique, could you feed him? I can't get up."
Henry walked to the crib, took the baby out very carefully, accommodated his head on his shoulder and said, "So, you know what he wants every time that he cries."
"Why can't you get up?" said Brandy.
Paola turned her face to look at her and said, smiling, "Hi, I'm Paola, and I can't get up because I just started my period."
"Deliver us from pre- menstrual Eve!" yelled Henry.
Brandy laughed. Paola looked at him like she didn't believe that he'd just said that. "I'll kill you."
"No, you won't. Do you breastfeed him?"
"Yes," said Paola and Henry gave the baby to her. "Luckily I do. That way, I don't have to worry about making his cereal when I can't get out of bed, and that is most of the time." She lifted the top of her pajamas, placed the baby in the position where his mouth grabbed her areola, and when he started sucking, she said, "I've got back problems. I think I have either scoliosis or spinal meningitis."
"May God forbid that you have spinal meningitis!" said Henry. "Scoliosis is reversible.
Spinal meningitis is not. It's a spinal defect that can put you in bed for the rest of your life. You're a mother. You can't afford that."
Brandy sat beside Paola and said, "I don't think that you have spinal meningitis, Paola. You should go to the doctor and have him do a thorough and profound revision."
"I'm going to cancel my daily activities for today and take her to the doctor."
"Oh, no, Henry, don't do
that."
"You take care of your business and let me take her to the doctor," said Brandy.
Paola looked at her again, gave her a big hug, and said, "Thank you so much, Brandy."
"It's the least that I can do for the mother of my future godson," said Brandy, caressing the baby's head.
Paola smiled and said, "You want to baptize my baby?"
"Yes," said Brandy, smiling. "I promised Henry that I'd be the godmother of all of his children, didn't I, Henry?"
Henry smiled and said, "Yes, she did."
"That's so sweet," said Paola, holding her tears in to keep her baby from crying. "I thought that no one cared about me and Ricky."
Henry sat beside her, on the other side, and said, "How can you say that?" and lifted his left arm and started caressing her hair. "What about your family? Don't they care?"
"My grandmother, the woman that raised me, she just died," said Paola, holding her tears in, "and my sister would break her bond with me if she found out that I had a baby before marriage."
Paola's grandmother wasn't dead. Paola thought that she was because the last time that she saw her, the seventy-year-old woman was fighting for her life in the Intensive Care area, 300 miles away. She fought for her life until she ran out of strength and she won. She survived, and she was waiting for Paola to come home. She didn't know where Paola went when she ran away from it all, so she and her older granddaughter, the sister that Paola was referring to, Vanessa, they couldn't go out and look for her. Paola never lived in a house that was hers. She had been living with people that she'd just met since she arrived at Coral Gables, so they could never locate her. However, a friend of the grandmother told her that Paola was living in Coral Gables, and now she and Vanessa were only fifty miles away from her, looking for her. They missed her terribly and they wanted her to come back home, no matter who she was living with or how her life had changed since the last time that they saw her. They were staying at a four-star hotel. The woman had just gotten $300,000 from the release of Paola's first twenty songs for other artists, and she was living the good life---literally. Vanessa was getting a good slice of the cake as well. "Did your sister wait until she got married to start having children?"
"No, she didn't. She couldn't. The night that she and her husband conceived their first daughter, they were drunk."
"Oh, my God," said Brandy. "Vanessa is so much like me," and Paola looked at her, stunned.
said.