“I run things from here. My house is the center of most of our Pride meetings and business. Not the leather manufacturing side, but Pride business itself. I usually operate from that table right there,” he said pointing to the large formal table in the dining room. “It’s where my most trusted and I get together and plan. It’s safe here, no chance anyone has been in to plant any kind of sound device or that our lines are tapped. Everyone is comfortable here. But with the last of the females and children that arrived with Gwen still living upstairs, you never know when they’ll walk through. Titus and his crew should have the next four houses finished in a day or two, and three of them are duplexes. So the last group of females that are upstairs with their kids, and camping out in our family room in there,” he said, pointing toward the room that opened up onto the pool and splash pad, “will soon be in their own places. Afterward it will just be us and Gwen and her kids.”
“It’s nice of y’all doing all you have to find space for these females. And damn y’all work fast.”
“Titus is good at what he does, and he’s pulled most of the males that aren’t working security into the building process. We don’t need palatial mansions. We need safe, clean, nice accommodations, and luckily we started on some before Gwen and her people ever showed up. These last four should pick upthe slack, at least for those here. We’ll get Titus on another round of duplexes that’ll provide for everyone bunking with families on the mountain. After that, we’ll get back to providing housing for our own. Like I said, I got a feeling that we’re going to need some more options for our own people soon,” Jack said.
“Still, you didn’t have to do any of this. It says a lot about your character,” Frenzy said.
“Thank you, Frenzy. But it’s the right thing to do and I’d never consider not taking them in, but honestly, I’ll be glad to get back to normal around here. In the meantime, what are we going to do about the three other Gamieyon males? If you seriously think they were involved, I can’t have them wandering around my people at will.”
“Steve and Dean are keeping their eyes on them, not giving any indication that we suspect anything,” Rance said.
“And I intentionally let them keep their ear pieces. Valor knows to continue monitoring them. Hopefully they take them back to their rooms or wherever they’re staying and toss them on top of a dresser or a table or something. Whatever they say will be picked up. If its incriminating, Valor will let me know,” Frenzy said.
“You people are devious. I like it,” Jack said with a grin.
“No doubt about it. But you’re wrong about one thing… I’myourpeople, now,” Frenzy said with a grin.
~~~
Overgrown vines and low hanging tree limbs covered about seventy percent of the old, weather-worn farmhouse. Without knowing exactly what lay beneath them, one might think the whole house was beyond saving, but Niko didn’t even notice as he stood back, his eyes seeing it the way it once was, ratherthan what it had become. To the left he could clearly see the rounded shape of the bay window that his grandmother had loved so much. The front door was nestled immediately to the right of the bay window, with a set of three wooden six foot steps set directly across from it, leading up to the porch itself which stretched from the bay window to the far right side of the front of the house. He couldn’t see them at the moment, but he knew there were three double windows to his right, looking out over the porch. There were three to his left as well, though those were part of the bay window and were smaller regular sized windows to fit into the smaller angled walls necessary to create the fully rounded bay window, and from what he could tell at least one of those in the bay window was cracked. His heart ached as he moved a little closer, but not in the crippling way it once had; more in a longing, missing home kind of way.
He walked through the thigh-high overgrown yard toward the front porch of the house, pausing on the bottom step to grasp several handfuls of vines and yank them away from where they grew so he could continue on. Looking to his right, he took note of the faded, peeling gray paint on the boards of the porch, and the peeling white clapboard of the exterior walls. The windows were opaque with dust and dirt, but their frames had held up well — no warping that he could see from where he stood. He noticed the remnants of the old wooden flower boxes that used to hang from the railings along the porch had crumbled and fallen to the porch floor.
He walked the length of the porch slowly, looking up at the roof over his head, knowing that he was seeing the bottom of a portion of the bedrooms on the second floor. To his surprise there didn’t seem to be any sagging or water leakage, at least from where he stood. The square wooden posts, once whitewashed, still held strong and when he pushed against them, there was no give in them. Unable to avoid it any longer,he walked over to the front door and tried the knob. To his surprise it turned. He slowly opened the door, peering inside like a stranger that didn’t belong there, until the sight of the tiny pink roses printed on the floral striped white wall paper covering the living room walls had him stopping in his tracks. He shook his head as the tears started.
“I’m home, Mimi,” he said, his voice strained with his struggle to stop the tears.
Getting himself under control, Niko make his way through the house, into her bedroom, which was in the back of the house on the first floor, through the kitchen, a peek into the bathroom, then into her favorite room in the whole house — the small sitting room she’d deemed the library, which also happened to house the rounded bay window she loved so much. It wasn’t much of a library, truth be told, but there were a couple of sets of book shelves with a few dozen books on them, along with some Reader’s Digests. Some magazines; mostly Home and Garden, and National Geographic. He smiled as he picked up one of them still lying on a small, round, marble topped table with ornate carved wooden legs. He flipped through it to the page she’d stuck a folded sheet of paper in to mark her place and smiled at the story — ‘How to Decorate Your House to Feel Like a Home’. “Our house was always home, Mimi,” he whispered, replacing the paper to hold her place, and returning it to the table beside her chair, before wandering over to the old, wooden staircase and looking up, wondering if he really wanted to go up there.
“I’ve come this far,” he said, before setting his foot on the first step and starting up the stairs. He took note of the polish still on the wooden banister from years of hands running up and down its surface as their owners ran back and forth up the stairs. And he noticed that the old familiar creek of the third stair from the top was still there. It saved him many times from gettingcaught reading his comic books in bed after bedtime. His Mimi would step on that third step from the top and the creek of the wood would warn him to pretend to be asleep. By the time she opened his door to check on him, he always appeared to be deep asleep. He smiled to himself at the memory as he looked into the two back bedrooms, the extra bedroom, and the front bedroom — which had been his. He felt like a child again when he stepped inside. The smile he still wore melted away when he took note of the clothes he’d left hanging in the closet, the toys on the shelf, even his shoes kicked off and left where they landed beside the bed. He closed his bedroom door and left it all just like he had last time, not any more willing to deal with the remnants of his childhood than he had been when he’d first closed the door on it.
The last room he checked was the extra one that sat next to his at the front of the house. It was a little smaller than his bedroom had been, but was one of the busiest rooms in the house. Mimi’s sewing room. Everything in that room was covered with bolts of material, and cookie tins long ago emptied and filled with an array of buttons. Spools of thread and both safety and straight pins, wax pencils for marking off patterns, and of course her sewing machine, still and unused after all these years. Despite all the dust and the cobwebs that had accumulated throughout the house, he could still smell her in this room. The lavender perfume she loved despite the fact that it made everyone else sneeze still scented this room. He picked up one of the squares she’d saved most likely with the intention of making a quilt from it, and held it to his nose. Sure enough, it smelled like lavender. He looked around the room again, then tucked it into his pocket and made his way back downstairs. He made a quick trip out of the back door to take a look at the back porch where her rocking chair still sat beside the bench he and his friends would perch on when enjoying sweet, ice-cold watermelon as it dripped down their arms in the summertime.Satisfied that the old house was worth salvaging, he went back inside, and then out the front door, pulling it securely closed behind himself.
“So, are we rebuilding it?”
Niko swung around and found Rance standing there.
“Why are you here?” Niko asked.
“Because you’re my friend,” Rance said.
“Why are you here?” Rance countered.
“It was time,” Niko said with a shrug.
“Past time,” Rance said.
Niko nodded as he stepped off the porch, turning his back to Rance and looking up at the second floor windows as he surveyed the house again. “It’s held up well.”
“Considering it’s been a lot of years since anyone has stepped inside, or walked its porches, I’d say it’s held really well,” Rance said. “How’s it look inside?”
“Other than twenty years of dust and grit, it looks like it did the day I left it. Everything is exactly in its place, waiting for whoever lives here to come back and pick up where they left off,” Niko said.
“Are you?” Rance asked.
“Am I what?” Niko asked, looking back at him.
“Going to pick up where you left off here? Build a life in this house.”
