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“But why am I in this hospital bed if I wasn’t shot either?”

“You passed out,” Gramps said. “You collapsed right there. That shooting was the last straw for you. It was the icing on the cake for you. You couldn’t eat no more. After all you went through.

Joy looked at Gramps. Did he know about William and that woman too?

“You was hinting about it when you came to see me,” Gramps said, “but Tess told me all about it. Shame on him,” he added, as he looked directly at William.

Tess and Cory glanced at each other. They couldn’t have said it better themselves.

Neither could Joy. That was why she didn’t look at William either, but kept her focus on the man she considered her grandfather. “What about you, Gramps?” she asked him.

“What about me?”

“You didn’t get shot either?”

“Me? Who gonna shoot me in BrIdell? Not in my Bridell. He better not!” Tess and Cory laughed. “But I was still in Maylene’s when all that shooting first started. I went to the restroom. Remember? None of them bullets came my way at all.”

Joy didn’t have an independent recollection of him going anywhere, but she did remember walking out of Maylene’s without him. “Thank God you’re okay. And thanks for coming to the hospital to see about me. I know how you hate hospitals.”

But before Gramps could respond, the door to that hospital room flew open, and a worried Juanita Lacey, Joy’s mom, came crashing in.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Oh my baby girl, my baby girl!” Juanita cried out as soon as she entered the hospital room. She began hurrying for the bed. “My poor baby girl, are you alright? Gramps told me what happened and I came right over!”

Gramps knew that was a lie. He told that heifer what happened four hours ago. It would have taken her thirty minutes to get over to Fort Wayne. That wasn’t coming right over by anybody’s measure.

But William interrupted her momentum as he got up and stepped in front of her. “Get out,” he ordered her in no uncertain terms. “Get your ass out of here!”

Juanita, being Juanita, placed her hand on her hip and looked him up and down like he was a little person although he was taller than her. “You don’t tell me what to do! Not after all that cheating you done already done on my baby girl.”

She then proceeded to go to Joy’s bed, but William just as quickly proceeded to grab her. “I said get out!”

Max intervened and held her back.

“Let me go! That’s my child!”

Even Gramps was confused. “What y’all doing?” He stood up. “She’s Netta’s mama. No matter how bad she is, and Lord knows she’s bad, she’s still that child’s mama.”

Juanita would have cussed Gramps out for giving her such a nice-nasty endorsement, but she knew she had to stay focused to get by a man like William Skeffington. “Let me go!” she was saying to Max. “I got a right to see my baby!”

Joy’s heart was hurt enough. There was no way she was going to allow her mother to pour salt in her wound. Which would be the only reason she’d be there. “I don’t wanna see you right now,” she said to her. “I don’t wanna have nothing to do with you.”

“But you wanna have something to do with him?” Juanita motioned toward William. “You ain’t got no problem seeing him after what he did to you? Or is it his money you ain’t got no problem seeing?”

“Get her out of here,” William said.

“Let’s go, lady,” Max said as he strongarmed her towards the exit.

“Ain’t this some shit?” Juanita was complaining. “You gonna let these crackers treat me like this, bitch? You gonna let them do this to your own mama? Netta? Netta? This some bullshit, Netta!”

She was complaining the whole time, but Max didn’t care. He got her out of there.

Gramps looked at Joy. He above anybody else on earth knew that Joy had plenty to hate her mother over. But she’d always been cordial with her mother. Just a few days ago she stopped those cops from abusing her mother and went to jail for intervening on her mother’s behalf. “Why you treating your own mama like this?” he asked her.

Gramps didn’t know about Juanita’s part in that little shakedown scheme they tried to pull off in Westchester county. Although Joy returned Cassidy’s money that had been deposited in her bank because she felt dirty keeping that heifer’s money, she still couldn’t so easily get over how they tried to besmirch her reputation in William’s eyes. And the fact that her mother was willing to go along with it for cash was the end of it for her. The only reason she intervened with those cops was because the cops were wrong, not because of any affinity she had for her mother. “I don’t wanna see her right now,” was all she’d say to Gramps.

“Suit yourself. But she’s gonna always be your mama. Don’t ever get too high and mighty that you forget that, Baby Girl.”