“Momma, give me three lousy minutes. I’ll get right back to you.”
“Promise?”
I took a deep breath and sighed. “Promise.”
“Okay, baby.”
I hung up before she could change her mind and start rambling again. What was she going to do if something happened to me? If I lost my job or something and couldn’t keep sending her funds on the drop of a dime.
There were only a handful of people in the store. I was thankful that no one was at the register waiting to be rung up. I was going to locate the flour and haul ass. Like the majority of small markets, all of the items were overpriced to pay for convenience.
I made my way to the rear of the store, grabbed a two-pound sack of flour and headed back toward the front. I was rifling through my purse for a five-dollar bill and not paying attention when I bumped into another patron; a young white man.
“Excuse me,” I said, walking around him. He didn’t reply.
I was less than four feet from the counter when I froze. There was another young white man pointing a rather large gun toward the Middle Eastern man behind the register.
“Freeze, old man!” he yelled at the merchant. “We don’t want any trouble! Give us all the cash in the register and we’ll leave! Don’t fuck around, so we can all go home tonight!”
“What are you? A fucking crackhead?” the man shouted back at him with an accent.
I practically drowned him out. Did he say “we” and “us”?
I scanned from side to side, trying to figure out who else could’ve been with him. There was a Puerto Rican woman holding an infant in the health-care aisle. One second after I’d ruled her out as his accomplice, I felt the cold metal on my temple and an arm grab me around my waist.
“Don’t move, bitch, or you’re dead!”
I whispered, “Shit,” as everything dropped to the floor out of my hands.
He was trembling as much as me and so was his partner at the counter. I had a feeling that they were crackheads or some type of drug addicts.
“Don’t fucking move!” he screamed so loudly in my ear that I felt like my eardrum might explode.
“I’m about to get married,” I heard myself saying.
“Who gives a fuck?” He tightened his grip around my waist and started gyrating his hips behind me, rubbing his dick against my ass. “You know what? Now that I’m checking you out, you look like a sweet little piece of ass. Want me to take you in the back room and do you?”
His friend started chuckling. “Do her right here, Donny. I wanna see, and save some for
me.”
“Listen to me,” I said. “You’re not going to rape me because I won’t allow it. You came here for money, right? Simply take the money and leave.”
The one at the counter eyed me with disdain. “Bitch, if we wanna fuck you, we will. Who the fuck do you think you are?”
I don’t know why but I still felt like I could talk some sense into them. “I’m a woman who is in love for the first time in her life—truly in love—and I want to live. I want to get married in a month, grow old together, and have beautiful children to carry on our names. I want to have a nice home, go to work every day, and come home to my family. I want to travel around the world with my husband and kids. I’m a woman who wants to love life. Don’t you love life?”
“Does it look like we love life, bitch?” the one behind me yelled and pressed the muzzle of his gun harder onto my temple. “On second thought, man, this whore is psychotic. Let’s get the money and get the fuck out of here. I need a fix, man.”
The woman holding the infant started crying and clutching her baby to her chest. The man behind the counter started fidgeting with the cash register. Good, he could simply give them the money so they could leave and we’d all be safe.
My heart dropped in my chest when I saw a glimmer of metal in his other hand that had been reaching under the counter. You idiot, I thought as everything seemed to move in slow motion. Now I won’t be able to keep my promise to Momma!
As the first of many shots rang out, only one word left my mouth. “Yardley!”
Thirty-four
Yardley