Guilty Gucci by Ashley Antoinette

her threw her way made life bearable. Without him she would be on stuck. He was her man and she wanted to show him she appreciated the things he did for her, no matter how small. She slid her head between his legs and took him into her mouth, tears filling her eyes. Gucci would have gladly done what it took to please him if he didn’t constantly make her feel as if she had to. With him, it wasn’t a choice; it was a requirement that he had made clear from day one. He held her head and she finished the job as they pulled into her driveway.
    “Go grab you an overnight bag. You’re coming over tonight. I’ll take you shopping in the morning,” he promised. To most girls the offer would be romantic, exciting, but to Gucci it felt like a demand. But instead of standing up for herself she told him to wait a quick minute and ran into the house to retrieve a few items. She was labeled weak minded, not because she wanted to be but because she didn’t know how to be anyway else.
    Gucci avoided his stare and got out of the car with a short good-bye. She was halfway up the walkway when he called her name.
    “Guch!”
    She turned around and walked back to him, standing outside his window. He put his hand out the window and placed ten hundred-dollar bills in her hand. “Pay a bill or something, make sure your moms is straight,” he told her.
    She nodded her head.
    “What do you say?” he asked.
    “Thanks, daddy,” she said as she backpedaled into the house.
    She quickly peeked in on her mother and nodded to the nurse who was on duty.
    “How you doing today, Ma?” she asked as she bent and kissed her on the forehead.
    Her mother turned her head away and peered at the nurse. “She mean, Gucci.”
    Gucci arched her eyebrows and glared at the nurse. “What did you do to her? Did you hurt her?” she asked directly.
    “No ... no. I just helped her get dressed for the day. She was upset and crying about it, but I would never ...”
    Gucci put her hand up already knowing that her mother was giving the nurse a hard time. She didn’t like to be undressed by strangers. Past ghosts made her wary of everyone but Gucci. “It’s okay, Ma. I’m home now. Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to hurt you.” She was used to taking care of things. Gucci’s mother had relied on her ever since she was a young kid. Significantly disabled, her mother didn’t function well mentally. Southern born she was labeled slow, even the most minute tasks seemed impossible for her to learn and Gucci had always been the glue that held everything together. Gucci was a product of her mother’s rape. A male nurse who had been hired to take care of her mother had molested her for years. The crime wasn’t even discovered until she went into labor with Gucci. There was no way that the sex could have been consensual. Gucci was a product of rape and had been born to a mentally challenged mother. Now here she was at twenty-three, burdened with the task of caring for a woman who had never wanted her in the first place. The man who raped her would whisper in her ear.
    “Ooh this is some good coochie,” he would say.
    So when she gave birth to her baby all she could say was the word coochie, but she was so slow that she mispronounced the word.
    “Gucci ... Gucci,” she said repeatedly. She said the word so much that the nurses put it down on the birth certificate. No, Gucci’s name had nothing to do with fashion. It was a direct reflection of her mother’s rape and it was a ghost that haunted her even to this day.
    If Gucci had the money she would put her mother in an adult facility to make things easier. A professional home could take better care of her mother than Gucci ever could, but with her minimum-wage job at the rehab center she was going nowhere fast. With genetics like hers life wasn’t easy. She inherited an empty head disguised by a beautiful exterior. Her body and face were magnificent, but they were of no value to her. She was simply living,