La Familia 2 by Paradise Gomez Page A

knocking. Through the peephole, I saw Kawanda in the hallway. I wasn’t in the mood to see her at the moment, but I opened the door anyway. She walked into my place smiling and dressed like she was going to the club in the afternoon: six-inch heels, tight jeans, and her shirt tighter than her jeans highlighting her ample tits. She was always dressed like she was going out somewhere with tight clothes that looked painted on and accentuating her luscious curves.
    â€œHey, girl, what you doing?” she asked gleefully.
    I forced myself to smile and returned, “Nothing, just chilling, smoking, and watching TV.”
    â€œWhere’s Danny?”
    â€œSleeping. I ain’t complaining,” I said.
    Kawanda made herself comfortable in my place. We weren’t best friends, but she was cool peoples. She took a seat on my couch and decided to smoke with me. She pulled out a phat dime bag from her purse and dangled it in front of me. “I know you ain’t finished smoking yet. I just copped some of that good shit from my homeboy and I ain’t tryin’ to smoke alone.”
    â€œYeah, I’m down. Let me go check on Danny first.”
    I walked down the hallway to see if my baby was still sleeping. He had been asleep for two hours now and I knew it was going to be hell trying to put him back to sleep tonight. For some reason, that boy loved to sleep during the day and keep his mama up at nights. I started breastfeeding him at first; like any nigga, pop a nipple in their mouth and they would shut the fuck up and enjoy. But since I started dancing and smoking weed, I stopped breastfeeding him. I didn’t want my baby getting high too. Because I read online that if you smoke marijuana and breastfeed, the active chemical in marijuana is passed to your baby through your milk. So I felt it was better to abstain from breastfeeding than smoking. Yeah, I was the mother of the year for choosing smoking weed over breastfeeding my child. But a bitch was stressed the fuck out and weed was the only thing that soothed me and made me break away from my worries.
    I left the door ajar to Danny’s bedroom. I quietly glanced inside and saw he was still out cold, lying on his stomach probably dreaming about when he was born, or missing home when he was safe and sound nestled inside my stomach and going everywhere with Mommy. I smiled at my little bundle of joy. My baby boy was so cute.
    â€œSleep tight,” I whispered to him.
    I went back into the living room to join Kawanda. She had kicked her shoes off and was rolling up the dime bag on my secondhand coffee table. She had split the blunt apart, slid the tobacco out of the blunt from the mouth end down, and started loading up all the freshly ground buds into the blunt wrapper. Kawanda was a professional at rolling up. She was precise and fast, not like some of these nonprofessionals who rolled sloppy joints and had bad weed.
    She said to me, “We ain’t been seeing you at the club in a week, Sammy,” as she started rolling the mouth piece in her right hand and the burning end in the left, rolling right to left. She tucked the bottom flap under the top flap using her thumbs and thumbnails.
    â€œNiggas been askin’ ’bout you and shit. They missin’ you fo’ real,” she added.
    I smiled. I was definitely becoming the center of attention at Crazy Legs. Kawanda continued putting together the blunt by licking what she got done so far and pressing it to the bottom of the flap. She kept licking it until it stuck firmly. Then she said, “Girl, you missed out on some money the other night. This young baller came to the club and just started makin’ it rain everywhere, throwing up money like crazy. I’m tellin’ you, he must have spent at least ten stacks that night.”
    â€œWord,” I uttered.
    â€œWord. Bitches were all over that nigga like sweat on skin,” she joked. “But you know a bitch had to