Page 12 of The Princess and the P.I.

r/TamekaBrown

Attaboy: I can’t wait for this case to get the Podcast treatment. Maurice Bennett is a bum. You all only like him because he’s associated with Dorsey Fitzgerald #EatTheRich

Princess_PI: What did he do that was so terrible?

Attaboy: it’s what he didn’t do—after he let the Tameka case languish. He was in the clubs every night high as a kite with his tongue down the throat of some influencer.

“Sister Fiona.” Sister Janice tapped on her door. “Your father would like to speak to you.”

This was never a good thing. Fiona’s steps echoed behind Janice in the long corridor as she approached her father’s office, a space that always felt more like a throne room.

She hesitated for a moment, took a deep breath, and pushed the door open.

The room was dark, the heavy drapes keeping out the morning sun, but her father still squinted at the crack of light Fiona’s entrance widened.

Kofi sat behind a massive mahogany desk, and it made Fiona think for a split second about how she and Kwesi used to pretend to be him when they were children.

The Lord has told me! Kwesi’s nine-year-old voice had quavered with intensity.

He was always the best at imitating her father.

She and her sister had rolled around and pretended to catch the spirit.

It had been at that moment when their father walked in.

While all three of them had been playing, he only beat Kwesi, who had donned their mother’s shoes sometime in the middle of play.

So few memories of their family life were happy.

“Fiona,” he said. “Please, sit down.”

She obeyed, like she always did.

“It’s been a week. And you haven’t spoken to your father. Brief me on the latest with our case,” he began.

Fiona’s jaw tightened. Our case. This is my case. You left me to get arrested . But she said nothing, like she always did.

“We spoke to Amelia, Robert Thorpe’s wife. She knows I’m innocent and has offered us money to prove it. Maurice was thinking I could use that money to hire a lawyer. Dismiss the public defender.”

She let the last part hang. Why hadn’t he gotten her a lawyer? Why was it so easy for him to let his children drift in the wind?

“As you know, the church’s money is tied up.

For now we must rely on God’s provision,” he said, his eyes watering, like he didn’t even believe what he was saying.

Her father’s position had been toppled in recent years.

Tameka changed everything for them. Her father had launched a full investigation into Tameka’s husband and had lost all of his credibility with his congregation when the man had an airtight alibi.

That’s when the personal attacks came, accusing Kwesi of “unnatural” relationships and accusing Esi, Fiona’s sister, of adultery.

Kofi had paid the price for his bravery.

“What evidence have you uncovered, child? Money for this, money for that. Maurice is trying to dazzle you while he slips his way inside of church business. He wants someone to go down for Tameka.”

“Dad, that was three years ago.”

“Ears that do not listen to advice, eh? They will go with the head when it is chopped off, child. You think you are wiser than the elders? Eh? Let me tell you something—members of this congregation, our people, they are still being accosted by that man. In supermarkets, at baseball games—wherever he finds them! I hear it all. Everything! You don’t think I know what he’s doing? ”

Fiona folded her arms.

“Listen to me. Open your ears. That man, he doesn’t care about proving you innocent.

He doesn’t even care about you . What he cares about is proving himself right about Tameka.

About me. About my church! You think you can outthink him?

A man who’s been sharpening his pride for years?

You’re still a child to someone like that!

Fiona, you haven’t seen enough harm to know the kind he brings. ”

Everything was about his church, about her inexperience. Whose fault was it that she was “no match” for a man like that? Fiona’s life hung in the balance, and he thought it was all about him.

“And my case? Do I just let it go?” Fiona asked.

“We all grieve…differently. Your attempt to take the vest—it was misguided, very misguided. Only you and the Lord know what you were thinking. Eh? But you did not succeed. Surely, there is leniency to be found there. And as for Robert…” He said the name with distaste.

“Robert. You did not kill him. This will resolve itself, child. It will. The Lord sees all things, and in His time, He will make all things right.”

“Dad.” She felt a surge of anger, hot and fierce, but she swallowed it down. “I don’t want to wait for it to resolve itself . I have legal responsibilities here. Maurice—”

That tipped him off. Her father’s expression hardened, and he slapped the desk, sending pens rolling to the floor.

“Fiona! Your responsibility is to this family— this family! —and to our faith. Have I not told you what that man is about? Do you not hear me when I speak, eh? Or is it his small-small attention that is flattering you now? Vain girl! Ah, look at you. Hmm? You are done—finished—playing your little Anansi Drew.”

“I won’t let it go,” Fiona said. And she felt like the room was shaking. It may have been her very first firm no to her father. “I can’t.”

When you said no to Kofi Addai, you needed a backup plan. He should have been a professional poker player the way he called bluff on Fiona constantly.

Her father leaned back in his chair, his fingers steepled, regarding her with a mixture of disappointment and frustration. “You must ,” he said quietly. “I have decided.”

“Well, I’ve already made arrangements. With…Maurice.” Fiona was digging a hole she did not know how to actually get out of. Worst-case scenario, she chipped away at the 401(k) check she had coming to get herself a hotel room.

“What has that slick leather jacket boy put in your head? You don’t know what men get up to when they think they have you alone.”

She did, though, and he knew she did.

This compound was full of men who pressed too close to her in the hallway—leered at her from the pulpit.

Their own family friend whom her father trusted so much, David, had made every excuse to touch her.

Their late mother began to see Fiona’s body as a problem to be contained—putting her on diets and water fasts while her slim sister, Esi, ate greasy burgers from her job at Burger Hut.

Her father began to chastise her. The way men responded to her was her fault. Something sinful she was doing—a too-tight dress or an over-glossed lip. He forced her to sit in the back of the church with three to four layers covering her body.

She was something to hide.

The room seemed to squeeze in around her. When she stood up, without being dismissed, the chair scraped loudly against the floor.

He stood up faster, truly angry now. “Why did you have to get on that stage, eh? Why did you have to meddle in anything? You ruined everything.” He reached for her shoulders, and she snatched herself away at the last minute. He lost his footing and tripped over his robe.

His image, his congregation, his good name. Fiona was always ruining something of his.

When she bent over to help him up, he jerked away from her.

“I came all the way to America for my own daughter to kill me? You won’t last a week out there.” His voice was quiet now, and he pulled himself up from the floor like he had lost a round with Mike Tyson.

He had said those exact words to Kwesi. Her brother, Kwesi, had been the golden boy of the family. He took dual-credit classes at fourteen and had a bachelor’s at nineteen. He spoke four languages. He was perfect and good in every way except for one.

He loved a man.

When the photos Mark sent started to spread, whispers rippled about evil in the congregation.

Culminating on one Sunday, when Kofi made a sacrifice of his son, demanding that he renounce the demon inside of him.

When Kwesi refused to stand, her father kicked him out—making a show of his godliness to the church.

The unimaginable would happen four weeks to the day of his exile, shattering the fragile peace of their lives forever.

A senseless carjacking. Her brother—moody, mercurial, curious, and too hopeful for this world—bled out under the cold, indifferent glow of Walmart’s superstore lights at three a.m. The perpetrator, a child barely sixteen, would be found less than thirty miles away, twisted around a tree, his own story ending as abruptly as he had ended Kwesi’s—two lives, irrevocably shattered.

Such a waste. Such an enormous waste.

Since then, her father wouldn’t even allow the family to speak his name.

The disavowal was so complete that her father consistently told people he had only two children, listing her restless sister as his oldest. When her father declared that Kwesi wouldn’t last long on his own, he had been sickeningly correct.

“I may not last, Dad, but I don’t have anything to lose.”

“Fiona, you have everything to lose. Everything. You cannot let that leather jacket pull you down to his level. You will be full of his baby and in jail.”

Funny, that was the exact life Kofi had planned for Fiona. Pregnant in a jail of his choosing.

—

The next, day, Maurice pulled into his Oxon Hill office space. It had been ten days since Robert Thorpe flopped on that stage like a fish out of water. Three since Amelia Thorpe made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

The presence of the MGM casino turned his location into prime real estate, but some patches in Oxon Hill still lagged behind the promise of progress.

The Food Lion in this strip still had soft lettuce and baby food and Tide locked up behind the counter.

Packs of unoccupied teenage boys roamed the strip not for crime per se but for opportunity—an unlocked car or a dropped wallet.