The Coldest Winter Ever

Winter and Bullet are in Key West. She thinks about how she feels like she belongs:

This is the type of life I saw myself having, leaving town with no permission, warning, or limitations. This whole matter was what made Bullet so damn sexy to me at that moment. He was making the rules, maybe even breaking the rules. He was the shot-caller. A man who can only react to life could never have me (363).

The airport limo takes them to their Villa, and then Bullet takes Winter shopping for a whole new wardrobe. That night, after they have sex, she thinks, “it couldn’t be any better than this. A man, a solid man, with loot and a luscious big dick, a champion pussy-eater and he was dedicated to my every desire. I waited for someone to wake me up. But no one ever did” (366). Bullet tries to teach Winter how to swim, and he mentions that at least he can teach her something her father didn’t. This makes her mad, and she says that Midnight told her he is her father’s enemy. Bullet might have worked for Santiaga’s enemy, but Santiaga was his hero. He says that his father was killed when he was four and Rings, Santiaga’s enemy, took him in and gave him a simultaneous job and father figure.

He tells Winter that Santiaga was betrayed by the police officers that used to be on his payroll because another big name in the business offered them more money. He then says that he has loved her ever since they were both little:

[H]e wasn’t gonna ask me about my past ‘cause he expects every woman to lie about what she done no matter how small it is. He made it clear over and over that everything between us starts now, today, and ‘you belong to me from here on in.’ The penalty for betrayal is death, he said, the seriousness of the cancer disease. ‘If I catch you lying to me about anything, no matter how small, the penalty is pain’ (375).

Winter doesn’t understand why he is being so possessive: “I don’t know what he was so uptight about. His dick was good and his dollars were long. I had no reason to complain, leave, or cheat” (376). The only thing that bothers her is that when she mentioned visiting her father in prison, he behaved strangely.

She tells him that she doesn’t want an apartment in Brooklyn because of all the girls that have it out for her, but he says that he at least wants her to see his apartment. While Bullet is out, Winter hears her mom banging on Bullet’s door, begging for crack.

Bullet leaves Winter all alone again at his apartment. She doesn’t have any food or money, and he doesn’t come back until nighttime. When he comes home, she is angry, but then he throws a stack of money on the bed and says, “Yeah, I know how to make it hot for you” (383), and she loves it. They get an apartment on the East Side, and Bullet lets her decorate however she likes:

Initially, I was cool with the amount of time he spent away from home. Decorating was taking up all my energy anyhow. But, Bullet was slowing down my decorating with his lack of trust. Every time I wanted to purchase something I had to wait for him to have free time to go with me to each store so he could pay the cashier directly. It was clear to me that he wasn’t gonna let my hands feel no dough (385).

To counteract this, Winter leases the apartment in her name so that items can be directly shipped to her. One night, Bullet tells Winter to get dressed for a party and gives her a diamond Rolex. She gets so excited she accidentally calls him “daddy.” They go to a fancy restaurant with two other couples. The men go talk near the bar and the women go the bathroom; Winter joins them. One of the girls, Tiffany, picks up Winter’s pocketbook and leaves her bag at the sink. She gets mad and rushes Tiffany, who tells her what’s going on: “Take that bag. It’s for your man. Don’t blow it. Somebody should’ve put you up on it in advance” (389). The girls leave the bathroom, and in the bag Winter sees several guns and a bag of cocaine. After going back to the table and eating with the group, Bullet and Winter walk out. The feds are watching, and Bullet hugs Winter and tells her to take the bag full of guns back in his closet.

When he gets home, she’s mad that he didn’t tell her the plan, and that they didn’t actually go to a party. He congratulates her for pulling it off and says that he couldn’t tell her the truth in advance because he needed her to act as naturally as possible. They go to a party at a club, and afterwards one of GS’s bodyguards comes up to Winter and calls her Sasha. Bullet gets mad that some guy would approach his girl. She pretends not to know him. Once Winter’s in the car, Bullet brings GS over to the car and introduces her to him. Bullet asks GS if he’s ever met her before, and he says no: “I don’t know why GS covered for me. Or maybe he was just protecting his own ass. There was no way he had forgotten me. I know that that Bullet was the man. He wasn’t taking no shorts and I got to dig him for that” (396).

Winter finds out she’s pregnant, and immediately goes to the abortion clinic without telling Bullet. Based on the date of her last period, which she can barely remember, the baby isn’t Bullet’s. On the way to the clinic, she reads an article in a newspaper that says GS’s friend and bodyguard was murdered. She immediately knows that Bullet had him murdered for trying to talk to her. After the abortion, Winter is given pills to fight off infection, and she takes the bus back to the apartment.

Winter recovers from the abortion: “At the apartment, I ate, then slept. When I woke up, I left out to go to the drugstore. I purchased some pads for heavy-duty flow” (405). She also thoroughly cleans the apartment so that there isn’t any trace of the abortion because she doesn’t want Bullet to know that she lied to him:

I felt down-low. I didn’t know why. It was like something was pulling me down, making me feel deep depression. It was something I couldn’t control. The lower I felt, the more I thought of Daddy. The more I thought of Daddy, the lower I felt. Tears started running down my face (405).

She calls the prison and asks about Santiaga. He’s been at the same prison all along; he was just moved to a different building in the prison. She decides that she will go visit him tomorrow: “Nothing and nobody would stop me” (406).

Bullet comes home and immediately says, “Joey said you went out yesterday for three hours” (406). Joey is the apartment doorman, and Bullet paid him to keep an eye on Winter. She tries to lie and say that she went shopping, but he knows she’s lying: “A dick-suck cures everything. So I unfastened Bullet’s belt, dropped down to my knees and went to work. I centered myself so he could see my lips sucking and pulling. So he could see my tongue. He needed to know he was boss. I had no problem with that” (406).

He tells her that she’s messing with his head: “When you fuck up my head, you fuck up my business. I can’t let nobody fuck up my business” (407). He asks her if she would die for him, and she says yes. He then gets an erection and tries to pull down her pants. She tries not to panic and says she’s on her period: “A nigga wants pussy. This is my pussy, right? […] A little blood ain’t gonna hurt his big dick” (406).

The next morning, Winter awakes to a crazy inhuman noise coming from the living room. She grabs a gun from her bedside table and opens her bedroom door to see two Rottweilers who were “[v]icious-looking, no-nonsense killer dogs with a chain that allowed them to roam the entire length of the living room and kitchen and two feet into our bedroom” (408). Bullet isn’t home, so she calls him. She asks him what’s up with the dogs: “Them some loyal bitches. They do whatever I tell them to do. […] Are you loyal, Winter?” (408). She says yes, and he tells her to just close the bedroom door, stay put, and the dogs will leave her alone. She tells him he’s crazy, and he says, “Yeah, your pussy smelled funny yesterday” (409), implying he thinks she’s cheating.

Bullet finally comes home after two nights and three mornings. Winter is starving and weak. Bullet feeds the dogs first and then comes into the bedroom. She tells him he’s hungry, and he says, “Oh, so you remember who feeds you?” (410). She says yes, and they eat breakfast. He says he has to swing back to Brooklyn, and she must come along or be left alone with the dogs again. He asks Winter about why she had a ticket to Maryland in her pocket the day he picked her up. She tries lying, but he says he knows she was probably going to try to see Midnight. He says she would have been wasting her time because “he ain’t pushing no weight” (412).

He says he has a plan. Winter will pay for a rental car, and they will dress nicely to transport some guns. First, though, they must drop his car off in Brooklyn. Winter says she doesn’t want to go back to Brooklyn, but he insists. Once in Brooklyn, Bullet leaves Winter in the passenger seat of the car so that he can drop the dogs off. A fire marshal comes up to her window and tells her to move the car as people pour out of a nearby building. One of the people in the crowd is Winter’s mom: “Shame and disgust are the only things that describe my state of mind when I spotted Momma in the crowd. She was wearing purple hot pants in the winter, a red T-shirt, runover Reeboks, and carrying a dirty yellow crochet bag” (415). She spots Winter and goes up to the car right as Bullet is approaching. He tells her to go away, but she tells Winter that she has some letters from Santiaga addressed to her. Winter’s mom wants money for the letters, but instead Winter fights her and gets them herself.

Bullet leaves Winter alone in the car to retrieve his gun from the other car, when a brick hits the windshield. Before Winter has time to think she, sees Simone coming at her: “You stupid fucking bitch. You had the nerve to bring your ass back around here” (418). Winter and Simone start fighting as a crowd forms around them. Simone breaks a bottle and slashes Winter across the cheek. Bullet shoots a gun off to disperse the crowd, and Simone runs away. Bullet gets in the driver’s seat and is about to drive away, but a police car begins to pull up. Before they reach the car, Bullet leaves Winter behind and gets away. The police apprehend Winter.

Since the arrest, Winter has been incarcerated: “Twenty-five hundred and fifty-five days later […] I had twenty-nine hundred and twenty days left to serve on a mandatory fifteen-year prison sentence” (420). Winter says that every day in prison has been the same, but this day is different because she gets to leave the prison briefly to attend her mother’s funeral:

Because I was gonna get a few hours outside of these walls, I was like a superstar. Everybody in here wanted me to be sure to tell them everything and everybody I saw outside as soon as I returned. Other than people’s relatives, there was no real way for us to know what was going on outside(421).

She explains how most people’s relatives aren’t willing to take an almost eight-hour journey to the prison, which is almost in Canada. In seven years, she’s never had one visitor. Winter describes how since being in prison, she works “several hustles to keep [her] commissary in living condition” (421), and she isn’t afraid to fight anymore. When she first came to prison, she tried to keep herself looking nice, but stopped: “[A]fter while, you’d figure, what the fuck for? You can’t get no dick. I don’t want no pussy. There’s no one to impress here except those broke-down broads” (421). Winter’s old friends Natalie, Simone, and some other Brooklyn girls are locked up as well, and they are friends despite their previous beef. Winter points out that like her, each of her friends is locked up because they were girlfriends “to niggas moving weight” (422).

Winter gets letters from Santiaga every now and then. When she gets to the graveyard for her mom’s funeral, the sight of seeing her father after eight years makes the tears come “gushing out of [her] eyes, after so many years with no tears at all” (426). They want to hug each other, but they are both in handcuffs. He says she’s still the prettiest girl in the world, even with the scar across her face. When Santiaga looks into the grave at Momma, “[h]e broke down so bad, he fell to his knees” (427) because he didn’t recognize her. She has changed drastically after becoming addicted to crack.

A man and a group of women approach the grave. Winter immediately recognizes the man as Midnight: “For the first time in many years, I became self-conscious. I felt ugly. I wanted to fix myself. I wanted to rip off these clothes and tear out these braids, comb my hair of something” (427). Winter thinks that Midnight looks great: “[T]all, black, and regal. He looked more amazing than I remembered him being. Instantly, I felt jealous of the women with him. It was a piece of me that was dead, that was somehow coming to life again” (427).

At first, she doesn’t recognize the girls with him, but soon she realizes they are her little twin sisters, Mercedes and Lexus, and they’re all grown up. She says they are “so soft and delicate and different. Their eyes were different” (427). Midnight presents Mercedes and Lexus to Santiaga, and the girls act shy as if they don’t know Santiaga. Winter looks away because she doesn’t want Midnight to look at her.

As the funeral continues, a luxury Mercedes Benz pulls up and a “model type of girl, straight out of the pages of a high-fashion magazine, stepped out of the car. Dressed in a white Versace slinky dress—odd color for a funeral—and white Dolce and Gabbana leather stilettos. She was obviously paid out the ass” (428). Winter recognizes the girl as her little sister, Porsche. Porsche immediately runs over to Winter and says that she’s sorry for not visiting her, but she is just too far away. She offers to pay for whatever she might need in prison. Winter asks about whose car that is, and Porsche says it’s Buster’s, as if Winter should know who that is. She asks what’s up with Mercedes and Lexus, and Porsche says that Midnight adopted them: “They all religious and whatnot. They be wanting to tell somebody how to live they own motherfucking life. That’s his wife right there. She ain’t all that. I look better than she do” (429). Midnight now owns a barbershop instead of selling drugs.

Winter looks at Porsche and notes how perfect she looks, wishing she could tell her sister the reality of living such a dangerous lifestyle:

I wanted to warn her about certain things in life. Usually I’m not at a loss for words. But I didn’t feel good enough to tell her what I really thought. I knew what she would think: Winter, you’re just saying this ‘cause you’re in jail […] So instead of saying what I had learned, what was on the tip of my tongue, I said nothing at all. Hell, I’m not meddling in other people’s business. I definitely don’t be making no speeches. Fuck it. She’ll learn for herself. That’s just the way it is (430).