“Hurry up girl, we gotta get going.”

Pammy was struggling to keep up with Ennis, his long-legged strides proving very difficult to match by a six year old.

Pammy wanted to be just like her Daddy. She wore white t-shirts and blue jeans just like him every day. She didn’t want to wear her dresses and shiny shoes everyday, even though she loved them so. Those were special clothes for the few times they went to church or went to Christmas dinner at Aunt Fredericka’s house.

No, she wanted to be like her daddy. Because she loved him bigger than the sun.

Today they were going to the store down the street.. The VW Bug was outta commission and Ennis was waiting on his check to buy a part in order to fix it. They were walking to the Stop N Go for some cigarettes.

Ennis needed to get away from Melinda to think. She was too much.

I guess it’s better than her shutting down for days, he thought as he ran his hand through his black curls.

“Shit, I need a haircut.” He mumbled. Something else to spend money on. Money they didn’t have. He had to get away.

“Shit, I need a haircut.” He snapped his head around to see his little girl tugging at her black pop up braids and mimicking him. She looked just like him, a light bright with big eyes, but with hair that didn’t coil like his. Melinda’s pretty chocolate brown skin had no effect on this child, but when Pammy was mad, boy was she her mama made over.

He had to stifle a chuckle.

“Pamela.”

She stopped walking and stared up at him with wide eyes.

“What did I say about cussing?”

He watched her dip her head. He bent over, lifted her head up and then turned around to keep walking.

It took a minute for Pammy’s heart to stop beating. When Daddy talked to her it was like the stars collided, but when he was mad, she couldn’t take it.

She looked at the ground just like he did as they walked and tried to pick up the smooth, rounded pieces of glass that lay between the gravel in the parking lot on this block of the neighborhood. There was some good stuff here.

Ennis was thinking. She loved Melinda and Pammy, but when he was sober, he remembered the others.

The wife he drove away from, just seven years earlier. 1978.

The other children that were calling for him as he left. Sons. Fine sons.

He knew he wouldn’t spend his last three dollars just on cigarettes.

The steady pace of his daughter’s little feet shuffled a little in the gravel and he heard a strange sound.

Ennis looked back to see a man struggling to get a firm grip on Pammy. She was giving him quite the fight, biting and kicking as the man tried to cover her mouth.

Before he knew it, Ennis was on him. The dude was on the gravel trying to fight Pammy’s father off now. Ennis did not feel his knuckles smashing into the man’s face over and over, but he watched and he knew it would hurt later.

“Wait wait wait wait wait, Man wait.” Out of curiosity, Ennis paused in his quest to teach this young man not to touch anyone’s child again.

The dude was crying, but yelling through his busted lip, as loud as the blood in his throat would let him.

“I’ll give you a thousand dollars for that little girl right there. One. Thousand. Dollars. I ain’t joking.”

Young dude tried to smile, his teeth red through already swollen lips.

The rage inside of Ennis was white hot. And he was calm. That’s how he knew this guy was going to die.

“You must not like your life. I’m going to kill you, then line your coffin with that money.”

Ennis said it so low, that Pammy came out from behind the car she had hidden behind to hear better. The smile that was on his face scared her.

So when Ennis started kicking the shit out of the man, she just watched, her mouth open; her eyes, ears and all her senses taking in the screams, thuds, blood and impact of steel toe boots on semi-soft body parts.

If she were able to identify the stranger before, she certainly couldn’t now as she watched him gain permanent damage at her father’s hands and feet.

She was still frozen to the spot when Leonard and Spock came to drag Ennis away from the dude, who was breathing like he was a balloon overfilled and let go to fly around a room.

“Go home, Ennis! Man, leave before the cops come.”

They tried to point him in the right direction of their apartment, but Ennis wasn’t having it.

“I’m not going to touch him.” Ennis told his buddies. He was still eerily calm. They let him go. But they were ready as he walked back over to the man, who was trying unsuccessfully to turn over.

“You even think about my daughter again, that’ll be your dying thought.”

He hunkered down and said something very low to the man, who started crying, loudly.

“No man, no! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” The man was sobbing like nothing Pammy had ever seen a grown man do before.

Ennis stood up and continued in the direction of the store.

Pammy didn’t know what to do. The shock was wearing off, so she sobbed like the baby she was.

Ennis stopped in his tracks and bowed his head for a minute. He flexed his left hand. It was getting stiff already.

He looked back and said,

“Hush now. Pammy. Be a man about it.”And he turned around, swooped her up to his shoulders and carried her the rest of the way to the Stop N Go.