Full Glow: A Town Unknown

By Amatielle Silva

This is a story of struggle, pain, and triumph as La Von and Tracy Jenkin’s daughter April comes into her own and makes her mark in the wide world of music entertainment, managing the first lady of hip-hop. Will she survive the passions of her heart, or will her ex-boyfriend and culture vulture take her all the way out of the game?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781546275497

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Copyright © 2019 Amatielle Silva. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   01/24/2019

ISBN: 978-1-5462-7550-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-7549-7 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

La Von

went home, he walked in the door, he sat in his favorite recliner. He took off his shoes, poured a drink, drank it and died.

April had nothing to do with it but she played it back in her head like she did.

She slit his throat. Tracy came home, she found him that way and their thirteen year old daughter who looked ever so much like her birth mother it was creepy was left bereaved and fatherless.

Barely ear shot from a preteen April was cold inside at the stark realizations the routine of unpredictability so rudely interrupted, her life, by death.

He was a decent father but often absent out of town for this and that, some new business endeavor, some big idea, some friend in need, some reason or another. How he would come back looking who knew. Thinner this time, a few pounds heavier that time, agitated and disgusted this time, mellow, peaceful and yogafied the next. It was a wonder her mother stayed married to him. April loved Tracy even though everyone knew they looked nothing alike.

As beautiful as she was April was LaVon’s child and no one else’s to the naked eye.

Each day after first thing in the morning there was this chill in that house.

There was this empty space between the comfortable knowing her dad was alive and the grey poke, the broad, vast emptiness of a silent echo reminding April in a set of seconds that she was what she knew as one parent short.

She always felt strange with Tracy. It was not the strangeness one felt suddenly, or awkwardly in a new experience. It was the dull sense that she could be part of something else. It was the strangeness that she clung to in her mother which was her only awareness of what childhood was, but she could never figure who she REALLY looked like. Her father seemed to plague her life with mystery.

April had an undying suspicion there were other people, in other places who knew him like she did.

La Von was by all accounts though masculine, a ‘pretty man’, but there was no favor of Tracy. There was no matching eyes, nose, cupid’s bow. She matched her in behavior.

The way she would move her wrist after washing her hands.

The way April sneezed at was like Tracy, but her shape, her gaze, her golden skin, all Irene, and all a mystery unknown and unrevealed to her.

They planned on telling her when she turned eighteen.

That was the agreement, the two of then LaVon and Tracy together.

Now five years early her partner in promise was gone.

It was like he vanished.

No one sat in his arm chair anymore, it looked like a gaping canyon of a seat with dust by the time April was seventeen. The church Pastor came to the house on Summer and sat in that chair, there on La Von’s ghost, and Tracy and April could only exchange looks. The room filled with unmentionables and Tracy offered her hospitality by way of food and drink.

Tracy would some days gaze around the room quickly allowing herself to feel the sort of emptiness she did when La Von was away on a trip but at least still with them and that is how she lived on after his absence. With that shear pale reality.

‘What was the difference?’ she thought often to herself and this in a way eased her pain of his loss. It was a heart attack. That is what the doctor said it was and everything looked different in their lives now. April and she were able to receive social security death benefits for their loss of him and the life insurance which Tracy made damn sure was intact once she learned of her then new husband’s fast living ways.

For the remaining years and while there were no ground breaking business ventures as it would have been should LaVon still be alive accept, he wasn’t there.

They maintained the small four bedroom two story house they lived in now in Kennesaw.

Sad and lonely nights April and her mother would crawl in bed together and cry, and sober one another with the ‘What if’ game.

It was a bunch of random ideas and fantasy stuff, until they ended with What if Dad really wasn’t you know, and he lived across the street spying on us, or on a deserted tropical island.

It was then that the memory of LaVon’s warmth would seem to kiss them to sleep and the two were never a more splendid pair of survivors.

The two of them stayed in what they commonly referred to between themselves as ‘Dad’s house’ until Tracy gained 30 lbs., got fed up and decided things were all wrong for them there. She had a fit of sorts. The basement all full of everything L.V. from clothing, to business documents, to old fermented colognes and unopened things.

Clutter, mountains of clutter.

The smell of that place. She stopped cooking as much.

She never had sex anymore. Make up was unimportant, going from a fashionable woman about town to a single mom widow in a day would do that to you.

Her now fifty seven year old self still youthful and in good health had retired from her nursing career and April never called or came by anymore except on Sundays which to her still felt like never and that was okay because she still hadn’t told her about Irene, and tried her best to forget that small important detail. April was her daughter. No one raised her but her.

No one loved her like she did and it didn’t seem to matter anymore, but some nights it was a marble in her back as she tried to sleep.

Her great fear was losing April completely if she knew. Tracy had no one left but April and there was not going to be another child.

The faint smell of carnations and salt, kept her fearful La Von would, though long gone, find disapproval with her.

Washing machines, dryers, window treatments, knobs, fixtures. Is this what makes a home?

Every strip of lashes she glued on, each stroke of lip color, any hope of foreverness, faded in his midst.

There would be no one to give their daughter away at her wedding. She formed from the thought from the loss of this husband and April’s father that anyone she loved would leave them since he did in his mortal way.

April didn’t know water could flow from her fingertips until standing there that day in the shower, so still and looked down and saw his blood. She wasn’t even sure what she saw. He was dead. He was in the other room, and she was…why she was taking a shower wallowing herself in guilt, imagining she had somehow caused this.

But there was no blood on her hands. There was no stab wound or knife wound. She didn’t kill her dad.

He had come home, poured a drink, sat in that favorite chair of his and died all by himself.

April didn’t know why she imagined things to be her fault that never were. It was a recurring theme in her life.

Her childhood had been a bit of a tug of war between something intangible, and vying at times with Tracy for her father’s attention.

She tilted her head back to the shower ceiling.

Same thing would happen on another day, this day dreaminess of hers.

This time she sat on a white leather couch in a Buckhead suite, large paned windows in from of her with an infinity balcony while the powerful essence of light, flooded in. Cool warmth enveloped the girl and she ascended. She was way high. Dude to the left was passed out. Their pal to the right had maxed out. April had spent the afternoon doing something naughty she never did before at one of her client’s unyielding egging and enablement.

They smoked a joint right around the corner from the Amphitheater. Sound check was not scheduled for another three hours.

They admonished her playfully for hanging out with ‘younger boys’ her plan had backfired, or she was karmatically destined for their immature behavior, each one taking turns blowing shot gun kisses into her mouth and laughing, as she pushed the second one away. After this morning’s meeting with Interscope she and those two fake thug boys who were essentially hype men and roadies for her clients making them her clients as well since everyone knew she was Artist Management. April could already hear the rumors flying around like bats at dusk.

One of them didn’t make it to the show for getting shot the previous summer. It was Curtis. The one she had a secret crush on.

Their eyes locked, their souls seemed to mingle, but that was all.

She kept it strictly business to keep control of herself and the situation and that is what worked.

Pedro was a dancer for Sessy Dabess her multi Platinum Grammy award winning rap star girl who had the sickest floes on the radio from coast to coast. Sex with Pablo, all that stuff, Jimmy D, how he had cheated with old girl from the radio station who she really thought was her friend, the first four years in the business taught April not to trust, and never to sleep on what people would do for their own agendas, She had seen funds funneled from major labels for deals real artists never received, fake reps, fake lawyers, all kinds and types of shenanigans. April’s first talent was a trip to Disneyland with weeks of alcoholic weed smoke laden debauchery, and casual sex with strangers.

None of which she was directly involved in because of Marcus but enough to turn her stomach and make her want to quit more times then she would ever admit. She had seen scapegoats, prison sentences doled out, rappers wives put hits out on background singers and dancers mistaken for mistresses.

Pedro was a dancer from the Bronx.

He was a cool dude, very down to earth but questionably gay. Not a feminine bone in his body just never seen with a woman or any straight men.

April loved her career, her shiny A list affiliates, and glamourous job stuff but always believed deep down she faked it. A part of her was unworthy. A part of her was insecure and needed to create the fan fare for others to be important.

All of this pain, this torment of dumbed down uncertainty and self-doubt is what emerged on the outside, though shiny and pretty, She hardened and formed the cool self-image that would keep her safe for as long as she lived. Coolin. Doing all a soul can