Meeting Michelle

In late 2003, Clarance met Michelle through a coworker who had been buying marijuana from him. The coworker and Michelle had gone to school together. Michelle and her family had come to Tulsa looking for a connection: someone who could supply them marijuana when they needed it. The coworker made the introduction.

When the coworker moved back to Sacramento, Michelle began calling Clarance herself. He was not looking for anything beyond business, especially since he was in a long-term relationship with La Kendra. His attention was there, where it belonged. But Michelle was persistent in the specific way of someone who is used to getting what she pursues. Something began between them: transactional at its core, without the weight of real emotional investment, but present.

Michelle presented well, at first. She seemed composed. Organized. Someone who had it together. That presentation was effective for a time. What it concealed, as Clarance came to see it, was more complicated: a dependency on meth, an entitlement shaped by her family’s indulgence, a vindictive streak that she kept beneath the surface until the circumstances that revealed it arrived. She was someone who kept accounts, who catalogued grievances, nursed them, waited. In his telling, once her mask dropped, the woman underneath was chaotic in ways that should have been a clear signal.

Clarance recalls that she gossiped about her family in ways that were more revealing than she seemed to realize. She described her sister as jealous. She described her brother as worthless. She aired secrets that were not hers to air, undermined people she claimed to care about in conversations with someone who was, in the final analysis, an acquaintance. That pattern of behavior, the willingness to wound the people closest to her when she felt wounded, was visible if you were paying attention. Clarance was paying enough attention to keep his distance. Not enough to understand what it might cost him to remain in her orbit at all.

He set a boundary with her early and held it: he would not get involved in her family’s business. Whatever was happening between Michelle and the people in her life was not his concern, not his responsibility. He had his own family. He had enough. That boundary was clear, and it was real. It also was not enough to protect him from the consequences of being in her world when her world exploded.

Each call was a brick removed from the wall of the life she had constructed.