“Anyway,” she scrunches her face up in delight, “when I was a little girl, we’d run through the fields at night with our gentlemen callers, slip our hands in theirs. They’d try for second base, and we’d allow it, but we’d make them fight. Everybody looked up to Daddy. Even men his own age didn’t call him by his first name. Mr. Dufrene, they said. And the boys, well, they all wanted to be seen with a Dufrene girl.” She smiles. “All of them,” she repeats. “They’d start sniffing around once we turned thirteen, and after that we were never alone.”
I had brought the dinner’s gin and tonic upstairs with me, and I’m grateful for that decision now. I take a few sips; I wasn’t prepared for the stroll down memory lane is all.
She points to her jewelry box, and I lean over toward her bureau and pass it to her. She lifts a diamond necklace from it.
“You like this?” she asks.
“Very much,” I say. My mama had found religion in her New Age church and since then she’d say we had different strains of ourselves in the universe, like there was me here sitting with Grandma Martha, but there was the other version of myself who had finished college in four years, not seven, who didn’t eat mint chocolate chip ice cream at night, who married the right man, or at least divorced King’s daddy sooner. There was the version of myself who knew how beautiful I was, how smart, how kind. A version of myself who didn’t need an alarm clock because she had ambition ringing through her bones, and that woman attended balls where she wore that diamond necklace.
“It’s yours,” Grandma Martha says now.
“No, no way in the world,” I say shaking my head. “I could never. That’s not what this is,” I add just to be clear.
She stretches her cheeks in a quiet smile. “I was going to give it to you anyway. It will look so nice against your beautiful brown skin, and the other grandchildren, well, they don’t deserve the pot I piss in to be frank.”
I laugh. “But Grandma Martha, I saw the photo of you at your husband’s, at Grandfather’s, swearing in,” I correct myself. “You wore it then and it was beautiful. You might want to remember it that way.”
She shakes her head. “There will be a time coming real soon when I’ll be beneath the dirt and you’ll be above it, and there’s no jewelry in the world that’s going to spring me back up again, now is there?”
I don’t know what to say to that. She talks like this sometimes and I don’t like it. I hadn’t grown up with her but I am getting used to leaning on her, more and more each year.
“All right, Grandma.” I stand and kiss her cheek. “I’m just a floor away.”
I turn down her lights.
I check in on King on my way to my own room.
He’s unpacking his shirts, hanging them in the closet, but he looks like he’s been crying.
I pull him toward the bed and sit down beside him.
“It’s going to be all right,” I say.
“No, it’s not,” he says, twisting his dredlocks in a frenzy like he does when he’s concentrating or nervous, or sad. “I’m telling you, I have a bad feeling about this house. Didn’t you feel it when you walked in? It’s like walking into a refrigerator and shutting the door behind you.” He starts to whisper. “I have a bad feeling about her.” He nods in Grandma’s direction.
“About your great-grandmother?” I ask. “She’s family.”
“Not all kinfolk is skinfolk,” he says.
I laugh at that. “Boy, it’s supposed to be the other way around.”
“Nah, think about it, Mama.”
“Look,” I say. “Give it a month? If you don’t like it after that, we can figure out our next steps.”
He pauses.
“Fine, Mama,” he says.
He’s back to fiddling with his iPhone, and before I stand, sound bursts out. It’s that new Childish Gambino song he bumps. He doesn’t let me kiss him too long and then he’s laying his Nikes and Pumas out in the closet just so.
“We’re going to be okay here,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me, and the lyrics follow me out his door.
Too late
You wanna make it right, but now it’s too late
I set up the lamp I brought outside King’s room. It is a classic trophy lamp with a brass finish and a black shade. King would never say he’s afraid of the dark, but I know it soothes him to see an outline of the familiar when he wakes up before morning. I switch the light on, then go to my room, sink into my bed. The mattress is thicker and softer than what I’m used to. I’ve been running on adrenaline since I made the decision. Grandma had been looking for a companion for some time and I’d contacted Traveling Angels for her but then King’s school called; he had been in a fight. I’d driven straight over, and sure enough there he was with his eye already swelling, holding a blood-soaked napkin to his nose.
“You should see the other kid,” he’d joked, but I’d gone off on him.
“You know we don’t do that,” I said. “You know we don’t.”
And he’d tried to explain. This boy from the ninth grade was messing with his friend Nathan. He didn’t have a choice but to defend him. Wasn’t I always telling him to stand up for what he believed in? Well, he believed in his friend.
I’d told him I wasn’t raising a thug, but that night while he ate stuffed mirliton with garlic bread, his favorite, I watched him, my son whose newborn face I could still envision, and I wondered where I’d gone wrong. We had lived in a house when he was born. A modest one a few blocks south of Freret, and a policeman lived on one side of us, and a secretary lived on the other. Then King’s daddy left, and the rent inched up every month, first $30, then $100, and Mr. Jeff was a good man, but he couldn’t clone my paycheck. When it was time to move elsewhere, there was nowhere to go. Five years after Katrina, my neighborhood had bloomed. We had a white mayor and fancy restaurants that stretched a dozen blocks, but all I could afford was a redeveloped unit in what used to be the projects. With the neat lawns and fresh paint, you’d never know what the apartment had been, but the D-boys on the corner told on it, and I’d said to King that I wasn’t raising no thug, but I wondered at that moment if that wasn’t exactly who I was raising. I called Grandma and I told her she didn’t need to look anymore, that the companion would be me.
Tonight I’m walking distance from where I’d been but it might as well be a world away. Except for the security van that passes on the hour, there’s little traffic, and the crickets and the occasional wind chime are the only breaks in silence. I’m still tipsy from my drink, and I hit up Spotify for Sam Smith, set up a song for repeat. It was Byron’s favorite, mine too, and I don’t miss him, as much as I miss the fullness I felt being part of a unit, the depth and the purpose.
You say I’m crazy
’Cause you don’t think I know what you’ve done
It doesn’t take long to fall asleep but I wake up soon after, my right foot shooting forward as if in the other world I’d been running. I close my eyes, and a thread of the scene is back. My legs were pumping through water, clear enough to drink, but it smelled like rot. There was the thunder of horses galloping behind me, and out of their mouths streamed sentences I couldn’t grasp. King was with me, but he was a grown man with a different face, and just before I opened my eyes, I heard a shot ring out, and someone scream.
GRANDMA PULLED SOME STRINGS TO GET KING INTO HER neighborhood public school, and he’s