29. What Should I Call You?
what should i call you?
julian
My relationship with Micah happened naturally somewhere under the part of my life I was paying attention to.
It began back when Alyssa and I were just friends.
He was always around, the way family is around.
He and Zhaire were the same age and cousins and thick as thieves, so any room that had one of them often had the other.
I’d been an active uncle to Zhaire since the day he was born, so being something to Micah never felt like a new weight I was picking up.
It felt like the same one, sitting a seat over.
It wasn’t quite the same, though, and I knew it wasn’t. Zhaire had a father in the house. Micah had a man in the ground who’d left him with a scar above his eyebrow and a mother who’d done the work of two people for years.
So I showed up for him. Not as a favor to Alyssa, she never asked. I’d have done it if she and I had stayed nothing but friends till the end of time. Micah was such a good kid, he made it easy.
I knew being with a woman with a child raised the stakes. More to lose. I just had nowhere to put it down, because he was Simone and Raschad’s nephew, and Zhaire’s cousin, and a boy without a father, and I was… me. A careful version was never on the table.
What I didn’t see coming was how cleanly the two things would fuse. Somewhere along the way of Alyssa and me becoming “us,” so did Micah and I. By the time I clocked it, it was already done.
He wasn’t a favor to his mother. Somewhere along the line he’d gotten essential, becoming someone I’d rearrange a whole day for, and that should have scared a man like me.
It didn’t. It just made me want to keep showing up.
One afternoon I came by and found Alyssa pacing the kitchen, shoulders tight, phone in her hand like a weapon.
“He says he fell off the slide,” she said, “but look.”
Micah was at the table, picking at a sandwich, eyes on the floor. Too quiet. She turned his elbow gently and showed me a raw scrape running wrist to forearm.
“Baby. Just tell the truth. Did somebody push you?”
He shrank. “It was an accident.”
She looked at me, helpless and furious. “He’s getting pushed around and he won’t tell the teacher, won’t tell me—”
“Let me try.”
She bit her lip, nodded, stepped into the next room.
I crouched to his level. “You don’t have to lie to me.”
His face crumpled. “They push me off the slide and call me a crybaby. I didn’t want them thinking I’m scared.”
I kept my voice level. “Are you scared?”
He shook his head, wiping his nose.
“Good. Because you don’t have to be.” I held his eyes. “Here’s what we do. Your mama’s right — you tell the teacher. Every time. That’s not snitching, that’s smart. But you also stand up straight, look them dead in the eye, and let them see you’re not somebody who’s easy. Bullies want easy.”
“What if they hit me?”
“You don’t start anything. Ever. But if a boy puts hands on you, you make sure he only does it once. Plant your feet—” I showed him “—and don’t fold up small. Take up your space.” I tapped his chest. “Confidence. That’s the whole thing. You show them you’re not afraid, they go find easier.”
The spark came back into his eyes for the first time all week.
“Okay,” he said, stronger.
I clapped his shoulder. “That’s my guy.”
Two weeks later, we were on the phone when she got a call on the other line.
“That’s Micah’s school. I’ll call you back.”
Three minutes later, she called back. “Micah got in a fight. I’m on my way to get him.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to. On my way.”
By the time I got there, she had the whole thing handled, the administrator, the incident report, the other child’s history of pushing him around, all of it. She came out of the office with that flat lawyer calm on her face, Micah beside her looking equal parts nervous and proud.
I walked them to her car.
“So.” I looked at Micah. “Did you handle it?”
“Yep. Liam pushed me again. So I pushed him back. Hard. Then he got up to push me again, so I mollywhopped him.”
I tried not to laugh. “You mollywhopped him?”
“Yep. Just like you said. Good, too!”
“Bet he thinks twice now, huh.”
“Yeah. And his friends.”
Alyssa shook her head, losing the fight with her own smile. “Julian. You are not supposed to encourage him to fight.”
“I’m not encouraging him to fight.” I pulled out of the lot. “I’m encouraging him not to be a victim. And apparently expanding his vocabulary. Mollywhopped.”
“That’s what you said!” Micah called from the back.
“I know what I said, little man. I’m just proud you were listening.”
She was still shaking her head, but her hand had drifted across the console to rest on my arm, and in the rearview Micah was grinning like a kid who’d just learned he was allowed to take up space.
Whatever this was, whatever I was allowed to call it yet, it had already stopped being a favor a long time back.
A few Saturdays later they were at my place for the weekend, Alyssa still asleep and Micah up early the way kids are, and I was moving around the kitchen making coffee with my do-rag still on from the night before when I heard him behind me.
“Why you wear that on your head?”
He stood in the doorway holding a half-built Lego ship, watching me like I was a nature documentary.
“This?” I touched it. “Keeps the waves right. Helps the hair lay down.”
He frowned. “Like… ocean waves?”
“Kind of.” I crouched so he could see, pulled it off. “See the pattern? Like little ripples. You brush it, keep it trained, protect it while you sleep. It’s maintenance, man.”
He touched my hair, careful, fascinated. “That’s cool. Can I get one?”
I looked at his hair — growing out, uneven, cut at home — and worked my fingers through a few curls. “You’ve got a nice curl pattern. Yeah. I’ll get you one.”
In the reflection off the microwave I caught him watching every move I made, soaking it in.
“Who cuts Micah’s hair,” I asked Alyssa later that day.
She went defensive before I finished. “I do. Why.”
“How long since he’s been to a barbershop?”
“He’s never been.” She crossed her arms. “He was little when his dad died. I’ve been doing it myself ever since.”
“Okay.” I kept it gentle. “That makes sense.”
“A lot of parents cut their kids’ hair at home, Julian. It’s not—”
“I know. And you’ve done it well. I’m not saying you haven’t.
” I let it sit a second. “But the barbershop, for a Black boy, is a different thing. It’s not the cut.
It’s the room. The men. The talking. Learning how to sit in the chair, how to tell a man what you want, being around people who look like him doing that.
My uncle Reggie cut us at the house sometimes, and we still went to the shop, because the shop is the point.
The cut’s just the reason you’re in there. ”
She looked at me a long time, arms still crossed but loosening. “I didn’t think about it like that.”
“How could you. You’re his mama, not his daddy, and you’ve been doing all of it alone.” I held her eyes. “But I’m here now. Let me take him. I go every other Saturday anyway. Not because you’ve been doing it wrong. Because this is something I can give him.”
“Okay,” she said finally. Quiet. “Okay.”
Saturday, Micah was up before me, standing by the door in the black do-rag I’d bought him from the corner store, holding it on his head like it was armor.
The shop smelled like talc and fresh fades, clippers humming, men arguing about a game that had ended weeks ago. Leon looked up when we walked in. He’d been cutting my hair since I was younger than Micah.
“Julian. Right on time.” His eyes dropped. “And who’s this?”
“This is Micah.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “His first cut.”
Leon’s whole face changed. He set his clippers down. “First cut?” He raised his voice to the whole room. “Yo. We got a first-timer up in here.”
The shop erupted. Men I half-knew calling out congratulations, somebody telling the kid about his own first cut thirty years back, another one welcoming him to the brotherhood like he’d been drafted to something. Micah’s grin got so wide I thought his face might split.
“What we doing with him?” Leon asked me.
I kept my hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Clean up the sides and back, low fade, keep it tight. But leave the length on top, let his curls come through. He’s got good texture, don’t take that off him. Just shape it up.”
“Say no more.” Leon snapped the cape. “You ready, young man?”
Micah looked up at me, nervous now that it was real.
“You’re good,” I told him. “It’s gonna be good.”
He nodded and climbed into the chair, and I watched my boy get his first real shape-up.
Watched him sit up straighter as he listened to grown men talk about ball and work and what it took to keep a thing going, taking in a new frequency.
When Leon spun the chair so he could see himself, his whole face lit up.
“Whoa. Julian, look.”
“Looking sharp, man.”
Leon handed him a lollipop. “You did good. Next time you sit in my chair, you’re officially crew.”
On the drive home he wouldn’t stop checking himself in the side mirror.
“Can we come back?”
“Every other Saturday. That’s the schedule.”
“And I wear my do-rag?”
“Every night. Gotta protect those waves.”
When we got back, Alyssa opened the door and her hand flew to her mouth.
“Look at you!”
“Mama! Mr. Leon did my hair, and everybody in the shop said I did good for my first time, and I got this—” he yanked the do-rag out of his pocket.
She knelt and ran her fingers over the fresh lineup, the shaped-up fade, and when she looked up at me over his head her eyes were shining. She didn’t say anything. She just mouthed it. Thank you.
We’d finished dinner at my place. Alyssa was in the kitchen doing that thing where she pretends to clean up so she can stay in earshot. Micah was next to me on the couch, fidgeting, working himself up to something.
“Mr. Julian?”
“Yeah, buddy.”
He picked at the hem of his shirt. “What should I call you?”
I kept my voice even. In the time I’d known him he’d gone from calling me Coach Julian, to Mr. Julian. “You’ve been calling me Mr. Julian. That bothering you?”
“Kinda.” He nodded, looking down. “Because you’re not like Mr. Robinson.
I call my teacher Mr. Robinson, but he’s just my teacher.
You—” he glanced up, then back at his lap “—you take me to the barbershop. And you play games with me. And you teach me push-ups. And you’re nice to Mom too.
” He said that last one like it was an established fact, and I had to take a second with it.
“And Mister is what I call people I don’t know that good. I know you good.”
He screwed his face up, hunting for the words.
“So what do you want to call me,” I said, working to keep it even.
He was quiet a long time. Swung his feet. “Zhaire calls you Uncle Julian. But—” He shook his head. “You don’t feel like an uncle. Not like Uncle Raschad.”
His face did something complicated — wanting to say a thing and not having the nerve, or the permission, to say it.
I had to take a breath before I could speak. In the kitchen, Alyssa had gone still over the sink and wasn’t turning around.
“Micah. Look at me.”
He looked up. The thing he wanted to call me sat in the room with us, big and unsaid, and I knew exactly what it was.
I could see it behind his teeth. And I knew he couldn’t say it — not yet, not when the grown-ups hadn’t given him the ground to stand on — and that I couldn’t hand him that ground tonight was going to sit with me a while.
“How about this,” I said, and I had to clear my throat to get it out.
“For right now, you call me Julian. No Mister. Just Julian. And maybe—” I had to stop “—maybe one day, when it’s the right time, you call me something else.
Something we both want. We’ve got time to figure out what that is. That work for you?”
He thought about it, then looked at me with a slow smile. “Okay. Julian.”
He lunged into me, no warning, the way kids do, and I caught him and held on and put my head against the top of his fresh-cut hair so I wouldn’t have to talk for a second.
After he was down, Alyssa came and sat next to me on the couch. She’d had a while to fix her face and hadn’t quite managed it.
“I heard all of that,” she said.
“Figured you did.”
She was quiet a moment. “I think he wanted to call you Dad.”
I nodded.
She turned toward me, eyes wet, and let them be. “I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t scare me. He’s eight, Julian. His heart’s all the way in this. If you and I—” She stopped. Started again, steadier. “If this doesn’t hold, I don’t just lose you. He loses you.”
“That’s not going to happen.” I took her hand.
“I was in his life before we got to this point, and I’ll be in it no matter what — same as I’ve always been in Zhaire’s.
That much I can promise you. I’m not going to disappear on that boy.
Ever.” I held her eyes. “I’m not in this halfway. Not with you. Not with him.”
I pulled her into my side, and she came, and we sat there a long time — the two of us, a sleeping kid down the hall, and a title neither of us could say yet hanging in the dark between us.