39. Come Yourself
come yourself
alyssa
Sunday dinners at Simone and Raschad's had become a thing I looked forward to.
Their Uncle Reggie was there that night, but unusually quiet, picking at his plate while the rest of us argued about Tre's latest Midnight Mic session, the stripped-down thing he did online, just him and a guitar, live for his followers.
He'd previewed a new one Friday night, and the internet had not recovered.
“It's a love song,” Tre insisted.
“It is not a love song.” Taryn had her phone out. “You wrote a whole ballad about a woman with ugly feet. Chorus and everything.”
“A tasteful ballad.”
“You rhymed 'sandals' with 'that ain't it, cancel.'” Zion was already wheezing. “In your Marvin Gaye voice. Like that made it any better.”
“Art mimics truth, what can I say?” Tre spread his hands, dead serious. “She was a beautiful woman. I'm just saying: you can like a painting and still have questions about the frame. That's a grown man's love song.”
“Over two million views from people watching you serenade-diss that woman's feet, Tre.” Simone shook her head, wiping her eyes.
“Wait, and didn’t she comment? Tellin’ on herself?” I asked, laughing.
“And did. She posted, and I quote…” Taryn turned her phone around to the table, “I know you not singing about my toes on the internet.”
“She thought she was sending me a DM,” Tre chuckled and the table came apart. Even Julian, who was trying hard to be the mature one at the table, gave up and laughed.
“See, that's my problem with this family,” Tre said over the laughter. “Y'all wouldn't know art if it slapped you in the face. This is why I don't share things.”
“You share everything,” Simone said. “That's the problem.”
“You good, Unc?” Julian asked. Reggie had been turning a fork through food he hadn't eaten, a smile pushed onto his face a half-second late every time the rest of us broke.
Reggie set his fork down and looked at it like it had gotten heavy. “Need to talk to y’all about something.”
The lightness in the room shifted and the conversations died mid-sentence.
“About your daddy.”
I have never heard a table go that quiet that fast. Simone’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth and stayed there.
Zion and Tre looked stunned. Beside me, Julian did not move at all, not a muscle, not a breath I could see.
He just got very still, the way a thing gets still when it’s holding itself together by holding itself still.
“I saw him not too long ago,” Reggie continued, his voice heavy with something that sounded like exhaustion. “He asks about y’all every time. Y’all know that. Asks how you’re doing. What the grandkids are up to. Whether you’re happy.”
His eyes found Julian across the table. “He loves y’all. Misses y’all. But he’s got it in his head that if he came back now, after all this time, he’d just tear up the good things you got going. So he stays gone.”
“Then he’s correct.” Julian said it flat like a ruling he’d handed down.
Simone gasped slightly and her eyes went bright. Tre opened his mouth. “Julian, maybe we—” Then he shut it and looked at his plate. Zion swallowed hard. Taryn put a hand on his back, rubbing it like she was trying to keep him grounded. Raschad pulled Simone in against his side without a word.
I felt Julian beside me like a held breath. He didn’t look at me. I understood, watching the side of his face, that he couldn’t.
“Jules,” Reggie said, quietly. “I just think it’s gonna take y’all going to get him yourselves… to bring him home. He'll die out there alone before he ever walks back through a door he broke.”
He turned the fork over again. “But he's getting old. Slower every time I see him. And I'm telling you, if y’all don’t go out there and put a hand on him and say come home...”
“We tried, Unc.” Julian's voice was controlled. “For years. Begged him to come home. Begged him. He made his choice.”
“That was different then. He was —”
“If he wants to be in our lives, he knows where we are. He’s gonna have to come to us. Or he stays gone.”
It came out harsh, and I watched it reach Simone, watched her flinch like she’d been the one it hit.
Despite the looks on their faces that said they might’ve felt differently, nobody argued. There wasn’t a discussion between the four of them. They just sat there, accepting the finality of Julian’s decision settling over the table like a shroud.
Under the table I put my hand on Julian’s thigh. “Julian,” I said, low. “Maybe you—”
“Alyssa,” he snapped, cutting me off with my own name, then heard himself do it. His hand found mine on his leg and pressed it. “I’m sorry,” he said, quieter.
I nodded and squeezed his thigh. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not. I can’t talk about this right now.” He stood up and his chair scraped loud against the floor. “I’ll be at Belmead,” he said to me, not quite looking in my eyes. “Take your time.”
“Thank you for dinner, Simi.” He walked around the table and kissed the top of her head and she leaned into it half a second.
He squeezed Zion’s shoulder, dapped Tre and Raschad and nodded to the rest of the room.
Then he was gone, the front door closing behind him with a sound that had a period on the end of it.
I sat frozen in my chair, my heart aching because he’d just shut down any possibility of healing, for himself, for his siblings, for his relationship with a father who was getting older every day. And he'd done it with the kind of quiet authority that made it hard to argue.
Nobody talked for a minute. Then Reggie let out a breath. “Welp. That about went like I figured.”
“He’s just protecting us,” Simone said to her plate.
“From having our father back?” Tre’s voice came out choked.
“From hoping for something that probably won’t come through,” Zion said. “He doesn’t want us to be let down, is all.”
I looked around the table at them, grown people, all of them, with careers, spouses, and for a moment they looked like children, waiting on their big brother to tell them what to do.
I understood that he’d earned that. And because he’d earned it, not one of them would push him on the unilateral decision he’d just made that they might, if anybody had asked them plainly, have made another way.
“So what do we do?” Taryn said, still rubbing Zion’s back.
Nobody had an answer. But I was already standing, reaching for my keys, because I’d watched him refuse a rope while he drowned, and I was not going to be another person at this table who loved him and let him.
“I should go,” I said, keys in hand. “Check on him. Can I get Micah in the morning?” I asked Simone.
“No problem,” Simone said, grabbing my hand. “He’s just —”
“I know,” I said.
Driving to Julian’s, I thought about the piano he'd covered back up. The way he’d shut down any conversation about therapy or processing what he'd been through. The way he held everyone together by holding himself so tightly controlled that the real emotion couldn't leak through.
I drove toward his place with the whole thing turning over in me. He couldn’t go through the front of it; he’d proven that at the table. So maybe the way in was around.
I knocked on his door and he answered, stepping back to let me in.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Alyssa. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”
“It’s okay, Julian. It was nothing. I’m not mad at you. I’m worried about you.”
He followed me to his couch and sat with his elbows on his knees, and didn’t say anything for a while.
“He’s been testing me for years,” he said finally.
I didn’t say anything.
“My father. Reggie’s been bringing me things from him for years. Message here or there. Mama’s ring at Simone’s wedding. A phone call once or twice, where I’d answer and the line stayed open forty seconds and then went dead.”
“Have you ever asked them? Zion, Tre, Simone. Whether they’d want to see him. Whether they want the messages?”
“No. They don’t need that on them.”
I sat silent, letting him get it out.
“I’ve never said we don’t want him home. I said come yourself. Give the message yourself. Every time. I never said don’t come. I said if he wants to come home, he knows where home is, and he can walk through the door himself. I’m not going to be the one who gets him. Not again.”
“Again?” I repeated.
He was quiet a long moment. Then, to the middle distance, not to me: “A few years after he left, I found out where he was.
Didn't tell anybody. I drove out there by myself and I stood in front of my father and I asked him to come home. I begged him, Lyss. Told him we were falling apart…” He swallowed.
“He said no. Looked me in the face and told me he was doing us a kindness by staying gone, and sent me back down that road alone.”
I didn't move.
“I never told them. They didn't hold that rejection.
That's a different kind of leaving.” He finally looked at me.
“So when Reggie sits at that table and says go get him?
I already went. I got the answer. And I'm not going to let Simone or Tre or Zion drive out there hopeful and come back with the same no I've been carrying for years.”
I moved closer and put my hand on the back of his neck. “You’ve been making this call for everyone for eighteen years.”
“Yes.”
“They’re grown.”
“I know they’re grown.”
“You’ve decided they don’t need this on them, so you’ve carried it.
And they let you, because they love what you did for them too much to push you.
They haven’t pushed because they respect you.
That’s not the same as agreeing. What if they want to handle it differently.
What if you shared the weight of these decisions, instead of carrying the entire load on your back? ”
He was quiet.
“They might be all right getting him, Julian. They might even want to.”
I felt him start to pull back and I kept my hand where it was. “I’m not saying you’ve been wrong,” I said. “I’m saying you’ve been carrying it all alone. And you don’t have to.”
I watched the side of his face. “You’ve been everything to them. But let me ask you one thing. Who has that for you?”
He looked at me, and then he looked away. “That’s not the point.”
“Who’s been protecting you, while you protected everybody else, Julian? Don’t you think you’re allowed to set it down, and find out the ceiling stays up?”
He didn’t look up. I reached over and covered his hand with mine.
“Julian, you know I went to therapy after everything happened with me.”
“I know.”
“Two years. Every week. It was hard, but it really helped. Having somebody whose only job was to help me through it. My siblings weren’t enough. My mother sure wasn’t. Even I wasn’t enough on my own. Sometimes it has to be a person who isn’t standing inside or adjacent to the thing with you.”
He was very still. “Lyss…”
“Somebody has to say it, and nobody else is going to. Will you just think about it?”
He didn’t answer, he looked at me, and I watched him take it in, hold it a second, and decide… not to.
He reached for me instead. His hand came up to the back of my neck and he drew my face to his and kissed me, and I let him, because the only other option was making him keep talking past a door he’d just shut.
“Lyss,” he said against my mouth.
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“But —”
“Shh.” He kissed the side of my throat and breathed me in. “Need to feel you.”
He turned me toward him on the couch, his hand finding the side of my face, and looked at me. I saw what he was doing, deflecting, and I let him. I dropped it and didn’t say anything else.
“Bedroom.” His mouth was at my ear.
“Okay.” I nodded.
And we went, and left the question I’d asked him, and the therapy I’d asked him to think about, sitting out there in his dark living room, waiting to be picked up.