Chapter 1 #2
I turned the record toward him. Deion leaned in, close enough that I felt him through my jacket, and I watched his eyes move across it the way they moved when he was really looking.
Low, unhurried, taking their time. His eyes went soft at the corners when something was good and he let himself feel it.
“She’s clean,” he said, in the voice he saved for things he meant without decoration, scratching his beard like the thought was still settling.
Lord.
“Immaculate,” I said, and pulled her back to my chest. “She’s coming home with me.”
The man I’d been buying from since my first WaxCon, the one with the faded A Love Supreme poster behind his head, slid a number across the table without my having to ask.
He looked at the record, then at me, then at Deion standing at my shoulder holding my bags like this was exactly where he’s expected to be.
“Both of you standing there looking like that,” he said, and almost smiled. “Figured it was time.”
I paid without negotiating because some things you didn’t negotiate. Deion followed me to the next table without being asked, because that was how we worked. Two tables down, he held up a Stevie Wonder double album. “Look at this.”
I barely paid him any mind. “That album sold ten million copies in the U.S. alone. That is not a find. That is a participation trophy.”
“It’s a classic.”
“So is Can’t Slow Down. You don’t see me sprinting across a floor over Lionel Richie.” I pulled a sleeve, checked it, set it back. “Keep digging.”
He put the Stevie down where his frustration was clear enough that the vendor glanced over. I was smiling into my crate, which he could not see, clearly tickled by his antics.
“One day,” he said, “I am going to find something that impresses you.”
I looked up then, and he was already looking at me. He did this sometimes, just looked, with no explanation and no apology. And that was the problem.
When he looked at me like that, I felt it everywhere. In my chest first, then lower, then in my hands. It arrived without my permission, like a chord change you didn’t see coming and couldn’t unhear. I went back to digging.
“You already did,” I said. “The Minnie Ripperton.”
He went still, and I knew he understood.
My mom had a record, Come to My Garden, that she played every Saturday morning while she cleaned and I’d sit at the kitchen table with whatever I was coloring, neither of us talking, just existing inside it together.
I hadn’t seen a copy since hers went the way things go when a life gets sorted through.
I had told him that once, somewhere in a story about Saturdays and my mother, not thinking he was keeping it.
The week we understood her diagnosis wasn’t going to change, Deion showed up at her door with a Monarch pressing.
He didn’t say where he found it or what it cost him or how long he had been looking.
He just handed it to her. She held it the way she held things she had loved and lost track of.
Then she looked at me and said put it on.
We sat together the rest of that afternoon, and she talked and I listened, really listened, the way I hadn’t let myself since the diagnosis because listening meant accepting what was coming.
In the weeks that followed, less than three months, she told me everything she hadn’t said yet.
I had never told him that. He had never asked me to.
Surprise crossed his face, there and gone. “You remember that.”
“I remember everything,” I said, although I know I should not have said it out loud. Instead of kicking myself, I went back to digging. That’s when Deion turned back to his own crate and neither of us said anything for a minute.
We moved through the rest of the floor naturally close, the space between us set to something that wasn’t quite touching and wasn’t quite not touching.
I want to assure you that I had not thought about this at all.
His hand found the small of my back when the aisle narrowed, easy and automatic, the press of his palm through my denim jacket, and neither of us acknowledged it, the way you didn’t acknowledge breathing.
A woman looked at the bags in Deion’s hands, then at us.
“Your husband’s a patient man. Standing there holding all that.”
“He’s not my husband.”
“Mmhmm,” she said, in the register Black women reserved for occasions when they had decided you were lying and had chosen to let time prove them right without further investment.
I glanced at Deion. He was studying a price tag with the focused interest of a man who had found the most fascinating thing in this building, not meeting my eyes. I took my bags back from him and stepped away.
My record player had never once looked at me like that.
Damn. I shouldn’t have even clocked that.
Lunch was at the West Indian spot off South Street that Deion had been going to since before I knew him, a place that had been there long enough to feel like it belonged to everyone who’d ever eaten in it.
The oxtail came in a sauce that was not trying to be anything other than what it was.
I had the curry goat. Deion had the stew chicken, which he ordered every single time despite knowing the oxtail was better, a choice I had stopped commenting on and started accepting as a character trait.
Deion’s food arrived first. He waited until mine came before picking up his fork, the small, automatic courtesy he had been doing for years without fanfare, like it was just how eating worked, like the alternative had never occurred to him.
He didn’t look at me when he did it. That was the part that made it stick.
I had been noting this quality of his for the better part of a decade and filing it carefully in a folder I had stopped pretending was temporary.
My Laura sat propped in her tote beside my chair because I had turned her to face the table.
“You turned it toward you,” he said.
“For company.”
He looked at me over his glass, the expression that on anyone else would have been a whole conversation, and on Deion was just his face when he found something charming and was deciding whether to admit it. He usually didn’t. “You turned a record to face you for company.”
“Patti, Nona, Sarah, and Laura have been looking for their people for fifty years. I’m not going to put them in the dark.”
He set his glass down. “That is genuinely one of the most Nova James things you have ever said, and you have said a lot of Nova James things.”
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t entirely a compliment.”
“I know. It still counted.”
The corner of his mouth moved. He picked up his fork.
“Reputation is vibes,” I said.
“Reputation is literally the opposite of vibes.” He pointed a piece of hard-dough bread at me with the energy of a man who had accepted he was going to lose this argument and was going to lose it with full commitment. “Vibes are intangible. Reputation is documented.”
“The distinction is vibes,” I said. “The tingle can’t be explained. My mom’s filing system can’t be explained. Vibe-based systems, Deion, functioning at an extremely high level.”
He looked at me with a long, even fondness that I felt land somewhere in my chest and chose, as I always chose, to move past it. “The tingle,” he said, “led you to a scratched Teena Marie.”
I set my fork down. “That information is classified.”
“You held it up in the middle of that flea market and said, ‘I knew it, I knew it, the tingle never lies,’ and then you put it on the turntable and the needle sounded like it was dragging itself through gravel.”
“That was a phantom tingle. Anomalous data. The system’s overall accuracy remains high.”
“The system’s overall accuracy?”
“Deion.” I said his name the way I said it when I wanted it to land like a full stop, and he closed his mouth.
His eyes softened, then went amused. I watched him try not to smile and fail, the smile arriving in stages, one corner then the other, then his whole face taken over by it, eyes going to crescents, the laugh underneath it quiet and absolutely real.
I knew that smile better than I should have.
I felt it move through me like a note held past its natural end.
I looked at my plate and kept my face exactly where it needed to be.
He set his fork down. Looked at me like he was about to say something that mattered. “So,” he said, “I wanted to tell you something.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have a date tonight.” A beat. “I’ve been seeing someone. Her name’s Kendra.”
There are moments when the space around you doesn’t change at all and yet everything in it lands differently, like the sun shifted two degrees and nobody told the furniture.
I kept my face exactly where it was. Lord, I kept my face.
I reached for my glass because my hand needed something to do, and took a sip, let the cold of it be useful.
“That’s really good, Deion. Tell me about her. ”
He turned his water glass a quarter turn, the tell, the thing he did when he was choosing words more carefully than the surface of the conversation required. “She’s a school nurse. Smart. Kind.” A small pause. “Easy to be around.”
Easy to be around.
That landed somewhere I wasn’t going to check just yet.
I let it pass through and picked my fork back up like I hadn’t noticed anything at all.
He kept going, not listing, just… adding to it in pieces.
The way you talk about someone when you’ve decided they deserve to be spoken about properly.
I nodded along where it made sense, asked a question at the right time so it didn’t feel like I wasn’t listening.
“What made you notice her?” I asked, like that was a neutral question and I was a neutral person asking it.
He answered, and I let myself smile where it called for it, let out a small “mhmm” when something sounded particularly right, the way I would if this were anybody else telling me about someone new. Because that’s what this was.