Chapter 1 #3
“Okay,” I said after a second, setting my glass down. “So she’s kind, she’s smart, she’s easy to be around. You’re clearly past the point where we’re checking for loud chewing.”
The corner of his mouth shifted.
“And?” I added, glancing at him. “Does she return her shopping carts, or are we dealing with a situation?”
The laugh caught him off guard. I saw it land before he decided to let it. “I haven’t had a chance to witness the cart thing and no, she doesn’t chew with her mouth open,” he said.
“Then you’re already ahead of most people. What does she think of your record collection?”
“I haven’t shown her yet.”
“Wise. Lead with your personality. Introduce the collection once she’s emotionally invested and deserving access to your space.”
“That’s not advice. That’s a hostage strategy.”
“It’s pacing, Deion. All good romance has pacing.”
He was smiling, but something behind his eyes had gone careful. “What about you?” He looked at me across the table with that open, steady attention I had never once managed to make feel like less than what it was. “Anybody new?”
“Me and my mama’s Technics 1200 are in a committed relationship. It never disappoints me, plays whatever I want to hear, doesn’t leave dishes in the sink, and has never once told me that Songs in the Key of Life was a rare find.”
“Nova.”
“I’m being perfectly sincere.”
“You’re deflecting.”
“I’m being honest.”
“You’re deflecting,” he said, not pushing, just naming it.
“I am,” I agreed, picking up my fork again like that settled it. “And I would like to continue doing that without interruption.”
That got the smallest shake of his head, like he had expected exactly that answer. He lifted both hands slightly, not dramatic about it, just enough to signal he was letting it go.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll allow it.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, already moving on like there was nothing to see there.
The check came. He reached for it. I put my hand flat on top of his before he could get there, and we both looked at our hands on the check for a moment that was slightly longer than necessary. Neither of us moved first.
“I’ve got it,” I said. “You buy every time if I let you.”
“I know.”
He slid the check out from under my hand anyway, not abrupt, not forceful, just done.
“Deion—”
“It’s handled,” he said, already reaching for his card.
I watched him sign the receipt with an expression that had something just underneath it, and I felt that something land in my throat the way certain chords did, the ones that arrived before you were ready and stayed longer than they should have.
He walked me to my car without asking, carrying the heavier bags because that was just how he was built. At the trunk he handed them over one at a time, and on the last one our hands overlapped on the strap.
His fingers closed over mine before the transfer was complete.
I felt it from my fingers up through my wrist, my arm, my chest and lower, a current with no appropriate destination given that we were standing in a parking lot in broad daylight, so it stayed exactly where it was.
Everywhere. Then his thumb moved just once across my knuckles, slow, the deliberate pressure of something that was not an accident and was not nothing.
I stood very still. Let it happen. Felt it in places that had nothing to do with my hand.
Three seconds, maybe four. He let go and I took the bag.
“Have fun tonight,” I said.
He was quiet for a moment. “I’ll text you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to.” He said it anyway.
Neither of us moved right away. A decade of almosts stood there with us, wearing ordinary clothes, pretending to be nothing more than an afternoon goodbye between two people who had always been just friends.
A decision that had been made by someone, and it might have been me, and I was not going to examine that today.
I took a step back first. He lifted two fingers, the way he signed off sometimes, not a wave, just an acknowledgment, I see you, go. I went.
But I did look back.
He was still standing there with his hands in his pockets, watching me go like he’d forgotten where he was supposed to be next. I drove home.
The city was doing its Saturday thing around me, a bus exhaling at a red light, someone’s bass carrying two blocks before the car arrived, and I had nowhere to be and a feeling I was going to have to sit with.
I carried my haul up three flights, my Laura pressed against my side.
The third stair creaked under my right foot and held, the way it had held under my grandfather’s for forty years before mine.
The coat hook by the front door still held the scarf my grandmother left there the last winter she was alive.
Some things in this house I’ve kept exactly as they were.
My mother never moved back in after her parents passed, even though the house was hers.
She stayed in her apartment and came through only when she had to, never lingering, never rearranging more than necessary.
Like if she stayed too long or shifted too much, the place might ask something of her she wasn’t willing to give.
Other things I’ve added slowly after the deed transitioned to me, piece by piece. Most days, I can feel where that line is.
I set the bags down in the front room where the crates took up the whole far wall, sorted by feeling, by what the music did to you when you sat with it, a system I had inherited along with the house and the records and the weight of being the one who stayed.
My own run sat at the end of the wall, smaller than I liked.
Grief had a way of interrupting accumulation.
I looked at the canvas bag with the Laura Nyro inside it. She deserved her moment properly. Not tonight. Sunday, when the house was quiet and I had the whole morning.
Instead, I went to my mom’s section of the wall and found what I was actually looking for.
Phyllis Hyman, Living All Alone, the Philly International original, the sleeve worn soft from years of Mom’s hands.
I held it the way she used to hold records before she played them, both hands, taking in the weight of it and the act of choosing what you were about to let into a space.
She’d played this record at every crossroads.
Not the joyful ones; it was for the quiet ones.
The ones where you didn’t know yet which way things were going to go.
I lowered the needle and sat on the couch with my legs tucked under me and let Phyllis fill the place.
Lord, that voice. A woman who knew exactly what she was carrying and carried it openly, without managing it into something more convenient, without filing it under Not Right Now or Later or This Is Fine.
Just carrying it. Singing it. Giving it everything.
I had been keeping that feeling at a careful distance for years, and Phyllis Hyman was out here putting it directly into the air. The sample place I had been trying not to put his name.
My phone lit up at eleven. Five words. Date was good. Talk tomorrow?
I read it twice like it might say something different the second time, and set it back down face up. I went to the turntable, set the needle at the beginning again, and sat back down.
Then I took everything I was feeling, every unnamed, unexamined, inconvenient piece of it, and I put it where I always put it.
In the drawer.
I pushed it in anyway. The drawer, lately, had stopped closing all the way.