Chapter 2 #2
Kendra opened the door before I knocked.
Just how she operated, always slightly ahead of the moment, prepared without being rigid, comfortable without requiring anyone else to adjust. She was in a burnt-orange sweater with her locs down, and she looked as she always looked when I arrived, like someone who had decided who she was and stopped revisiting the question. She was steady.
Behind her the apartment smelled like garlic and something slow-braised. There was a foam anatomical ear beside the fruit bowl, the kind she used with her students. It had a name now. Of course it did. I decided not to examine that too closely.
“Harold says you’re four minutes early,” she said, nodding toward the counter.
I glanced over. The ear, apparently Harold, stared back.
“Four minutes is not early,” I said. “Four minutes is respect for your time with room to breathe.”
“Harold is reserving judgment.” She stepped back to let me in.
I nodded at it on my way past. I understood why she liked it.
We ate at the kitchen table the way we always ate, easy, the conversation finding its own level.
She had made salmon with something involving preserved lemon that was good, and I told her so, and she accepted the compliment with the directness she brought to everything, no deflection, just thank you, the lemon is the whole point.
We argued about whether a food could be both technically correct and aesthetically wrong.
She said yes, I said no, we were both right in different ways, and the argument had the comfortable circularity of two people who had been having versions of this one for a couple of months and had no interest in resolving it.
It was easy. Nothing in me reached.
My phone was on the counter, face down. I had put it there before we sat. I heard it buzz once during dinner and kept my eyes on Kendra’s face. The effort was visible. I knew she saw it. Kendra refilled my glass without comment.
After dinner we moved to the couch and put on Boomerang. She was leaning against my shoulder when she said, without shifting, “Can I say something?”
“Go ahead.”
She was quiet for a beat, choosing with care rather than caution, as she chose most things. “I’ve had a really good time with you these past couple of months. I mean that.” A pause. “And I think there are moments when you’re somewhere else. Not often. But I notice it.”
I didn’t say anything right away.
“I’m not asking you to explain it,” she said. “I just thought you should know what I see.” She wasn’t asking for anything. She was leaving it with me. Then she settled back against my shoulder and we let the movie play.
At the door she hugged me, sincere and without weight. It didn’t ask anything of me. I then stepped out into the night.
The bars were still full and lit. The city didn’t care what I had just been handed. Fair enough.
Marcus called when I was three blocks from home. He always knew when to call. “How’d it go?” he said.
“Good. She’s good people.”
“Hmm.”
He let that sit for a second. Then, “So… I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the storefront.”
“I’m calling Gerald this week.”
He exhaled like he’d been holding that for years.
“This week,” he reiterated. “Not next month. I have called Gerald four times on your behalf. Thanks to you, Gerald and I have a rapport and folks probably think I’m his grandson or something.
He also said, and I am quoting, ‘That boy has been planning long enough. Tell him to stop stuttering, roll up, and build the damn thing.’”
“I know.”
“Good.”
“The store must come first,” I said, thinking of the space Gerald had been leasing to me for fourteen months, rent paid on time for something I hadn’t fully brought to life yet, a shop built around comics and the type of space I had needed when I was younger, somewhere kids could come in and stay a while without feeling like they had to explain why they were there.
I needed to see it through without splitting my attention or borrowing momentum from anywhere it didn’t belong.
Marcus let that sit.
“That,” he said, “is the first wise thing you’ve said since what? College? I’m proud of you. I’m saying it now before you are doing something that makes me revise the statement.”
I sat in the car for a minute, parked outside my place. Upstairs, my living room still looked like she had been there yesterday. The comics she helped me organize, the labels in her handwriting I had never moved, everything where she said it should go because she had been right.
I’d told myself it didn’t mean anything. That it was just organization. It wasn’t.
In bed, I opened the laptop to the latest floor plan, the one with the listening station at the center of the room, and then a new document.
I put a date at the top, not a goal, an actual date, and started listing the steps.
One, then the next, then the next, until the list ran long enough to make me pause.
That was how I knew it was real. Once it was all the way out of my head, there was nowhere left to hide from it.
Downstairs, everything still carried her decisions.
The Milestone shelf, Hardware first, because McDuffie built that universe with the intention of making sure a kid who looked like us could walk into a shop and see himself as the main character, not the guest star, not the lesson.
Priest’s Black Panther, then Coates, two different T’Challas, both true.
Hudlin and a few others between them. McDuffie again at the end, because his name went everywhere it needed to go.
It wasn’t organization. It was attention. The same attention I had been paying to her, and the same attention she had been paying back. I closed the laptop and left the list where it was. I also didn’t text Nova. This time, it was space. Not reaching for her out of habit.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand. I needed something I could stand in before I showed up asking for anything, reminding myself that the store comes first, and after that there was no confusion, only the question of whether I was going to step into it or keep standing off to the side.
At eleven, all of that was out the window. I picked up my phone and typed five words, sending them before I could adjust them into something safer.
Date was good. Talk tomorrow?
I set the phone face down on the nightstand and left it there.