18. Corinthians #3
“What’s wrong, Mary?” he asked her. He pulled her close to him, and that’s when the dam broke.
She wrapped her arms around him, buried her face in his chest, and cried so hard that her body shook.
Granddaddy held on to her, kissed the top of her head, and waited until she got herself together.
“You ready to talk?” Madea shook her head.
“How am I supposed to fix whatever got you crying if you ain’t ready to talk about it?
” He looked over at me and smiled. “Hey baby girl, you know what’s wrong with your grandmama?
” I nodded. “Yeah?” he lifted his brow, and I nodded again. “You want to tell me?”
I took another deep breath, then looked around the garage.
Growing up, I never noticed the random things Granddaddy had sitting around his garage.
He had a knife cabinet with a section for overly sharp garden tools, a barbed-wire bat leaned against one wall, and a collection of axes lined the wall near the door leading to the house.
There were also two cabinets near his car tools that stayed locked no matter what.
I turned back to him and nervously said, “I-I-I-I want t-t-t-t-t-t-o lear-r-r-r-r-r-r-n.”
“Learn?” he repeated, and I nodded. “Learn what?”
“Ho-o-o-o-o-o-o-w t-t-t-t-t-t-to kill,” I told him.
Granddaddy nodded, then kissed the top of Madea’s head and let her go.
“Alright, I know you know how to box, why you ain’t doing it I don’t know, but we will get to that.
” He walked to the cabinet that held his knives, took out his keys, unlocked it, and pulled the drawer open.
“Everybody else got their weapon. Yo boy cousins and Mercy’s asses like guns.
” He smirked and shook his head. “I ain’t surprised by none of them.
Well, nah, I’m lying, but that’s not important now.
Psalms uses those shears; she's always in the dirt, so it just made sense. You though?” he chuckled, then moved some things around before stopping and picking up a knife that looked like a barber's blade. “Since you cut hair, I think you need these. Nobody would suspect a damn thing if you had a blade like this.” He ran his hand over his smooth head and smirked. I’ve been cutting his hair for the last year.
One day he said he was tired of sitting at the barber shop, hopped up from his chair, and left the house.
Three hours later, he came back with all the barber supplies and handed them to me.
I didn’t know what I was doing, and he knew it, but he trusted me to get it right.
Now, I was the only person he let touch his head.
“Okay,” I said, nodding and standing.
I walked over to him and looked down at the blade. The handle was black and wood with a small inscription on the bottom: Matthew 5:39. My thumb brushed over the verse.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,’ " Granddaddy said. He picked up the blade and flipped it open. “Now this is how you use it.”
**
I flipped the knife through my fingers as I sat on the bench watching Psalms. We were back at the park, her favorite place to be besides in the garden Madea and Granddaddy allowed her to start in their backyard.
She was covered in dirt as she pulled weeds and whatever else from the small flower bed she’d planted years ago.
“That’s dangerous,” a voice said from behind me. I looked over my shoulder to see a woman, probably in her twenties, standing there. She was dressed in scrubs, with a backpack on her shoulder.
“I won't get hurt,” I said.
“You sure?” she asked, and I nodded. “How?”
“I know what I’m doing,” I told her. “My grandparents taught me.”
“Not your parents?” she asked with a small smile. I didn’t like how she looked at me. It was like she enjoyed the fact that I didn’t have parents. Which was impossible since she didn’t know.
“My grandparents.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Psalms approached me. Her eyes were locked on the woman, her hand gripping the shears in her hand.
“Your sister?” the woman asked. Her eyes lingered on Psalms a little too long, and I stood. “You're beautiful.”
“Do we know you?” I asked, stepping in front of Psalms. I tilted my head to the side and waited.
If she said the wrong thing, I was going to cut her throat open.
We were in the middle of Turner Row, where they lived by a code of no snitching.
If I killed this woman, the only people that would know would be who needed to know.
“No,” she answered with a smile. “Just passing through and noticed you and that knife.” She nodded towards my knife. “Thought you should know it’s dangerous to play with them is all.”
“I’m not playing with it,” I told her.
“Well okay,” she said, smiling. “Have a good night.” She gave one more passing glance between Psalms and me before she turned and walked to her car. We didn’t move as we watched her drive away.
“You know her?” I asked Psalms.
“No, never seen her before, but the way she looked at us made it feel like she knew us. Or at the very least, she knows you.”
“I know,” I agreed. The woman’s car was long gone by now, but I still had a funny feeling. “Let’s go.”