Justice (The Banks Empire #7)

1. JUSTICE

JUSTICE

If I had to sit through one more inept mothafucka in my grandmother’s living room, somebody in this house was going to get hurt.

That’s the thing people never understood about me. My brother Prime, he ran hot. His temper was quick. If he felt it, he acted on it.

Me, I ran cold. I took my time and assessed every situation. And then I acted but they never see it coming.

I’d made a life out of being the quiet one in the room. The one who let everybody else do the talking, the sweating, the swinging, while I sat back and did the math on how a thing was going to end.

And I had done the math on this man about forty seconds after he walked in.

We were three hours into this circus. Three hours into interviews and it felt like the agency had sent us the worst of the worst. It was insane, considering they were viewed as the best in the town.

That was the problem right there, see. We actually gave a fuck. This was Rita Banks. My grandmother. She came up on moonshine and numbers, ran back-alley after-hours clubs, and turned it all into a real empire. A legitimate business. Half the world had a bottle with our name on it.

She buried a husband, raised generations, straight outlasted everyone in her family. And now some agency want to send us a nigga who couldn’t even answer if he’d pick her up off the floor.

She deserved the best of everything. And these people were not it.

The man across from me settled deeper into Rita’s good armchair like he’d been invited to Sunday dinner instead of a job interview.

“So like I was sayin’,” he said, “I can take care of your moms real good. Just got my CNA license last month, so it’s all fresh, all up to date.” He tapped his temple like the knowledge lived right in his peanut brain. “Imma be real with you, though, ’cause I like to keep it a hunnid.”

I already didn’t like where “real” was about to take us.

“I just got acquitted for some spousal abuse thing,” he went on.

“But I ain’t really do that shit. They ain’t have no evidence, feel me, so it’s basically like it never happened.

” He shrugged, a man at peace with himself.

“Oh, and I don’t do no heavy liftin’. My back is bad.

So if your granny fall, she gon’ have to figure it out, or we just wait till somebody stronger get here. ”

I let the silence stretch.

Nobody moved. Quest was staring a hole through the coffee table. Prime, over by the window, had his fist pressed flat against his own mouth to keep whatever was in there from coming out. Serenity had stopped writing on her little clipboard entirely.

This man had confessed to domestic violence and refused to do the single most basic part of the job. On top of that he folded his hands over his belly and waited on us like he’d sealed the deal. This nigga was out of his motherfuckin’ mind.

His name was Rodney. Ellis Care Staffing had sent us this incompetent fool. I was ’bout ready to call and cuss them out. But we had two interviews to go.

“You know what. You need to get the fuck up outta this house,” I said. The comfort drained out of his face all at once.

“Yeah, that’s a no from us.” Quest was already up. Together, we walked Rodney back through the same front door he’d strolled in through like he was coming to a cookout. He didn’t say another word. Smartest thing he’d done since he sat down.

I shut the door and leaned my back against it and exhaled the tension from my shoulders.

“Well,” Rita said from her throne, patting the arm of the chair, “I liked his tattoos.”

I turned around. My grandmother sat there in her navy blue dress looking at me over the top of her glasses. A month out from the cataract surgery and she could see clear across a room for the first time in years.

“Grandma, his tattoos can’t take care of you,” I said. “That man was an abuser.”

“Allegedly.” She lifted one finger. “And even a broke clock is right twice a day. Y’all in here acting like I need a bodyguard. I don’t need no damn nurse. I ain’t dying and I ain’t sickly.”

Nobody answered that. Because the truth of it was heavier than anything we wanted to put in the room.

Two months back she’d walked out the front door at four in the morning in her nightgown, house keys in her hand, convinced she was late to open the after-hours spot she and my grandfather ran back in 1971.

A club that had been closed longer than any of my siblings has been alive.

Prime found her three blocks down, standing on a corner in the cold, fussing about how the ice delivery was going to beat her there. She hadn’t known his face for a full minute. A whole minute my brother stood there while his grandmother looked at him like a stranger.

We didn’t talk about that morning. But it was why we were all here, giving up a Tuesday to interview the dregs from this care agency. It wasn’t about a nurse. It was about the fact that we were losing her slowly, in pieces, and it was becoming unpredictable.

“Grandma,” I said, softer, “humor us.”

She sucked her teeth and looked out the window. “Send in the next clown.”

The next one came in with six-inch seashell-designed nails.

This bitch had platinum-blonde hair styled up high and sculpted, done like Ronnie out of The Players Club.

She sported gold hoops big enough to fit my fist through.

To top it off she had severe drag-queen make-up.

Underneath it all, she was gorgeous, I’ll give her that.

She was also, before she reached the couch, an absolute no.

“La’Monakita,” she announced, popping a piece of gum, as she reached across the coffee table to take Rita’s hand.

Every one of us flinched at once. Those nails came at my grandmother’s thin skin like little curved blades, and I actually moved forward in my seat, ready to catch her wrist if I had to.

“Now how you gon’ bathe her with them things?” Quest asked, looking at her sideways.

La’Monakita looked down at her own hands like she’d never met them before.

“Oh, these? I can do anything with these. I just gotta be real careful.” Pop went the gum.

“Most of the time, anyways. This a nice house y’all got here,” she said as she looked around.

“She got jewelry? ’Cause my last old lady, she had this real nice necklace, and when she passed, God rest her sweet soul, the family said I could keep it, so. ”

Rita raised one hand without so much as turning her head toward the woman.

“Baby. No. Bye.”

La’Monakita shrugged, unbothered, gathered her enormous purse, and let herself out like she had three more of these lined up before lunch.

“I’m starting to think this is a setup,” I said to the room. “Like somebody at these agencies got money on how long before I catch a charge.”

Prime finally let the laugh out. “Bruh. I think she would’ve been thinking about it.”

“She was eyeing my chain,” Rita said with a hand going to the gold at her throat.

We all laughed because it was true. We would’ve had to handle that Temu-Ronnie if she crossed the line.

Serenity wiped her eyes and looked down at her clipboard. “That’s a no. I’m writing a no. I’m writing a big, underlined no.”

I sat back and dragged a hand down my face. I was about to tell Serenity to cancel the rest of the day, but we only had one more to go, and Serenity said the woman was already outside parking. So fuck it.

When she walked in the room changed temperature.

She came through the door soft like a breeze.

Just a woman in a simple wrap dress the color of cognac, hair pulled back off a face that made me lose the sentence I’d been building in my head.

Thick enough to make a man’s eyes slow down and take the long road.

A warm cocoa round face, with a pair of almond eyes that tipped up at the corners, and when she said “good afternoon” to the room a dimple pressed into her right cheek like the sweetest afterthought God ever had.

I sat up in my chair without deciding to.

Here is what got me, though. Every single person who had come through that door looked at us first. At me, at Quest, at the money in the room, sizing up whose approval they needed to win. This woman walked past all of that and went straight to my grandmother.

She crossed the floor and lowered herself into a crouch in front of Rita’s chair, bringing herself down beneath my grandmother’s eye line, both her hands closing gently around Rita’s.

“Miss Rita? I’m Skye. It’s a real pleasure to meet you.”

“Ooh.” Rita’s face lit up. “She got manners. Y’all see that? She came to me first.”

“Well, you’re the one I’d be keeping company,” Skye said, sweetly.

Quest, who did not smile at strangers, smiled. “I’m Quest, the oldest. That’s Prime by the window, Serenity with the clipboard, and that’s my brother Justice.”

Her eyes came to me then. She extended her hand and shook mine. She held it for a while. And then I felt a sensation somewhere in my chest that hadn’t been touched since I put Monica in the ground. Then the dimple showed. She turned back to Rita, and I made myself take a breath.

“Miss Skye.” Rita leaned in like they were about to trade secrets. “You know these fools trying to put a nurse on me. You a nurse?”

“CNA, ma’am. But I’m not here to nurse you.” Skye squeezed her hand and let it go. “You don’t look like you need nursing. You look like you need somebody to keep the house running, keep you good company, and stay out your way when you want to be left alone. That’s a different job.”

“Mm.” Rita studied her hard with those brand-new eyes. “What you cook?”

“Everything. My grandmother raised me in her kitchen. Smothered pork chops, oxtails, greens with the neck bones in ’em. I make a cornbread that’ll have you speaking in tongues.”

“Lies,” Rita said, delighted. “Everybody say that.”

“I’ll prove it, then. First week I’m here, I’m making you a plate, and you can tell me to my face if I lied.”

Prime laughed behind me. “She confident, Grandma.”

“I like confident,” Rita said. “Confident I can work with. It’s the mumbly ones I can’t stand.”

Serenity had stopped writing nos and started writing something longer, her pen moving quick.

I leaned in. Charm carried people through the easy part. I made my living on the part they couldn’t rehearse for.

“Miss Mercer.” I kept my voice leveled. “My grandmother has good days and bad days. On a bad one she might not know your name. She might not know mine. She might get angry, might try to leave, might say something that cuts you clean down to the white meat, because she’s frightened and can’t tell you why. What do you do on that day?”

The room went quiet. Even Rita went still.

Skye didn’t rush it. She looked at me steady, and whatever came up behind her eyes had been sitting there a long time before I asked.

“On that day,” she said, “I don’t correct her, and I don’t argue with her.

Because telling somebody they’re wrong when they’re already scared just makes the fear bigger.

I meet her where she is. If it’s 1971 in her head and she’s got a club to open, then all right, we’re opening the club, let’s go find your keys, and by the time we get to the door the moment’s usually passed on its own.

I keep her safe and I keep her dignity.” She paused, and her voice dropped a little.

“A person doesn’t stop being who they are just because their mind starts turning loose of the details.

She’s still Rita Banks on the bad days. I’d just have to work a little harder to help her feel like it. ”

I had sat through three hours of people, and not one of them had looked at my grandmother and seen a person to be protected instead of a body to be handled.

And this woman walked in off the street and said it plain, like it was obvious.

Like I hadn’t spent all morning failing to put it into words myself.

Rita reached out and took Skye’s hand back, held it in both of hers this time.

“This one,” my grandmother said, to the room, to all of us, final as a gavel. “I want this one.”

Prime caught my eye across the room. My brother never missed much.

“We’ll be in touch,” I told her, and it came out lower than I meant it, rougher, and I watched her notice it and file it away.

“I’d like that.” She rose from the crouch in one smooth motion, gathered her folder to her chest, and gave Rita one last look. “It was really good to meet you, Miss Rita. I hope I get the chance to prove I wasn’t lying about that cornbread.”

“You best not be,” Rita called after her. “I’ll know. I always know.”

Then she was gone down the hall, Serenity walking her out. The room felt bigger and emptier than it had a minute before. And I sat there in the middle of it, not caring for how much I was already thinking about a woman I’d known twenty minutes.

Rita was riding high now, all lit up from finally liking somebody.

“Serenity,” she called the second my sister came back through the door. “When you done, run me up to the market. I want to make a real dinner tonight. Something with some love in it. None of that dry-ass baked chicken your brother be calling a meal.”

“My chicken is seasoned,” I said.

“Your chicken is a cry for help.”

Prime damn near went out the window laughing, and for a minute it was good. For one minute it was just my family in my grandmother’s living room, everybody breathing easy, the weight lifted off.

Then my phone went off in my pocket.

When I pulled it out the screen said Kingsbrook Preparatory, and everything good drained right out of me.

The school did not call to tell you your child made honor roll.

The school called when there was a problem.

And with my oldest, there was always a problem.

A teacher she’d disrespected. A girl she’d bullied.

Some incident nobody could quite explain, that always seemed to end with Storie sitting calm and dry-eyed in the principal’s office while everybody around her came apart at the seams.

I looked at the phone one more second before I answered it, and God forgive me, the thought that moved through my head was the same tired one that moved through it every single time that school’s name came up.

There was always something with Storie.

I stepped into the hall and put the phone to my ear.