5. SKYE
SKYE
Rita Banks’s home held so much history. I felt it the second I stepped in for the interview. There was a rich energy buzzing all through the place. It was impossible not to feel.
It sat back off a quiet street in a historic Black neighborhood. This was the DC the tour buses never showed you. Not the marble monuments, not the museums with the free admission.
The other DC. Chocolate City. The one that raised bank presidents, church mothers, and numbers men in the same Sunday pew. The one that built Black wealth up out of U Street back when the rest of the country still wanted us coming through the back door.
Rita’s block was one of those old gold-star streets where doctors, undertakers, and school principals had been buying up brick and handing it down for four generations.
Where the money stayed quiet and the history stayed loud.
Where every third house had raised somebody whose name ended up on a scholarship, a church program, a street sign.
You could feel every bit of it the moment you turned the corner.
Legacy. Roots I would never have, because I’d had to burn mine clean to the ground to stay alive.
It was the largest house on the street. It was one of those older houses built with brick, with a deep front porch, a swing nobody was sitting on, and a screen door in front of the real one. A house with flowers in the beds, a floral wreath on the door, and beautiful bay windows.
It wasn’t a mansion. It was better than a mansion.
It was a home with heart. The sort of place where the door’s lock had a dozen keys floating around, because family was always coming through it, where a pot was always going on the stove and nobody left without a plate.
I pulled my raggedy little car into the driveway behind a Mercedes truck.
I sat there a second, and I hated how much I wanted to belong to a house like that one.
Because I’d had one once. A home, people in it, my name on the mailbox and my baby’s shoes by the door.
I knew exactly what it cost to lose it, down to the penny, and here I was pulling up to somebody else’s, about to walk in and pretend I was nobody at all.
I cut the engine and checked my face in the mirror. Smile, Skye.
Not a lie, exactly. Just the version of me that could walk through a door like that one and belong there.
Just the warm, easy, harmless version of me.
The one that didn’t check every window for the shape of a man who wasn’t there.
I’d gotten so good at her that some days I couldn’t find the seam where she ended and I began, and that scared me worse than getting caught ever could.
Serenity opened the door before I finished knocking, a baby propped on her hip.
She was pretty in a soft, unguarded way, younger than the brothers and gentler around the edges.
There was story written in her eyes. The baby was the first line of it.
A chunky, gorgeous little thing, seven or eight months old, brown as a pecan with a puff of soft curls and two cheeks you wanted to press your face into.
She had one fist wound up in her mama’s collar, and she looked at me like she was deciding whether I was worth that bubbly little glare.
“Skye. Oh, thank God. Come in, come in.” Serenity got an arm free and grabbed my hand, warm and desperate at the same time.
She pulled me into a front room that smelled like coffee and something sweet baking, and my chest ached at how easy it would be to love this house.
“I have been counting down the days. You have no idea. Grandma’s been impossible, and I love her to death, but I have a life I’ve been trying to get back to and I could not leave her with just anybody. ”
“I understand completely.” And I did. Somebody who loved an old woman that much and still couldn’t do it alone. There was no shame in that, though I could see her carrying some anyway.
The baby chose that second to break into a gummy, drooling, delighted grin at me, her face lighting up, and I was gone. Just like that.
“Oh, now who is this?” I heard my own voice go soft in that old, dangerous way. “Look at you. You are the prettiest thing I have seen all year, you know that?”
“That’s Sarai.” Serenity’s face changed when she said the name, fierce and tender at once, a mother who had clearly fought for something. “This little girl right here is my heartbeat.”
“She’s perfect.” I let Sarai catch my finger in that strong little grip, and I smiled through the emotional pain that was spreading throughout me.
Because I knew this. I knew the weight of a baby girl on a hip, the smell of the top of her head, the grabbing on like you were the world.
It was the best feeling God ever made. And then He took it back. “She’s got a grip on her.”
“Girl, she’s strong as an ox. Gets it honest.” Serenity kissed the baby’s temple.
“I’m running her over to Mehar. That’s Quest’s wife.
She’s been dying to get her hands on her, and Sarai’s got a cousin over there right about the same age.
” She said it light, but there was something underneath it, relief maybe, that this baby had a family lined up to love her.
Some of us built our lives out of exactly that and lost it anyway.
I would have given a kidney for a family lined up to catch my child.
She walked me through the house, talking nonstop, nervous and bright, Sarai riding her hip.
It was a home a family had been living hard in for decades, warm and worn in all the right places.
Photographs covered every wall, the Banks men as cute little boys, an old wedding portrait gone gold at the edges, babies and graduations and Christmases stacked frame against frame.
A kitchen at the heart of it that had clearly never once gone cold, cast iron on the stove, a table with more chairs than it needed.
And in the front room, angled toward the window so she could see the people on the street coming and going, one high-backed chair that could only have been hers. The chair a woman sat in to rule from.
Serenity touched things as she passed them, straightening what was already straight, and I understood her without her telling me.
This was a woman who loved her grandmother down to the marrow and was about to leave her in a stranger’s hands, and every straightened picture frame was an apology she couldn’t say out loud.
“She can be sharp,” Serenity warned, lowering her voice near the end.
“She’ll test you. Don’t take it personal.
And her eyes are still adjusting, she just got the cataract surgery, so she’s a little vain about the reading glasses.
She fought us on getting help. Fought us hard.
” She stopped in the kitchen doorway, hand on the frame.
“But she’s the best woman I know. Please be good to her. ”
“I will,” I said, because I knew what it cost to trust the wrong person with somebody you loved.
Her phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen and her body shifted, that nervous brightness sharpening into something hungry.
“Shoot, that’s my reminder. I need to get on the road.
” She was already moving, gathering the diaper bag, her keys, her coat, hiking Sarai up higher on her hip.
“I’ve got a meeting across town, and I’m dropping this one with Quest and Mehar on my way.
” She pressed a kiss to Sarai’s curls without breaking stride.
“You’ll be okay? Grandma just woke up from her nap, she’s in her chair up front, she’s had her pills.
I’ll be back by six, I swear it. And Justice or one of the boys will swing through before then to sit until I’m home. They don’t leave her alone. Ever.”
They don’t leave her alone. Ever. I filed it away in the part of me that never stopped taking notes. This was a family that guarded its own like a fortress, and I was walking straight into the middle of it wearing somebody else’s name.
“Go,” I told her, warm. “Get to your meeting. We’ll be just fine. And you.” I touched one of Sarai’s fat little feet. “You be good for your auntie.”
Serenity hugged me with the arm that wasn’t holding the baby.
A stranger, and she hugged me like I was already saving her life.
Then she was gone, Sarai’s face watching me over her shoulder down the drive, heels clicking against the walk.
The big house went quiet. It was just me and the old woman now.
Rita Banks sat in her high-backed chair by the front window, angled to catch the light and the street at once, a throw across her lap, watching me come with eyes that had no business being that clear.
“Well, come on in here where I can see you.” She waved me over with one ringed hand.
“Lord knows I waited long enough to see anything at all. You spend forty-some years looking at the world through dishwater, then some doctor gives it all back to you, and now I can’t get enough of just looking at folks. Come here, girl. Let me look at you.”
I crossed the room and let her look.
She took me in slow, head to toe, like my own grandmother used to.
I stood there and let an old woman read me, because it would have been rude not to, and because some starved thing in me leaned toward it.
When her eyes came back up to my face, they went soft.
Light eyes, near gray in that window light, set in deep brown skin.
I found myself wondering on her people, where all that came from, before I caught myself doing it.
Reading her the same as she was reading me. Old habit. Dangerous habit.