Grizzley

Chapter 24

I got in the car and sat there for a second before I said anything.

Raja was in the passenger seat with Goldie’s leash wrapped around her hand and she was looking straight ahead out the windshield with that particular expression she got when she was deciding whether to say what was on her mind or let it go. I already knew which one was going to win.

“Raja.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to. Go on and say it.”

She cut her eyes at me. “That girl is crazy. How did she even find you? You sure that’s who you want?” She laughed.

“I know, huh. And damn you right. How the fuck did she find me?” I was now in deep thought on that one. She had pulled one of my moves.

“She came across that parking lot like she was ready to go to jail today. I haven’t seen somebody move like that since—” She stopped and something moved across her face briefly before she put it away. “Since a long time ago.”

I looked at her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have had you out here in the middle of that.”

“It’s fine.” She waved it off but I could tell she meant it.

Raja didn’t hold things when she said she was letting them go.

That was one of the things I had always respected about her.

I have been in the middle of several of her and Dank fights, and the next day she was back to normal like nothing happened.

“Tell me what’s going on with her though. Griz, this looks like some toxic shit. She came to fight, and seconds later, you were kissing her forehead and making her leave without her dog. What the hell?”

I pulled out of the PetSmart lot and drove for a minute before I answered.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“Everything with you is complicated. You gotta do better than that brother.”

“Her and I go back. Long way back. Before Dallas, before any of this. We grew up in the same town.” I kept my eyes on the road. “I ran into her out here by accident a few weeks ago.”

“And?”

“And she’s engaged.”

Raja turned her head and looked at me slow. “She’s engaged.”

“Yeah.”

“And you—”

“Yeah.”

She stared at me for a long moment and then she looked back out the front window and shook her head. “Grizzley. This shit ain’t right man. You know, this shit might not end good.”

“I know.”

“She is engaged to somebody else and you stole her dog.”

“I borrowed the dog.”

“You stole that woman’s dog.” She pressed her lips together and I could see her fighting the smile. “I have never in my life. You really stole her dog.”

“It was a strategic move. She can get the dog back, when she leaves that nigga and comes with me.”

Raja lost the fight with the smile. It broke through and she laughed, a real one, the kind that came from somewhere unexpected, and I hadn’t heard her laugh like that since before Dank died.

It only lasted a few seconds before it settled back down into something quieter but it was real while it was there.

“I’ve never seen you like this,” she said. “Not ever.”

“Don’t read into it. I’m still me.”

“I’m not reading into anything. I’m just observing.” She looked at me sideways.

“She loves that dog.”

“I know she does.”

“And she tracked you down in twenty minutes and came ready to fight me over you.” She paused. “She’s not just a girl you’re messing around with.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“Just make sure you know what you’re doing,” Raja said.

Quiet now. The levity was gone and what was underneath it was just her, the version of Raja that had been walking around with loss in her chest for the better part of a year and had learned things from it that she hadn’t been looking to learn.

“Make sure she knows too. Because that woman back there was not playing. And women who aren’t playing deserve to know what they’re actually signing up for. ”

I heard what she was saying underneath what she was saying.

“I know,” I said. And I meant it in both directions.

I dropped her off back at Deuce spot. I was tryna give her a break away from the baby, and being stuck in the house, but this happens.

I sat in the car for a minute after she went inside.

Goldie had her head between the two front seats looking at me with those eyes that were always asking for something.

I reached back and scratched behind her ear.

“You’re a lot of trouble with your cute self,” I told her.

Her tail went.

—

I gave Ivy three days without seeing her. But we still talked on the phone.

Not because I was done, not because anything had changed, but because she needed the space to let what happened at that parking lot settle into something useful.

She had shown up ready to fight over me. Had tracked me across the city using a method she refused to explain. Had stood there in a PetSmart parking lot crying and telling me to give her dog back and I had watched her face the whole time and seen what was underneath all the anger.

She knew what she was going to do. She just needed to get out of her own way enough to do it.

I was counting down the days until she was fully mine.

We spoke about her leaving, and she was making arrangements already.

Moving her money to her own bank account, switching things out of his name that they shared jointly.

In the meantime I let her FaceTime Goldie every day.

I would prop the phone up on the couch and let them have their conversation and sit back watching this dog go insane at the sight of her person on a screen, spinning and pawing at the cushion, and I would watch Ivy’s face while she talked to her and see the way it went soft in a way that it didn’t go for anything else.

She was good with the dog. That told me things about her that she probably didn’t realize she was showing me.

If she was that good with a dog, she will be an even better mother.

Seeing my boys have babies, that shook something in me.

I wanted to be a father too. The way that babies cling to me, I knew that it was in the cards for me.

On the fourth day I was sitting on my back patio with coffee when I called her.

She answered on the second ring which told me she had been waiting.

“How’d you find me?” I said instead of hello. “At PetSmart. How did you know where I was. This is my second time asking you, now it’s bothering me, and I need an answer.”

Silence for a second. Then, “I’ll never tell.” She joked.

“Ivy.”

“Sources are confidential.” I could hear the smallest smile in it even though she was trying to keep her voice even. “That’s just how it works.”

I sat back in my chair and looked out at the yard. Goldie was moving around near the fence investigating something that probably wasn’t worth investigating. “You put something on my car.”

Nothing.

“How long has it been there? If I find out, you did something to my car. I’m gonna choke the fuck out of you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do know what I’m talking about.”

“I really don’t.” She paused. “But hypothetically if someone had done something like that, it would only be fair. Considering.”

I shook my head. She had put a tracker on my car. I had put an investigator on her and she had turned around and put one on me and hadn’t said a word about it for weeks. Just been sitting on that information and using it quietly.

I respected it more than I was going to tell her.

“Hypothetically,” I said.

“Hypothetically.”

“Alright.” I let it go. “What else.”

She was quiet for a moment and the quality of the quiet was different from her usual quiet. Something was sitting in it that hadn’t been there before.

“I think it’s almost time,” she said.

I set my coffee down. “Say that again.”

“I said I think it’s almost time.” Her voice was steady but I could hear the effort behind it.

“To end things with Brendon. I’ve been sitting with it and going back and forth and I keep arriving at the same place.

” She stopped. “I’m probably going to get a hotel for a little while.

After I break the news. Just to give us both some space from the house. ”

I sat there for a second and didn’t say anything because I needed the moment to be what it was without me rushing past it. She was really going to do it. I had known she would get here but knowing it and hearing her say it with her own voice in her own time were two different things.

“You don’t need a hotel,” I said.

“Griz—”

“I’m serious. You don’t need a hotel. Come here.”

“I can’t just—“

“Yes you can.” I kept my voice even. “You handle what you need to handle and then you come here with us.” I looked at Goldie across the yard. “She knows where the couch is already.”

Ivy was quiet for long enough that I thought the call might have dropped.

“You make everything sound simple,” she said finally.

“It is simple. Everything else you’re adding to it is the complicated part.”

“My whole life is about to change.”

“I know.”

“I built something real with him. Three years. A house, plans, a future that made sense on paper.” Her voice didn’t break but it got smaller. “He didn’t do anything wrong. That’s the part that doesn’t go away. He’s a good man and I’m about to blow up his life.”

“Yeah,” I said. Because she deserved honesty more than she deserved comfort right now.

“You are. And that’s going to sit heavy for a while and there’s nothing I can say that makes that part easier.

” I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees.

“But staying doesn’t fix it either. Staying just means you’re both living inside something that isn’t true anymore. That’s not fair to him either.”

She breathed out slow.

“When?” I asked.

“Soon,” she said. “I just need a few more days to figure out how to say it.”

“You don’t need to figure out how to say it. You just say it.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“Nothing about any of this has been easy,” I said. “But you’ve known what you were going to do since before you wrote that note in the hotel room. You knew then. Everything since then has just been you taking the long way to something you already decided.”

She didn’t argue with that. Which told me everything.

We stayed on the phone for another while after that.

Talked about smaller things, nothing significant, just the rhythm of two people who had gotten comfortable with each other’s voices.

She told me about a situation at the Houston office she had to handle remotely.

I told her about a deal I was working through with Deuce on some investments.

She asked about Raja and I told her Raja was good, doing better than she had been when she first arrived, that being around Malani and the babies had done something for her that nothing else had managed to do.

“She’s going to hate me,” Ivy said. “After the parking lot.”

“She doesn’t hate you. She does think you’re crazy though.”

“I came at her wrong. Send my apologies.”

“She understood it. She said she wasn’t even mad, just that there was a better way to go about it.”

“There was a much better way to go about it,” Ivy said. “I just—” She stopped. “I heard that woman laughing and I heard my dog and something just left my body.”

“I know. Shit, you got that dog in you too. I joked.

“I’ve never done anything like that. I haven’t had a real fight since high school.”

“It showed,” I said. “You was about to get your ass beat. I didn’t know what to do.” I laughed.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying your technique needed some work.”

“My technique—” She cut herself off and I heard her try not to laugh and fail. “You are the worst.”

“You were about to fight a woman in a PetSmart parking lot over a dog and a man that technically—”

“Don’t say technically wasn’t mine. Don’t say that.”

I smiled. “I wasn’t going to say that.”

“You were absolutely going to say that.”

“Go handle your business Ivy.”

She got quiet again. The easy quiet this time, not the heavy one. “Okay,” she said. Just that. Small and real.

“Call me when it’s done.”

“Okay.”

“And Ivy.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re making the right call. Not because of me. Because you already know you are. That lame ass nigga, and that boring ass life would have never been what you truly wanted.”

She didn’t say anything for a second.

Then, “I know.”

We hung up and I sat on that patio for a while after with my cold coffee and Goldie eventually came and put her head on my knee and I sat there scratching her ears thinking about all the ways a man’s life could turn in directions he never mapped out.

Three weeks ago I was getting pulled out of a chair in a warehouse by a man I had come to call a brother.

My brothers were somewhere out there living with the decisions we had all made.

I had a business to run and a position to hold and enough weight on my back on any given day to flatten most people.

And I was sitting here on a Tuesday morning thinking about a woman with red curly hair and too much mouth who was about to walk away from a good life to come home to mine.

I didn’t take that lightly. Whatever I projected on the outside, whatever certainty I walked around with when it came to her, underneath it I understood what she was giving up and what she was trusting me with by doing it. That wasn’t something I was going to waste.

My phone buzzed on the table.

Ivy.

One text. Three words.

I told him.

I read it twice. Set the phone face down on the table and looked out at the yard where this woman’s dog was currently digging a hole near my fence with absolutely no remorse about it.

It was done.

Whatever came next, whatever Brendon did with what she had just handed him, whatever fallout was coming, it was done.

I picked the phone back up and typed back.

Come home.