Chapter 6 #2
"My mama's photos. Her bracelet. The shoebox in the closet."
Casey's eyes went back to Lucien and stayed there. Lucien didn't say anything. He just stood in the doorway with his arms folded across his cut and took up all the space in the room without trying.
Casey had always talked about Black people like they were a species he'd studied from a distance.
The jokes at dinner parties. The comments in the truck.
The way he'd change the radio station if a rap song came on and say not in my vehicle.
He'd never said it to anyone's face because men like Casey never do.
They say it at home where it's safe. Where the only audience is a woman too scared to push back.
Now he was standing in his kitchen looking at a six-foot-three Black man covered in ink wearing a one-percenter cut and the ideology was running headfirst into biology. Fight or flight. Casey's body was choosing flight but he had nowhere to go.
"Threw all that shit out," Casey said. He was talking to me but he was watching Lucien. "Soon as I got back. Garbage day. All of it."
A hollow ache opened up in my chest. Not because I believed him. Because I knew he was capable of it. He would throw away a dead woman's bracelet just to make sure I had nothing left.
"You threw out her bracelet," I said.
"I threw out everything. You left, so your shit left with you."
Lucien still hadn't spoken. He unfolded his arms and took one step into the kitchen and Casey took one step back. It was involuntary. His body moved before his brain caught up and we all saw it and there was no taking it back.
"Casey." Lucien's voice was low and even. "The lady asked you a question. Think carefully before you answer it again."
Casey opened his mouth and closed it and then a voice came from the hallway.
"Babe? Who's here?"
She walked out of the bedroom in one of Casey's t-shirts and nothing else. Young and thin. Long legs and smudged mascara and a confused look on her face that cleared up fast when she saw me.
She looked exactly like me.
Not exactly. But close enough to make my stomach turn.
The same build. The same coloring. The same type of pretty that men like Casey pick out of a crowd because it photographs well and folds easy.
She was in her early-twenties, I guessed.
Standing in the hallway of a house I used to clean, in a shirt I used to sleep in, looking at me like I was the intruder.
I stared at her and I didn’t feel anger. Just a pure and simple clarity. I wasn't special. I was never special. I was a casting choice. Casey had a type and when I broke he went back to the catalog and ordered another.
This girl was standing where I stood four years ago.
Young and beautiful and thinking she'd found someone who would take care of her.
And Casey would take care of her the way he took care of me.
He'd dress her up and sand off every edge until she fit the shape he needed and when she stopped fitting he'd find another one.
I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and say run, but I looked at her face and I recognized the expression because I'd worn it. She wouldn't hear me. She'd have to find the bruise that doesn't show before she'd believe a word I said.
Lucien looked at the girl and then looked at me and I saw him understand everything without a single word.
"The bracelet," he said to Casey quietly.
Casey swallowed. He looked out the door, where Morrow was now standing on the porch with his arms crossed, and said:
"Might be in the garage. In a box. I don't know."
"Then go look," I said.
He walked past Lucien and gave him a wide berth like he was passing a lit fuse and went through the side door to the garage. The girl stayed in the hallway watching me with wide eyes.
"How old are you?" I asked her.
"Twenty."
"How long?"
"Three months."
The honeymoon period. The nice dinners and the compliments and the shopping trips where he picked everything. She didn't know yet. Wouldn't know for a while.
"Be careful," I said.
She blinked. I didn't say anything else because anything else would've been for me, not for her.
Casey came back with a shoebox. Not the box I'd kept but a different one, and when he held it out to me I opened it.
Mama's bracelet was there. Tarnished. A few photos I recognized.
The letters, rubber-banded together and creased.
He hadn't thrown them out. He'd kept them.
Not because he cared but because he knew I'd come back for them and he wanted to see me beg.
Except I wasn't begging. I was standing in his house with a man he was terrified of and I was taking what was mine and leaving.
I closed the box.
"We're done," I said.
Not I hate you, or you ruined me. Not the speech I'd rehearsed in my head. We're done covered everything.
Casey didn't answer. He was looking at Lucien again with something in his eyes I recognized because he’d put it in mine so many times. Fear.”
I walked out and Lucien followed. He didn't look back at Casey and neither did I.
On the porch I stopped. Morrow was leaning against the railing and he nodded at me and I nodded back and the song was coming to an end. I started laughing and Lucien looked at me like I'd lost my mind.
"The song," I said. "Listen."
He listened. It took him a second, then he heard it and his face cracked into a grin and Morrow heard it too and all three of us were laughing on Casey Landry’s porch while Casey stood inside a whiter shade of pale.
Lucien put the shoebox in his saddlebag and I climbed on behind him and pressed my face into his back and breathed him in.
The bikes started one by one and the sound filled the cul-de-sac and I held on to Lucien and we rode out of Terrebonne and I didn't look back.
Not once.