OFF SEASON

OFF SEASON

Everybody had a theory about why I kept my mouth shut.

They said I was after a check. A come-up. The soft life they figured a girl like me would crawl across broken glass to get her hands on. The women in my own shop had a version. My mama had one. Not a single one of them ever got it right, because the truth was simpler and uglier than all their noise put together. I did not keep my son a secret from Kordel Banks because I wanted his money. I had my own money. Built it with these two hands, dollar by dollar, head by head, and I never owed that man a single thing. I kept Khari a secret because I had already watched that man choose another woman one time, with his whole chest and his whole future, while his mama stood in her kitchen and told me to my face I didn't fit the picture. And I swore on the night he left that I would never again stand in line and wait my turn to be loved by Kordel Banks.

That was the plan, anyway.

***

Six Years Ago

The gym stayed open past midnight because Coach Pernell gave Kordel a key when he was sixteen, and Kordel gave me a reason to keep coming back to it. I sat in the third row of those bleachers with my coat still zipped up, watching him run the same baseline drill he had run a thousand nights before, and I knew every inch of that man under those lights. I knew how his shirt stuck to his back once he sweated through it. I knew the sound his shoes made when he stopped hard and cut the other way. I knew that he never cursed when he missed. He just went quiet and shot it again until the ball did exactly what he told it to do.

People met him later, after the league and the money, and they walked away thinking they knew him. They knew the one who grinned for cameras and said the right words into a microphone. I knew the other one. I knew the boy who used to split a two-piece with me from Mr. Chong's on the corner because that was every dollar we had between us, the one who looked at me with hot sauce on his fingers and swore that one day we wouldn't have to split a damn thing ever again.

I believed him. That was my whole problem. I believed every word out of his mouth.

"You gone sit up there all night, or you gone rebound for me?" He didn't even turn around. Already knew I was up there. Already knew I was smiling.

"I been on my feet since seven this morning doing heads," I said. "My arches hurt worse than yours, and you the one running."

He laughed, and the sound of it climbed up into the empty rafters. "Come on. One more set. Then I rub them feet myself. Right here at center court."

I came down off those bleachers because I always came down. Left my coat folded on the bottom row and crossed that floor in my socks, because I was not about to scuff up my good shoes for his jump shot. He bounced me the ball and I sent it right back, over and over, and we fell into the rhythm we had been keeping since I was nineteen and he was twenty and neither one of us had a thing in this world but each other and a dream too big for the block we came up on.

He sank the last one and let it roll off into the corner. Then he crossed the court and pulled me in by the waist, both of us sweaty and tired and not caring, and pressed his forehead down against mine.

"Three days," he said. "Three days and they call my name."

"I know what day it is."

"You gone be there?"

"I been there every other day of your life. Why would I miss the only one that counts?"

He kissed me then, slow, the way he kissed me when there was nobody left to perform for. I let myself believe that wherever this thing took him, it was taking me too.

***

Desiree put a plate together every Sunday whether anybody asked her to or not, and that Sunday the whole house smelled of oxtails and rice and somebody's cigarette out on the back porch. I came through the door with a peach cobbler I had stayed up half the night baking, because my grandmother raised me to never walk into nobody's home empty-handed. Desiree took one look at that foil pan and set it on the counter behind her without a word, like it was a something she planned to deal with later.

"Winter," she said. "You came."

"I always come, Miss Desiree."

"Mm." She wiped her hands down her apron and looked me over the way she always did, starting at my face and working her way down to my shoes and back up again, like she was checking me out. "Kordel in the den with his uncles. Talking business. Grown folk business."

I let it go. I poured myself a cup of the red drink from the glass dispenser on her counter and stood at the edge of her kitchen while she stirred a pot that did not need stirring.

"You know my son about to be a very important man," she said.

"Yes, ma'am. Been knowing that longer than you have."

She let that slide past her. "Cameras everywhere he go now. People watching everything he do, everything he wear, who he stand next to. The kind of woman who stands next to a man like that, she got to understand what she carrying. She got to move a certain way."

"I move just fine."

"In here you do." She nodded at her own kitchen, the tile floored and the saints on the wall. "I'm talking about out there." Then she turned all the way around and faced me, and there was no meanness in her voice, which somehow made it worse. "There's a young lady I been wanting him to meet. Jazmine. Her people own half of Cascade. Spelman, then law school. Carries herself like she was raised to be seen, not just looked at. I just want what's best for my baby. A mama got to look out."

I heard everything she did not say. She did not say the Bluff. Did not say my daddy whose name nobody spoke, or my mama who cleaned offices downtown until her hands cracked. She did not have to. Underneath all that talk about cameras and pictures, I heard the other thing clean as day. A girl like me was a liability. And Desiree Banks had not scratched and fought her way up out of nothing just to watch some hood girl drag her son back down into it.

I set my cup in her sink. "Cobbler's still warm," I said. "Tell Kordel I had an early morning."

"You not gone wait and say bye to him?"

"He knows where I stay, Miss Desiree." I picked up my keys. "He always has."

***

The draft came in June, the whole world changed in a single afternoon.

We packed into a banquet room downtown, his people and a few of mine, balloons taped along the walls and a sheet cake sweating under the lights. When the commissioner said his name, the room just came apart. His uncles hollered. His little cousin Dreux jumped up on a folding chair. Desiree dropped into a seat with both hands over her face and rocked, and the cameras the team sent caught all of it.

I stood near the back. I clapped until my palms stung and I watched the boy I had loved since I was nineteen turn into something the whole country was about to own a piece of. He found me with his eyes one time, across all those heads, and he mouthed something I couldn't make out. Then a man in a gray suit set a hand on his shoulder and turned him toward a row of microphones, and that was that. The back of the room was where I belonged, and we both knew it, and only one of us was hurting over it.

After that day the calls came slower. I told myself it was the schedule. The combine, the workouts, the flights. But I knew better. When we did talk, his voice had a tiredness behind it that had nothing to do with sleep, and behind him I started hearing rooms I didn't recognize, voices I couldn't place. A woman laughing once at something I never got to hear the beginning of.

He flew back into town the week before he had to report, and he came to my apartment late, after everybody else had their piece of him. When I opened my door he was standing there in clothes that cost more than my whole month, and he looked tired and he looked beautiful and he looked like a man who already had one foot somewhere I couldn't follow.

"You gone let me in," he said, "or you gone make me beg on this hallway floor?"

I stepped back and let him in. I had been letting that man in my whole life.

We didn't talk much. We never had to. He pulled me into him the second the door shut and kissed me the way he kissed me when there was nobody left to perform for, slow and deep and desperate underneath it. His hands found the bottom of my shirt and lifted it over my head, and mine went to his belt, and we left a trail of his expensive clothes from the front door to my bedroom where the only light came from the streetlamp outside the window.

He laid me down and took his time, his mouth moving down my throat and my chest and lower, and he said my name into my skin, and the way he said it told me it still meant everything to him. When he finally settled his weight between my thighs and pushed into me slow, I held on to his shoulders and let myself forget every warning his mama had ever planted in me. He moved over me slow and deliberate, his forehead pressed to mine, his eyes open, watching my face the whole time, and when I broke apart under him I felt him follow right behind, his whole body going tight and then loose, his breath against my ear.

After, we lay tangled up in my sheets in the dark, his arm heavy across my stomach, his heartbeat slowing against my side.

"Come with me," he said into my hair.

I almost believed it. "And do what, Kordel? Sit in some apartment in a city where I don't know a soul, waiting on you to come home from being somebody I won't even recognize?"

"It won't be like that."

"You don't know how it's gone be. You don't know one thing about where you going." I turned my head and looked at the side of his face in the streetlight. "Neither one of us does."

He didn't answer. He just held me tighter, and I let him, and I told myself the silence meant he would figure it out. That a man doesn't love a woman the way he had just loved me and then walk off into a brand-new life and leave her standing in the old one.

I told myself a lot of things that night.

***

When he left he sent three words and a heart, texted from the airport. I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at my phone and felt something in my chest start closing up before I even understood what it was.

The first week he called every night. The second week, most nights. By the third week the calls had turned to texts and the texts had turned shorter, and there is a particular cruelty in watching a man's words to you shrink down to nothing in real time. I didn't chase him. Let me be clear about that, because everybody who told this story later got it wrong. I didn't blow up his phone. I didn't show up at no airport. My grandmother raised me with too much sense and too much pride to beg a man to want me.

So I let it go quiet. I poured myself into my craft and did heads from open to close. I started putting every spare dollar into a coffee can in my closet, because if I was going to be the woman who got left, I was at least going to be left behind with something of my own. A storefront on Hollowell with my name on the glass. Mine. Paid for by my own two hands, beholden to nobody.

Then my body started feeling funny.

Three weeks late before I let myself count, and I was regular. Five in the morning on the side of my tub, a stick in my hand, two pink lines coming up certain, while the man who put them there sat three time zones away learning a whole new life. I sat there with my hand flat on my own stomach, and the first thing that moved through me wasn't fear. It was a love so big and so mean it scared me.

I did not call him.

Three weeks after I made that decision, I got a call from a number I didn't know. I almost didn't answer. When I did, the voice on the other end was smooth and calm, the voice of a woman who had already decided how the conversation would go.

Desiree Banks had found out. I don't know how. The Westside talks, and I wasn't the first girl from the block to end up in a situation, and word has a way of getting back to the people who are listening for it. She didn't raise her voice. She didn't threaten me. She offered me money, a real number, not an insult and she said all the same things she had said at that Sunday dinner, just stripped of the softness now that the stakes were real. He has a future. You don't fit the picture. Handle it quiet or raise it quiet, but keep his name clean.

I told her I wasn't taking her money.

She said she understood. Then she said, very soft, that she hoped I understood too. That a woman who showed up at her son's door with a baby and a story was going to find out real fast how the world decides who to believe. That she had people who could make my life very complicated. That she was not asking me to disappear, just to be smart.

I hung up. I sat on the side of my tub for a long time after, I understood, with the clarity that only comes when somebody has shown you exactly who they are and exactly what they are capable of, that Desiree Banks had spent years building a wall between her son and everything from before, and I was just the latest thing she had decided didn't belong on his side of it.

I kept my mouth shut. Not because she scared me. Because I looked at the life she was offering me: the money, the managed distance, the agreed-upon silence and I looked at the life I was building with my own two hands, and I decided that I would rather build something true in the dark than live inside somebody else's lie in the light.

I thought on it one night. Ran the whole conversation in my head: his voice, the pause before he answered, and then the people standing behind him. Desiree's face. Howard's folder. The woman in the cream dress his mama had already picked out. I knew down to the bone how that call would go. They would decide I came for a check. They would slide a number across a table and a folder to sign, and they would turn my child into a problem to be managed, and I would spend the rest of my days standing in line behind whoever fit the picture better, waiting on Kordel Banks to choose me out loud.

I had stood in that line one time already. My baby was not about to be put in it behind me.

That was the decision. Clean and a hard one, I made it alone at five in the morning, and I have lived with it every day since. Some nights, after I got Khari down, I'd sit in the dark and let myself ask the one thing I wouldn't let nobody else ask me. What if I was wrong. What if I had guarded my own heart so hard I robbed my own son of a daddy he could have had.

I never found a clean answer. I just got up the next morning and loved that boy twice as hard, and I told the question to wait.

Then somebody at the shop turned their phone around to show me a gossip blog, grinning while they did it the way folks grin when they think they're breaking your heart, and there he was. Courtside at some game, fresh and clean, his arm easy around a woman in cream who matched the picture Desiree had been holding in her head all along.

I looked at it long enough to understand what I was looking at. Then I handed the phone back and picked up my comb. "She pretty. Turn your head, you moving too much."

That was the whole funeral.

People ask me, in the years since, how I could stand to keep all that I kept. They decide I must be hard. That something in me is missing. But I want you to understand something about that summer. I learned that Kordel Banks would always, every single time, choose the life that looked right over the life that felt right. I learned that his love was real and it still wasn't enough to make him stay. And I learned that I would rather build my own world out of nothing than spend one more day waiting on a man to pick me.

So no. When the universe set him back down in front of me years later, that same slow smile and those same warm hands, I did not hand him the truth wrapped up in a bow.

He left me once when all I had to lose was my own heart.

I was not about to give him a reason to do it again, now that I had so much more to lose.