Present Day
The picture went up on a Tuesday, and by Thursday I knew it was only a matter of time before that man came walking through my door.
It was nothing. That's the part that kept me up three nights running. My girl Trina ran our shop page, and she posted a little flyer for the shop. Some of the babies whose mamas got them braided up fresh, and Khari was right there in the middle, grinning with his whole face, both dimples deep. Free advertising. Cute babies bring likes and likes bring mamas and mamas bring chairs full of heads. She tagged the shop and tagged me, and three hundred people shared it before I ever rolled over to look at my phone. Not one thing I could do to pull it back.
I knew the second I saw my son's face up on that screen. I had spent five years studying those same two dimples across my kitchen table every morning, and they didn't come from me. They came from one man. A man with a couple hundred thousand people following his every move.
I called Quan first. Quintin on his birth certificate, Quan to everybody who came up with him. That's the thing nobody ever tells you about having a brother in the streets, they’re the first call you make when your world comes apart, not because they can fix it but because they already know every way it can get worse, and knowing is better than not knowing.
"You see it," he said.
"I'm looking at it right now."
A long quiet. Then, low: "You need to take it down, Winter. Today. And after that I need to come see you, because this ain't just about a picture no more. There are people on my end who have already been asking questions, and I need you to understand what it means that your son's face is sitting on the internet next to a Banks name."
I didn't ask him to say more. Quan didn't make that kind of call unless the situation was already past talking on the phone.
I waited.
***
He came the next morning, before I opened, and he sat across from me at the station with his hands folded and talked to me the way he only talked when the thing he was saying could not be taken back.
"Kareem Banks," he said. "You know that name?"
"Kordel's brother."
"Kordel's little brother owes money to people off Bankhead. Real money. Been throwing Kordel's name around for two years to buy himself time. My people and them people been into it since before you had that kid, Winter. We are not friends. We have never been friends." He looked at me. "Your son's face on the internet next to a Banks name is not just a gossip blog situation. Those people are going to know exactly who Khari is within forty-eight hours if they don't already. And a child connected to a man they've been squeezing is a chip, you understand me? He becomes something they can use."
I did not move. I sat there and let every word land where it was supposed to land, and I did not move, because my child is watching me move and I have trained myself, over five years of doing this alone, never to let fear show up in my body where Khari can see it.
"What do I do," I said.
"You let me handle the street end. And you tell Kordel today, before somebody else does and he finds out in a way you can't control. Because a man who gets blindsided by something this big in front of the wrong people is a man who does something you can't take back." He stood up. "And Winter. Keep Khari with you. Don't let him out of your sight until I tell you different."
He left, and I sat in the quiet of my shop before the girls came in, and I thought about the five years I had spent making sure my son was safe, and how it had all come apart from a flyer.
Then I opened the shop, because a woman who folds up every time her world shakes is a woman without a life. I had heads to do and a child to raise and a business to run.
And I waited on a man I already knew was coming.
***
He came at half past two.
I felt the room change before I saw him. The dryers going, Trina running her mouth about somebody's no-good baby daddy, and then all of it dropped to nothing at once. Every woman in my shop went quiet in the same breath. I turned around with a rat-tail comb still in my hand, and there he stood.
Six years. Six years and that man still took up a whole doorway.
He had grown into himself in the time he was gone. Broader through the shoulders, clothes without a wrinkle in them, a watch on his wrist that cost a lot. But the face was the same face I used to hold between my two hands in a gym late at night after he practiced. Same mouth. Same eyes. And the dimples when his jaw worked, the exact same dimples I kiss on my son every single night.
"Winter," he said.
Just my name. Low and careful. And I hated the way my body answered to it before my good sense could catch up. Five years of building a wall, and that man knocked a brick loose just by opening his mouth.
"We closed," I said.
"Your sign say open."
"For you we closed." I looked past him at my shop, every woman in every chair froze with their mouth hanging open, getting a show they'd be texting about for a month. "Trina, finish Miss Pat's edges and lock up behind everybody. I'll be in the back."
I walked toward my storeroom and I did not look back to see if he followed, because I already knew he would.
***
I shut the door behind us and rounded on him in that little room full of boxes of edge control and bundles still in the plastic, and I let him have it.
"You got a lot of nerve."
"Winter—"
"No. You don't get to come in my place of business, in front of my customers, and say my name soft like we still know each other." My voice stayed low because the walls were thin, but every word had the whole six years behind it. "You been gone since before he drew his first breath. So whatever you think you walked in here to do, you can turn right around and do it somewhere else."
"Is he mine."
Not a question. He said it flat, jaw tight, eyes gone glassy and hard at the same time. He already knew. He had counted the same nine months I had. He had looked at that picture and seen his own face looking back at him out of a five-year-old.
I could have lied. God knows I had gotten good at the lie of leaving it unsaid. But I looked that man dead in his face and I gave him the truth, because my son was not about to be a thing I was ashamed to claim.
"His name is Khari," I said. "Khari Murphy. And yeah. He's yours."
I watched it land on him. Watched the breath go out of him and his hand come up to drag over his mouth, and for a second I almost felt for him, because whatever else he was, I had just told a man he had a son on this earth he had never laid eyes on. But then I remembered who put us here. The soft feeling died right where it stood.
"Murphy," he said. "You gave him your name."
"I gave him the name of the only person who showed up." I folded my arms. "You was busy."
"You didn't tell me." His voice cracked on it, and he stepped in closer, and the little room got smaller. "Five years, Winter. I got a son out here five years old and you let me find out off the internet like everybody else? Like I find out my game times?"
"Don't you do that." I put the comb at his chest. "Don't stand in my shop and act wounded. You left. Your mama told me to my face I didn't fit the picture and you got on that plane and you proved her right. You put a ring on somebody else." I let my eyes drop to think about that ring, then came back up to his face. "I read about the engagement same as everybody. So no, I did not call you. I was not about to hand my baby to a man who already showed me he would put me down the second somebody nicer-looking came along."
"That ain't fair."
"Fair?" I laughed, and nothing was funny. "You want to talk to me about fair? I had that baby by myself. Sat in that hospital by myself. Got up every two hours by myself. You were on a billboard downtown the whole time, smiling, and I was home with your son on my chest wondering how a man could love me the way you used to and still forget I was alive."
That stopped him. It landed somewhere real, because his face came apart for just a second, and what was underneath was not the rich man and not the All-Star. It was the boy from the gym. The hungry one. The one I knew.
"I never forgot you," he said. "Not one day. I told myself I did. I been telling myself I did for six years." He took the comb out of my hand, slow, and set it on the shelf, and I let him, which was my first mistake. "It was the biggest lie I ever told, Winter. And I tell a lot of them."
"Stop."
"I look at every woman and I look for you in her. You know what that's like? To build a whole life trying to replace something you can't replace?"
"I said stop, Kordel."
But I didn't move back. That was my second mistake, and I knew it while I was making it, the same way I knew it was a mistake to let him in my apartment that last night six years ago. Some part of me had been starving for this man since the day he left, and that starving part didn't care about pride or weddings or anything but the warm and the want.
He reached up and ran his thumb along my jaw, the exact way he used to, and my whole body remembered him before my mind could tell it not to.
"Tell me you don't feel that," he said. "Tell me and I'll go."
I did not tell him. God help me, I couldn't get the lie out.
***
He kissed me, and six years fell off the both of us at once.
It wasn't soft and it wasn't careful. There was nothing left in it of the boy he used to be. He kissed me with six years of wanting loaded behind it, and I kissed him back with my hands fisted in that expensive shirt dragging him into me, and he walked me backward until my spine hit the shelf and the bundles tumbled down around our feet and neither one of us cared. His hands were already under my shirt, spread hot against my back, pulling me flush against him, and I could feel exactly what I did to him pressed against my stomach, and I made a sound against his mouth I had not made in six years.
He got my shirt up over my head and his mouth went straight to my neck, down to my collarbone, and his hands found me through my bra and I let my head fall back against that shelf and let him. He was saying things into my skin — my name, that he missed me, that he never stopped, that nobody ever felt like me — and every word went straight through me and lit up something I had spent five years pretending was dead.
His hand slid down the front of my jeans, fingers working the button, and he dropped to his knees right there in front of me and pressed his mouth to my stomach, both hands gripping my hips like he was trying to hold on to something he'd already lost once.
And that was the exact second I came back to myself.
Because that was the same hold. The same desperate, don't-let-go hold from the last night before he left, the night he made me believe in a forever he had already decided to walk away from. My body knew that grip. And my body remembered what came after it.
I put my hands flat against his shoulders and pushed him back.
"Get up," I said.
"Winter—"
"Get up, Kordel." I was already grabbing my shirt off the floor, already turning my back so he couldn't see my hands shaking, already hating myself for how close I had come. "I'm not doing this. Not again."
He got to his feet slow. Chest heaving, eyes dark, he reached for me one more time and I stepped clean out of his reach.
"No." I said it to the wall so I didn't have to see his face. "I let you have all of me one time and I spent five years raising the proof of it alone. You don't get to walk in here and have me again like the last six years didn't happen. I am not the girl in that gym anymore. That girl waited on you. This woman don't wait on nobody."
He stood there breathing hard. Then something in his face shifted, and the man underneath came back. He pulled his shirt straight. Set his jaw.
"That's fine," he said. "You don't ever have to touch me again. But understand something." He looked me dead in my eyes, and his voice came out quiet and certain in a way that scared me worse than yelling ever could. "That is my son. Khari. Mine. And I am not going anywhere. Not this time. Wedding or no wedding, you are going to have to learn how to hate me with me standing right here, because I will spend every dollar I have before I miss one more day of that boy's life."
He pulled a card out his wallet and set it on the shelf next to my comb.
"Tell him I'm coming," he said.
And then he walked out of my storeroom and back through my shop, and I heard the bell over the front door, and he was gone.
I stood in that little room with my shirt half on and bundles all over the floor, I pressed my hand flat against my chest to feel how hard my heart was going. I stood there and I breathed and I told myself I did the right thing. I told myself I was stronger than this. I told myself that man was about to get married and none of this changed anything.
Then my phone buzzed on the shelf. Quan's name.
I picked it up.
"They know," he said. No hello. "Kareem already talked. Word got out about the baby. Winter—" He stopped. "You need to get Khari and go to Mama's. Tonight. Don't go home first. Just go."
I stared at the card Kordel left on my shelf.
Then I walked out of that room. I went and got my baby, and I did not let myself look back.
I had kept my vow for five years.
He had been back in my life for fifteen minutes.
And already the whole world was burning.