6
The process server came to my shop. Young white boy, couldn't have been older than twenty-five, khakis and a button-down shirt that was sweated through before he even got out of the car. He stood on the sidewalk outside Murphy's and looked at the door for thirty seconds before he came in, which I know because Trina was watching him from the window and giving me the play-by-play like it was a sporting event.
"He's definitely coming in," she said.
"Trina. Finish that set."
"He got a folder, Winter. That kind of folder."
I knew before he opened his mouth. I knew by the folder and I knew by the way he found my face before he was all the way through the door, the way they always find the right person in a room, like they've memorized your face from a photograph and they're just confirming the match.
"Winter Murphy?" he said.
"Speak."
He handed me the envelope and said something I stopped hearing after the word petition and turned around and walked back out, and I stood in the middle of my shop in front of three clients and Trina and a woman under the dryer and I held that envelope and I did not open it for a full two minutes because I already knew what was in it and I was not ready for it to be real.
"Back in ten," I said. And I went to the storeroom.
***
Maddox Holloway's law firm had four names on the letterhead and an address downtown that cost more per square foot than my whole block. The petition was sixteen pages long and dense with language designed to feel inevitable, the language of people who have decided the outcome and are now building the architecture that makes it look like a process.
The argument was straightforward and filthy. Winter Murphy maintained an ongoing relationship with her brother, Quintin Murphy, a documented member of a criminal enterprise with two felony convictions and known associations with violent offenders. The child, Khari Murphy, resided primarily at the home of the maternal grandmother, in a neighborhood with a documented violent crime rate significantly above the city average. The child's primary caregiver had been observed in the presence of known associates of criminal organizations. The biological father, Kordel Banks, was a man of significant financial means who could provide a demonstrably superior environment for the child's development and wellbeing.
They were not asking for visits.
They were asking for full custody.
I stood in that storeroom and I read it three times. Not because I didn't understand it. Because I wanted to understand it all the way down, every word of it, every piece of my life and my brother's life and my mama's house that they had turned into a weapon and pointed at my child.
Then I called Kordel.
He answered on the first ring. "I know," he said, before I could speak. "Howard told me twenty minutes ago. Winter, I didn't, I want you to know I didn't ask for this. I didn't know my name was going on this."
"But it's on it."
A silence. "Yeah. It's on it."
"Your fiancée's daddy filed papers to take my son."
Another silence. Longer. "I know."
"And what are you doing about it."
"I'm on my way to you right now."
I hung up and I stood in my office, and I thought about something Quan said to me a long time ago, when I was nineteen and stupid in love and he was trying to warn me about men who came from places they were ashamed of, men who would spend their whole lives running from the version of themselves the block knew. He said a man like that will love you real and leave you anyway, 'cause loving you and choosing you are two completely different things. And when he finally come back it'll be 'cause somebody else made him, not 'cause he grew up.
I thought about that for a minute.
Then I washed my face and went back out to my shop and finished the day.
***
Quan came to my mama's that night after the shop closed, and for the second time in a week I watched my brother sit down in that kitchen and look at me with something on his face I did not have a name for.
"They used me," he said. "In them papers. My record. My people. They used all of it."
"I know."
"I put you in this." He pressed both hands flat on the table. "I put you in this before Kordel Banks ever came back. Every time I caught a charge, every time I made a choice I shouldn't have, I was loading a gun somebody else was gone pick up and point at you. At him." He meant Khari. He couldn't say the name right then. "At my nephew."
"Quan—"
"Don't." He held a hand up. "Don't say it's not my fault. Don't do that. I need you to let me sit with what I did."
I let him sit with it. That's the thing about loving somebody in the streets. You learn that sometimes the kindest thing you can do is let them carry what belongs to them, because taking it away doesn't make it go away, it just means they can't find it when they need to learn from it.
After a while he said, "Kareem Banks."
"What about him."
"Two of Kareem's boys from that crew off Bankhead got found yesterday." He said it to the table. "Parking lot of that chicken spot on MLK. Nobody dead. But close enough to send the message." He looked up. "Fat Rod is done being patient. He's letting everybody know, Kareem, everybody Kareem owes, everybody whose name Kareem been using. And Kordel's name been all over Kareem's mouth for two years."
I thought about the voicemail. Tell him his little boy is real cute.
"Is it handled," I said.
"It's getting handled." He didn't tell me how and I didn't ask. "But Winter. I need you to hear me on this. The streets piece is getting handled. What I can't handle is Maddox Holloway's lawyers. That's a different kind of war and it runs on a different kind of money."
"I know."
"You need Kordel on your side in that room. Not just on your side in his feelings. On your side in writing, in court, with his name attached. Because right now his name is on that petition and if he doesn't stand up and pull it—" He stopped. "You understand what I'm saying?"
"I understand."
"Does he?"
I thought about Franklin the Spinosaurus. I thought about a man on his knees in a parking lot with his hands shaking. I thought about what he said in my mama's kitchen, I'm sure, said it the way people say a thing they're finally done pretending isn't true.
"I think so," I said. "I think he's finally getting there."
"He better get there fast," Quan said. "We ain't got much time."
***
Deon came by the next morning.
I saw his truck from the window and I almost didn't go to the door, because my heart could only hold so many conversations at one time and I had been having the hardest ones of my life for a week straight. But it was Deon, and I opened the door.
He had Khari's baseball cap in his hand, the one he'd left at the park last Saturday, the orange one with the dinosaur patch I had iron-on'd to the front. He held it out.
"Found it under the bleachers," he said. "Been meaning to bring it by."
"Thank you."
He nodded. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and the thing between us was quiet and finished and we both knew it, and somehow that made it easier than if it had been loud.
"I heard about the papers," he said.
"Word travels."
"Fire station is two blocks from his firm's office. One of the guys did some work on their building." He set the cap in my hand, and his hand covered mine for just a second, the last time. "Winter. Whatever you're in right now, whatever's coming — you're the best mother I've ever seen. Any court with eyes is going to see that. Don't let them make you feel small for what you built."
I didn't trust my voice right then, so I just nodded.
"Tell Khari his uncle Deon said hey," he said.
Then he went down the steps and got in his truck and drove away, and I stood on the porch and watched him go, and I thought about what it meant to let a good man leave, and I thought about all the choosing and not-choosing that had brought everybody to where they were standing, and I held my son's baseball cap against my chest and I let myself feel the grief of it for exactly as long as I could afford to.
Then I went inside.
Because Kordel was coming at noon, and we had a child to figure out how to raise together, and I did not have time for the grief of the road I didn't take.
***
He came at noon with food he had picked up from a place on Cascade, the good Caribbean spot that used to be on our side of town before it moved up. He set it on my mama's kitchen table and we sat across from each other and ate, and it was the most ordinary and terrifying meal of my life.
"I called Howard this morning," he said. "I told him to contact Maddox's firm and pull my name off the petition."
I looked at him.
"He told me if I do that, Maddox is going to pull the investment from the agency. The whole partnership. Everything we were going to announce." He held my eyes. "I told him to pull it anyway."
I did not say anything. I put my fork down.
"I know that doesn't fix what the papers already did," he said. "I know it doesn't undo the fear you been sitting in for a week or the fear your brother been sitting in. I know pulling my name off a paper doesn't give you back five years or give Khari back five years." He pressed both hands flat on the table. "But I am not putting my name on something that tries to take my son from his mother. I don't care what it costs."
I sat with that for a minute.
"Kordel."
"Yeah."
"You still getting married in three days?"
He looked at the table. Then back up at me. "No," he said. "I'm not."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"Does she know that?"
"Not yet." He picked his fork back up, then set it back down. "There's something I need to tell you about Jazmine. Something she told me this morning."
I waited.
"She's pregnant," he said.
The word landed between us and sat there.
I sat there and I looked at his face and I let myself feel every inch of what that word meant, all of it, the full width and depth of it. Another woman carrying this man's child. Right now. In real time. While my son was down the hall eating his lunch and watching cartoons and calling me Mama and asking me every morning since that Tuesday if his daddy was coming back.
I thought about a bathtub at five in the morning, six years ago, and two pink lines, and the decision I made alone.
"Okay," I said.
"Winter—"
"Kordel." I picked my fork back up. "We got a son to raise. That's the thing we're focused on. What happens between you and that woman is between you and that woman, and I am not about to add her situation to my list of things to carry." I looked at him. "But I need you to understand something. Whatever you decide about your life with her, whatever you decide about the baby, the only thing I care about is what you decide about Khari. I need you to be sure. I need you to be in, all the way in, not just in when it's convenient and out when the next thing comes along."
"I'm in."
"Then prove it." I met his eyes. "Not to me. To him. Show up. Every time. Rain or shine, deal or no deal, married or not married, whatever Desiree says, whatever Howard says, whatever any of it costs you. You show up. You got that?"
He looked at me for a long time.
"I got it," he said.
We finished eating. From down the hall we could hear Khari's cartoon, the one about the kid with the dinosaur that he had been watching on repeat for two months. The ordinary sound of a child on a Tuesday afternoon, unbothered and whole, not knowing what the adults in his life were sorting out at the kitchen table.
I thought about the party tonight.
I thought about three hundred people.
I thought about the dress I had bought and told myself I was buying for a work event, and the bow tie I had tied on my son in the car on the way over, and how I had told myself a hundred times it was a bad idea.
"He's going to be there tonight," I said. "He wants to see the chocolate fountain they got for the dessert table. He's been talking about it since you mentioned it."
Kordel looked at me.
"I know it's a bad idea," I said. "I know."
"I'll keep him close. I'll have my own people on him. Nobody touches him."
"I'm not talking about the streets. I'm talking about three hundred people and cameras and your whole other life standing in the same room." I looked at him. "I'm talking about what happens when Jazmine sees that boy's face."
He was quiet.
"She already knows," he said finally. "She's known for a couple weeks. She found the photo."
I let that sit.
"So she's been planning," I said.
"Yes."
"And tonight she's going to walk into that party with everything she knows and everything she's holding and she's going to do something with it."
He didn't answer, which was its own answer.
I sat at my mama's kitchen table and I looked at this man and I thought about all the ways this could go wrong, and I thought about my son and the chocolate fountain and the bow tie I had already laid out on his bed.
God help me.
I was going to let him go to that party.