5. Asha
Asha
The salon was full by ten.
Nene's cousin Tasha ran the place out of the front room of her brownstone.
Two chairs, a standing dryer that roared like a jet engine taking off, a kitchen open at the back where she kept the coffee on.
It wasn't fancy and it didn't need to be.
Three days a week I worked out of there, and those three days were the best ones I had.
I had three clients booked. Tasha had two.
Nene was perched on a stool by the window with a notebook on her knees, doing the books for her cousin like she'd been doing them for the last six months, half her attention on the spreadsheet and half on whatever was happening in the chair.
She had a bagel in one hand, a pen in the other, her braids tied up in a silk scarf.
She'd already given me one long look when I walked in that I'd pretended not to clock.
My first client was Mrs. Anders, a retired teacher who came every other week without fail and tipped me forty dollars cash in an envelope every single time. She had a roller set, she had her stories about everybody's grandchildren in a six-block radius, and I loved her for both.
"You quiet today, baby," Mrs. Anders said as I sectioned her hair.
"Just concentrating, ma'am."
"Mmhm."
I didn't elaborate. Mrs. Anders watched me in the mirror for a long second, then went back to telling me about her granddaughter's wedding plans and a cousin who was trying to claim two seats at the head table that didn't belong to her.
I made encouraging sounds at the right moments and got my hands moving.
I'd slept four hours. I lay awake next to Supreme until past three, the ceiling panels burned into my mind in every possible light, my chest tight and restless.
Then I dozed off and dreamed the dream, the one I hadn't had in a year and a half.
I was sixteen again, standing on a corner in Bed-Stuy, the rain soaking through my jacket, my feet numb on the sidewalk as I waited for a bus that never came.
I woke with my throat clenched, Supreme's arm heavy across my waist, the ceiling staring down at me like it already knew.
And then I came to work, because work was always going to be there waiting for me whether I'd slept or not.
I rolled Mrs. Anders' last section, set her under the dryer, brought her a magazine and a fresh cup of coffee, and turned around to find Nene standing in the doorway of the kitchen with her arms crossed.
"Outside," she said.
"I got another client at noon."
"You got fifteen minutes. Come on."
I followed her out.
We stood on Tasha's stoop with our coats pulled around us. Brooklyn was doing that cold gray thing it did where the wind found every gap in your collar, and Nene fished a stick of gum out of her pocket and offered me half before she spoke.
"You look like somebody died."
"Nobody died."
"You sure?"
I took the gum and unwrapped it slowly because I needed something to do with my hands. Nene watched me do it.
"You wanna tell me?" she said.
"Not here."
"At my place after?"
"Maybe."
She tilted her head. Nene was the only person on this earth I could have this kind of conversation with, where things stayed half-said and three-quarters-folded.
We'd met when I was twenty in Atlanta at a hair show neither of us belonged at.
She'd come over to me at the food table, asked if I wanted to split a plate because the line was too long, and we'd been close ever since.
Eight months ago she'd packed up her shop and come north for a man who turned out to be a waste of a flight.
She'd stayed because I was here. She'd never said that out loud. She didn't need to.
"Last night was something," I said.
"Something?"
"Yeah."
"Supreme something or your-own-self something?"
"My-own-self."
She made a small sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite a sigh. "A'ight. We'll talk."
She let me leave it there. That was the other thing about Nene. She knew when to push and when to step back, and right now in front of a salon on a Bed-Stuy stoop with my next client on her way over from the train wasn't when to push.
We went back inside.
The rest of the day passed in the rhythm I'd built my life around.
Heads in chairs, washes, rollers, blow-outs.
Nene drifted between her cousin's books and the front window.
Tasha cussed out a courier on the phone for ten minutes about a delivery that hadn't arrived.
The college girl Kaya showed me a TikTok of a style I had to politely talk her out of, and we landed on something better that took her an extra forty-five minutes but came out looking like a magazine cover.
By the time I locked up at six I'd made just under five hundred dollars in cash, hugged Nene at the door, and almost let myself believe last night had been somebody else's problem.
I got home at six.
Supreme was on the couch with a glass of bourbon, ESPN on mute, his phone face down on the armrest. When I came through the door he looked up and his mouth curved into that little smile he gave me, half pleased husband, half something else.
There was a private little smile underneath the warmer one he turned up for me.
I'd been around long enough by now to know which one was the truer of the two.
"There's my baby," he said.
"Hey, Premie."
"Come here."
I crossed the room and let him hook an arm around my hips and pull me down onto his lap. He kissed the corner of my mouth, slow, holding me against him a moment longer than he needed to, his hand spread flat on my thigh. I gave him the smile he was waiting for.
"How was the salon, mama?"
"Busy. Mrs. Anders, the college girl I told you about, and two new bookings."
"Mmm, that's what I like to hear. My baby out here doin' her thing."
"I'm tryna."
"Don't tryna me. You out there doin' it." He kissed me again, brief, then patted my thigh. "I got us a reservation at Negril tomorrow night."
"Yeah? What's the occasion, Premie?"
"Occasion is I wanna take my woman out and have her looking like new money on my arm. That's the occasion."
I laughed despite myself. "Aight. The black dress?"
"You read my mind."
He looked at me a moment longer. Reading. He always read. By now I knew exactly what he was looking for and exactly how to give it to him.
He kissed me one more time and let me up.
In the kitchen I took the chicken out, salt-and-peppered it, set a pan on the burner and put the rice on. The TV came back up out of mute behind me, basketball commentary low and easy, the sound of Premie shifting on the couch, his phone buzzing once on the armrest.
Footsteps. He came up behind me at the stove, slid an arm around my waist, rested his chin on top of my head.
"Look at my woman doin' her thing in here," he said into my hair.
"It's just chicken, Premie."
"Mmhm. My woman cookin' for me in my kitchen. Don't get no better."
I shook my head, smiling. "Boy, sit down."
He laughed against my temple. "Aight, aight. You need anything?"
"Glass of water be nice."
"I got you, mama."
He kissed the back of my head, then stood there for a moment with his arm around my waist and his weight against my shoulders, then he let me go.
He was one of the most dangerous men in three boroughs. The man my father had handed me to like a receipt for a debt. And he was also, sometimes, this. A man who'd come up behind me at the stove and kiss the back of my head before he stepped away to get me a glass of water.
That was the thing about Premie. Half the time he was the boyfriend in the magazines, the one you saw in pictures with his arm around his woman looking at her like she'd hung the moon.
The other half he was a man who'd have me killed and not lose sleep over it.
Both versions lived in the same body. Both versions came home to the same bed.
He came back from the fridge with the glass, set it on the counter next to me, kissed my temple, then walked off to the couch.
I drank it slowly, watching the rice steam, and I knew the warm version of him was the more dangerous of the two. Because the warm version was the one that made it possible to stay.
I stood at the bathroom mirror with the tap running.
The face in the reflection was tired and no amount of makeup could fix that. I leaned on the sink, both hands pressed against the porcelain, and looked at myself.
I was going back to Carroll Gardens.
Not to find him. That's what I told myself first, before anything else.
I just needed to see him. Once, in daylight, on a street, as the man he was now and not the boy I'd held in my head for fourteen years. I needed to look at him and feel nothing, or something small enough to ignore. Then I could let him go.
Whatever had passed between us across that warehouse table, the thing that stole my breath and left me frozen by that office door, I couldn't carry it.
I had a life to survive, a number to hit, a man asleep in the next room I belonged to until I didn't. I couldn't afford to be a woman with her heart elsewhere.
Then I'd have seen him, looked, finished it. Then I could put him away.
My reflection didn't argue.
I turned the tap off, dried my hands, and went to bed beside Supreme. I lay in the dark a while before I closed my eyes.