8. Evander Van Coleman
Evander "Van" Coleman
Walking through the house on Dog River was fucking with me more than I expected. Everywhere I looked, somebody had one of those little neon estate-sale stickers stuck to something I remembered from when I was a kid.
We had already packed away the things that actually mattered.
Memaw Abigail’s recipe cards, Poppa Earl’s tackle boxes, the photo albums, and all the little keepsakes nobody else would understand the value of.
Still, watching strangers walk through the house picking over everything else felt weird as hell.
Memaw died from COVID four years ago. Poppa held on without her longer than any of us expected, but he was never really the same after she was gone. Then last month, we lost him to a brain tumor.
I spent half my childhood in this house. Most days, if I wasn’t inside getting into something, I was out back on the dock with Poppa and a fishing pole.
“You alright?”
I looked over and saw my cousin Skye coming toward me, stepping out of the way of a man carrying an old bookshelf toward the front door. Skye was Aunt Sloane’s daughter, and since both of us were only children, we had always been more like brother and sister than cousins.
“Yeah.” I looked around the room again. “It’s just weird watching people buy up shit we grew up around.”
“I know.” Skye leaned against the doorframe beside me for a second before looking over. “You keeping the house or selling it?”
“I don’t know yet.” I glanced at her stomach. “Why? You want it? You and Landon could raise Tobias here.”
I put my hand against her belly, and she pushed it away with a laugh.
“No. We like Spanish Fort for the schools, and I want something a little more modern anyway.” She looked around the room before turning back to me.
“Honestly, I think you should move in. This house has way more room than that little apartment of yours.”
“For what? It’s just me and Snoop.”
“So?”
“This house deserves some kids running through it. My place is fine for me and the dog.”
Skye let out a sigh, and I already knew where the conversation was headed. “You need to start dating again.”
I looked at her, and she raised her eyebrows. “When’s the last time you even asked somebody out?”
I shrugged because I didn’t have a good answer, and I wasn’t about to make one up just to get her off my back. Skye watched me for another second before saying, “I saw Raya at Briquettes the other day.” That got my attention, and when I looked at her, she added, “She was on a date.”
Raya was my ex-wife. We’d been divorced three years, and no matter how much shit we argued about toward the end, our marriage really came down to one thing. I wanted kids, and she didn’t.
The fucked-up part was that she never told me that before we got married. At first, it was Let’s enjoy being married for a while. Then she wanted to finish her master’s. After that, we needed to travel, pay some shit off, get more established. There was always another reason to wait.
Eventually, I stopped asking when and asked her straight up if she wanted kids at all. She didn’t, and apparently, she never had. Losing my marriage hurt, but finding out I had spent years waiting on something she never even wanted hurt worse.
I was still thinking about Raya when a woman’s voice carried from the front of the house. “I ain’t know Black people stayed on Dog River.”
Skye looked at me, and I looked at her. Neither one of us could help laughing before we headed toward the living room to see who had said it.
When we walked in, my dad was standing near one of the side tables talking to a woman I didn’t recognize.
He didn’t look bothered by what she’d said at all.
Knowing him, he had probably already told her half our family history.
By the time we got closer, he was explaining how Poppa had made good money installing elevators and how specialized the work had been, especially for a Black man coming up back then.
The woman nodded along, looking genuinely interested before she turned toward the other side of the room. “You hear that, Lee? Sound like I picked up the wrong trade.”
I followed her line of sight and saw Leona.
She looked different from the woman I’d picked up off the sidewalk the week before.
Her hair was braided now, and she had on some fitted cream outfit with a pink sweater over it and pink Uggs.
A pink bag hung from her arm, and she had on some silver jewelry.
Her lashes looked fuller than I remembered too.
She hadn’t noticed me yet. She was too busy turning one of the old lamps on the table, looking it over from every angle.
“How much for the lamps?” she asked my dad.
When she looked up, her eyes landed on me. She paused for a second before a smile spread across her face.
“Fifty a piece, or seventy-five for the set,” my dad answered.
Before Leona could respond, the woman beside her jumped in. “Sixty for both.”
My dad grinned. “Seventy.”
“Sixty-five.”
“You got a deal.”
My dad and the woman both looked toward Leona, probably expecting her to be paying attention to the deal they had just made, but she was still looking at me. My dad noticed first, then Skye looked between the two of us like she was trying to figure out what was going on.
“How you doing, Leona?” I asked.
“I’m good.” She smiled. “It’s Van, right?”
“Yeah.”
The woman looked between us. “Y’all know each other?”
Leona turned toward her. “I was walking around the neighborhood last week, and his dog thought I was fresh meat.”
“Who, Snoop?” my dad asked. “That dog crazy as hell, but he harmless.”
“That’s what he said after I was already on the ground,” Leona said, looking back at me.
I laughed. “You survived.”
“Barely.”
“You got everything unpacked yet?” I asked her.
Before she could answer, the woman jumped right back into the conversation. “Unpacked? Her house so empty you could hear a mouse piss on cotton. We saw the estate-sale signs in the neighborhood and came over here hoping we could find some nice what-nots for it.”
“Mama!” Leona looked at her like she couldn’t believe she had said that in front of everybody.
I smiled. “I put the signs up yesterday. Glad somebody actually noticed them.”
Leona shook her head and reached into her purse, but Skye stepped closer before she could get her money out.
“I love your lashes. Who did them?”
“A girl named Shawni,” Leona answered. “She works in a private suite off Azalea.”
“My baby look good, don’t she?” her mama asked, looking directly at me.
Leona’s head snapped toward her. “Mama.”
I looked at Leona anyway. “Yeah, she does.”
“And she single.”
“Mama, no I’m not.”
Her mother waved her off like she hadn’t heard a word she said. “Trust me, son. She is.” Then she looked at Leona. “Pay the man so we can go… and see if your new man will carry these damn lamps to the car.”
“Mama, please.”
I laughed and picked up both lamps before Leona could argue with her anymore. She paid my dad, then followed me outside toward her car while her mother went ahead of us.
“Please excuse my mama,” Leona said as she popped the trunk. “She don’t know how to act.”
“It’s cool.” I set the lamps inside carefully. “I like people who are blunt.”
“She makes me want to smoke a blunt.”
I laughed, and Leona did too. Her mama had already gotten into the passenger seat, but apparently that wasn’t far enough away to keep her out of our conversation.
“Go on and schedule a date!” she yelled through the open window. “We need to hit Hobby Lobby. We ain’t got time for y’all to be out here courting.”
Leona closed her eyes for a second and shook her head. “See what I mean?”
I was still laughing when I looked back at her. “So you do have a man?”
Her smile faded a little, and she looked down before answering me. “It’s complicated.”
I nodded. At least she was honest about it. “Well, if it ever gets uncomplicated, let me know. I’d like to take you to dinner.”
Leona looked at me for a second, but she didn’t say yes or no. I wasn’t about to press her either. If she had somebody, complicated or not, that was enough for me to leave it where it was.
I walked around and opened the driver’s door for her. She looked at the door, then back at me. “Thank you.”
“No problem.”
Leona got in, and I closed the door behind her before stepping away from the car. A few seconds later, she backed out of the driveway and headed down the road.
Skye walked up beside me after they were gone. “She got a man?”
“Apparently.”
“That’s a shame.”
I looked down the road one more time before turning back toward the house. “Yeah, it is.”