2. Josiah Brooks #4
Uncle Zeke pulled up one summer afternoon in that old Cadillac, paint shining like midnight under the sun, chrome clean enough to check your reflection.
He was Pops’s identical twin, same face, same voice when he wanted it, same broad shoulders, but the spirit moved different in them.
Pops walked into rooms and made folks feel steady.
Uncle Zeke walked into rooms and made folks check what they owed.
He tossed me the keys like he was giving me a favor, told me to run the car down to Ray-Ray’s shop, and I caught them against my chest with all the foolish pride of a boy who thought being trusted by a grown man meant he was becoming one.
Pops was at work. Mama was at the church, helping Sister Darlene with somebody’s repast. Juice had practice. And me, wanting my uncle to see me as more than Jeremiah’s good son with fast hands, climbed behind the wheel.
I didn’t know what was in that car.
The bag shifted when my fist hit it harder.
One-two.
Step.
One-two.
Breathe.
Blue lights flashed behind me before I reached Ray-Ray’s street.
Hot vinyl pressed beneath my palms while the officer told me to step out.
The summer air smelled like gasoline and cut grass.
My mouth dried before my fear could even find words.
I kept asking what I’d done, but nobody answered me in a way that mattered.
The trunk opened. Somebody whistled low.
Another officer said something into his radio, and the boy I’d been that morning started leaving my body right there on the side of the road.
The courtroom smelled like floor polish and other people’s prayers.
Mama sat with a tissue balled in her fist, her church hat tilted slightly because grief had been leaning on her.
Pops kept his arm around her shoulders, but his jaw was locked so tight I could see the muscle jumping from across the aisle.
Uncle Zeke sat two rows behind them, eyes forward, face unreadable.
I looked at him once. Just once. He didn’t look back fast enough.
That was the moment I learned loyalty could be a beautiful word wearing funeral clothes.
I kept hitting the bag. Left. Right. Slip.
Right. The chain rattled above me, and sweat broke across my forehead.
Three years was what they took. Three birthdays behind walls.
Three summers measured by heat through narrow windows.
Three years of Mama’s hand pressed to scratched glass while she tried to smile like she wasn’t breaking.
Three years of Pops sitting across from me with pain in his eyes and steel in his voice, refusing to let me confuse survival with manhood.
“Don’t let this place finish raising you,” Pops told me once through the visitation phone. “I raised you. Your mama raised you. God claimed you before any judge called your name. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” I said back then.
“No. Hear me with your life,” Pops said, leaning closer to the glass.
I swung too hard. The bag jerked away and came back mean. I caught it with both gloves and held it against my chest until it stopped moving.
Juice set the foil plate down. I could hear him do it. I could hear his shoes shift against the floor.
“I hated him for that,” Juice said.
“Who?” I asked without turning around.
“My daddy,” Juice said.
The room tightened.
Juice rarely said that out loud. Not because he loved Uncle Zeke less, but because truth got complicated when the man who hurt you also taught you how to tie a tie, drove you to games, put money in your hand, and clapped loudest when your baby sang in church.
People wanted clean villains because clean villains made forgiveness easier to organize.
Real life handed you men with blood and love on the same hands.
“I know,” I said.
“I was mad at you too,” Juice said.
That made me turn.
He stood near the shelf, no joke on his face now. Just my cousin. My cousin twin. The brother God hid in the family tree.
“You were mad at me?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Juice said. “For taking it. For sitting there like you owed everybody your silence. For making me write letters instead of dragging you to the park to hoop. For making Auntie cry behind glass. For making Uncle Jeremiah age ten years in one summer.”
I looked down at the gloves.
Juice swallowed. “I know it wasn’t fair.”
“I was sixteen.”
“I know.”
“I thought keeping my mouth shut was loyalty.”
“I know.”
“I thought if I took it, the family stayed standing.”
Juice’s eyes shined, but he blinked it back fast. “I know, Siah.”
The name sounded different when he said it like that. Not teasing. Not clowning. Just holding.
I turned back to the bag because looking at him too long would make something in me loosen. “Pops told me loyalty without wisdom would bury me.”
“He was right,” Juice said.
“He usually was.”
“Except about that old Buick,” Juice said.
I huffed a laugh before I could stop it. “That car was terrible.”
“Terrible?” Juice asked. “Man, that car coughed when it saw hills.”
“It had character.”
“It had asthma,” Juice said.
The laugh helped. It didn’t fix anything, but it opened a window.
I hit the bag again, lighter this time. Rhythm found me.
Jab. Cross. Step out. Guard up. The room narrowed to breath and leather, sweat and memory.
Boxing had never been about violence for me, not after county.
Violence was easy. Discipline was a higher language.
Any fool could make a fist. A man had to learn when to open his hand.
That lesson saved Kacey from becoming another locked door in my life.
Juice heard the thought before I said it.
“You ain’t talked about Domonique in a while,” Juice said.
My gloves paused. Outside the room, somebody laughed in the bay. A wrench clanged against concrete. Life kept interrupting pain with noise.
“What’s there to talk about?” I asked.
“You loved her.”
“I tried to.”
“That ain’t the same,” Juice said.
No.
It wasn’t.
Domonique had the beauty of a woman who knew mirrors were not neutral around her.
Deep brown eyes, wide and watchful, with lashes that made every blink look intentional.
Smooth brown skin that held light like it had been taught to behave.
Cheekbones high enough to sharpen her whole face, a soft, rounded mouth always glossed, a slender nose with just enough lift to give her expression a permanent little edge.
Her jaw was delicate but defined, her neck long, her shoulders graceful, her waist narrow enough to make every dress look tailored even when it wasn’t.
She had that tall, polished, corporate-fine shape.
Curves disciplined into elegance. Not loud with it. Worse—certain.
She wore her hair like image was a language she spoke fluently.
Sometimes bone-straight and silk-pressed with a middle part so clean it looked measured.
Sometimes pulled into a sleek, low ponytail with her edges laid like punctuation.
Sometimes shoulder-length waves that moved when she wanted attention and behaved when she wanted control.
Every style looked expensive, and every expensive thing on her somehow looked like it had been waiting for her permission to exist.
Domonique knew how to enter a room and make the room correct itself.
For three years, I gave her what a man gives when he thinks effort can become certainty.
Dinners. Trips. Flowers. Bills handled before worry touched her.
Time, even when I was tired. Grace, even when she’d earned correction.
I was faithful because Pops had shown me anything less made a man a thief in his own house.
But faithfulness and trust had never been the same thing between us, and my body must’ve known what my pride kept dressing up as patience.
I never touched Domonique without protection.
Not once.
Not when she rolled her eyes and called me dramatic.
Not when she climbed into my lap with that pretty mouth glossed and persuasive.
Not when she tried to make desire sound like proof and a condom sound like distance.
Even when intimacy moved to her mouth, I kept myself covered.
That might’ve sounded cold to another man.
To me, it was instinct wearing discipline’s clothes.
Some part of me, buried deep beneath love’s effort and a man’s hope, had always kept one hand on the door.
Still, every time I looked at rings, my spirit stepped back.
I’d stand at the jewelry counter with all that glass shining beneath white lights, and something inside me would go still. Not scared. Not confused. Just unwilling. The saleswoman would talk about cuts and clarity, and all I could think was, why does forever feel like I’m forcing a locked door?
Kacey used to laugh when I brought it up.
“You moving slow, bro,” Kacey would say.
“Marriage ain’t a race,” I’d say.
“Nah, but women like to know they chosen,” Kacey would say.
He said it like advice.
I heard later it was competition.
Kacey had always studied what didn’t belong to him.
My truck. My business plans. My house. My discipline.
Domonique’s laugh when I said something low enough for only her to hear.
He clapped for me in public, but his face always arrived late, like support had to pass through envy before it could reach his mouth.
The night I caught them, rain had been tapping the windows hard enough to hide the sound of my truck in the driveway. I’d left a job early because a client’s permit got pushed to the next morning. Domonique thought I was across town. Kacey thought friendship made him invisible.
My key turned in the lock.
The house went too still.
Not peaceful.
Caught.