Part?I had to take a minute, press a hand against my throat where it ached with unshed tears.
“I don’t like any of this. Go ahead. Get it over with,” I gritted eventually.
He looked at our sleeping child again, and something flashed in his eyes I couldn’t name.
“The way you feel about Christmas—I think it’s unfair. You hate this time of year so bad, you shut the whole town out. You shut her out. She sitting up here with a mini tree in her room talking through a damn fence about how she wishes she could see more Christmas lights. That’s not right.”
Anger flared inside me, making my head snap back, my eyes tangling with his. “Aziza is a well-adjusted, happy child. You don’t get to tell me anything about my baby from something you heard in the streets of a town I couldn’t care less about. Something’s wrong with me because I don’t wanna take part in all that gaudy, loud, over-the-top shit they do every year supposedly in the name of Christmas? Please!” I spat. “I don’t care?—”
“Nah,Idon’t care, shorty. I don’t care bout none of that shit you saying. Her feelings trump yours with me, especially when you sitting up here cold and mean. You don’t care about Christmas being commercialized, Kyleigh. That’s an excuse for what really bothers you about this time of year. But you almost thirty and rich, like you pointed out. You know ways to deal with your feelings. You can go to therapy and cuss people out in a journal. She nine. She should not be the collateral damage for what happened to you ten years ago.”
My eyes stung. I blinked hard. “Could we get back on track, please?” I asked.
He nodded. “You want to avoid Zahara waging a war on your ass? Fine. Then we do two things, to start.”
He held up a finger. “One. You let the town decorate them damn pine trees again. Give ‘em full access, like Mrs. Amanda did. Lights, ornaments, the whole thing. We put safetymeasures, waivers, whatever make you feel better. But that hill lighting up is part of this town’s heartbeat at Christmas. It means a lot to people. You can’t take that. And I think our daughter would love seeing it.”
“Absolutely not,” I snapped, too loud. Aziza moved beside me. We both froze until she settled again. My next words came out in a whisper. “Those trees aremine.”
“And that girl isours. You want her to grow up in a house everybody side-eyes ’cause her mama too bitter to let people hang lights? You want people mad at her, treating her like an outsider? Bad enough you got her isolated up here on this hill.”
I flinched. He saw it, probably counted it a victory. He knew, more than anyone, how much I had hated being treated like I didn’t belong. To imply that I would cause that for my baby?—
“And two,” he went on, holding up another finger. “You agree to three Christmas things with me and her. Together. Non-negotiable.”
I shook my head immediately. “No.No. We not a family. We willneverbe a family, and I refuse to give my baby the wrong impression?—”
“We areherfamily. She deserves to see her parents in the same space doing normal stuff, at least sometimes. She not about to feel uncomfortable or like she gotta choose.”
I knew he had a point, even if I hated to admit it. “What kind of ‘stuff’?” I asked begrudgingly.
“Put a real tree downstairs. Not that little thing in her room. A big one. In that empty foyer where Mrs. Amanda always had one. We could decorate it together.”
My chest tightened. I knew he’d said he didn’t care about my feelings, but my God, did he have to make it so clear? A tree was a symbol of everything I’d worked to forget or avoid over the last ten years. Seeing one every day in my living space… “No.”
“Also, you come to the cocoa walk with us. Not hiding behind your fence and your frosted glass windows. You put on a coat and walk down that hill with our baby and let her see her town at night,” he said, ignoring my previous reply.
I swallowed hard. Said nothing. He continued.
“You pick the last one. I’on care what it is, but it’s got to be Christmas-themed, and it’s got to be all three of us. You, me, Aziza. No martial arts nanny or stiff ass butler running interference.”
Jabali stopped, looked at me. He looked content with himself and his ridiculous ass plan. Anger surged inside me to meet the fear.
“You trying to blackmail me with Christmas?” I hissed. “You really gone sit here in my bedroom and tell me I got to do holiday activities with you or you gon’ unleash your lawyer sister on me?”
He chuckled. “Oh, she already unleashed after ya little performance earlier. I’m telling you the terms to rein her back in. I’m telling you the terms to keep me from being your nightmare. Be a shame if you had those. You look so pretty when you asleep, Ky,” he said.
I wasn’t touching that at all. “This Christmas thing… it’s not even that serious. Why does it matter if I don’t want to participate? What are you even doing, Jabali?”
Frustration laced my tone, and I was a minute away from losing the battle with these tears.
“I’m making sure my daughter don’t grow up thinking she got to lock herself in a tower away from the people she comes from because her mother chooses to. I’m making sure she knows there’s no guilt in finding joy where she can in this fucked up world, even if it’s in a string of lights around an old pine tree.”
His words tap-danced on my insecurities, triggered the kind of parental guilt that sometimes kept me up at night. “You make it sound like I’m hurting her. She’s happy. She’s safe?—”
“She’s limited. Her world should be broader. From what I hear, she wants it to be.”
My heart ached, felt like it was being carved from me and torn. I blinked and shook my head.
