“Who that for? You already found you a little Emancipation boo?” he asked, smirking.
“Something like that.”
I didn’t owe him explanations, and I had neither the time nor the inclination.
He leaned against a cart, rubbing the salt on his fingers like he was getting ready to say something slick. “You know who back on that hill, right?The Grindleyherself. I know you seen that big-ass house dark as hell like it’s Halloween instead of Christmas.”
“Yeah. I’m aware.”
He laughed. “Man, people still mad about that. She really came back from Houston and stole Christmas. Talking about ‘liability’ and ‘my property.’ Like she wasn’t running up and down that hill when Mrs. Amanda had it open for everybody. Now, she acting like she too good for the rest of us.”
He said it like a joke, but there was that mean edge under it. It was the same one he’d used in high school when he thought nobody would check him.
I always checked him.
“Deon. Watch your mouth.”
“Here we go,” he sneered. “What, you still on Ms. H-Town’s side after all this time? She the one shut the gate. You know how many folks still mad we can’t take pictures up there? Just cause she mad that people laughed at her weird ass.”
“Say that again.” My voice was low, calm.
My temper was not.
He blinked. “What?”
“Call her that again. Call her weird. Talk about her like she ruined your life because you can’t hang some dollar store ornaments on trees you don’t own. Go ‘head.”
He frowned, confused by how fast the mood changed. “Man, calm down. I’m just saying?—”
I moved before he finished. My hand fisted in the front of his jacket, and I slammed him into the endcap of canned yams. Not enough to make a full scene, but enough to get his attention. A couple of cans fell. One older lady down the aisle looked up, then decided she didn’t see anything.
Deon’s eyes went wide. “Hey, chill, bruh?—”
“No. You chill,” I said quietly. Then, I leaned in close enough that he could feel every word I was going to speak next. “You don’t get to talk about her. Not like that. Not in front of me. You was one of the main ones running your mouth back then. Causing the shit on that stage. You remember that?”
He swallowed. “We was kids. We all laughed,” he muttered.
“I didn’t.Shedidn’t. And let me be real clear, since we grown now. She’s not your little town joke anymore. She wasn’t then, either, but y’all didn’t see it. You see her now with money and land and a closed gate, and y’all mad. That’s cool. Y’all can be mad. But if I hear you or anybody else talking sideways about her where I can hear it, we gon’ have a different kind of problem.”
I tightened my grip once, shook the fuck out of him, then let him go. He stayed pinned to the shelf anyway, rubbing his chest as he stared at me.
“You act like she didn’t shut you out too,” he whined.
There it was. A little flash of that old petty Deon. I smiled. It wasn’t a nice one.
“Nothing about us is your business. Just remember that.”
I didn’t raise my voice, didn’t change my face. But he got it.
“Damn. You in your feelings,” he finally mumbled.
“Yeah, I am. And now you know where they at.”
I turned, walked to the registers, and let the cashier ring up the bouquets. My mind was racing, but not from dealing with Deon’s ass. Taniyah’s words rang in my head.She couldn’t hate you so much if she didn’t love you so much.
If I was willing to put Deon through a shelf over her name ten years later, maybe I needed to admit something on my end too. Instead, I grabbed the flowers, nodded at the cashier, and headed out. The drive to the hill felt different with the bouquets on the passenger seat. The line where the town lights stopped and the hill started looked less like some wall I’d never climb. I was scaling that mothafucka starting today. At the gate, I hit the intercom.
“Grindley residence,” Mr. Benton’s voice came through, formal as ever.
