“No, sir,” I said, dropping into the chair across from him.
He stood without comment and I didn’t say anything either. There was no use. My dad had been fixing our plates sometimes since we were little. I looked at the roasted chicken, cabbage, potato salad, and cornbread. These people stayed ready.
“Your mama out back. She been wearing a groove in that deck thinking about this granddaughter she ain’t met yet,” he commented.
My chest tightened. “She mad?” I asked.
“Oh, she hot,” he said easily. “At everybody. At Kyleigh, at you, at me, at the Lord for not CC’ing her on the situation. But she’ll cool down. We’ve both had time to sit with it. Right now, she mostly… excited.”
He said the last part soft, letting me know he was excited, too. He waited till I took a few bites before he really looked at me again. “So, how is she?”
I knew who he meant. Both of them.
“Aziza’s… amazing.” The word felt too small for my little girl. “She smart, mouthy, sweet. Got her own ideas about everything. I don’t even know how to explain it. She just… feels like mine.”
He nodded slowly. “And Kyleigh?”
I blew out a breath, leaned back in the chair. The kitchen light felt too bright all of a sudden. “She’s complicated. Same as she always was. Just richer and more stressed.”
He let me sit in that for a second. “You wanna take this somewhere your mama can’t come in and start preaching?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
We ended up on the back porch, cold air hitting my face, the yard lit up by the soft glow from the house. He eased himself into one of the chairs, joints popping a little. I leaned on the railing, hands shoved in my pockets, staring at the dark outline of the trees.
He let the silence sit a minute before he spoke. “A’ight,” he said. “Tell me what’s really going on in that big hard head.”
I laughed, but it came out more like a choke. “I don’t even know where to start. One second I’m at a tree lot stopping myself from choking a kid, really, barely twenty, probably. Next second, I’m watching my daughter hug on a damn pine like it’s her best friend, thinking about all the times she wanted to do that and couldn’t ’cause I ain’t been there.”
My voice roughened on the last part. I cleared my throat, but it didn’t fix it.
“I missed everything, Pops.” The words were sharp, jagged on the way out, and they hurt like they were. “First steps. First words. First time she fell off a bike. First day of school. All the little stuff that don’t seem like nothing at the time but it’s… it’s everything. I ain’t even know her name. I was out here diving out of planes and kicking in doors for people who don’t give a damn about me, and mychildwas up the road, pressed against a fence talking about lights.”
My hand hit the railing harder than I meant it to. The wood rattled.
He watched me, face calm, eyes not missing a thing. “You mad,” he said.
“Hell yeah, I’m mad,” I snapped. “I’m mad as hell. I think about her being born, and I wasn’t there. I think about Kyleigh insome hospital room by herself, scared out her mind, and I wasn’t there. I think about all the times that little girl asked where her daddy was and got some half answer, and I wasn’t there. And none of it was my choice.”
My voice broke on the last word. I hated it.
“I would’ve come home,” I said, quieter now. “I would’ve done anything for that girl. For both of them. You know that.”
“I do,” he said simply.
I dragged a hand over my face. “And then I look at Kyleigh,” I went on, “and I want to shake her. ’Cause she made a decision that took all that away. She decided for me. For my mama. For you. She decided we wasn’t part of our own blood’s story. That ain’t small, Pops. That ain’t nothing.”
“No, it’s not,” he agreed.
“But then… then I remember exactly how bad that girl got hurt. I remember her looking at me by the amphitheater like some trust in her had broken in half. And I think about an eighteen-year-old, humiliated, pregnant, feeling alone, being told by grown folks with money and degrees what her life ‘supposed’ to look like. You know her dad came to me?”
My pops sat up, gave me a hard look. “Hell you mean he came to you? When you were a kid?” he demanded.
I nodded. “Nineteen. Home for Christmas. Hoping she would be, too. He came to me, told me how she had moved on with her life—Aziza must’ve been three or four months old, and he said that shit. She had moved on with her life, and he and his wife agreed it would be best if I stayed away from her. He told me how happy she was, that she was settling into her university, enjoying life. ‘Mama told me you still be sniffing around behind her,’ he said. He told me if I cared about her, I wouldn’t. Nigga offered me money. I offered to break his face.”
“You didn’t have to deal with that bastard by yourself. Matthew Grindley got a few dollars and got beside his fucking self. Why you didn’t tell me?” he fussed.
I shook my head. “I believed him. She had blocked me. Refused to entertain me anywhere or anyway. So, I believe him. And she was laid up with my baby. If he would do that, can you imagine the pressure on her? They wanted her to go Ivy League, have some big career. I can imagine how they felt, how they treated her when she popped up pregnant. Ain’t no telling what they were telling her. I know that. I know it was hard for her.”
