Nuri glanced at me with the cutest expression. “I don’t know if I can come up off that one, Jah. Your brother is one of a kind. That’s some steep competition.”
He playfully cupped his heart and hunched over. “Damn, you know how to break a nigga heart. It’s cool though. Just call me when he gettin’ on your nerves. I don’t mind being a side nigga.”
I reached up and put him in a headlock. My brother clearly had a crush on my wife, and I couldn’t blame him. What was there not to like about Nuri Symone? She lit up any room she walked into and left rays of her light to filter the room once she was gone. Little did he know I wasn’t coming up off her ass either. The girls chuckled and kept walking ahead of us.
“Mine,” I warned him in a low tone. I didn’t need to say anything more than that.
“Okay, okay, damn.” Jah couldn’t stop laughing.
I released him and shook my head. His eyes trailed up the street to where the girls were walking onto the community center lawns, steadily yapping, forgetting all about us.
“She’s good for you, bro. I’m happy for you and would never step on your toes like that.”
Jah walked over to dap me up. I hugged him and offered one last threat so that he knew how serious I was about my Legacy baby. “Good, or I’ma have to steponyou.” He knew exactly what I meant.
He held his hands up in surrender. “It’s like that?”
“About that one? Anybody could get it.”
He whistled. “If I didn’t know any better, I would think you’re falling in love with your fake wife.”
I gave him double middle fingers. “Mind your business, nigga.” I bumped into him as I booked it the rest of the way to the community center.
Thankfully, Jah dropped the subject because I didn’t want to talk about my feelings. I wasn’t even sure what they were, apart from the truth that hearing him flirt with Nuri burned me up inside. The shit was like poison to my ears, blurred my vision, and had me ready to put hands on my blood brother.
“Where the fuck are Man Man and Nazje?” I questioned Jah about my other two siblings. We typically all attended shit like this.
He shrugged. “I’on know. Probably in some pussy, and Je is in her bedroom, knocked the fuck out. She was out late last night and came stumbling in with the sun.”
I grunted before pulling out my phone and shooting my brother a text. As I adjusted to life with Nuri, I wasn’t around as much, which meant I couldn’t keep tabs on my siblings. When we were living together, I always knew what they had going on. Living at the estate had me on the outside looking in, and I didn’t like the shit.
I made a mental note to see what was up with Je when we got back to the big house. Her ass had better be on top of her schoolwork while she was out getting drunk. I knew my sister was twenty-one, which was technically grown at the end of the day, but I would never stop being her big brother and looking out for her. If she wasn’t good, then neither was I.
We walked onto the lawn to see bubbles floating in the wind, children chasing each other around while laughing, and bounce houses in the distance. There was a cloud of smoke coming from the grill filled with burgers and hot dogs. Various tables were set up with different vendors selling things.
I could say when it came to community events in The Dutch, everybody came out to support. We didn’t have much around these parts, but we had each other. All of us played our part, too, from the business owners to the drug dealers, residents of Prosper Ave, and everyone in between. We showed up for the children because we understood they were the future and deserved a chance at a better quality of life than the slums they were born into.
The east side of Solaire consisted of a few hoods. You had Marlowe Heights, or The Heights, which was a large communityof single-family homes. Then there were the project apartments called Baldwin Terrace, Winslow Place, Greenbrier, and The Dutch, where I was raised.
Of course, there was the infamous Prosper Ave that stretched from one end of the east side to the other. The name started as a joke, but over time, it became gospel around these parts. Living on Prosper Ave was equivalent to buying a Lamborghini truck. We call it Prosper Ave, not because you had money to live there or because it held the best houses the east side had to offer. We called it that because we were still standing after everything we’d been through.
The block was first purchased by an old hustler named Dolla. He was the first person to ever believe in this community and tried to pour back into where he was from. It started small with a corner store, then a house here and a house there, before a thriving community sprouted up right in the middle of chaos. Seeing everyone out today made me feel good. We were still fighting our fight, and that was all that mattered.
I walked over to where I saw Nuri standing behind a table. “What are you doing, wifey?”
She looked up at me in shock. She was too busy organizing books on the table to notice I’d walked up. “I volunteered to help pass out these free books to the kids.”
Nuri wasn’t even over here for ten minutes and had already found a way for her to help. It was a real testament to her nature. I was so in awe that all I could do was walk around the table to assist her.
We had a good time talking with the kids who came by. I could see Nuri’s love for her work even in volunteering. There were a few mothers who came by whom she spoke with, offering advice or her free massages. She went above and beyond for a little boy who was being fussy with his mother. I watched her rock him to sleep while humming ”Ready for Love” by IndiaArie. She was so magnetic when she was in her element that my eyes tracked her every movement.
Once all the books were gone, we held hands while walking near the stage set up for the poetry contest. Children of all ages got up there to offer original work or recite well-known pieces of poetry. I could tell Nuri was thoroughly enjoying the performances by the smile on her face. She looked like a proud mother and didn’t know any of the children who performed. This woman was a force to be reckoned with, and I found myself feeling lucky every time I saw the sunlight reflecting off her wedding ring. I noticed Jiah waving at me in the distance. She was near the stage, so I figured that meant it was my turn to go.
“Come on.” I pulled Nuri along with me as we walked along the edge of the crowd.
Everyone started to surge forward when they spotted me heading to the front. Jah, Lazer, and Burg fell in step with us on security because sometimes the crowd got too rowdy trying to get to me. Suddenly, there was a massive crowd at the front before I could even make it up there.
I smiled as I got the microphone from my sister. “Rock out, Kai,” she encouraged.
