“I will definitely choose awkward over dead,” Thomas said, “pretty much every single time.”
“That’s becauseyouare mentally healthy,” she informed him. “Not everyone is.” She cleared her throat. “So. About that night. Alan and Mia weren’t home, so I called you, and you showed up like a superhero, in full medic-mode.” She corrected herself, and he didn’t need to see her face to know she was rolling her eyes. “Hospitalcorpsman-mode. Why does the Navy have to insist on being different? Not only is a Navy captain a higher rank than a captain in every other branch of the service, butheloinstead ofchopper...? It’s annoying.”
“See now,Ithink it’s everyone else who’s wrong,” Thomas said.
“Spoken like a true naval officer,” she said. “But, you know—and here’s my point of this lovely trip into the way-back machine—it wasthatnight—massively bleeding head wound night—that I knew you were going to become a hospital corpsman.”
“Really.” Thomas laughed. “Because, back then,Icertainly didn’t know it.”
“It just... Well, it made sense to me,” she told him, finally done with her nursing assignment, and wiping her hands on one of the extra napkins she’d brought from the kitchen. She moved to sit down on the sofa, on the other side of the L from him. Close but not too close. “I mean, I knew you wanted to be a SEAL like Uncle Alan, but I think, back then, I didn’t want to imagine you doing the really dangerous stuff. Plus, I couldn’t imagine you killing anyone, but Icouldimagine yousavingthem, so... I jumped all over that. Ofcourseyou were going to be a corpsman. Problem solved.”
“Corpsmen on the Teams don’tnottake out targets,” he reminded her. “First and foremost, I’m a SEAL.”
“Yeah, I know, but shhh, I don’treallywant to know.” Tasha reached for the thick, white fleece blanket that she’d found in the bedroom closet. Wrapping it around herself, she made a loose loop to go over her head like a hood that she held closed at her neck. “And I certainly didn’t know that back then, so...”
He laughed again, thinking back. “I do remember you saying things like,when you’re a medicand I taught you it wascorpsman,so then you started sayingthatall the time. And it’s funny—I don’t exactly know the timeline, but I remember checking into it, to find out if I was qualified to be a corpsman and how much extra school I’d need. I remember Grandma saying,Why on earth would you want to do all that extra work? Isn’t it hard enough for you, trying to get into that private club?”
Even today, the SEAL Teams were overwhelmingly white. Out of around three thousand active duty SEALs, fewer than two percent were Black men like Thomas.
Tasha grinned at his imitation of his grandmother. “I can hear her saying that. God, I miss her so much.”
“Yeah, I do, too,” Thomas said.
“Do you remember introducing her to me?” she asked him, tucking her feet up under her blanket.
Thomas squinted, trying to remember. It had to have been shortly after he’d first met Tash, when she was mostly freckles and a huge cloud of red hair. “I really don’t,” he admitted.
“Oh, my God,” she said, helping herself to more peanuts from the second jar they’d opened. “You were so intense about it, likeI think it’s very important that you meet my grandmother,so I insisted on wearing my very best dress.”
“Let me guess, it was pink. To match the famous settee.”
“Well, obviously,” she said. “I remember following you into your apartment, and we had to take off our shoes, and... everything was just so beautiful.”
Thomas had learned from an early age to take his shoes off at the front door because his grandmother’s religion included a belief that “clean enough to eat off the floor” was not just an expression. She also had a strict doctrine that everything belonged in its place; that organization created efficiency—which allowed more time for creative endeavors. “Grandma ran a very tight ship.”
“She was in the kitchen,” Tash continued. “Somehow cooking something that smelled delicious, while every counter—and the sink—was impossibly clean.”
“Clean while you cook, Natasha!” Thomas still followedthatrule because Grandma had been right. The efficiency gave him more time to put his feet up and read a good book. Gram had usedherspare time to get a law degree, and then pass the bar.
Tash grinned. “I still hear her saying that, every time I’m in a kitchen. And Ialwaysregret it when I don’t listen.”
“She was the smartest person I ever met,” Thomas said.
“Which is why you brought me there,” Tasha said. “To meet her. I remember you introducing us, and it felt so formal.Grandma, this is Natasha Francisco. She’s Ms. Summerton’s new neighbor, the girl I told you about? Tasha, this is my grandmother, Mrs. King. You know, for years, I thought queens were addressed as Mrs. King. It made sense at the time.”
Thomas laughed. “Don’t make that mistake with Ted’s mom.”
“Yeah, believe me, I won’t,” she said. “But what was I, six...? Five...? And already brainwashed by the patriarchy into thinking that a queen should be addressed by her husband’s name. I mean, sort of, right?”
“Maybe that came from playing chess. If you lose the king, you lose the game.” When Tash had come to live with her uncle, Alan had had little-to-no experience with young children, and had taught her games like chess and all kinds of weird varieties of poker. Being Tasha, however, she ate it up. She could still rule the poker table at a game of Night Baseball in the Rain.
“In chess, the queen kicks ass to protect the incredibly fragile and impotent king,” she countered. “Chess was the beginning of my feminist enlightenment.”
“Chess and proximity to Mia,” Thomas said.
“Andyour grandmother,” Tasha told him. “You know, I’m pretty sure you introduced me to her so I’d have a safe place to run, if things went south with Uncle Alan.”
“I didn’t know him very well back then,” he said. “And you just seemed so vulnerable. I mean, you were definitely a tough little kid, but...”
