It took a minute but I got there.
I found her page tucked behind his tagged photos and when it pulled up I leaned back in my seat and just looked at it.
Scrolled slow.
And then I stopped scrolling.
She had a whole fiancé. Smiling in pictures together, tagged locations, the kind of page that told a story she was clearly comfortable with. Dogs in the yard. What looked like a house with awhite picket fence. A whole life she had built and was apparently proud enough of it to post.
I stared at the screen for a long moment.
So she had come out last night, recognized me, sent over a drink, crawled across that bar like we were the only two people in the room, put her hands and her mouth all over me, stayed up half the night talking like old times, and then slipped out before sunrise to go home to some nigga who thought he was about to marry her.
I set my phone face down on the passenger seat and started the car. I had to ball my fist, and un-ball them several times to calm down. This muthafucka didn’t think to tell me she was engaged. She just fucked me like that and thought it was the end?
That wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t know how I was going to make that make sense yet but I knew it wasn’t happening. She wasn’t about to disappear on me again. Not after last night. Notafter everything that one night had pulled up out of me that I thought I’d buried a long time ago.
I pulled out of the lot and drove, letting the morning settle around me while I waited on my investigator to call back. The lame looking ass nigga wasn’t about to live happily ever after with my bitch. I don’t give a damn what history or how many years they had. I was back now, and whether she knew it or not, she was mine. Especially after what happened last night. Call me tender, but I really don’t give a fuck.
—
Before heading home, I needed to pay a visit to Dom’s grandma. Ms. Erma nursing home was about twenty minutes from the hotel.
I stopped at a florist first and grabbed roses, then hit a KFC drive through and ordered enough food for both of us. It had become a routine over the past few months without me ever consciously deciding to make it one. The lady literally had nobody left, and the time that I snatched her, I’d grown to like her old, mean ass. So, I just kept showing up and she kept being there, and somewhere in between it had become the one part of my week that felt uncomplicated.
Drez and Dom had to die. That wasn’t something I lost sleep over. They had made choices that put them in the path of consequences and the consequences came. But their grandmother hadn’t made any wrong choices. She was just an old woman with dementia sitting in a nursing home who had already outlived everybody she loved, and none of what happened to her family had anything to do with her.
I had paid the nurses to add my alias name to her visitor list months ago. Added me as a grandson so I could come and go without questions. Deuce didn’t know about any of this and I intended to keep it that way. Not because I thought he’d interfere but because I knew the look he’d give me and I didn’t feel like explaining myself. I was a killer, true. I knew what I was. But I had always had a line that I’d never cross, and old people and children lived on the other side of it and that had never changed.
I pulled into the lot just before lunch, signed in at the front desk with my alias, and headed down the hall. One of the nurses I had paid to set up Dom, she looked up when I passed her station and the look she gave me wasn’t friendly. I didn’t acknowledge it. Her opinion of me wasn’t something I had any interest in. She had taken the money when it was offered and whatever guilt she was sitting with behind it, that wasn’t my problem.
I knocked on the door frame before I walked in.
Ms. Erma was sitting in her chair by the window, a thin blanket across her lap, eyes on the television but not really watching it. When she heard me come in the room, her face opened up like a window being pushed open on the first warm day of the year.
“There he is,” she said.
“Hey Grandma.” I pulled the folding table from against the wall and set it up in front of her, then pulled a chair up close. I set the roses on the table where she could see them and started unpacking the food between us. “Brought your favorite, pretty girl.” I smiled. I never had a grandma, and she gave me a feeling that I needed. She was a cool ass lady, just dealt a bad hand in life.
She looked at the KFC bag and shook her head slowly like I had done something extraordinary. “You spoil me.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
We ate together. She talked, and I listened, which was mostly how it went. Her mind moved in and out the way it always did. For a stretch she was back in her childhood somewhere in rural Louisiana, talking about her mother like the woman was still alive and she’d just seen her that morning. Talked about picking okra, about a dress she wanted for Easter one year, about a boy at her school she didn’t like. I sat there eating my chicken and nodding and asking the right questions to keep her going because she was peaceful when she talked about those times and I wasn’t going to interrupt that. Watching her go back into a child like mind space was hard, but I was understanding now that it was a part of life.
Then somewhere in the middle of a sentence about her mother’s cooking, she stopped.
Just stopped talking and looked at me.
Her eyes were different. Clearer. The kind of clear that only came sometimes and you couldn’t predict when.
“When are you going to tell me who you really are?” she asked, clear as day.
I kept my face even. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.” She looked at me steady, no confusion in it. “I know you’re not my grandson. I remember. I remember when you took me away from here that one time.” She said it without alarm, without accusation. Just fact. “You’ve always been kind to me. You bring me food and my nightgowns and you sit with me, and you never been ugly to me not one time.” Shefolded her hands in her lap. “But I want to know the truth. Who are you really? And what do you want from me. People ain’t just nice for nothing.”
I sat there for a moment and looked at this old woman who had lost everything, her sons, her grandson, her mind half the time, and was still sitting here asking me for honesty with more dignity than most people half her age could pull together.
