“I came to see my mama, boy. What you doing here?” He said it with bugged-out eyes and a grin that was half charm and half desperation. That was Calvin—even strung out, he had personality. The Banks charisma didn’t care about crack; it just kept running on fumes.
We hugged. He smelled like cigarettes and outside and something sour underneath it all that I didn’t want to identify.
It was crazy because he used to be the man. When my father died he sort of fell apart and started hittin’ the pipe. Grandma Rita, tried to mold him into the one to take over the company, but he didn’t have the heart for it. He ended up taking out a bunch loans and ran that shit in the ground. I eventually cleaned it all up.
His addiction killed his relationship with his kids and his wife. And I’m sure it helped mold Thaddeus into what he became. I had love for my cousin, but I wasn’t gettin’ in the way of those girls’ revenge. If Zahara was my sister I would’ve donethe same thing. Well, I would’ve put a bullet in his head. Not hold him captive like some 1980s serial killer. Crazy-ass.
“MAMA!” he called out, arms wide, shuffling past me into the foyer.
Rita looked at her youngest son with an expression I’d seen a thousand times, love and heartbreak braided together so tight you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other started. She pulled him into a hug and held him for a long time, longer than she’d held me, and I looked away because watching Rita love Calvin was one of the saddest things in the world.
“Boy, how much you need?” she asked, still holding him.
“Just two hundred, Mama. That’s all.”
She let him go and walked to the kitchen. I heard the drawer open where she kept cash—the same drawer where she kept the birthday cards, the old photos, and a .38 revolver that she thought nobody knew about.
“Where you staying at, Unc?” I asked while she was gone.
“Off Kenilworth Ave. I got a spot.”
“In the abandoned apartments?”
“Yeah, but I’m aight though. I’m a hustla. Old school hustla.” He said it with pride, tapping his chest, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was nothing old school about sleeping in a building with no running water. But Calvin had always narrated his own life like he was the hero of it, and maybe that delusion was the only thing keeping him upright.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
Rita came back with the cash and pressed it into his hand. Calvin pocketed it fast and then his face changed—the grin faded and something more serious crept in behind the glassy blue eyes.
He shared her light skin and had light eyes, just like our pops, just like Prime and Cannon.
“You seen my boy?” he asked. “I ain’t heard from Thad in months. He ain’t called, ain’t come by. That ain’t like him. Iknow we have our issues, but I at least hear from him once a month”
My chest tightened, but my face didn’t move because I’d been lying about Thad for six months and the muscle memory was automatic by now.
“Nah, you know how Thad is. He goes ghost sometimes. Probably caught up in something.”
Calvin studied me for a second, then nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, you probably right. That boy always was hard to pin down.” He sniffed hard and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Tell him to call his daddy if you see him. Aight?”
“I will, Unc.”
He hugged Rita again, hugged me, and shuffled back out the front door. We watched him walk down the driveway and disappear around the corner, and the house felt heavier after he left the way it always did.
Rita closed the door and stood there with her hand on the knob for a moment. Then she turned to me with an expression that had nothing to do with Calvin’s addiction and everything to do with what I’d just said.
“Where is Thad?” she asked.
“I told you, I don’t?—”
“Boy, don’t lie to me.” Her voice dropped into that register that had been making grown men confess since the 1960s. “I can smell a lie the way I can smell rain coming. Where is Thaddeus?”
I rubbed my jaw. Looked at the floor. Looked at the ceiling. Looked everywhere except at my grandmother because the truth was ugly and she was going to have an opinion about it and I wasn’t ready for either.
“Grandma.”
“What did he do?”
I exhaled. “He killed Mehar and Zainab’s sister. Zahara. Raped a girl. Cheated on Mehar, had a whole double life with Kacey and the kids.”
