Quest:Just be there at 4.
Oh God. Something was wrong with Grandma. She was eighty-four years old and nearly blind and I’d just been sitting in a prison telling my mother about her birthday party like it was guaranteed to happen. What if she’d fallen? What if her heart gave out? What if this was the call every grandchild dreaded getting?
I pressed the gas harder and started driving toward Rita’s with my hands shaking on the steering wheel and my eyes blurring with tears I hadn’t given permission to fall.
Please God, not Grandma. Not yet. We still needed her. I still needed her.
29
QUEST
I got to Rita’s early because I needed a minute before my brothers showed up. Sat at the kitchen table with a glass of water and my thoughts and let my mind drift to a place it hadn’t been in a long time.
I went to Peanut’s bathroom. My old apartment on Georgia Ave. I was twenty-four and she was sitting on the counter with a pregnancy test in both hands and a smile so wide it changed the geometry of her whole face. I remember standing in the doorway with my heart going so fast I thought I was having a cardiac event because this woman—this beautiful, brilliant woman who I would’ve set the whole city on fire for—was telling me I was going to be a father.
She was only 19, and was my best friend’s lil sister. I’d grown up with her and thought of her as a lil sis until she blossomed. Mehki and Zephyr didn’t approve of us, naturally. We even came to blows. And I whooped Mehki’s ass because she was that important to me. I wanted her. I loved her. She was my first love.
I grabbed her off that counter and spun her around and she laughed into my neck and I remember thinking that this was it. This was the thing that was going to make all the othershit make sense. The company, the debt, the transport, the darkness I’d been wading through since I was eighteen—none of it mattered because I was about to be somebody’s dad. I was going to do it right. I was going to be everything my father didn’t get a chance to be.
I named him before he was born. Quindon. Quindon Banks. I had the nursery painted before Peanut was even showing. Blue walls, white crib, a rocking chair I bought from an antique shop in Georgetown because I wanted my son to have things that were built to last.
And then?—
“Yo, you good?”
Prime’s voice yanked me out of it. He was standing in the kitchen doorway with Justice behind him, both of them looking at me with that expression brothers give you when they catch you somewhere you don’t usually go.
“Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat. “Just thinking.”
“About what?” Justice asked. “Nigga, you were staring at that glass of water like it you were trying to make it levitate.”
“Nothing. Sit down. We got business to handle before Serenity gets here.”
They sat. But Prime was still looking at me sideways, doing that thing he does where he reads you without saying anything and waits for you to crack. I didn’t crack.
“Something’s different about you,” Prime said. Not a question.
“Different how?”
“I don’t know. You seem… lighter. Less like you’re carrying the world and more like you’re carrying a secret.” He leaned back in his chair. “You got a new girl.”
“I don’t got a new girl.”
“You lying.” Justice was grinning now.
“Both y’all need to mind your?—”
“It’s Mehar.” Rita’s voice came from the hallway. She shuffled into the kitchen with her cane in one hand and her tea in the other, nearly blind but able to see through every single person in her family with surgical precision. “He took her roller skating and he’s been grinning at his phone ever since. He told me himself.”
“Grandma.” I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Don’t Grandma me. I’m eighty-four years old and I’ve earned the right to put you on blast in your own kitchen.” She settled into her chair at the head of the table. “Besides, it’s good news. First good news out of this boy’s mouth in fourteen years.”
Prime looked at me. Really looked at me. And his expression shifted from amusement to something more serious. “Mehar?”
“Yeah.”
“Bro, don’t break her heart. I mean that. That girl has been through more than most people survive. She’s family to me through Zainab, and if you hurt her?—”
