Not my father.
I pulled my hand out of Mehar’s and walked out. Didn’t say goodbye. Didn’t explain. Just turned and moved through the casino’s dark corridors like a man who couldn’t breathe and needed air more than he needed anything else in the world.
“Quest!” Mehar’s voice behind me. Her heels on the floor. “Quest, stop!”
“Go back inside, Mehar.”
“No.”
“I said go back inside.” I was walking faster now, heading for the exit, heading for the parking lot, heading for anywhere that wasn’t here.
“And I said no.” She caught up to me and grabbed my arm and I spun on her with something in my face that should’ve scared her. It would’ve scared anyone else. It didn’t scare her.
“I want to be alone.”
“I don’t care what you want right now. I’m riding with you.”
“Mehar, I’m not in the mood?—”
“I didn’t ask about your mood. You’re not leaving here alone. Not like this.”
We stared at each other in the dark hallway of the casino, both of us breathing hard, both of us shaking for different reasons. Her eyes were steady and stubborn and full of something I couldn’t name but recognized because it was the same thing I’d felt every time she was in trouble and I showed up without being asked.
I didn’t have the energy to fight her. I didn’t have the energy to fight anything.
“Fine. Let’s go.”
We got in the whip. I pulled out of the parking lot fast enough to make the tires bark against the pavement. Mehar buckled her seatbelt without saying a word and I was grateful for the silence because if she’d tried to comfort me I would’ve shattered and I was not prepared to shatter in front of anyone.
I drove. No destination. Just movement. The city passing by on both sides like a blur of streetlights and buildings that didn’t matter.
Rashid Muhammad was my father. That was my bloodline.
My mind went somewhere it hadn’t been in decades. I was five or six years old. Sitting on my father’s lap behind the wheel of his car, a big black sedan that smelled like leather and hiscologne. Alexander had put a piece of cardboard in my hands and told me it was my driver’s license.
“See that?” he’d said, pointing at the Banks Reserve sign across the street from where we were parked. “One day that’s going to be yours. Everything I’m building will is all going to be yours, Quest. You’re going to run it. And you’re going to be better at it than I ever was.”
I remembered holding that piece of cardboard like it was the most important document in the world. I remembered believing him with every cell in my small body. I remembered thinking that my father was the biggest, strongest, most important man alive and that I was going to grow up to be exactly like him.
Not my father.
Then I remembered the day she told me. I was in my room playing with my action figures when Vivica came in and stood in the doorway. She didn’t sit down. Didn’t kneel to my level. She just looked at me and said “Your father is dead” the same way you’d tell someone the mail arrived.
I started crying. Loud, ugly, child sobs that I couldn’t control because I was a little boy and my daddy was gone and nobody had prepared me for a world where that was possible. Vivica crossed the room and slapped me. Hard. Across the face. I was seven years old.
“Banks men don’t cry,” she’d whispered through clenched teeth. “Stop it. Right now.”
I stopped. I wiped my face and I stopped crying and I didn’t cry again for twenty-six years. Not when Quindon died. Not when Peanut betrayed me. Not when the warehouse burned or the company almost went under or the women in my life proved over and over that trust was a currency I couldn’t afford. I just stopped. Because my mother told me to at my father’s funeral.
Except he wasn’t my father. And she wasn’t just cruel. She was protecting a secret. Every slap, every cold look, everymoment of calculated distance, it wasn’t just Vivica being Vivica. It was a woman looking at her oldest son and seeing the face of the man she’d cheated with. Every time she looked at me, she saw Rashid.
I wanted her dead. Not in prison, not suffering behind bars, dead and gone and erased from the earth the same way she’d tried to erase the truth about who I really was.
Mehar’s hand touched my arm. Gentle. Not demanding. Just there.
I looked down and realized I was going ninety-five on the highway. I eased off the gas and took the next exit and pulled into the parking lot of a gas station and sat there with the engine running and my hands on the wheel and my jaw locked so tight my teeth hurt.
Mehar didn’t say a word. She just sat there with her hand on my arm and let me drive.
