“Good.” I tucked the gun back in my waistband and looked at Prime and Justice. “We’re staying tonight.”
Justice nodded. Prime was already moving furniture to clear sight lines from the front door. We were setting up an ambush in a nursery-in-progress surrounded by shopping bags and onesies and a car seat still in the box.
I sat in the living room and waited. Somewhere in Virginia, my baby sister was tied to a bed in a motel room, pregnant and alone and drugged. And the man who put her there was driving back to this condo tomorrow morning thinking he was going to build a crib.
He was going to build something alright. But it wasn’t going to be furniture.
27
Mehar
After the men left, Zainab and I cooked for everyone. We stuffed salmon with crab meat, pan-seared some broccolini and made garlicky mash potatoes. Cooking helped us get our minds off of Serenity for a bit while those brothers made sure they brought her home.
It felt good to be amongst them because I’d been running around so much the last few months that I hadn’t had a chance to really connect with my sister or the rest of the family.
We all sat around the table and ate. Justice’s girls, Zainab and her babies, Yusef, and Grandma Rita. And I felt a bit more at home. Shortly after dinner, we all dispersed into different pockets of Rita’s vast abode. Yusef and I stuck together.
“I started writing my own music,” Yusef announced proudly as we sat at Rita’s kitchen table doing homework.
“What genre?” I asked.
“Oh, he writes a little bit of everything. Jazz, classical, R&B,” Rita chimed in from her chair in the living room. That woman had the ears of a bat. She wasn’t even in the room and she heard every word.
“Sometimes Prime joins in on his guitar,” Yusef added.
“I forgot Prime plays the guitar,” I laughed.
“It’s easy to do with all his otheractivities,” she said from around the corner.
I laughed and looked across the table at my nephew. He was thirteen now, all elbows and concentration, hunched over a geometry worksheet. He looked more like Zahara and Zainab every year. Same eyes and smile. Sometimes when he laughed, I had to look away because the resemblance hurt.
“I’m proud of you, Yu. You’re doing amazing.” I reached across and squeezed his hand. “I gotta come around more.”
“Yeah, I miss you a lot. I know you’ve been busy with school.”
“That’s no excuse. I’ll be at your next recital. Front row.”
A smile stretched across his face and then dropped just as quick. He looked down at his worksheet and pushed his pencil around without writing anything.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Is Serenity gonna be okay?”
The question caught me in the chest because I didn’t know the answer. But I needed to comfort him.
“Yes, she is,” I said anyway. Because what else do you tell a kid? “You know those guys. They will do anything for family. They’re going to find her and bring her home.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He nodded and went back to his geometry and I went back to pretending to study for my exam on chemical peels. Neither one of us was actually doing the work. We were both just waiting for someone to come through the door with news.
Rita came into the kitchen and sat at the table with us.
“Yu, baby, go. I want to talk to your auntie.”
Now, it was just me and Rita in the room. Storie and Dream were downstairs watching television. My sister had taken the twins upstairs for a nap. With how much she had to run aroundto keep up with them, it wouldn’t surprise me if she was sleeping too.
