“Yes, I have,” I counter, placing the basket on the table beside the grill.
“I’ve never seen you.”
“I come up late at night when you’re sleeping.”
“What do you do here?”
I point in the corner to the plants.
“Are those marijuana plants?”
“Yeah. This is my chill spot.”
My rooftop deck has patio furniture, an outdoor kitchen area, complete with a grill and refrigerator, and an outdoor herb and vegetable garden.
I reach inside the cabinet of the grill and remove the pans that I need along with some foil, a cutting board, and some cutlery. I take it to the table on the other side of the roof and set everything out.
“You’ve got everything up here,” she proclaims as she fingers a pepper that’s still on the vine.
I grab a pepper and an onion before I also pluck some basil and thyme from their pots.
“You wanna chop the veggies while I season the meat, corn, and potatoes?”
“Yeah,” she replies, smiling and taking the knife that I hand her.
I watch as she sets the herbs and vegetables on the chopping board and sets to work.
“There was a time when I imagined you and me just like this,” she happily confesses.
“Yeah?”
“Mm-hmm. I used to think about us cooking dinner together in the evenings after work.”
“Humph.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I guess I used to think about a lot of things we would do together too. Still having a hard time accepting that we lost all these years because of a misunderstanding.”
She smiles shyly back at me. “Yeah, but we’re here now.”
I bob my head, but I go silent.
“Do you think we would still be together if things hadn’t gone the way they had?” I ask.
“I would like to think so. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know, Charisma. My daddy used to say that shit happened the way it was supposed to. That’s how I was able to accept his murder.”
“I know he was killed when you were sixteen. That’s the year that I was battling my mama’s boyfriends, but you never told me what went down. I only knew that he was shot, and you were there. Is that still hard for you to talk about after all this time?”
I sigh. “I don’t know, really. I haven’t talked about it in so long.”
“You can always talk to me. I mean, if you feel like it. One day, CJ will want to know the story.”
She’s got a point, and if I could ever talk to anyone, it was always Charisma. I only told my mother and sister the story because they deserved to know, but I hadn’t shared it with anyone else.
“You remember how I used to be in the streets with my old man all the time?”
