“Anything, nigga!” Saint snapped.
I laughed once, dry and humorless, because that was easy for him to say. Like there was some easy way to fix this, like there was some good way to tell a woman you never wanted this and still not crush her.
I looked around the room one more time and felt cornered from every side. So, I walked out. I didn’t know what to say to Ava. But standing there with all of them looking at me like I had just failed some test of manhood was making my trigger finger itch. And because no matter how much I wanted to stay mad,some lower, scarier feeling kept dragging me toward the hallway anyway.
As I headed toward Aria’s wing, all I could think was that I had never wanted to be in the kind of position where a child could look at me and feel let down.
That had always been the point. I never wanted to be the man a kid waited by the window for. I never wanted to be the voice they listened for and never heard. I never wanted to be the reason a child learned disappointment too young. Because I knew exactly what that shit felt like.
And the second that thought hit, my mind went somewhere I hated. Back to being small enough to still believe my mother was coming back for me.
A LONG TIME AGO
TARIQ “REEK” HORTON
I was eight the first time I understood what it felt like to be abandoned.
“Ma, I don’t wanna stay here.”
My voice sounded too small even to me, swallowed up by the stink coming off my grandparents’ porch. The house smelled like old grease, bleach, cigarettes, and something rotten that never really went away. The wood beneath my sneakers was soft in places. The screen door hung crooked. I had one trash bag in my hand with my clothes stuffed in it and a knot in my stomach that kept getting worse the longer we stood there.
My mother didn’t even look at me when I said it. She was digging in her purse for something, irritated already, like me speaking had just made the day harder.
“You don’t have a choice,” she muttered.
I looked up at her. “I don’t wanna live with them.”
She finally looked down then, but not the way a mother should look at her son when he’s scared. It was quick, dismissive, and like I was asking for too much from somebody who didn’t have anything to give.
“We got evicted, Reek. You think I care about what you want right now?”
That made me feel a little better for half a second. My grip tightened on the trash bag. “So, you’re moving in too?”
She didn’t answer me. She just knocked on the door. That should’ve told me everything right there, but I was still young enough to hope.
A few seconds later, the door opened, and my grandmother looked out at us with a face full of disgust.
“Unt uh,” she said immediately. “No.”
My mother stepped forward fast. “Ma, please.”
My grandmother opened the screen door a little wider but didn’t move out the way. She had on an old house dress, a scarf tied around her head, and that same mean look she always wore when she saw my mother.
“I already know what this is,” she snapped. “You trying to dump that boy over here so you can run the streets.”
My mother rolled her eyes. “That ain’t what this is.”
“No? Then what is it?”
“We got put out. The landlord changed the locks. I can’t have him out here with me.”
My grandmother looked at me, then at the trash bag in my hand, then right back at my mother. “The nigga you fucking must not want to be bothered with him.”
“This ain’t about no man.”
“Everything with you about a man,” my grandmother shot back.
I stood on that porch listening to them go back and forth like I wasn’t even there, like I wasn’t the thing being argued over.
