“That magnolia out front,” she says, pointing the spoon toward the window. “Three years it’s been dropping petals on my car.”
“It drops on everyone’s car, Nan.”
“It drops on mine specifically. I park in the same spot every time I come here and every time I come back out there’s petals on the windshield. Three years.”
“Have you tried parking somewhere else?”
She turns and looks at me. “I’ve been parking in that spot since Isaiah moved in. I am not going to rearrange my life because a tree has a grudge.”
“She wrote a letter to building management,” Zay says.
“I wrote two letters. The first one was polite.”
“What was the second one?”
“Specific.” She stirs the collards. “They haven’t done a thing about it. I told Isaiah to follow up and he didn’t. You follow up on things?”
“I follow up on things.”
“Good. Someone needs to.”
Her hand lands on my arm while she’s reaching past me for the salt. Not deliberate. Just contact, her palm on my forearm, the casual weight of a woman who touches people because people are meant to be touched. She leaves it there for two seconds while she adjusts the seasoning and then it’s gone and she’s back at the stove.
I’m laughing. The sound surprises me a little because it’s full and easy and I haven’t heard that version of my own laugh in weeks. The pressure of the last month left marks in the places where the ease used to live, and right now, standing in this kitchen with corn bread in my hand and Nan’s magnoliagrievance carrying the certainty of a woman who will outlast a tree, the ease is finding its way back. Not forced. Not performed. Just warmth and a kitchen and a laugh that sounds like mine used to sound.
I look up and Zay is in the doorway. Leaning against the frame, arms loose at his sides, watching us. Not the way he watches at the facility. Not the way he watched me last week. He’s watching with his whole face open, his jaw soft, and whatever is behind his eyes isn’t organized into compartments. It’s just there, visible, and he doesn’t catch it.
Nan reaches up and puts her hand on my cheek. Her palm warm and dry, her fingers curling around my jaw, and she holds it there while she tells me the corn bread needs more honey next time and she’s going to leave the recipe with Isaiah, who will lose it, so I should remember the honey myself.
I look at Zay over her hand. His face hasn’t changed. The two people he is softest with standing in his kitchen being soft with each other, and the wall between his worlds isn’t falling because there is no wall to fall. It was already gone. He just didn’t know until he saw us standing here.
Nan pats my cheek and goes back to the collards.
We eat at Zay’s small table, three plates, the collards and corn bread and black-eyed peas she brought from home in a container that has her name written on the lid in permanent marker.
“So, Teo. Your family. Where are they?”
“Jersey. My parents and three older sisters.”
“Three older sisters.” She sets her fork down. “So you’re the baby.”
“I’m the baby.”
“I can tell. Isaiah, can’t you tell?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“You can tell.” She picks up her fork again. “Your mama cook?”
“My nonna cooks. My mother tries.”
“That sounds familiar. My daughter is a good woman but she uses too much garlic.”
“There’s no such thing as too much garlic.”
“There is if you’re my daughter.” She points her fork at me. “Your grandmother. She makes her own sauce?”
“Sunday gravy. Every week since before I was born.”
