“Good.” My mother picked up her fork. “Because a Carter heir is not something we take lightly. Kaseem WILL HAVE CHILDREN. And his children will carry something that goes back further than you understand right now and we take that seriously in this family.”
“I can understand that,” Tatti said.
Namier was watching both of them like he was trying to figure out which one was going to snap first. He caught me looking at him and immediately dropped his eyes back to his plate and shoved a forkful of eggs in his mouth. I already knew that today was going to be a full interrogation from my moms so I was prepared for it. My only problem was not knowing if Tatti was or not. I had promised her something that she desperately wanted, so I could only hope that she kept her cool and answered the question with the answers she knew that my crazy ass mother wanted to hear.
My mother cut into her food. Took her time. Let the table settle back into regular conversation for a few minutes while my father talked and Namier cracked a joke that nobody fully laughed at. Then she set her fork down, folded her hands and looked at Tatti again like she’d been sitting on something and had finally decided to come on out and say it.
“I want to circle back to something,” she said.
Tatti looked up from her plate.
“You said your relationship with your mother has always been surface level,” Zuri said. “That she and your father were each other’s world and you were never as close with her as you could have been.”
“That’s right,” Tatti said. Careful now. I could hear it.
“I want to understand that better.” My mother tilted her head slightly. “Because a mother who couldn’t prioritize her own daughter — who chose a man over building something real with her child, what does that say about what you were taught? About what being a woman in a family actually looks like?” She paused. “I’m not asking to be cruel. I’m asking because my grandchildrenwill be raised in this house and I want to know what kind of foundation you’re bringing to that. If you’ve never been shown the right way to love your legacy, how can I know that you’ll do it correctly?”
The table went completely quiet. She just came back with the same insult just worded differently and I didn’t like that shit at all.
Not the polite kind of quiet. The kind where everybody heard exactly what was just said and nobody wanted to be the first one to move.
Namier put his fork down slow. Looked at his plate like it had personally offended him.
My father shifted in his chair.
Tatti sat very still. Too still. The kind of still that in any other situation would have been the last warning before everything went left. My mother had just questioned her womanhood, basically. I watched her jaw tighten and her eyes go flat and I knew she was doing the math — the phone, the call, everything she needed on the other side of this breakfast. I watched her decide in real time whether any of it was worth swallowing her pride for. If it was me, I would have went the fuck off, no questions asked.
She opened her mouth.
I got there first.
“That’s enough.” I said it low but firm, I put my eyes on my mother and didn’t move them. “What Tattiana’s mother did or didn’t do has nothing to do with this table or this family. That’s not a line of questioning we’re running with.”
My mother looked at me. “I’m simply trying to understand—”
“I know what you’re trying to do.” I kept my voice flat. “And I’m telling you it’s done. Knowing your relationship with your mother, that questioning is out of pocket. You still did a great job despite of. So, let’s not do this!”
My mother, Zuri Carter held my gaze for a long moment the way she always did when she wanted me to know she wasn’t somebody I should play with. Then she picked her fork back up and went back to her food like the conversation had ended on her terms.
My father cleared his throat. “Namier, didn’t you say you had something going on with the east side property this week?”
Namier grabbed that lifeline with both hands, desperate to ease the tension in this room. “Yeah, yeah — so check it, the contractor been on some slow time and I had to get in his face about it—” He launched into it and the table noise came back up slowly around us.
I glanced at Tatti.
She was looking down at her plate. Her jaw was still tight and her eyes were somewhere far away from this dining room and everything in it. She picked up her fork and moved her food around and didn’t eat a thing for the rest of the meal.
She didn’t look at my mother again either.
But she didn’t cry or show that she was bothered. Didn’t crack. Didn’t give Zuri Carter one single thing to take back and use. She showed that she wasn’t weak, and she unknowingly passed the first test.
She just sat there with her back straight, her face closed and took everything that breakfast threw at her without breaking.
I didn’t say anything to her about it.
But when we got up to leave and she walked ahead of me toward the door. I put my hand on the small of Tatti’s back and leaned down close enough that only she could hear me.
“Go to the truck,” I said. “I’ll be right out.”
