“You were having a whole moment.”
“Those are not separate activities.”
Auntie Rhonda held her gaze for a second, then shook her head slightly. “The turkey is on the table in five minutes.”
My mother smiled, just a little. “Four minutes and fifty seconds.”
We ate at a table covered in a cloth she’d found at an estate sale, surrounded by mismatched plates she had collected one at a time over years, each one chosen for a reason she could explain if you asked her. Food moved across the table without pause, hands reaching, passing, adjusting, nobody asking who needed what because everyone already knew.
After we finished, she disappeared into the back and came out with a shoebox, setting it down like it mattered.
“I was going through the closet,” she said, easing the lid off.
Inside were photographs. My mother before me, behind turntables. Laughing with people I didn’t know. Living a life that had existed fully before I ever entered it. And then there were the outfits.
“Mom,” I said, holding up a picture of her in a velour tracksuit with a Baby Phat bag hanging from her shoulder like it was part of her identity.
She lit up immediately. “That was a look.”
“That was a whole era,” Auntie Rhonda added, leaning over to see.
“She loved her a Juicy Couture set,” I said, shaking my head.
“As I should have,” my mother replied without hesitation.
I kept flipping through, slowing down as it started to settle in.
I had spent so much time thinking of her as my mother that I hadn’t made room for the woman she had been outside of me. I didn’t realize until much later that I was doing the same thing to myself.
She told stories over wine, one leading into the next, Auntie Rhonda laughing hard enough to lean into the table, and my mother watching it all like she always did, like she knew exactly what the moment needed and had already given it that.
It was the last Thanksgiving. I didn’t know that yet.
What I knew was the sound of them together, the ease of it, the way love lived in that space without needing to be explained.
She died in February. It came fast; there was no easing into it. Just a shift from presence to absence that the apartment didn’t know how to hold.
I didn’t play anything for three weeks. Not because I didn’t want to. Because I couldn’t stand the idea of hearing her not be there.
I moved into the house she left me in Spring Garden a couple of months later. It was a house her parents had left her along with the ache of their absence, and now I inherited the same. She never could bring herself to live there, but somehow I did.
The records came with me, all twenty crates. I stacked them the way she had them because changing their order felt like a decision I wasn’t ready to make. My own collection sat at the end of the wall. Only three crates. It was a beginning I hadn’t stepped into yet.
She told me I would know when it was time. I thought that meant I would feel ready. Lately, it feels like everything around me has started moving anyway.
And I’m the only one still standing still.
Chapter 6
DEION
The gate draggedhalfway up, loud enough to make the fact that I’d decided to roll up to the Archive at a quarter past seven everybody’s business.
I didn’t fight it. Just kept my hand on it and let it complain while I stood there in the cool of the morning, keys pressed into my palm, the block still easing into itself. A car rolled past slow. Somebody two houses down dragged a trash bin back toward their steps.
“All right,” I muttered, pushing it the rest of the way up. “You got it.”
It didn’t get quieter, choosing to be as loud as the thoughts in my head reminded me of the disaster of choosing to introduce Kendra to my the people who were more than just friends, they were family. And although I was certain she’d passed the crew’s vibe check, I had undoubtedly failed it before I could even file paperworkto withdraw. I unlocked the front door, stepped inside my store, and left the gate up behind me.
