“You preordered them in August,” I repeated, because I needed a second to place what that meant.
He nodded, returning with a few paper towels.
“I wanted to have them if you needed them.”
Alex Isley moved through the speakers, the sound carrying just enough to sit underneath everything without interrupting it, and I stood there with the box in my hands, aware of something shifting in a way that did not ask for immediate interpretation. I set the shoes back in place, smoothing the tissue paper without thinking about why.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Happy birthday,” he replied, just as simply.
We ate, the conversation moving the way it always did, returning us back to our vibe of easy and familiar, covering ground that didn’t require either of us to say anything we weren’t ready to say.
Then out of nowhere I watched him in the spaces between those moments, noticing the slight delay before he answered certain questions, the way something in him felt held back without being withdrawn, like he had shifted something internally and hadn’t decided what to do with it yet.
“Kendra good?” I asked eventually, letting the question land as casually as I could manage.
He didn’t answer right away, and the pause was brief enough that it could have gone unnoticed if I hadn’t been paying attention.
“We’re not together anymore,” he said.
He didn’t offer anything else, and I didn’t ask. When he was ready, I hoped we could return back to the kinship where he’d tell me.
I nodded, accepting the information in the same way I would have accepted anything else he chose to share, but it did not settle in the way information usually did. It stayed active, moving through everything else in the room whether I acknowledged it or not.
We finished eating, and he cleaned up without being asked, the quiet efficiency of someone who had done it enough times that it no longer required thought. When he left, he did it the same way he always did, without lingering, without shifting the moment into something it wasn’t already.
The door closed behind him, and the house held the absence in a way that made it noticeable. The record had long ago ended, the needle circling at the center with the soft, repetitive sound marking time without moving it forward.
I went back to the table and opened the box again, the tissue paper still folded the way I had left it, careful and deliberate, the shape of the moment preserved without being disturbed.
August.
He had done this in August. I stood there with that for a moment, then took the shoes out of the box and put them on, feeling them settle into place with an ease that made it clear there had never been a question about whether they would fit.
I walked over to the wall, finding a home for Alex to now stay, and then pulled my mother’s copy of Phyllis Hyman’sLiving All Alone. I set it on the turntable and let it play.
I moved to sit on the floor with my back against the couch, the shoes still on my feet, and let the music do what it had always done, which was tell the truth without asking permission.
The system I had been relying on, the careful way I had been organizing things into something manageable, no longer felt as solid as it had before. It felt heavy. Heavier than something practical had any right to be.
I had been calling it discipline, calling it timing, calling it a decision I had made for good reasons, but sitting there, it became harder to ignore what it had actually beendoing. It had been keeping everything in place so I would not have to move toward it.
The record played through the room, steady and unbothered by whether I was ready to hear it. I sat there until the side ended, letting the silence that followed stretch just long enough to make itself known.
Then I stood and reached for my phone, my thumb hovering over his name for a second longer than necessary as I considered what it would mean to close the distance I had been maintaining so carefully.
I did not call him, but I did not put the phone away either.
Chapter 8
DEION
Marcus called ita fact-finding mission.
What it was, in fact, was him hearing about a card game in East Oak Lane and deciding I needed to get out of the Archive for one Saturday afternoon, using the language of a man who understood that I responded better to logistical framing than to expressions of concern about my general state of being.
“There’s a jawn tomorrow,” he said Friday night. “Leon’s. You remember him.”
