“That’s confidence.”
“That’s the same problem you had last hand.”
Marcus ignored him, then nodded toward me. “He over there building something, though,” he said. “Whole storefront. Been in it every day like it’s already open.”
Big Ray didn’t look up. “Yeah?”
“Archive,” Marcus said. “Comics, space to sit. Not one of those spots where they looking at you if you don’t buy something.”
Darius leaned back in his chair. “Where at?”
Marcus told him, giving directions like he worked for Apple Maps before the latest update, then he flicked his eyes at me. “Tell it right.”
I set my cards, fanned them out. “Couple blocks over,” I said. “It’ll be about comics, some records. Adding a space to listen and chill.”
Marcus let out a quiet breath through his nose. “That vinyl part sound like some Nova shit,” he said.
I glared at him, but Marcus being Marcus didn’t let it affect him. “It sounds like the store.”
“If you say so,” he replied, already sorting his hand. “Just don’t stall out trying to make it perfect.”
“Call it,” Big Ray said.
We went around. Cards hit the table, the hand moving.
“You planning anything in there?” Kyle asked, glancing over his cards.
“Thursdays,” I said. “I teach eighth grade, so I want to hold space for them to just be, you know. Got a kid who doesn’t fit anywhere they’ve decided he should. Smart, just not in the ways they know how to measure. I want him to have somewhere else to land, and I know he’s not alone. Itwas tough being a Black kid growing up in Philly when I was coming up. These kids got that on steroids now.”
“I hear ya.” Leon leaned back slightly, studying me for a second. “That’s a good thing to build,” he added.
Kyle nodded once. “That’s how it starts. One place.”
“The block built it,” I said. “I just showed up.”
“Showing up,” Big Ray said, cutting a card clean, “is most of it.”
Marcus glanced at me once, then dropped his card. “Hebeenshowing up,” he said, like that was enough said on it.
“You ain’t gotta carry that solo,” Kyle said. “We around if you need it.”
“’Preciate it,” I said, catching the quiet smirk on Marcus’s face. For once, he actually played a hand right.
Chapter 9
NOVA
I found themon a Saturday, a few weeks before the Archive was set to open. I had been meaning to go through the storage closet on the third floor since I moved in. The house my grandparents had left my mom had accumulated things the way houses did when people lived fully inside them, boxes of photographs and old appliances and the sediment of a life that had not been sorted because there was always more living to do first.
After she died, I had moved it all in without opening any of it, because opening things required decisions about what to keep and what to release, and I had not been ready for either. I had not been ready for two years.
The morning I finally opened the closet, I told myself I was looking for an extra blanket.
(I was not looking for an extra blanket.)
In the back of the closet, behind the photographs and the extra linens, were two shoeboxes I had not seenbefore. They weren’t sneaker boxes. They were the smaller kind, from a department store, the lids slightly warped from age. I brought them into the third-floor room, sat on the floor, and opened the first one.
That was when I saw all of these cassette tapes. It had to be a dozen, maybe more, packed in tight, each labeled in my mother’s handwriting. Labels carefully describing Friday nights, Saturday nights, and her other radio sets. That was when I realized she had recorded herself.
