“You’re lucky you have a friend who loves a good throwback,” he said, lifting it slightly. “I swung by Jerome’s after we left Leon’s. Jerome had this in his garage. I owe him twenty dollars and an explanation I did not give him.”
I looked at him, then at the boxes on the floor. I had cried into the phone about cassette tapes and he had gone and found a way to play them like that was the only solution that made sense.
He stood.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
He nodded once. “Goodnight, then.”
“Wait.”
I looked at the space beside me.
“Can you stay?”
He paused. Not long, just enough for the question to be real. Something shifted in his face, careful and contained, and then settled. He stepped out of his shoes, shrugged offhis jacket, and laid it over the chair. He came around to the other side of the bed and lay on top of the covers, leaving space between us that felt intentional and not.
I reached into the box and found a tape. Held it up to read the label in the dark. Her handwriting. A Friday night, the year before I was born.
I leaned over and pressed it into the machine. There was a soft mechanical hesitation, a click, then the low hiss of tape.
Then her voice. “Good evening, Philadelphia.”
I had heard my mother’s voice my entire life, but never like this. Not in a room like this, with someone else hearing her with me. I did not turn my head. I was aware of him anyway, the way you become aware of something once you stop pretending it isn’t there.
He did not speak. He did not need to. He lay beside me in the dark while my mother filled the room, while she moved through songs and silence and whatever she had been carrying on those nights, and for the first time it felt like I was hearing her in real time instead of remembering her after the fact.
The tape ran. At some point it ended. I did not get up to flip it.
At some point after that, I fell asleep.
Just before then, his breathing, beside me, was slow and even. The boxes still open on the floor. My mother’s voice now something I could return to instead of something I had lost.
I was not ready to know all of it, but I knew where it was now and that changed something… not everything. But enough that I knew, even before I could name it, that the way I had been holding certain things in place was not going to work much longer.
I closed my eyes. I did not reach for him. I did not move away, either. And that, more than anything else, felt new.
Auntie Rhonda called at six forty-five to say she needed a hand, which in her language was not a request so much as a notice that something was already in motion and I was expected to join it. I answered by getting up and getting dressed, because I had never once successfully said no to her and had long since stopped pretending that was an option worth testing.
It had been one of those weeks at work where everything I had built into something steady decided to remind me it could just as easily come undone. Three insurance submissions came back with revised codes no one had thought to notice. Crystal handled two before I even made it in on Wednesday and left the third on my desk with a note that saidthis one is personal, which meant it would require both of us and a level of patience neither of us had planned for that day. We got through it by four. Dr. Adeyemi brought us lunch from the Dominican jawn down the block, which our office appreciated.
By the time I reached Auntie Rhonda’s, the house already carried that early holiday vibe, not loud, not rushed, just full in a way that told you people were coming and hadbeen coming for years. That’s because today was our annual Friendsgiving, though nobody called it that out loud.
Auntie Rhonda’s kitchen had not been renovated since 1987 and had no intention of starting now. The linoleum was original. The stove had a personality she respected more than most people. When the oven door squeaked, she treated it like information instead of a problem.
I stood at the sink cleaning collards while she worked the pot with smoked turkey necks, because smoked gave the greens the depth she insisted was not preference but necessity, and I stripped stems without being told.
“Not the apple cider,” she said when I reached for the vinegar. “The good one. Behind the cooking sherry Jerome has been visiting since Labor Day weekend.”
“Jerome steals your cooking sherry.”
“Jerome believes anything in a closed cabinet in a locked house is community property if he has a key.” She stirred the pot without looking at me. “He came by the other day to drop off the oil for frying the turkey and noticed I had measured the bottle. When I asked him where did four ounces go because it was practically a new bottle, he looked me in the face and said that must have been evaporation.”
I handed her the vinegar, laughing. “Evaporation.”
“I said, Jerome, sherry does not evaporate four tablespoons at a time in a sealed bottle.” A pause. “He said he’d look into it.” Another pause. “And weknowhe will not look into it.”
