“That feels reckless.”
“You asked me not to think too hard,” he said, and I could hear the slight shift in his voice that meant he was enjoying this more than he was letting on.
I let out a quiet breath. “All right. That’s fair.”
The silence that followed settled into something easier, something that didn’t need to be filled right away.
“What are you going to wear?” he asked after a moment.
“Maybe something black,” I said, letting my voice stay even.
“I mean, the shoes.”
I exhaled, letting my head rest lightly against the cabinet behind me. “That’s what I haven’t figured out yet.”
“It’s not a question,” he said, and something in his tone made me still before he added, “The Air Max 95s.”
I didn’t answer right away. The memory of discovering pieces from her fashion capsule when I sorted through her items in the closet came back all at once. The box in my hands, the tissue paper still intact, the quiet that followed when I realized what I had found.
“You remember those?” I asked.
“You showed them to me,” he said. “You didn’t say much, but you didn’t have to.”
I let my hand rest against the counter, grounding myself there.
“They were my mom’s,” I said.
“I know,” he said, and there was nothing in it but recognition.
I looked down at the tickets again, the quiet promise of the night waiting on the other side, and thought about the way my mother used to hold on to things until the moment she knew they belonged somewhere.
“Saturday,” I said.
“What time?” he asked, his voice lower now, already there with me.
The event was in a converted space in Northern Liberties, exposed brick and high ceilings and the energy of a room full of Black people who had decided to be both dressed upand comfortable while choosing to give back. The sneakers were extraordinary. I saw a pair of 1985 Air Jordan 1s that made me stop walking mid-sentence. I saw a woman in a floor-length gown and off-white Dunks that I spent several minutes studying from a respectful distance. I saw a man in a double-breasted suit and a pair of New Balance 990s that worked so completely that I had to recalibrate everything I thought I understood about what New Balance was capable of.
Deion had his hand at the small of my back, steady and present.
“The 990s,” I said, nodding toward the double-breasted suit.
“The v4,” he said. “Look at the sole.”
I looked at the sole. He was right. The v4 had a specific profile that worked with the suit in a way the v6 would not have. “How do you know the v4 sole profile?”
“You talked about it for forty minutes while out at Suburban Square last Black Friday when we were looking for Aunt Rhonda’s gift,” he said. “I retained the information.”
I put my hand on his arm.
He looked at my hand and then he looked at me. “The Air Jordan 3 retrospective is in the back room,” he said.
“I know.”
“You want to see it?”
“In a minute,” I said.
He turned and looked at me in the middle of the room with the formal clothes, the exceptional footwear,and the DJ in the corner doing something with a Chaka Khan record that was very much working. Deion looked at me the way he had been looking at me since the Archive, as a man who had been paying attention for a long time and had finally been given permission to let it show.
