“Good. She’s good people.”
“Hmm.”
He let that sit for a second. Then, “So… I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the storefront.”
“I’m calling Gerald this week.”
He exhaled like he’d been holding that for years. “This week,” he reiterated. “Not next month. I have called Gerald four times on your behalf. Thanks to you, Gerald and I have a rapport and folks probably think I’m his grandson or something. He also said, and I am quoting, ‘That boy has been planning long enough. Tell him to stop stuttering, roll up, and build the damn thing.’”
“I know.”
“Good.”
“The store must come first,” I said, thinking of the space Gerald had been leasing to me for fourteen months,rent paid on time for something I hadn’t fully brought to life yet, a shop built around comics and the type of space I had needed when I was younger, somewhere kids could come in and stay a while without feeling like they had to explain why they were there. I needed to see it through without splitting my attention or borrowing momentum from anywhere it didn’t belong.
Marcus let that sit.
“That,” he said, “is the first wise thing you’ve said since what? College? I’m proud of you. I’m saying it now before you are doing something that makes me revise the statement.”
I sat in the car for a minute, parked outside my place. Upstairs, my living room still looked likeshehad been there yesterday. The comics she helped me organize, the labels in her handwriting I had never moved, everything where she said it should go because she had been right.
I’d told myself it didn’t mean anything. That it was just organization. It wasn’t.
In bed, I opened the laptop to the latest floor plan, the one with the listening station at the center of the room, and then a new document. I put a date at the top, not a goal, an actual date, and started listing the steps. One, then the next, then the next, until the list ran long enough to make me pause.
That was how I knew it was real. Once it was all the way out of my head, there was nowhere left to hide from it.
Downstairs, everything still carried her decisions. The Milestone shelf, Hardware first, because McDuffie built that universe with the intention of making sure akid who looked like us could walk into a shop and see himself as the main character, not the guest star, not the lesson. Priest’s Black Panther, then Coates, two different T’Challas, both true. Hudlin and a few others between them. McDuffie again at the end, because his name went everywhere it needed to go.
It wasn’t organization. It was attention. The same attention I had been paying to her, and the same attention she had been paying back. I closed the laptop and left the list where it was. I also didn’t text Nova. This time, it was space. Not reaching for her out of habit.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand. I needed something I could stand in before I showed up asking for anything, reminding myself that the store comes first, and after that there was no confusion, only the question of whether I was going to step into it or keep standing off to the side.
At eleven, all of that was out the window. I picked up my phone and typed five words, sending them before I could adjust them into something safer.
Date was good. Talk tomorrow?
I set the phone face down on the nightstand and left it there.
Chapter 3
NOVA
I drove toCherry Hill without needing anything specific. I got into my car and left because sitting in my living room rereading the same five words was not going to produce a different answer no matter how many times I tried it.
Date was good. Talk tomorrow?
I had already read it enough to know where the pauses were, could hear exactly how he would have said it, the slight drop in his voice on the second sentence, the way it would have almost made me laugh if he’d been standing there saying it out loud, and I was not interested in doing that analysis surrounded by records that had been working overtime all morning.
I tried music first, which was my mistake. The record I put on to fill the quiet turned out to be a love song, and the next one followed it like it had something to prove. By the third, I realized I had somehow built a full set I was not prepared to sit through, so I turned everything offand left.
Auntie Rhonda was still on her annual church retreat in Hilton Head, the same group of women, the same wide-brimmed hats, the same energy of people who had earned the right to rest. She had sent a picture that morning, standing on a pier like she owned the water, and a message that said the crab legs were extraordinary, thinking of none of you.
Which meant no Sunday dinner. No Jerome. No Simone stopping by unannounced with commentary I did not ask for but usually needed. Just me and a house that had gotten entirely too quiet for what I was trying not to think about.
So I drove across the bridge because movement felt more useful than sitting still and pretending I was fine.
Norden in Cherry Hill understood aspiration in a very specific way, the space between who you were and the version of your life that looked close enough to reach if you stood in the right room long enough. It was one of those massive, mazelike furniture stores built to resemble a life in progress, where you followed arrows through fully staged rooms and came out convinced you needed things you had not considered ten minutes earlier.
