“Every night. Gotta protect those waves.”
When we got back,Alyssa opened the door and her hand flew to her mouth.
“Look at you!”
“Mama! Mr.Leon did my hair, and everybody in the shop said I did good for my first time, and I got this—” he yanked the do-rag out of his pocket.
She knelt and ran her fingers over the fresh lineup, the shaped-up fade, and when she looked up at me over his head her eyes were shining. She didn’t say anything. She just mouthed it.Thank you.
We’d finished dinner at my place. Alyssa was in the kitchen doing that thing where she pretends to clean up so she can stay in earshot. Micah was next to me on the couch, fidgeting, working himself up to something.
“Mr. Julian?”
“Yeah, buddy.”
He picked at the hem of his shirt. “What should I call you?”
I kept my voice even. In the time I’d known him he’d gone from calling me Coach Julian, to Mr. Julian. “You’ve been calling me Mr. Julian. That bothering you?”
“Kinda.” He nodded, looking down. “Because you’re not like Mr.Robinson. I call my teacher Mr.Robinson, but he’s just my teacher. You—” he glanced up, then back at his lap “—you take me to the barbershop. And you play games with me. And you teach me push-ups. And you’re nice to Mom too.” He said that last one like it was an established fact, and I had to take a second with it. “And Mister is what I call people I don’t know that good. I know you good.”
He screwed his face up, hunting for the words.
“So what do you want to call me,” I said, working to keep it even.
He was quiet a long time. Swung his feet. “Zhaire calls you Uncle Julian. But—” He shook his head. “You don’t feel like an uncle. Not like Uncle Raschad.”
His face did something complicated — wanting to say a thing and not having the nerve, or the permission, to say it.
I had to take a breath before I could speak. In the kitchen, Alyssa had gone still over the sink and wasn’t turning around.
“Micah. Look at me.”
He looked up. The thing he wanted to call me sat in the room with us, big and unsaid, and I knew exactly what it was. I could see it behind his teeth. And I knew he couldn’t say it — not yet, not when the grown-ups hadn’t given him the ground to stand on — and that I couldn’t hand him that ground tonight was going to sit with me a while.
“How about this,” I said, and I had to clear my throat to get it out. “For right now, you call me Julian. No Mister. Just Julian. And maybe—” I had to stop “—maybe one day, when it’s the right time, you call me something else. Something we both want. We’ve got time to figure out what that is. That work for you?”
He thought about it, then looked at me with a slow smile. “Okay. Julian.”
He lunged into me, no warning, the way kids do, and I caught himand held on and put my head against the top of his fresh-cut hair so I wouldn’t have to talk for a second.
After he was down, Alyssa came and sat next to me on the couch. She’d had a while to fix her face and hadn’t quite managed it.
“I heard all of that,” she said.
“Figured you did.”
She was quiet a moment. “I think he wanted to call you Dad.”
I nodded.
She turned toward me, eyes wet, and let them be. “I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t scare me. He’s eight, Julian. His heart’s all the way in this. If you and I—” She stopped. Started again, steadier. “If this doesn’t hold, I don’t just lose you. He loses you.”
“That’s not going to happen.” I took her hand. “I was in his life before we got to this point, and I’ll be in it no matter what — same as I’ve always been in Zhaire’s. That much I can promise you. I’m not going to disappear on that boy. Ever.” I held her eyes. “I’m not in this halfway. Not with you. Not with him.”
I pulled her into my side, and she came, and we sat there a long time — the two of us, a sleeping kid down the hall, and a title neither of us could say yet hanging in the dark between us.
30/
