Page 21 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Delphine didn’t say anything to that right away. She let the silence sit there, testing whether I’d fill it with something softer, something more comfortable. I didn’t.

“You still a dangerous man,” she said finally.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I know what you do out there. Don’t think I don’t. Man show up here with two guards outside my house on a Sunday afternoon, I ain’t blind to what that means about the rest of your week.”

“No, ma’am.”

“And you love my daughter.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Those two things ain’t cancel each other out.” She said it like a fact she’d already worked out a long time ago and was just now handing to me. “That’s the part you need to understand. Being dangerous and being good to her ain’t opposites. Plenty men out here soft as tissue paper and still treat women like garbage. Plenty men out here could kill a room full of folks and still be the safest thing that woman ever laid eyes on. Which one you gon’ be is a decision.”

“I want to be the second one.”

“Wanting’s cheap. I need to see you be it.” She pointed the spoon at me, red bean liquid dripping off the end of it onto the linoleum, and neither of us moved to clean it up. “So, here’s my rule, and I only got the one. Whatever demon shit you got to handle out there in them streets, you keep it out there. My daughter and that baby she's carrying don’t never become collateral in whatever war you fighting. Not once. Not for a good reason, not for a bad one, not because you thought it’d work out. You understand me?”

“I understand you.”

“I need more than understand. I need you to say what you gon’ do about it.”

I sat forward, elbows on my knees, and gave her the only true answer I had. “If something’s coming for me and it’s got a way to reach her too, I move her first. Before I move against whoever’s coming. Every time. I don’t use her as bait, I don’t wait to see if a threat’s serious before I act on it, and I don’t hide something dangerous from her just because telling her is inconvenient for whatever plan I got running. She gets to know what’s coming, so she can make her own choices about it, even if that choice is one I don’t like.”

Delphine set the spoon down on the edge of the pot and looked at me for a long time, the kind of look that felt like it was pulling something out of my chest and checking it for holes.

“Alright,” she said finally. “I believe you mean that today.”

“I mean it every day.”

“We’ll see.” She picked the spoon back up, all business again, dinner reclaiming her attention the way it always did. “Go tell my girls it’s almost time to eat. And take that wine out the bottle and put it into a decanter. I ain’t drinking out the bottle like we in a dorm room.”

I stood, relieved to have survived it, and paused at the kitchen doorway.

“Ms. Delphine?”

“Mm?”

“Thank you for asking me direct instead of talking around it.”

She didn’t look up from the pot. “I don’t waste time talking around things, baby. Never have. You’ll learn that about me if you keep coming back.”

I intended to keep coming back. That much, at least, I was sure of.

Dinner at Delphine Renois’s table was not a meal. It was a controlled riot with food attached.

There were nine of us packed around a table built for six, extra chairs dragged in from the porch, a card table set up in the corner for Saroya’s kids with paper plates because Delphine said she wasn’t risking her good dishes on children who still couldn’t be trusted not to throw a fork. The red beans and rice sat in the center in a pot big enough to feed a block, next to fried catfish, cornbread, a pan of greens that Honor kept eyeing like she was calculating calories she’d already decided not to worry about, and a sweet potato pie that hadn’t even been cut yet but that everybody was already talking about like it was the main event.

“Pass the hot sauce,” Raven said, not to anybody specific, and three different bottles converged on her plate at once from three different directions.

“Daanngggg!”

“You want Louisiana or Crystal?”

“I want whichever one the spiciest.”

Delphine sat at the head of the table, said grace fast and businesslike—thank you Lord for this food, for this family, keep us all breathing another week, amen—and then the whole table exploded into motion like she’d fired a starting gun.