Page 24 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“You drying that plate like you ain’t dried a dish in your life,” she said. “But it’s the effort that counts, so keep going.”

Truth laughed and went to check on something in the front room, leaving me alone in that narrow kitchen with Delphine and the sound of water running and dishes clinking, which felt like its own kind of test, one I hadn’t been warned about ahead of time.

“You did good tonight,” Delphine said after a while, handing me a wet pot without looking up. “Loosened up some. Wasn’t sitting there like you was waiting on somebody to pull a gun.”

“Old habit.”

“I imagine.” She scrubbed at a pan, steam curling up off the water. “I meant what I asked you earlier. In the kitchen.”

“I know you did.”

“I watched you tonight, Amai. Watched you laugh at my girls roasting you, watched you let your guard down enough to actually be at that table instead of just occupying a seat at it.” She set the pan in the rack and reached for another. “I believe you love my daughter. I ain’t got a doubt about that no more, and I had plenty when you first showed up here.”

“I do.”

“I also know what you are.” She said it plain, no accusation in it, just fact laid flat on the counter between us. “I know the kind of man who shows up with two guards outside a house on a Sunday afternoon ain’t a man who spends his week doing nothing dangerous. I ain’t stupid, and I ain’t gon’ pretend to be for your comfort or hers.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to.”

“Good. You being what you are don’t disqualify you from being good to her. It just means the stakes on getting it right are higher than most.”

I dried the plate she handed me slowly, giving myself something to do with my hands while she got to whatever she was building toward.

“So, here’s what I need from you,” she said, turning to face me directly now, water dripping off her hands onto the floor, “and I only got the one rule, same as before. Whatever bullshit you doing out there in them streets—and I know it’s some bad shit—you keep her safe. That’s the main thing got my nerves bad. You understand what I’m telling you?”

“I understand.”

Delphine studied me the way she had earlier, with that same measuring look, except this time there was something less guarded in it. Like she’d already decided something and was just confirming it.

“And if you break that,” she said, “I want you to understand something about me, because I don’t think you fully do yet.”

“Tell me.”

“I raised four girls in a house that didn’t have a man in it most of the time, in a neighborhood that would’ve eaten them alive if I let it. I know how to protect what’s mine, and I know how to make sure a threat understands consequences don’t come with a warning label.” She wiped her hands on her apron, slow and deliberate. “I don’t care how many guards you got outside my house, how many men work for you, or how much money you got stacked up wherever you keep it. You let something happen to my daughter or that baby because you got careless with your own war, I will personally end your life, and I will do it in a way that don’t leave enough of you for your daddy to bury properly. You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“I need you to believe me.”

“I do believe you.”

And I did. Standing in that small kitchen with dish soap on my hands and a woman half my size looking up at me without an ounce of fear in her eyes, I believed her completely, the same clean certainty I felt when Winston made a threat he intended to keep. The difference was, Delphine’s threat didn’t scare me. It settled something in me instead, because a woman who’d kill me for failing Truth was a woman I could trust to have Truth’s back when I couldn’t be there myself.

“Good,” Delphine said, apparently satisfied, and turned back to the sink like the conversation hadn’t just been the most serious thing said in that house all night. “Now finish drying them dishes. You still holding that towel wrong.”

Truth appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, catching the tail end of whatever peace had settled over the kitchen, and looked between the two of us with the particular suspicion of someone who knew a conversation had happened and she hadn’t been invited to it.

“What’d I miss?”

“Nothing,” Delphine said. “Your man learning how to dry a dish is all.”

“He’s thirty-something years old, Mama. He should already know how to dry a dish.”

“Some things you got to be taught late,” Delphine said and winked at me in a way that made it clear the dish towel had never really been the point.

We left a little while after that, Truth hugging her mother at the door, Delphine pressing a container of leftover red beans into my hands with strict instructions about reheating them low and slow instead of nuking them into rubber, and I carried it out to the truck, feeling the anxiety loosen in my chest that had been wound tight for longer than I wanted to admit.

Truth fell asleep in the passenger seat before we’d even made it out of the Ninth Ward. Her hand rested on the curve of her stomach, the container of beans balanced carefully in the cupholder like it mattered more than anything else in that truck.