Page 40 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Evening,” Amai said, taking the chair across from me without waiting to be told, which was its own kind of statement.

“It ain’t evening,” I said. “It’s four-thirty in the afternoon. You just don’t want to admit you slept ’til noon.”

“I had a meeting ’til noon.”

“Mm-hmm.” I lit my cigar off the desk lighter, took my time with it, because there was nothing about this conversation that required speed. “Where’s your brother?”

“Behind me,” Amai said without turning around.

Kaisen came in like he was walking into a doctor’s office. That’s the only way I can put it. Slow. Careful. Like the floor might shatter beneath him if he didn’t watch where he stepped. My boy had always come into a room like he was announcing something—good news, bad news, didn’t matter, he announced it—and now, he just… arrived. Sat in the chair beside his brother without so much as looking at either of us. Folded his hands in his lap like a schoolboy waiting to get called on.

I didn’t say anything about it right then. I’d learned in my years on this earth that you don’t lead with your worst observation. You let a man show you the shape of himself before you start cutting at it.

“Y’all want something to drink?” I said, mostly to see who’d answer first.

“No,” Amai answered.

Kaisen didn’t say anything at all. Just shook his head once, eyes on the desk.

That right there—the not answering—that was the first crack I let myself notice.

I’ve buried people, and I mean that both ways, the metaphorical way and the other way, and I knew what a man looked like when grief had him by the throat, and he was too proud to admit it was choking him. I had seen it on soldiers who lost somebody in a shootout that went sideways. I’d seen it on my own father, God rest him, though I wasn’t sorry to see him go. And I was seeing it now, sitting six feet from me in my own study, wearing my son’s face.

I let it sit for a minute. Puffed on the cigar. Watched him.

“So,” I said finally, “we got Rahsaan’s people dropping like flies all over this city, and my son can’t answer a simple question about whether he wants a glass of bourbon.”

“I heard you,” Kaisen said. Quiet. Even. “I said no.”

“You shook your head. That ain’t the same as saying words with your mouth.”

“No, thank you,” he said, and there wasn’t a lick of heat in it, which unsettled me more than if he’d snapped at me. My boy used to snap. He used to argue with me about the color of the sky if I told him it was blue, just for the sport of disagreeing. Just to prove he still had some fire left after growing up in a house where his daddy put the fire out on purpose. Regular, like a man tending a garden he didn’t want to overgrow. That fire was part of what made him useful. A dog with no bite ain’t worth feeding.

And now he sat there flat as a plate.

I looked at Amai. Amai looked back at me with that face he’d had since he was a child, the one that told you nothing whether he was about to cry or kill somebody. I understood right then that whatever this was, Amai already knew about it and had decided it wasn’t his business to fix.

That’s the thing about my sons. They don’t tell me things no more. Used to be I heard everything before it happened, because fear does that—it makes men report to you before they even know they’re doing it. Now I get told things after they’re settled, cleaned up, presented to me like a finished meal I didn’t have a hand in cooking.

“Alright,” I said, setting the cigar down in the tray. “We gon’ do this the easy way or the hard way, Kaisen. Which one you want?”

“There’s nothing to do,” Kaisen said.

“There’s plenty to do. You sitting there looking like somebody let the air out of you. I want to know why, and I want to know now, ’cause we got business tonight, and I ain’t got room for a son who’s checked out sitting at my table, pretending he’s present.”

Kaisen finally looked up, and for half a second, his eyes went flat and unfocused, the way a man’s eyes go right before he steps off a ledge that he’d already decided to step off. I’d never seen that particular stillness on him before, not even when he was a boy, crying over some toy Amai broke on purpose out of spite. It wasn’t anger. Anger, I knew how to read—apply pressure, watch it break or bend, and move accordingly. This was a man who’d already reached his verdict and was just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to him.

Then, his shoulders dropped, and he just looked tired.

“You know what happened,” he said.

“I know a piece of what happened. I know you and Amai and that girl went and got an ultrasound, and it wasn’t what y’all expected. I know that much ’cause your mama told me. Apparently, that’s how information moves in this family now—through Odette, not through you.” I leaned forward. “What I don’t know is why you’re sitting in my study, weeks later, still wearing it on your face like a Halloween mask you forgot to take off.”

“Weeks,” Kaisen repeated. Like the number itself surprised him.

“Months,” Amai said quietly, not looking at either of us.

I let that hang there a second. Then I said what I’d been sitting on since he walked through my door. I was never a man who let a wound sit unpoked when I thought lancing it might do some good, and because—I’ll be honest with myself, even if I ain’t always honest with everybody else—I was tired. Tired of watching my son fold up like a card table every time somebody mentioned that baby.