just so.
“We’re going to be okay here,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me, and the lyrics follow me out his door.
Too late
You wanna make it right, but now it’s too late
I set up the lamp I brought outside King’s room. It is a classic trophy lamp with a brass finish and a black shade. King would never say he’s afraid of the dark, but I know it soothes him to see an outline of the familiar when he wakes up before morning. I switch the light on, then go to my room, sink into my bed. The mattress is thicker and softer than what I’m used to. I’ve been running on adrenaline since I made the decision. Grandma had been looking for a companion for some time and I’d contacted Traveling Angels for her but then King’s school called; he had been in a fight. I’d driven straight over, and sure enough there he was with his eye already swelling, holding a blood-soaked napkin to his nose.
“You should see the other kid,” he’d joked, but I’d gone off on him.
“You know we don’t do that,” I said. “You know we don’t.”
And he’d tried to explain. This boy from the ninth grade was messing with his friend Nathan. He didn’t have a choice but to defend him. Wasn’t I always telling him to stand up for what he believed in? Well, he believed in his friend.
I’d told him I wasn’t raising a thug, but that night while he ate stuffed mirliton with garlic bread, his favorite, I watched him, my son whose newborn face I could still envision, and I wondered where I’d gone wrong. We had lived in a house when he was born. A modest one a few blocks south of Freret, and a policeman lived on one side of us, and a secretary lived on the other. Then King’s daddy left, and the rent inched up every month, first $30, then $100, and Mr. Jeff was a good man, but he couldn’t clone my paycheck. When it was time to move elsewhere, there was nowhere to go. Five years after Katrina, my neighborhood had bloomed. We had a white mayor and fancy restaurants that stretched a dozen blocks, but all I could afford was a redeveloped unit in what used to be the projects. With the neat lawns and fresh paint, you’d never know what the apartment had been, but the D-boys on the corner told on it, and I’d said to King that I wasn’t raising no thug, but I wondered at that moment if that wasn’t exactly who I was raising. I called Grandma and I told her she didn’t need to look anymore, that the companion would be me.
Tonight I’m walking distance from where I’d been but it might as well be a world away. Except for the security van that passes on the hour, there’s little traffic, and the crickets and the occasional wind chime are the only breaks in silence. I’m still tipsy from my drink, and I hit up Spotify for Sam Smith, set up a song for repeat. It was Byron’s favorite, mine too, and I don’t miss him, as much as I miss the fullness I felt being part of a unit, the depth and the purpose.
You say I’m crazy
’Cause you don’t think I know what you’ve done
It doesn’t take long to fall asleep but I wake up soon after, my right foot shooting forward as if in the other world I’d been running. I close my eyes, and a thread of the scene is back. My legs were pumping through water, clear enough to drink, but it smelled like rot. There was the thunder of horses galloping behind me, and out of their mouths streamed sentences I couldn’t grasp. King was with me, but he was a grown man with a different face, and just before I opened my eyes, I heard a shot ring out, and someone scream.
GRANDMA PULLED SOME STRINGS TO GET KING INTO HER neighborhood public school, and he’s nervous in the morning, wondering about his old friends, and barely eating the grits and eggs Binh prepared. I try to remind him of the positive ways the new school will be different, but he doesn’t say a word all the way through the carpool line.
He had told me he was afraid he’d be the only black kid in his class, and his worry wasn’t far off. There are a few sprinkled into the larger student body. Their mothers roll up in Porsches and Benzes; I can see from the car windows that the women are wearing suits, and they smile at me but they are fast smiles. I am not their own. But I’m okay with that because there are STEM classes at this place that you don’t have to pay for, a jazz band, a student-run literary magazine. King writes poems at night and sometimes I see them scribbled out on the dresser. Baby-love ones, though he’s never had a girlfriend: you be my earth, and I’ll be your moon, and I’m not saying he’s Langston Hughes, but everybody’s got to start somewhere.
It’s just a minimum day today, and King is buzzing when I pick him up. At dinner, he talks with his mouth full, but he’s so excited I allow it. There’s an assembly in the morning, he says, where kids give a speech about anything that’s bothering them. He got up and talked about moving to a new school.
“Afterward all these kids walked up to me in the hallways and introduced themselves. At my old school, somebody would have called me a punk, but here they were so”—he pauses—“nice.”
Grandma Martha is beaming.
“And that’s just the beginning,” she says. “You’re going to meet so many friends at this new school. Fine kids who will be good influences for you.”
His face suddenly turns, and he sets his fork down.
“I had friends at my old school too,” he says.
“Yes, yes, of course you did, but I’m just saying . . .” her voice trails off.
“We’re both just so happy you had a good day,” I say, and he seems to relax.
Spaghetti is one of his favorite foods, and he cleans the plate, then asks to be excused.
I clear the table, then help Grandma upstairs. I hadn’t noticed her outfit when she was sitting, the same classic button-down shirt with starched white pants that she always chooses, but she’s spilled tomato sauce from dinner and didn’t bother to wipe it. Even now, the red juice is running down the pant crease. Then too, there is an odor that wafts up from her, the unmistakable scent of funk. I almost ask if she needs help cleaning, but I see her heading into her bathroom, and I let it go.
KING IS SITTING ON THE EDGE OF HIS BED WHEN I WALK by his room. I go in and sit down next to him, rub the back of his neck like I’ve done since he was a baby at my breast. Sometimes he allows it, and sometimes he doesn’t. Today he sinks into me.
“What is it?” I ask. “You seem like you got a little down back there.”
“I don’t know. Just the way she said that thing about these kids being good influences. Like my friends weren’t good.”
“I hear you. I noticed that too,” I say. “But you have to understand she didn’t mean it that way. She’s getting old and she can’t always find the right words, but trust me. If anybody knows those are good kids, it’s her.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“You miss your friends, don’t you, buddy?” I ask.
He nods.
“How ’bout this? I’m off this weekend. We could go back to the old neighborhood. I’ll call Senait, we’ll set up something with her and Nathan and Issa, sound good?”
He nods.
“I love you, Mom,” he says.
“I love you
