“Mm,” she said, thoughtful. “And what about Spades?”
“I played Spades in other people’s houses, ‘til I got tired of getting cussed out behind a cut I ain’t know I wasn’t supposed to do.”
She looked at me like she was practically disgusted. “Ah, hell, nah! We gotta play. You ain’t about to be out here in these streets embarrassing me and the people of the great Emancipation, LA!”
She laughed again, low this time, and I found myself enjoying the sound. When she finished the kiosk puzzle, the screen flashed a little gold badge. Perfect score. She didn’t make a big deal of it. She looked at me instead, waiting for what came next without asking for it.
I led her into the last hall, the one with the memorial to victims. It was quieter there. People spoke in whispers without being told. Names filled a wall, engraved in steel. The light hit the lettering and turned it into something that looked almost liquid. Farrah was quiet, reverent. We stood in front of the wall for I don’t know how long. She reached out and traced a line of letters with the back of her finger. I stood a half a step behind her, feeling like I didn’t want to intrude in this moment of respect.
“You believe in redemption?” she asked, voice so soft I almost missed it.
“Yeah,” I said immediately.
“You sure?”
“I have to be,” I said. “If there ain’t redemption, then why am I still going?”
She looked at me, her eyes softened. I wanted redemption, but right now, I wanted to kiss those plush, glossy lips more than anything. I think the only thing that stopped me was the little girl that ran into Farrah.
“Sorry,” she sang as her mother fussed and apologized at the same time the way mamas do. Farrah watched them with a look I’d never seen on her face. It wasn’t anger or irritation. It was attention with longing in it.
“You want kids?” I asked.
She exhaled, smiled a little. “Some days I do. Some days I think about everything I ain’t learned yet, and I don’t want nobody drinking from me when I’m still a cracked cup.”
“You’d be a good mother,” I said, surprising myself again with what I said.
But somehow, I knew it was true. For a minute, I pictured her pretty and round and wobbling. Shit I shouldn’t be picturing.
“Why you say that?” she asked, skeptical but hopeful. “’Cause I can read people?”
“’Cause you stop. You hear and listen. You look and you see, Little Thug.”
She stared at me like I had told her a thing no one had told her before, a thing she clearly liked.
“You want kids?” she asked back. “Oh, yeah. Those silver spoons.”
“Yeah,” I said. “One day. Not ’cause I need an heir. ’Cause… I want to teach a little person how to leave a room better than they found it.”
“Redemption,” she whispered.
I nodded. “Redemption.
We circled toward the exit and passed a gift shop. Farrah gave it a glance, then dismissed it. I doubled back in two steps and grabbed something without letting myself overthink it: a slim notebook with a spine that said NOTES FROM EVIDENCE.
When I rejoined her, she looked at the bag and then at me with suspicion she couldn’t hide. “What you do?”
“Relax,” I said. “I ain’t buy you a T-shirt with blood spatters on it or nothing.”
“Please,” she muttered, but she couldn’t help smiling.
I handed her the bag. She hesitated, then took it. When she pulled the notebook out, her face changed, surprise sliding into something I didn’t have a word for. She touched the spine like it was fragile.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
I shrugged. “You want a lab coat, you need a lab. That’s your lab,” I said. “You got theories. Put them in there until you ready to test them out.”
She looked at me like I was the one seeing, this time. “Mekhi,” she breathed.
