“Don’t yeah alright me.”
“Gutta—”
I walked over and kissed her forehead and grabbed my keys off the dresser.
“I’ll see you tonight,” I said. “Before you make any moves about going anywhere, just know I’ll act a fool if you don’t have yo ass in this house once I make it back.”
She called my name again as I walked out but I was already down the hallway, and I let the front door close behind me because I wasn’t about to stand in there and argue about something that wasn’t happening. Simone going back to that house was not something I was going to allow and she was going to find that out tonight. I’d gotten too used to be laid up with my baby. I didn’t want to sleep without her again.
—
Riverside Park was quiet for this time of morning. A few people walking dogs, a couple of joggers, nobody paying attention to anything that wasn’t their own business. I was standing near the entrance with the Minnie Mouse under my arm when Sandra’s car pulled into the lot.
On the way here, I stopped at Target near my house and grabbed the cutest bear that I could find, and it was a Minnie Mouse. I hoped that baby girl liked it, I didn’t know what else to get a kid.
Sandra parked, and she got out first. Big sunglasses on, head moving around like she was scanning every inch of the park, making sure she wouldn’t be spotted. This woman was a damn trip.
She looked like a woman who was doing something she knew that she had no business doing, and had shown up anyway because she didn’t have a choice.
I shook my head.
Then the back door opened and Amara climbed out her booster seat, then out the car.
And everything I had been telling myself on the drive over went away.
She was wearing a little yellow dress and her hair was in two puffs. She was looking around the park the way kids looked at something that they found exciting.
Like everything in it was interesting and worth examining. Sandra took her hand and they walked toward me. I stood there and waited and the closer they got the more certain I became about everything.
She looked exactly like me.
Not kind of. My hair texture on her head. My thick eyebrows sitting on her little face. My jaw. My eyes. Everything that made my face my face was sitting right there on this little girl walking toward me holding her mama’s hand, she was just the pretty version.
I felt something move through my chest that I didn’t know existed until the first day that I saw her at that store.
When they got close I hugged Sandra loosely and she hugged back stiff and uncomfortable, keeping her eyes on the park around us like somebody was going to see her.
Then I crouched down.
Amara looked at me with those eyes — my eyes — and she didn’t look away. Kids that age usually went shy around strangers. She didn’t. She just looked at me steady and open like she was trying to figure something out.
“Hey,” I said. “My name is Deon. You can call me D if you want.”
She tilted her head.
Then she reached out with both hands and put them on my face.
I went still. Her little touch sent a shock through me.
She touched my eyes first with her little fingers. Then my beard. Then she grabbed one of my ears examined it. Her face was completely serious the way kids got when they were doing something important. I let her do all of it without moving because something about this moment felt like it needed to happen exactly the way it was happening and I didn’t want to interrupt it.
When she pulled her hands back she looked at me like she had confirmed something.
I held up the Minnie Mouse.
Her whole face lit up.
“MINNIE.” She grabbed it out of my hands and held it against her chest and then looked back at me. “Minnie is my favorite.”
