Chapter forty-one
The D train rattled beneath us. My palms slicked against my thighs, and I rubbed them on my jeans like that would fix anything. It wouldn’t.
Ellis sat beside me in a navy button-down that took him half an hour to iron. The fabric held that crisp, structured quality of something cared for. His geometric sleeve showed where he’d rolled up the cuff. People glanced at it, at us, at his hand holding mine. An older woman across the aisle tracked us, then looked away, back to her phone. This was Brooklyn. Nobody’s business but ours.
Still, my stomach was in my throat.
“You good?” Ellis asked.
The real questions lined up behind his: will you blow this? Run? Decide right now that this was all a mistake?
“Yeah.” Mostly honest. “Just sweating through my nice shirt, which is fine.”
He squeezed my hand. “Your mom’s going to love you either way.”
“She hasn’t spoken to me in four months, Ellis. She’s going to stand inthat doorway and…”
“Then we’ll handle it together.”
There was that word: together. I was still learning how to sit with it.
We got off at Atlantic Avenue-Barclays and the neighborhood unfolded around us like an old argument unfinished. The bodega where Mr. Chen used to give me free piraguados. The corner store, which was now a juice place, where Sierra bit Marcus Delgado senior year. Everything the same and completely transformed. Jett lived here, but Jett also didn’t. That was the trick of growing up and leaving.
I stalled by pointing things out.
“That used to be a hardware store. My mom took me there when I wanted to paint my room this terrible shade of green. The guy said she should choose the colors, that I was too young, and she just looked at him like he’d grown a second head and told me to point.”
Ellis listened like I was saying something important. He’d learned that about me. Sometimes the stalling became its own kind of vulnerability.
We walked slowly through Sunset Park. The neighborhood sprawled up the hill toward the water. The streets smelled like Dominican grocery stores, exhaust, bread from the bodega, and something beyond naming, just memory. This smell belonged to before. To my mother’s house. To myself when I was smaller and less broken.
“She feared I’d waste myself. End up like some guys from the block. So she pushed. And pushed. When I came out as an event planner, it wasn’t what she imagined. I was supposed to be a doctor or lawyer or something that came with the right answer when people asked what I did.”
“You plan events for some of Brooklyn’s biggest clients.”
“Yeah, but with glitter and chaos instead of a Juris Doctor.”
He laughed. “Your mom seems like someone who appreciates chaos.”
“You don’t know my mom.”
“I’m about to.”
That silenced me.
The walk-up held me in two tenses at once. Where I had always been, where I had never escaped from. Fourth floor. The stairs smelled unchanged. That particular combination of cooking and time, and New York City that seeped into the bones of older buildings. Scuff marks scored the walls; small changes happened in my absence. Someone’s wedding invitation taped to a door. A child’s drawing hung up with masking tape.
The faded welcome mat outside 4C was barely a mat anymore. Just threads and worn rubber.
I raised my fist. Three inches from the wood. A grand canyon between my knuckles and the door.
Ellis didn’t knock for me. Didn’t push my hand. He stood there, solid, warm, his hand a steady weight at the small of my back.
I knocked.
The pause stretched eternally. Then movement behind the door. The sound of locks. She’d always been careful about them. The chain slid. The deadbolt turned.
My mother opened the door.
