eight
. . .
“Baby,don’t put them little plates out,” my mother said from the stove. “This not brunch. Put the real ones on the table.”
I looked down at what I was holding and sighed. “They are real plates.”
My father, standing at the sink with a pack of chicken open and both hands deep in seasoning, laughed without even looking up.
“That’s all right,” he said. “Let her keep setting the table like she live off cheese and crackers.”
I cut my eyes at him. “I cook.”
My mother turned then, one brow lifted. “You assemble.”
That got a laugh out of him too.
“I cook,” I repeated, because I did, technically, and because I was not about to let the two people who raised me reduce my kitchen life to plated snacks and mood lighting.
My father finally looked over his shoulder, smile sitting easy on his face.
Six-three and lean as a rail no matter what my mother put in front of him, light brown skin, amber eyes bright with amusement, and the unfair metabolism of a man who could eat his way through half the refrigerator at midnight and still wake up looking like he had been fasting for the Lord.
I had gotten his coloring and those eyes, which still felt unfair to Nicole, who was missing all this Fourth of July foolishness because she had taken the kids to her husband’s people in Maryland this year. Somehow, the amber had skipped everybody else and landed on me like a family secret.
“You make pretty little meals for one,” Daddy said. “That ain’t cooking the way your mama mean it.”
I opened my mouth, then shut it again, because he wasn’t entirely wrong.
That was the trouble with parents who loved you well. They did not need much evidence to find the tender spots.
My mother turned back to the stove, checking the baked beans and shifting a foil pan over to make room for the potato salad she still did not trust anybody else to touch. She was shorter than him by plenty, brown-skinned and soft in the face in a way I saw every time I looked at my own reflection too long. I had her cheekbones, her mouth, her chin, and the same body that made dresses fit like they had been given instructions.
Curves. Hips. More behind than most women knew what to do with unless they had been raised by somebody who taught them to stop apologizing for taking up space.
Mama kept herself moving though. Walked the neighborhood almost every morning unless the weather wasacting ignorant, wrists swinging, sneakers bright, greeting half the block like she was running for office and checking on everybody’s business at the same time. She called it exercise. Daddy called it surveillance with cardio.
The kitchen smelled like barbecue sauce warming low, fried corn, and the fruit salad sweating gently in its bowl on the counter. Every time the screen door opened, charcoal smoke drifted in from the grill out back, along with my cousins’ laughter and somebody getting warned not to touch the fireworks before dark.
Also, Thursday never happened.
One of my clients turned an afternoon sponsorship issue into a late spiral of corrections and calls, and one of Micah’s closings ran long enough to wreck whatever remained of the evening. By the time we admitted it, the hour was too shot for reservations and performance.
So we kept talking.
Texts first. Then calls after dark. Never all night, never breathless in a way that made me feel foolish the next morning. Just enough to change the reality of things. Enough that I started expecting his name after sunset. Enough that his voice in my ear stopped feeling like a surprise and started feeling like something my body made quiet room for before he even called.
That was what had me off balance now.
The lust was there. God knew it was there. But Micah had gotten under my skin in a place heat alone could not reach. It was the man sounding like himself in private. The easy laugh. The music in the background. The silences that did not feel empty. The fact that he called instead of hiding behind messages once he realized the thread had gotten too thin for what he wanted.
“Ain’t nobody saying you can’t take care of yourself,” my mother said. “We know you can. You been taking care of yourself a long time.”
The kitchen quieted around that for half a second.
Frankie played low from the speaker near the window. My aunt Denise was in the dining room fixing napkins nobody had asked her to touch. Somebody out on the deck had started arguing about whether the hot dogs were done, and one of the little boys was already being told, loudly, to put the sparklers down before he burned off his eyebrows.
But Mama’s words still landed.
