Page 1 of Justice

1

JUSTICE

If I had to sit through one more inept mothafucka in my grandmother’s living room, somebody in this house was going to get hurt.

That’s the thing people never understood about me. My brother Prime, he ran hot. His temper was quick. If he felt it, he acted on it.

Me, I ran cold. I took my time and assessed every situation. And then I acted but they never see it coming.

I’d made a life out of being the quiet one in the room. The one who let everybody else do the talking, the sweating, the swinging, while I sat back and did the math on how a thing was going to end.

And I had done the math on this man about forty seconds after he walked in.

We were three hours into this circus. Three hours into interviews and it felt like the agency had sent us the worst of the worst. It was insane, considering they were viewed as the best in the town.

That was the problem right there, see. We actually gave a fuck. This was Rita Banks. My grandmother. She came up on moonshine and numbers, ran back-alley after-hours clubs, and turned it all into a real empire. A legitimate business. Half the world had a bottle with our name on it.

She buried a husband, raised generations, straight outlasted everyone in her family. And now some agency want to send us a nigga who couldn’t even answer if he’d pick her up off the floor.

She deserved the best of everything. And these people were not it.

The man across from me settled deeper into Rita’s good armchair like he’d been invited to Sunday dinner instead of a job interview.

“So like I was sayin’,” he said, “I can take care of your moms real good. Just got my CNA license last month, so it’s all fresh, all up to date.” He tapped his temple like the knowledge lived right in his peanut brain. “Imma be real with you, though, ’cause I like to keep it a hunnid.”

I already didn’t like where “real” was about to take us.

“I just got acquitted for some spousal abuse thing,” he went on. “But I ain’t really do that shit. They ain’t have no evidence, feel me, so it’s basically like it never happened.” He shrugged, a man at peace with himself. “Oh, and I don’t do no heavy liftin’. My back is bad. So if your granny fall, she gon’ have to figure it out, or we just wait till somebody stronger get here.”

I let the silence stretch.

Nobody moved. Quest was staring a hole through the coffee table. Prime, over by the window, had his fist pressed flat against his own mouth to keep whatever was in there from coming out. Serenity had stopped writing on her little clipboard entirely.

This man had confessed to domestic violence and refused to do the single most basic part of the job. On top of that he folded his hands over his belly and waited on us like he’d sealed the deal. This nigga was out of his motherfuckin’ mind.

His name was Rodney. Ellis Care Staffing had sent us this incompetent fool. I was ’bout ready to call and cuss them out. But we had two interviews to go.

“You know what. You need to get the fuck up outta this house,” I said. The comfort drained out of his face all at once.

“Yeah, that’s a no from us.” Quest was already up. Together, we walked Rodney back through the same front door he’d strolled in through like he was coming to a cookout. He didn’t say another word. Smartest thing he’d done since he sat down.

I shut the door and leaned my back against it and exhaled the tension from my shoulders.

“Well,” Rita said from her throne, patting the arm of the chair, “I liked his tattoos.”

I turned around. My grandmother sat there in her navy blue dress looking at me over the top of her glasses. A month out from the cataract surgery and she could see clear across a room for the first time in years.

“Grandma, his tattoos can’t take care of you,” I said. “That man was an abuser.”

“Allegedly.” She lifted one finger. “And even a broke clock is right twice a day. Y’all in here acting like I need a bodyguard. I don’t need no damn nurse. I ain’t dying and I ain’t sickly.”

Nobody answered that. Because the truth of it was heavier than anything we wanted to put in the room. Two months back she’d walked out the front door at four in the morning in her nightgown, house keys in her hand, convinced she was late to open the after-hours spot she and my grandfather ran back in 1971. A club that had been closed longer than any of my siblings has been alive.

Prime found her three blocks down, standing on a corner in the cold, fussing about how the ice delivery was going to beat her there. She hadn’t known his face for a full minute. A whole minute my brother stood there while his grandmother looked at him like a stranger.

We didn’t talk about that morning. But it was why we were all here, giving up a Tuesday to interview the dregs from this care agency. It wasn’t about a nurse. It was about the fact that we were losing her slowly, in pieces, and it was becoming unpredictable.

“Grandma,” I said, softer, “humor us.”