Page 10 of Justice

“Skye. Oh, thank God. Come in, come in.” Serenity got an arm free and grabbed my hand, warm and desperate at the same time. She pulled me into a front room that smelled like coffee and something sweet baking, and my chest ached at how easy it would be to love this house. “I have been counting down the days. You have no idea. Grandma’s been impossible, and I love her to death, but I have a life I’ve been trying to get back to and I could not leave her with just anybody.”

“I understand completely.” And I did. Somebody who loved an old woman that much and still couldn’t do it alone. There was no shame in that, though I could see her carrying some anyway.

The baby chose that second to break into a gummy, drooling, delighted grin at me, her face lighting up, and I was gone. Just like that.

“Oh, now who is this?” I heard my own voice go soft in that old, dangerous way. “Look at you. You are the prettiest thing I have seen all year, you know that?”

“That’s Sarai.” Serenity’s face changed when she said the name, fierce and tender at once, a mother who had clearly fought for something. “This little girl right here is my heartbeat.”

“She’s perfect.” I let Sarai catch my finger in that strong little grip, and I smiled through the emotional pain that was spreading throughout me. Because I knew this. I knew the weight of a baby girl on a hip, the smell of the top of her head, the grabbing on like you were the world. It was the best feeling God ever made. And then He took it back. “She’s got a grip on her.”

“Girl, she’s strong as an ox. Gets it honest.” Serenity kissed the baby’s temple. “I’m running her over to Mehar. That’s Quest’s wife. She’s been dying to get her hands on her, and Sarai’s got a cousin over there right about the same age.” She said it light, but there was something underneath it, relief maybe, that this baby had a family lined up to love her. Some of us built our lives out of exactly that and lost it anyway. I would have given a kidney for a family lined up to catch my child.

She walked me through the house, talking nonstop, nervous and bright, Sarai riding her hip. It was a home a family had been living hard in for decades, warm and worn in all the right places. Photographs covered every wall, the Banks men as cute little boys, an old wedding portrait gone gold at the edges, babies and graduations and Christmases stacked frame against frame. A kitchen at the heart of it that had clearly never once gone cold, cast iron on the stove, a table with more chairs than it needed. And in the front room, angled toward the window so she could see the people on the street coming and going, one high-backed chair that could only have been hers. The chair a woman sat in to rule from.

Serenity touched things as she passed them, straightening what was already straight, and I understood her without her telling me. This was a woman who loved her grandmother down to the marrow and was about to leave her in a stranger’s hands, and every straightened picture frame was an apology she couldn’t say out loud.

“She can be sharp,” Serenity warned, lowering her voice near the end. “She’ll test you. Don’t take it personal. And her eyes are still adjusting, she just got the cataract surgery, so she’s a little vain about the reading glasses. She fought us on getting help. Fought us hard.” She stopped in the kitchen doorway, hand on the frame. “But she’s the best woman I know. Please be good to her.”

“I will,” I said, because I knew what it cost to trust the wrong person with somebody you loved.

Her phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen and her body shifted, that nervous brightness sharpening into something hungry. “Shoot, that’s my reminder. I need to get on the road.” She was already moving, gathering the diaper bag, her keys, her coat, hiking Sarai up higher on her hip. “I’ve got a meeting across town, and I’m dropping this one with Quest and Mehar on my way.” She pressed a kiss to Sarai’s curls without breaking stride. “You’ll be okay? Grandma just woke up from her nap, she’s in her chair up front, she’s had her pills. I’ll be back by six, I swear it. And Justice or one of the boys will swing through before then to sit until I’m home. They don’t leave her alone. Ever.”

They don’t leave her alone. Ever. I filed it away in the part of me that never stopped taking notes. This was a family that guarded its own like a fortress, and I was walking straight into the middle of it wearing somebody else’s name.

“Go,” I told her, warm. “Get to your meeting. We’ll be just fine. And you.” I touched one of Sarai’s fat little feet. “You be good for your auntie.”

Serenity hugged me with the arm that wasn’t holding the baby. A stranger, and she hugged me like I was already saving her life. Then she was gone, Sarai’s face watching me over her shoulder down the drive, heels clicking against the walk. The big house went quiet. It was just me and the old woman now.

Rita Banks sat in her high-backed chair by the front window, angled to catch the light and the street at once, a throw across her lap, watching me come with eyes that had no business being that clear.

“Well, come on in here where I can see you.” She waved me over with one ringed hand. “Lord knows I waited long enough to see anything at all. You spend forty-some years looking at the world through dishwater, then some doctor gives it all back to you, and now I can’t get enough of just looking at folks. Come here, girl. Let me look at you.”

I crossed the room and let her look.

She took me in slow, head to toe, like my own grandmother used to. I stood there and let an old woman read me, because it would have been rude not to, and because some starved thing in me leaned toward it. When her eyes came back up to my face, they went soft. Light eyes, near gray in that window light, set in deep brown skin. I found myself wondering on her people, where all that came from, before I caught myself doing it. Reading her the same as she was reading me. Old habit. Dangerous habit.

“You got the prettiest chocolate skin,” she said. “Just as smooth. You know who you remind me of? My best friend Everly, God rest her. Dark and lovely, just like you. That woman could walk into a funeral and make it feel like a party.” She smiled at something I couldn’t see, sixty years back. “Everybody wanted to be next to Everly. I lost her a long time ago now. Been missing her ever since.”

“She sounds like she was something special.”

“She was the best of us.” Rita patted the chair beside her. “Sit. You make me tired standing there like the help. You ain’t the help. You family now, you just don’t know it yet.”

I sat. And for a minute I pretended to be just a woman sitting with a grandmother in the sun. We talked about nothing. Her stories, the DC she grew up in, the men she’d buried and the ones she should have. She was funny, mean like only old women earn the right to be, sharp as a tack even when a word slipped away from her and she had to go around it. I could have sat there all afternoon. That was the danger of it. I forgot to be afraid. I couldn’t tell you the last time that happened.

Then she reached over and took my hand.

Her grip was stronger than it had any right to be. She looked at me, and the funny fell out of her face. An older, stiller look came up underneath it. She held my eyes like she was reading the fine print of me, the part I kept folded up small where nobody could get to it.

“You’ll get him back,” she said.

My hand went still beneath hers. I hadn’t said one word about him.

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe right. My heart slammed up into my throat and sat there. I hadn’t said one word about him. Not his name, not his face, not the six-month clock ticking behind everything I did. I had buried him so deep inside me that some days I couldn’t reach him myself. And this old woman I’d known for one afternoon looked at me over her reading glasses and pulled him up out of the ground like she’d watched me put him there.

“Miss Rita, I⁠—”

“Mm.” She let go of my hand and patted it, already turning away, the strange stillness gone as fast as it came. “Don’t mind me. I say things. It’s the age.” She pushed herself up out of the high-backed chair. “I’m gone lay back down. Get old, all you do is sleep and wait. Wake me for my program at four.”