Page 39 of Justice

Later that night, after Rita was settled in bed, Skye had gone to her room, and Dream was placed to sleep, I found myself wandering about the home I bought for Monica all those years ago. I remember promising her the dream. And I made that shit come true.

It was massive, sprawled across thirteen and a half acres out in Potomac. The house cut across the property in pale stone and black glass, its arched windows lined up with the kind of precision money demanded. It didn’t sit near the road. It sat back from it, far enough to make the rest of the world feel dismissed. A broad circular drive opened in front of the entrance, all polished stone and empty space, forcing you to take in the size of the place before you ever reached the door. Seven bedrooms. More house than we ever came close to filling.

Inside, even in the dark, I knew every line of it. Blond wood floors ran unbroken from one end to the other, and in the daytime the sun spilled across them and traveled clean through walls of glass to the pool out back and the tree line past that. The rooms were enormous and quiet, furnished in different styles to ensure we were never bored.

Monica had a hand in every inch. She had a creative streak and I let her run rampant with her ideas. Every inch of this house was stamped by her essence.

It was less a home than a declaration. Elegant, immaculate, and entirely certain of its own importance.

Just like she was.

I made my way into Monica’s closet. It was one of the bedrooms I had converted to hold all of her luxury adornments. I never came in here anymore.

I’d never had the heart to clear it out. Three years gone, and her things still hung right where she left them. Her dresses in their neat rows, her shoes lined up. A silk robe on the back of the door that still held the faint ghost of her perfume, if you stood close enough and needed it bad enough. Some days I told myself I kept it for the girls. Truth was I kept it for me. I wasn’t ready to live in a house that had no proof she’d ever been in it.

I sat down on the little bench in there and just breathed her in a minute. It was probably time to start parting with her things. Maybe put them in storage for the girls when they are of age.

“Daddy?”

Storie stood in the doorway, backpack still on one shoulder, watching me with a careful look.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Your mother.” I didn’t see a reason to lie. “Wondering if it’s healthy, keeping all this in here like a museum. Three years is a long time to leave a closet like somebody’s coming back to it.”

She came in slowly and sat down beside me, and for a minute neither of us said anything, just two people who’d loved the same woman sitting in what was left of her.

I reached over and opened her jewelry box. Everything still in its place. And there, coiled in the top tray where it always lived, was the tennis bracelet.

“You know I gave this to your mama on our third date?” I lifted it out and let it catch the light. “Way back. Me and your uncles were still rebuilding the business up from nothing, and I did not have it like that. Not even close. But we were out one evening just window shopping, killing time, and she stopped at this case. The way her eyes lingered on it… I knew she wanted it.” I smiled at the gleaming diamonds. “So I bought it. Spent damn near everything I had that month. Ate noodles for three weeks and didn’t care one bit, because she wore it out the store and looked at me like I’d hung the moon.”

Storie was quiet, looking at the bracelet in my hand.

“I want you to have it,” I said.

Her head came up. “Really?”

“Yes.” I turned to face my oldest girl. “It’s beautiful, but why? That’s what you’re about to ask me. Here’s why. I’ve been hard on you, Storie. I know I have. And I meant every bit of it for the right reasons, but I’ve been sitting with it, and I can see you’re trying. I see you. Your mama would want you to have something of hers that meant something. Let this be a lil truce between us.”

Her eyes filled, and for once nothing about her looked cold or far-off or hard to reach. She just looked like my little girl.

“Thank you, Daddy.” Her voice went thick. “It’s beautiful. I’ll take good care of it. I promise.”

“I know you will.” I gently took her wrist and fastened her mother’s bracelet around it. It fit her like it had been waiting for her. “There. Looks right on you.”

She hugged me closely and then headed out of the room. I sat in that closet a minute longer, feeling like maybe, finally, we were breaking ground.

I’d be lying if I said the horse hadn’t been weighing on me. I threw Dream an elaborate party and bought her the most expensive gifts I’d ever bought my daughters. That lopsidedness had been sitting on me all week. I justified it by saying it was because Storie’s attitude had been fucked up and it had. She def deserved consequences but I still needed her to know that I loved her. The bracelet evened it out some. My girl was going through some of her hardest years. She was coming of age without her mother. She saw her mother die. I knew it was taking a toll on her and I would get her therapy soon.

And for her sixteenth birthday, if she kept her grades up and stayed out of trouble, I’d buy her a car and throw her an elaborate sweet sixteen. I just hoped she could stay on the right path.

I kept hearing Skye on that deck. She’s grieving. That’s all I saw. A girl grieving something too big for her. Skye had known my child two weeks and read her clearer than I had in three years, and it shamed me a little, that it took a stranger to say the plain thing out loud. Storie needed to know that I still loved her. That she wasn’t just the difficult one, the cold one, the problem. That she was still mine.

The next morning I came downstairs to the smell of coffee and something frying. My grandmother was already laughing before I even hit the kitchen.

I found Skye in there with Rita, the two of them at the island with cut fruit and coffee between them, the morning sun coming through the back glass, talking low about something that had my grandmother wheezing.

“There he is,” Rita crowed. “Mr. Party. When you gon’ let this child have some fun, Justice? She work seven days and don’t go nowhere. It ain’t natural.”