Page 48 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“You look tired,” she said.

“I am tired. Been a long day of watching my sons pretend they’re fine when they’re not.”

“You’re one to talk about pretending.”

“I never claimed to be an exception to my own rules, woman. Just the man who makes ’em.”

She almost smiled at that—the corner of her mouth doing that particular thing it did when she was trying not to give me the satisfaction of a full one. And then she disappeared down the hall toward the kitchen. I heard the water running again, the clink of a plate against the sink, the particular domestic music of a house where somebody was still willing to clean up after you, even when you’d given them every reason not to.

I sat back against the couch cushions and let my eyes drift to the television without really watching it. The sound washed over me instead of landing anywhere useful. I thought about the two men who’d just walked out of my study—one grieving too quietly to trust, one grieving too loud to steer, and both of them slipping past whatever grip I still thought I had on this family. And I thought about the woman in my kitchen who’d spent the better part of a month keeping her distance and had, tonight, without announcement or apology, decided to bring me tea, count my pills, and sit close enough on the couch that her hand ended up under mine.

A man takes his comforts where he finds them. I’ve buried enough friends, outlived enough enemies, and survived enough of my own bad decisions to know that much for certain. If Odette had decided the anger had run its course, decided thirty-some years of marriage was worth more than one more week of cold silence over things that were already done and couldn’t be undone regardless of how mad she stayed about them, then I wasn’t about to interrogate the reasoning. I was just going to let myself have it. Sit on this couch, hip aching, medicine working its way through my system, television hollering nonsense about surveys and showers, and let myself believe, for one evening at least, that the hardest part of the storm inside my own house had already passed.

She came back through a few minutes later with a second mug of that ginger tea, handed it to me without a word, and settled back onto the couch beside me. Closer this time, her shoulder just about touching mine, feet tucked back under her the way they’d been when I first walked in.

“They said cornbread,” the man on the television hollered, and the whole family behind him screamed like he’d announced a birth.

“Fool didn’t even say it right,” Odette muttered. “It’s cornbread and butter. That’s a whole different answer.”

“You’d know. You’ve made enough of it.”

“I have made enough cornbread in this house to build a second house out of it, and don’t none of these people on this show appreciate the difference between a full answer and half of one.” She sipped her tea and glanced at me sideways. “You gon’ watch the rest of this with me or you got somewhere better to be?”

I settled deeper into the cushions, careful of the hip, and let the cane rest where it was against the arm of the couch.

“Nowhere better,” I said. “Not tonight.”

And for a good while after that, that’s exactly what we did—sat there together in the blue light of a game show, her laughing at contestants who couldn’t do simple math, me sipping tea a little too sweet and a little too good. The two of us existing in that particular quiet that comes after a storm when the wind’s died down but the sky hasn’t quite cleared, believing, each in our own private way, that we’d made it through to the other side of something.

Chapter 8

AMAI

We hadn’t gotten a quarter mile off Winston’s property before the silence in that truck started weighing on me more than anything he’d actually said.

Kaisen sat in the passenger seat with his hands flat on his knees, looking out at the tree line like it held answers no one else could provide. Not slumped. Not shaking. Just still, in a way that didn’t sit right on a man who used to fill up every room he walked into. Kaisen always had some shit to say, especially to me. Winston had just told him to his face that his son was gone, and the girl belonged to me, and Kaisen hadn’t argued, hadn’t cursed him out, hadn’t done any of the things I would’ve expected. He’d just sat there and taken it, calm as still water, and calm was never a word I associated with my brother. That was the biggest red flag because Kaisen never missed a moment to whine about me taking whatever I wanted.

“You gon’ say something, or we riding to this funeral home on mute?” I asked, merging onto the highway.

“What you want me to say, Amai?”

“I don’t know. Something. Anything that’s not a watered-down version of yourself.”

He didn’t answer that. Just kept looking out the window at nothing, the fields blurring past, the sun already starting to set, throwing a hard light across the dash.

“Winston shouldn’t have said that shit to you,” I said, because somebody had to say it, and it wasn’t going to be our daddy. “It was fucked up. The baby you lost is still a baby you lost. Don’t matter whose blood the other one carries.”

“I’m fine.”

“You keep saying that, but I call bullshit.”

“That’s your problem, not mine. You have stabbed me, put me in a hole, and shot me. My mental health is where you draw the line and care?”

I let that sit for a second, both hands on the wheel, watching him out the side of my eye the way I’d been watching him for weeks now—not the casual glance a brother gives a brother, but the kind of watching I do when I think somebody’s got something going on in their head that ends up with someone dead. Kaisen used to talk with his whole body, hands moving, voice rising and falling like a preacher working a crowd. This version of him barely moved at all, and that bothered me more than tears would have.

“You eat today?” I asked.

“I had coffee.”