Page 46

“Sit down, Dylan.”

She walks to the front door in her purple suit and her church shoes and opens it.

I can see him from my chair. Over her purple hat. Filling up the whole doorway.

He’s in black. Black suit. Black shirt open at the neck, ink crawling up out of the collar. His hair’s combed back. His beard’s trimmed. He’s so tall he’s got to duck to see under the porch light, and so wide his shoulders are touching both sides of the door frame. Misha’s behind him on the porch, and behind Misha, there’s a black Escalade parked in front of Mr. Washington’s house, and Mr. Washington’s sitting straight up in his chair with his mouth open.

Lord. Lord, Lord, Lord.

He looks so good I can’t breathe. I’m sitting at my mama’s dinner table, in front of Pastor Moore’s wife and my six-year-old cousin, and my panties are done. Ruined. At my mama’s table. I have to squeeze my thighs together under the tablecloth.

He’s not looking at me. He’s looking down at my mama.

She’s looking up at him. All five-foot-two of her. Not moving out of that doorway one inch.

“Mrs. Jackson,” he says.

“Who are you?”

“Sasha Maksimov.”

“I know who you are. I saw you on Sister Patrice’s phone.” She looks him up and down, slow, the same way she looked at me on the porch. “I asked who you are.”

He’s quiet for a second. And I see something happen to his face. Something I’ve never seen on him before.

He’s surprised.

“I’m the man who’s going to marry your daughter,” he says.

Everybody at the table stops breathing.

Mama doesn’t even blink.

“Did you ask her?”

“No.”

“Did you ask me?”

“No.”

“Mm.” She folds her arms over her Bible. “So you just gon’ tell us.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Mama looks at him for a long time. Up at his face. At his hands, all the tattoos across the knuckles. At Misha on the porch. At the Escalade at the curb. Then back at his face.

“I grew up on 98th Avenue in the nineties, Mr. Maksimov,” she says. Real quiet. “You know what that was like?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I do. I knew every one of them. Every dope boy, every enforcer, every man who came through this town in a long car with somebody standing behind him.” She tilts her head. “My first boyfriend was one of them. They found him in Lake Merritt when I was seventeen.”

I didn’t know that. I’ve never heard that. I’m staring at my mama like she just grew a second head.

“So I know what you are,” she says. “I knew it the second I saw that video. You’re not the first one I ever looked in the eye.”

Sasha looks down at her. He doesn’t say anything.