Jackie nodded.
“Parents will be parents,” he said. “They can’t help worrying over you. I know with T.C., even when I was out there on the streets, I’d be thinking about him. Did he put something he found on the floor in his mouth? Is he going to grow up killing animals or worse ’cause his daddy’s out there fiending for crack instead of reading him bedtime stories?” He shook his head.
Jackie hadn’t heard him reference his life on the other side before and she felt a mix of curiosity and disgust.
The boy across the street was repeating himself now, his voice rising each time, “I ain’t do nothing. But I ain’t do nothing.”
One of the officers gripped his arm and slammed him into the door of the police car. The boy didn’t even wince, but Terry did. Still, he didn’t take his eyes off him.
“Me too,” Jackie said, trying to grasp his attention. Different concerns of course, but what mother didn’t fear the worst for her child? When he was with her, when he wasn’t, it didn’t seem to make a difference. “But I’m a grown woman,” she added. “That’s the difference between me and my baby. At some point they have to accept that I have to take responsibility for my own choices in life, that I’m qualified to make my own decisions.”
And that was the part where she stumbled, because she’d never been as judicious as her sister. Sybil said everything with a sense of certainty that obviated the presence of all doubt anywhere. Her failures seemed to only grant her more confidence. Tulane, for instance, was her dream school, but she didn’t finish reading the rejection letter before she changed her tune, a shift so abrupt and thorough it swept out all evidence of any opinion preceding it. All of a sudden, everybody knew the best judges came out of Loyola. Tulane was all well and good if you wanted to teach, but when you looked at the best practicing lawyers in the city, most of them had studied at Loyola. Jackie didn’t know if any of that were true or not, but more important, its veracity never would have crossed her mind.
“I’m a grown woman.” Jackie repeated it to see if it would stick.
“I know,” Terry said. He was nearly whispering. The police had cuffed the boy and were pushing his head into the back of their car.
“What do you think he did?” she asked, to change the subject.
Terry shrugged. The car’s sirens cut on, twinkled down the block. “Maybe drugs. Maybe nothing. Hard to know sometimes.
“You did the right thing,” he said once the car was out of sight, “hanging up. That’s the only way to draw that line, to make them understand it’s time to push back. Otherwise, they’ll be riding your back for the rest of your life.” He walked toward the front door of their apartment, but turned back toward her to speak. “Sometimes people have to see it to believe it. Sometimes you got to show them better than you can tell them.”
She studied his face. He seemed spooked, maybe from the arrest downstairs. She wondered if anything like that had ever happened to him on the street. Who knew what he’d witnessed? He never talked about it, but he’d told her once that crack wasn’t like alcohol, that he’d pay anything to be able to block some of his memories out, but that it wasn’t that kind of drug.
“But everything is going all right otherwise?” she asked. His hand was on the doorknob now, but she wanted to keep him with her.
He nodded. “Everything’s good. If you’re good, and the baby’s good, I’m good, girl.”
Jackie smiled, but she wasn’t satisfied; something in his demeanor was worrying her. “At work too, I mean?” she asked. He hadn’t talked about it much. The first day, he’d been so excited to wake up with a purpose, but now it seemed he got out of bed later and later, and he was quiet more than buoyed up when he got back.
He turned back toward the house. “Umhmm,” he grunted. “Same ol’, same ol’.”
“It’s going to get better, baby,” she said, not quite sure what the it she was referencing was. At that, he turned toward her again.
“Don’t mind me, I’m just tired, baby, but everything’s good.” He stretched his smile out, reminding her of herself all those days before he came back.
“Well, that’s good, baby,” she said, and though she recognized her own fake smile in his, she let his words soothe her. “That’s good,” she repeated.
She walked toward him. He was still grinning, but she could see the defeat in his eyes.
T.C.
Summer 2010
T.C. decided it would be easier to clone than start from scratch. Then he realized this was too big of an operation to run from his mama’s house, so once he bought the cuttings from his boy who also grew, they headed over to Tiger’s. Tiger stayed in the Ninth Ward like T.C., in a house about the size of his, with the same rust-colored brick and postage stamp lawn out front. But unlike T.C.’s, Tiger’s house wasn’t done up with sofas from Aaron’s, or salvaged baby pictures on the wall. No, the place looked as if it had been gutted in preparation for a remodel, but whoever was in charge stopped midway through, and the only thing that had been set down was an uncovered mattress and a TV in the last bedroom off the hall where Tiger planned to house the plants.
After Tiger gave him a tour of the space, T.C. stepped back out on the porch. There used to be a housing complex across the street, but now the townhouses were all fenced in, hollowed out, boarded up remains amid dead grass and neglected tires. Crackheads
congregated in the unit diagonal from Tiger’s; it was the first of the month, and they’d just received whatever check sustained them. All the houses were tagged with graffiti, but the house the addicts streamed in and out of was marked with fluorescent blue bubble letters and read: not a dump.
Tiger walked out on the porch all paranoid and shit.
“Get inside and lock the door, mothafucka. I don’t know who tryna come in behind me.”
“Man, ain’t nobody trying to rob this shithole. You ain’t got nothing to take.”
T.C. regretted it as soon as it came out; he could see the shame spreading on Tiger’s face.
Tiger was quiet for a few minutes. Then, “Don’t come at me like that. At least it’s mine. At least I ain’t leeching offa my mama.
“It came with a sofa,” he added, “but I sold it. Refrigerator too, but I don’t need that shit. It’s just me here, and my cousin, but he gone now.”
T.C. let him talk, shook his head. “All right, all right, calm down. You right about that,” he said. “You right about that,” he repeated. He thought he could smell mold but how could that be? It had been so long; still there was no question that was it; he would never forget the smell that greeted him when he walked in his own house five years earlier. It was fainter here now, but there it was.