He shrugged. “Something like that. I thought about calling all the time. I’d pick up the phone and actually dial the number. Then I’d imagine your mama in your ear telling you that nigga ain’t shit, then imagine my kid hearing that over and over through the years. That’s how it was for me, you know. I don’t think my mama ever mentioned my daddy’s name without following it with the word mothafucka, and I’d think about all that, and I’d put the phone right back on the hook, roll up. You know how that go.” He was looking at those kids again now, anything to keep his eyes off her. The overgrown weeds were hugging their knees.
I know something,
But I won’t tell.
Three lil’ monkeys,
in a peanut shell.
One can read,
And one can dance,
And one got a hole
in the seat of his pants!
“I just thought you had moved on to somebody else, that you weren’t thinking about me and old Malik,” Alicia said.
He reached for her hand. “I could never stop thinking about you, Licia. You never have to think that.”
“Well, you never have to think it’s too late. No matter what happens with us, it’s never too late for you to be part of his life, T.C. You hear me? That’s your son.” She moved his face so it was parallel to hers. He never wanted to kiss somebody more in his life, not fuck her, just kiss her, pour his whole heart into hers and have her pour the new merged contents back.
Instead he just nodded. They stared into each other’s eyes for a while until the kids changed their song, and T.C. looked up.
Call the army, call the navy
I heard Tashica gonna have a baby.
Wrap it up in tissue paper,
send it down the elevator
“They over there ear hustling,” T.C. joked.
Alicia shook her head, smiling.
“Anyway, what the hell y’all doing in here, nigga?” She gestured toward the house again. It smells like a high school bathroom. Better yet, it smells like the hallway to prison, that’s what it smells like.”
“Aww, please, you know it ain’t nothing like that.”
“I don’t know a thing.” She paused. “Now you doing good. Don’t go fooling around with Tiger and get yourself back in trouble, T.C. I mean it. Malik needs you. We need you.”
Tiger was right on both counts. T.C. had checked the buds just the other day, and they were cloudy as a glass of ice water. He chopped the branches off all twelve plants, trimmed the leaves so only the buds were left to dry. In another week or so, they’d be open for business.
Not only that, he and Licia were still kicking it together real strong. He’d worried that the momentum from a few weeks ago would whittle down, and she’d be back to going ham on him, worse than that, barely speaking to him, but no. Every morning first thing, he called her to check in, make sure the baby was still inside, see if she needed anything. He’d gone with her to buy that car seat too, and a pair of baby Jordans he thought his little man shouldn’t be without. Then she’d invited him to the doctor’s appointment last week, and he’d heard his baby’s heartbeat, steady as the rhythm of God. Tears welled up in his eyes, and he didn’t wipe them.
He was bagging up his first batch when he got the call from Licia’s mama.
“You betta get over here to Ochsner, T.C. Labor’s starting, and it’s going quick.”
He hung up the phone, then scrambled around the house looking for a suitcase among his mama’s piles of shit. Once he found one as old as he was, he stuffed some sweats and a T-shirt inside. Licia had told him he could expect to stay up to a week sometimes depending on how the baby was delivered, and he stopped in the bathroom on his way out for his toothbrush, left a note for his mama, and hightailed it to the bus stop for the 94.
By the time he got to the fifth floor, there was an IV in Alicia’s arm and something like a shower cap on her head. He was nervous to see her that way, but the nurse pulled him aside and reassured him: The baby was showing signs of distress, not moving as much as expected. Licia had done great carrying him, and he was big enough; it made sense to just pull him now.
T.C. nodded in silence, not sure how to formulate what he was really thinking. Finally he just said it. “Is she going to be all right?”
“She’s going to be fine, sir.” The nurse handed him some hospital scrubs and a cap, and he dressed, then sat outside waiting for anesthesiology to administer the spinal.
Then the same nurse came out and led him to the operating room. The doctors had already lined the curtain up at Licia’s stomach. He hustled over to her. He kept looking around for her mama or her sister, but it was just the two of them there. He took her hand, let her squeeze his as hard as she wanted.
“Are you in any pain?”
She shook her head, biting her lip. “Just scared,” she said.
“Can you feel this?” the doctor called out from the other side of the curtain. T.C. peeked back, watched as the doctor dug a scalpel into the bottom of Licia’s belly. “Because we started.”
Licia shook her head. She seemed to calm down after that, but T.C. tried to think of something to say, to take her mind off of the fact that she was getting sliced into.
“I know you wanted to do it the other way,” he whispered.
“It’s cool, however they can get him out healthy.”
He was about to tell her not to worry, that the baby was going to be fine, that everything would be now, but a minute later, the doctor called out to them again.
“Baby here in a second, Daddy, if you want to see.” He looked at Alicia to see if he could leave her. She nodded for him to go, her eyes wide and bright. He peeked behind the curtain again, and there he was, not anything like what T.C. was expecting amid the blood and goo, but he was his, long as a Lewis and red as one too, screaming like a banshee.
“You want to cut the cord, sir?”
“Sure.” T.C. asked them if he was aiming the scissors in the right place three times before he snapped them shut. Then the nurses weighed the baby, wiped him down, wrapped him in a blanket, and handed him over. He was tinier than T.C. could have imagined. T.C. guessed he was expecting something the size of one of those newborns on TV, but Malik could fit in the palm of just one of his hands. He carried him to Alicia and she burst into tears before she even saw his face. She couldn’t hold him because of the drugs, but T.C. held him out to her.
“Look at what we did,” she said. “Let me see him. He’s perfect, isn’t he? Did they say he was perfect?”
“They said he was perfect.”
“Can you believe it?”
T.C. shook his head. The baby’s eyes were closed, and T.C. kissed his closed lids.
“This is your mama,” he said. “And I’m your daddy, and we love you. We gon’ always be here for you, you hear? No matter what.”
T.C. walked out to the waiting room feeling even taller than normal. MawMaw, Mama, and Aunt Ruby had joined Licia’s people in there. They seemed to be trying to distract themselves from waiting with an episode of Judge Judy but they jumped up when they saw him.
“Twenty-two inches.” He pointed at himself, and they laughed. “Seven pounds, fifteen ounces.”
Everybody shrieked.
“He gon’ play ball like you, T.C.,” Licia’s mama said.
“That would be real cool,” T.C. said. “Real cool.”