He grinned big at that.
I placed the paper back inside the box and pulled out another item. Immediately, a smile crossed my face at the sight of the small, brown bear clothed in a red t-shirt that read ‘I think you’re beary sweet’. My mind went back to what felt like a lifetime ago to me and Sam’s senior year in high school. It was right after graduation, around the time she was getting out of the hospital following her car accident. I’d gone over to visit her at home one afternoon and she handed me this bear. ‘It’s for taking such good care of me while I was down, for being there,’ she’d said. I remembered it all so clearly, like it was yesterday.
Anthony squealed in my lap, wanting to hold it.
“Okay, okay, shhh… you’re gonna wake everybody up,” I said, smiling big as I let him take it. He had such a tight grip, I knew I probably wouldn’t get it back anytime soon. In that moment, I decided he should be the one to have it now, anyway. His mom would agree.
“What y’all doin’?” Terrell asked groggily, stepping down into the foyer. He walked into the living room where I sat sorting through the boxes.
“My bad. Were we too loud?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nah, I got up to use the bathroom and heard y’all down here.”
I nodded. “The boy couldn’t sleep,” I said, moving my fingers through Anthony’s curls with a laugh. “So we’re just going through these boxes my dad gave me.”
“Anything good?” Terrell asked, taking a seat in the recliner nearby.
I shrugged. “A few things, but most of it’s junk.”
He spotted the pile of pictures with Kira’s face plastered all over them. He let out a low rumble of a laugh. “Better not let Sam see these.”
I waved him off. “She wouldn’t care.”
“I know she’s not jealous or nothing, but how soon you forget the way she took it when she found out it was Kira in your bed that day… not Reina.”
He had a point. If Kira had been within a one-hundred mile radius when I broke the whole story down, Sam would have sniffed out her scent and gone in for the kill. Kira’s offense was much more than just her sneaking into my room and pretending to be her sister that day. She was the cause of me and Sam’s breakup, and everything else that followed. Granted, my secretiveness at the time played a part in Sam’s willingness to believe I was capable of doing what it looked like I’d done, but Kira was the catalyst that set the whole thing on fire. This fact wasn’t lost on Sam and it took a lot of talking and reasoning to calm her down the night we discussed it all. Terrell and Maisha weren’t there, but both had experienced the aftermath—Terrell as my sounding board, Maisha as Sam’s.
“Yeah… Maybe I should toss these sooner rather than later,” I concluded.
With another chuckle, Terrell scooped the pictures up and double bagged them before they made their way into the trash, just to avoid them being discovered later. He took a seat again, but this time not too far away on the floor.
“What you got there, Deuce?” he asked, bringing Anthony’s eyes to him as if that were his real name.
“Sam’s gonna kill you if she hears you call him that, you know.”
“That’s part of the fun,” he reasoned. That’d been the nickname he gave my son from the day he was born and Sam had grown to hate it even more over the eleven months since.
Anthony handed Terrell the bear in his hands, letting him look it over. “I think you’re beary sweet?” he read from the bear’s shirt. “What the hell is this?”
I laughed and started putting the items I planned to keep in that one box so they didn’t get mixed in with the others. “It was a gift from Sam a long time ago.”