Page 88 of Plus One

“Okay. Yes, ma’am.”

“You have your jacket, right?” Her voice was watery. He’d known her to be the silent party of the relationship, but she always showed up and said all the right things. “I feel like you’re leaving the nest.” She sniffed. “We love you, Maurice. And we’re so damn proud of the man you’ve become.”

She sounded like she was sending him off into the world to find his fortunes and his bride.

Am I?“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.” That was the thing about Deborah Fairbanks. Maurice had never known her to hesitate with him.

“Why me?”

“Why you what?”

“Why do you care so much? Is this Chicago merger about me?”

There was silence. “Yes,” she finally said. “It was always about you. I saw how your mother struggled with sobriety and all the hell that brought. And when I met you… I just knew that I had to look out for you. There was nobody else who could or would.”

Maurice struggled to fill his lungs. He pressed the phone to his ear and tried to drown out the revelry around him.

“It broke my heart when you went away. I didn’t do enough to stop it from getting that bad.”

She talked like she had been involved with his mother’s mess. Could his life have been different?

“Then they said you couldn’t get parole. We knew that whatever came next for you would be a thousand times harder. You know where we’re from. Not many men come out and stay out after a long sentence.”

She was right. PADOC had the distinction of having the most fathers and sons incarcerated at the same time. It was never confirmed, but Maurice had always suspected his father was among them. Just an abstraction of numbers somewhere in the same system. The link was there if you knew how to read it. Maurice had never wanted to.

“My brother and I fought for years to set up a construction trade program. Had to find all the loopholes to get you boys access to the tools and training you needed to build a life.”

“And now you’ve got hundreds of graduates. You should be proud.”

“I am, but I’m most proud of you, Maurice. I promised your mama that I’d look after you, and that’s what I intend to do. I couldn’t help the move to Jersey. I had to follow my family. But it all worked out in the end.”

When Tommie’s family had left Philly, Maurice thought he might die in prison from the isolation, from the abandonment. A year later, the visits started again, and Maurice could breathe.

“What happened was never your fault, Mo. I hope you believe that.”

He nodded. “Believing ain’t easy. I try, but that black spot follows you. It can’t be erased. You’re right. It makes everything harder.”

“But you can go to Illinois and start over. They have different laws, and this program is identical to what we’re doing in the Tri-State Area.”

Deb told him about the returning citizens’ job skills program and the retired cabinetmakers who started it. How they responsibly demolished and restored old homes but hadn’t adopted the full remodeling that Maurice’s crew had become known for. When the Chicago group approached Deb, they had more demand than they had capacity and were looking for a partnership.

“They actually called me first. Can you believe it?”

Maurice’s chest puffed a little bit. “Of course! We’re dope!”

“We are. Then I came to visit and was really impressed. And came again. That second time, I looked in on Monie but couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

There it was. Monique was hurt and offended. But Maurice had confidence that the whole scheme had been innocent.

He would never tell her how to feel, though.

“I should have said something sooner, but Monie got sick and needed so much that she wasn’t saying. Getting you two in the same room got trickier and trickier. And you had just worked up the courage to join us in Jersey. I couldn’t send you to Chicago right away. I needed time with you. I was being greedy.” Her laugh was husky and real. “But the Lord works in mysterious ways! TJ and Elaine finally got their shit together and set a wedding date. The rest, as they say, is water under the bridge.”

“Everybody wins, huh?”

“Not quite. Monie’s angry with us.”