Page 3 of Justice

“Lies,” Rita said, delighted. “Everybody say that.”

“I’ll prove it, then. First week I’m here, I’m making you a plate, and you can tell me to my face if I lied.”

Prime laughed behind me. “She confident, Grandma.”

“I like confident,” Rita said. “Confident I can work with. It’s the mumbly ones I can’t stand.”

Serenity had stopped writing nos and started writing something longer, her pen moving quick.

I leaned in. Charm carried people through the easy part. I made my living on the part they couldn’t rehearse for.

“Miss Mercer.” I kept my voice leveled. “My grandmother has good days and bad days. On a bad one she might not know your name. She might not know mine. She might get angry, might try to leave, might say something that cuts you clean down to the white meat, because she’s frightened and can’t tell you why. What do you do on that day?”

The room went quiet. Even Rita went still.

Skye didn’t rush it. She looked at me steady, and whatever came up behind her eyes had been sitting there a long time before I asked.

“On that day,” she said, “I don’t correct her, and I don’t argue with her. Because telling somebody they’re wrong when they’re already scared just makes the fear bigger. I meet her where she is. If it’s 1971 in her head and she’s got a club to open, then all right, we’re opening the club, let’s go find your keys, and by the time we get to the door the moment’s usually passed on its own. I keep her safe and I keep her dignity.” She paused, and her voice dropped a little. “A person doesn’t stop being who they are just because their mind starts turning loose of the details. She’s still Rita Banks on the bad days. I’d just have to work a little harder to help her feel like it.”

I had sat through three hours of people, and not one of them had looked at my grandmother and seen a person to be protected instead of a body to be handled. And this woman walked in off the street and said it plain, like it was obvious. Like I hadn’t spent all morning failing to put it into words myself.

Rita reached out and took Skye’s hand back, held it in both of hers this time.

“This one,” my grandmother said, to the room, to all of us, final as a gavel. “I want this one.”

Prime caught my eye across the room. My brother never missed much.

“We’ll be in touch,” I told her, and it came out lower than I meant it, rougher, and I watched her notice it and file it away.

“I’d like that.” She rose from the crouch in one smooth motion, gathered her folder to her chest, and gave Rita one last look. “It was really good to meet you, Miss Rita. I hope I get the chance to prove I wasn’t lying about that cornbread.”

“You best not be,” Rita called after her. “I’ll know. I always know.”

Then she was gone down the hall, Serenity walking her out. The room felt bigger and emptier than it had a minute before. And I sat there in the middle of it, not caring for how much I was already thinking about a woman I’d known twenty minutes.

Rita was riding high now, all lit up from finally liking somebody.

“Serenity,” she called the second my sister came back through the door. “When you done, run me up to the market. I want to make a real dinner tonight. Something with some love in it. None of that dry-ass baked chicken your brother be calling a meal.”

“My chicken is seasoned,” I said.

“Your chicken is a cry for help.”

Prime damn near went out the window laughing, and for a minute it was good. For one minute it was just my family in my grandmother’s living room, everybody breathing easy, the weight lifted off.

Then my phone went off in my pocket.

When I pulled it out the screen said Kingsbrook Preparatory, and everything good drained right out of me. The school did not call to tell you your child made honor roll. The school called when there was a problem. And with my oldest, there was always a problem. A teacher she’d disrespected. A girl she’d bullied. Some incident nobody could quite explain, that always seemed to end with Storie sitting calm and dry-eyed in the principal’s office while everybody around her came apart at the seams.

I looked at the phone one more second before I answered it, and God forgive me, the thought that moved through my head was the same tired one that moved through it every single time that school’s name came up.

There was always something with Storie.

I stepped into the hall and put the phone to my ear.

2

SKYE