Page 39 of Buy Back My Love

I put my hand against her belly, and she pushed it away with a laugh. “No. We like Spanish Fort for the schools, and I want something a little more modern anyway.” She looked around the room before turning back to me. “Honestly, I think you should move in. This house has way more room than that little apartment of yours.”

“For what? It’s just me and Snoop.”

“So?”

“This house deserves some kids running through it. My place is fine for me and the dog.”

Skye let out a sigh, and I already knew where the conversation was headed. “You need to start dating again.”

I looked at her, and she raised her eyebrows. “When’s the last time you even asked somebody out?”

I shrugged because I didn’t have a good answer, and I wasn’t about to make one up just to get her off my back. Skye watched me for another second before saying, “I saw Raya at Briquettes the other day.” That got my attention, and when I looked at her, she added, “She was on a date.”

Raya was my ex-wife. We’d been divorced three years, and no matter how much shit we argued about toward the end, our marriage really came down to one thing. I wanted kids, and she didn’t.

The fucked-up part was that she never told me that before we got married. At first, it was Let’s enjoy being married for a while. Then she wanted to finish her master’s. After that, we needed to travel, pay some shit off, get more established. There was always another reason to wait.

Eventually, I stopped asking when and asked her straight up if she wanted kids at all. She didn’t, and apparently, she never had. Losing my marriage hurt, but finding out I had spent years waiting on something she never even wanted hurt worse.

I was still thinking about Raya when a woman’s voice carried from the front of the house. “I ain’t know Black people stayed on Dog River.”

Skye looked at me, and I looked at her. Neither one of us could help laughing before we headed toward the living room to see who had said it. When we walked in, my dad was standing near one of the side tables talking to a woman I didn’t recognize. He didn’t look bothered by what she’d said at all. Knowing him, he had probably already told her half our family history. By the time we got closer, he was explaining how Poppa had made good money installing elevators and how specialized the work had been, especially for a Black man coming up back then.

The woman nodded along, looking genuinely interested before she turned toward the other side of the room. “You hear that, Lee? Sound like I picked up the wrong trade.”

I followed her line of sight and saw Leona. She looked different from the woman I’d picked up off the sidewalk the week before. Her hair was braided now, and she had on some fitted cream outfit with a pink sweater over it and pink Uggs. A pink bag hung from her arm, and she had on some silver jewelry. Her lashes looked fuller than I remembered too.

She hadn’t noticed me yet. She was too busy turning one of the old lamps on the table, looking it over from every angle.

“How much for the lamps?” she asked my dad.

When she looked up, her eyes landed on me. She paused for a second before a smile spread across her face.

“Fifty a piece, or seventy-five for the set,” my dad answered.

Before Leona could respond, the woman beside her jumped in. “Sixty for both.”

My dad grinned. “Seventy.”

“Sixty-five.”

“You got a deal.”

My dad and the woman both looked toward Leona, probably expecting her to be paying attention to the deal they had just made, but she was still looking at me. My dad noticed first, then Skye looked between the two of us like she was trying to figure out what was going on.

“How you doing, Leona?” I asked.

“I’m good.” She smiled. “It’s Van, right?”

“Yeah.”

The woman looked between us. “Y’all know each other?”

Leona turned toward her. “I was walking around the neighborhood last week, and his dog thought I was fresh meat.”

“Who, Snoop?” my dad asked. “That dog crazy as hell, but he harmless.”

“That’s what he said after I was already on the ground,” Leona said, looking back at me.