Hold Love Strong (23 page)

I
sat with my grandma on the Columbus Avenue bus. We headed home. I faced a litany of misdemeanor charges, rioting, disorderly conduct, and things I didn't even know how to do like endangering the welfare of a child. The court-appointed lawyer said there were so many charges it didn't matter. Some might get dropped. New ones might come up. I was a minor. I was given a court date and released. The key for me, said my lawyer, was to focus on myself, to focus on the positives. Go to school, he said. Stay out of trouble. Enjoy being with your family. Donnel was an adult. And he faced more charges than me. Assault, battery, criminal anarchy, resisting arrest. He had fought with the police, broke one's nose in addition to breaking Lorenzo's. And he was not legally employed. And he was not in school. And my grandma said he looked at the judge with a face like broken bricks, hard and sharp, his eyes accusatorial, as if it were not he who needed mercy but he who dispensed it. The judge took offense and set bail at seventy-five thousand dollars, and Donnel went to jail.

“He is guilty of something,” my grandma said. “But all that? He ain't never been in no trouble.”

She sat straight and stiff, more rigid than the plastic bus seat, and trying to avoid the reality of Donnel's situation, she told me that her relationship with Mr. Goines was over.

“Forever,” she said, staring straight ahead, her hands holding her purse in her lap, her face taut. “I ain't taking no more flowers and things. He's a fool. That's all he is.”

I stared out of the window and did not speak. I was so tired, empty, and hungry my lips and eyelashes were too heavy to bear. We were silent for a few minutes. My mind wandered to Mr. Goines. So that was it, he and my grandma's love was done?

“But that judge,” said my grandma. “That judge took it like Donnel was some whole army of men that just up and started acting crazy.”

It was the last day of summer camp. Each time the bus stopped it filled with the antithesis of us, the carefree relief and release of children in the bright colors of parks and recreation camp T-shirts. High on candy and soda, eyes bloodshot from city pools, lanyards adorning wrists and ankles and hanging from the keys in their pockets, their final arts and crafts projects jammed in backpacks and wrinkled in their hands, some children had first-place ribbons. Others had seconds and thirds. They laughed and disputed and championed frivolous ideas, enlightening one another, professing fates and favorite songs, each voice bursting above and ducking below others.

“Seventy-five thousand?” my grandma continued. “Who got that kind of money? What are we going to do?”

Outside on Columbus Avenue, the sidewalk was peppered with people making their way through the rigors of the day, walking over patches of heaved and crumbled concrete, past plastic bags, newspaper pages, broken glass, and tampon applicators. The bus passed the corner store and the decrepit Laundromat, its windows steamed and filled
with the rainbows and suns and simple faces children too young for camp carved into the fogged glass. It passed Pastor Ramsey's church, the Holy Name, its metal gates lowered over its door and windows. It passed the liquor store, still glowing yellow from the new coat of paint it received that summer.

The bus stopped at a red light and I saw Lindbergh pulling his shopping cart by a rope. The cart was piled high with plastic bags of cans and bottles, a broomstick and a tattered square suitcase. It was heavy and Lindbergh leaned so far forward to pull it, his body hovered above the sidewalk at a forty-five-degree angle, just between falling and standing. Suddenly, he slipped and fell to his knees. But he didn't let go of the rope. He put one hand down to break his fall and held the rope that was tied to the cart with the other. Then he stayed on his knees and looked down the street like he was seeing something holy, something once promised long ago, something that was still promising.

The light turned green and the bus continued forward. On the horizon, looming at the very end of the avenue, Ever Park's towers rose upon us floor by floor. Donnel's money was somewhere inside. Or it was somewhere near. And even if it wasn't, it was findable. It had to be. Because I was determined to find it. I was going to free him. Not just because I felt guilty for saying what I said to him and I wished to apologize. But for brotherhood. That is, wouldn't Donnel have done the same for me?

I
followed my grandma off the bus. Although Ever was the same as it always was—the same tired red bricks covered with grit and grime, the same scrawls and scribbles, the pleadings and preaching of teenagers with markers and cans of spray paint doing everything to prove they were alive, nicknames and gang names, the same phrases with the same words misspelled, killer with an
a
, fuck without a
c, Rest in Peace
written with the peace symbol instead of the word—it felt unknown to me. No longer did I see it as a residence. Rather, it was a vault, a lockbox. Maybe Donnel's money was beneath our bed. Maybe it was hidden in a sneaker box in the closet. Maybe it was in a safe. If so, I would find the safe and the key. Nothing would stop me.

In front of my building stood Kaya. She babysat Nakita Webb's four children, Valentine, Mercedes, Shavon, and infant Asia, sitting on Kaya's cocked hip as she watched the others play tag. My grandma said hello to Kaya. Then she said that she'd leave us alone to talk and she continued inside. I had talked to Kaya on the phone from the holding
cell. I had told her I was fine, that things were all right. But everything was different now. She could see that. She smiled a soft smile composed mostly of sadness. She shifted Asia higher on her hip. Neither of us could find words to say. So when Valentine stopped playing, it was he who spoke first.

“Abraham?” he said, studying me with round, gentle eyes as if I were an apparition he had never imagined. “What happened to your face?”

“I got in a fight,” I said.

“I got a boyfriend,” interrupted Mercedes, eight years old and already full of sass.

Suddenly, Shavon, who because she just turned three did not know how to question my wounds or brag, latched on to my leg. She looked up the length of my body.

“Hungry,” she said. “Me hungry.”

I touched her head, looked at Valentine and Mercedes, then I lifted my eyes to Kaya.

“Their mom's working,” she said.

“She bringing us McDonald's,” said Mercedes.

“She's a pilot,” said Valentine, already a hoper of such a colossal degree that he was also a pathological liar.

“She ain't no pilot,” scolded Mercedes, a liar herself. “She builds the planes.”

“She cleans them,” Kaya whispered because she couldn't bring herself to announce something that might disappoint the children.

She looked down the length of Columbus Avenue, sighed, and shifted her eyes to me.

“You OK?” she asked.

It took all of my strength to shake my head yes.

Kaya sighed. “You know, that was the worst thing I ever seen.”

She stopped herself. Then she forced herself to smile.

“And you,” she added. She shook her head, took a deep breath, and
then she let the words and a small laugh out at the same time. “You the worst damn fighter I ever seen.”

“Nah,” I said. “Nah, I'm good. I got caught off guard. I didn't see it coming.”

“See what?” she said.

“How I got hit.”

“It was Eric.”

“Eric hit me?”

“No, stupid,” she scolded. “He was pulling on you from behind. He was trying to pull you out of the fight.”

I
climbed the stairs, rose like smoke. If there was shouting, the sounds of televisions and radios coming from the hallways, I didn't hear them. If there was laughter or crying, I didn't recognize it as sound. The stench that hovered around Ever, the stench I had not fully been aware of until that day, the day of my return, was multiplied by the stairwell's confinement. Thus, although I ascended the stairs, it seemed as if I burrowed deeper into the stink, closed in on its awful core.

I reached my floor, I opened the stairwell door with the flat of my hand and stepped into the hallway's dimness. As it was in the lobby, because only a few of the fluorescent lights in the hallway worked, humming and flickering through their long dying, the hall was dusk. The apartment doors were black. In front of a few, there were welcome mats. I was home. I took the two steps to my door. There was only silence. The welcome home sign that had greeted my uncle was still taped to the door. I felt choked, as if two invisible hands were clamped around my neck.

I knocked. The door opened an inch, then two. Then my grandma opened the door all the way. I walked in. Eric sat on the couch, his arms wrapped around his chest, his sketchbook open on his lap. He turned his head and looked at me.

“D ain't coming back,” he said in a manner that could have been either a question or statement.

He swallowed something round and huge the way someone who is drowning seizes and clings to a gulp of air. Then he shook his head no.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Sorry?” I said. “For what?”

“I got to get stronger.”

Suddenly, my Aunt Rhonda ran across the room. Her face was torn leather. She raised her arms high. Then she dropped them with a thump around my shoulders.

“Oh Abraham,” she cried into me. “Oh Abraham, why?”

My uncle stood alone at the window, his muscular arms folded across his chest. He turned and looked at me bracing my aunt, bearing all her weight. He studied the sight. Was this how it was when he left? Were we wounded by his absence just as much? He closed his eyes and held them closed. He was a man privy to the aftermath of his own absence, how, no matter how he prayed that it didn't, it had victimized us, his family, at least as much as it victimized him. He turned and looked back out of the window. He looked left, down the length of Columbus Avenue, as if he would wait right there and never move, not until he saw Donnel walking his clip-clop stride home.

I opened and closed every door in my head, searching for a portal, some avenue of chance that led to a different reality. Where could Donnel's money be? The failure of not being harder on Donnel; for not demanding that he want more for himself; for allowing him to assume the familial responsibilities that his nature predetermined him to assume; for resting silent and still in his arms when he held me the moment I
was born into this world, then letting him carry me, bathe me, whisper to and defend and soothe me: for all of this and more, I reasoned his imprisonment was my fault. If only I had not dribbled the ball off of my foot. If only I had refused to be knocked down. How could I love someone so much and say I wished he was dead?

I couldn't take the television. I couldn't take not knowing right then and there where the money was. I couldn't take my family. I couldn't take myself. So I left. I didn't bother to excuse myself. I didn't say where I was going or when I would be back. No one called out. No one tried to stop me. I turned around. I opened the door. I ran out and slammed the door closed behind me. Then I ran down the stairs, skipping the last three steps of each flight with a leap to the landing. I sprinted across the lobby. I slammed my hand against the steel door. I ran past Kaya and Nakita Webb's children and I had no plans of stopping. I was going to run until I reached the edge of the world or the air I split wore me away, rubbed my skin, bones, and organs to ash and left my soul to the whim of the subsequent wind. But then I heard my name and my legs refused to churn and go.

“Abraham!” Kaya shouted. “Abraham!”

I slowed to a jog, then walked a few more feet with my hands on my hips. Slowly, the urge to blame Kaya for everything, starting way back when we were children, devoured me. Because she wasn't family. Because we didn't share blood. I had so much hurt I needed a target. I stopped walking and turned around.

Kaya walked toward me, her face twisted as if she had read my mind and her heart was broken.

“I ain't going,” was all I could compose, surprising myself with the declaration.

I was talking about school. Somehow, she knew it. She absorbed everything I hurled at her with those three words. But she would not stand for it.

“You got no choice,” she said, her voice forceful yet no louder than a whisper.

I looked down. I looked left and right. I searched for a reason, for some sight that provided me the proper words to respond with. In a week, we would begin our senior year. I could be the first Singleton in history to graduate from high school. But I was afraid. I was suffering, buckling. I closed my eyes. Where was that money?

“Abraham,” Kaya said. “Promise me. On the count of three. Swear to me.”

D
onnel wouldn't tell me where the money was. He wouldn't write about it in a letter. He wouldn't talk about it on the phone.

“That's for Atlanta,” he said. “That ain't got nothing to do with this. I worked too hard to blow it.”

Still I searched for it. It wasn't beneath the bed, in the closet, or behind the refrigerator in the kitchen. It wasn't beneath the sink in the bathroom. It wasn't hidden in any sneakers or shoes. Where does one put so much money? No, that was not the question whose answer I was seeking. It was more. It was where does one hide freedom? I asked every inanimate object we lived with. The showerhead, the floor, the toilet.
Where was it?
I thought. I whispered. I shouted. But it was as if everywhere I looked, from the black night to the first morning sky, had sworn to secrecy.

“So what you want is bigger than being locked up?” I asked Donnel when we talked on the phone.

“That's it,” he said. “That's exactly how it is.”

I became enraged. This motherfucker, I thought. Who does he think he is sitting in jail for the sake of what? Us? His nobility? His martyrdom? He made me so mad I started thinking about selling drugs myself. How many nickel and dime bags would it take to get to seventy-five thousand? How much time would it take me? I was confounded by brotherhood. I was confronted by the question of whether or not I should be more tied to what Donnel wanted or what I wanted for him. In the end, I couldn't sell drugs. I was scared of standing on the street. Scared of the police. Scared of being seen by Lorenzo at the wrong place and time because he told my friends and Eric that what happened at the park wasn't over, that if he caught me alone or without Kaya it was on. So I rarely walked alone and when I did I avoided him, ducking into a store, turning around, or cutting down a different street whenever I saw him or any of his friends. But more than anything else, I was scared about one thing: not doing what Donnel told me. He would never let me follow him, never let me do what he did.

Still, I kept looking for the money. Finders keepers: if I found the money then the rule clearly stated that it was mine to use as I pleased. So I looked even more than everywhere, which led me to look in places I had no business looking in, like my grandma and my aunt's panty drawers. I prayed to God.
Lord, where is it? Tell me where one hides such a thing
. I kept faith that I would find it.

And I kept my promise to Kaya and went to school. There, I did only three things. I thought about the money. I loved Kaya. And I wrote Donnel letters. But not just hello, how are you letters. I constructed petitions, pleas, and demands. I created rationales and arguments meant to confuse him and bend his heart into telling me where the money was. But it was fruitless. Donnel told me it was useless.

He said, “What do you think, just because a nigga is behind bars he don't have principles?” He breathed a breath that I knew so well I
could see he was smiling. Then he added: “But don't stop writing. Shit is entertaining, at least.”

Still I kept searching. And I lay awake and thought about being free. But I couldn't find the money. On the phone it became a back and forth between Donnel and me, cat and mouse, Abbott and Costello. Who's on first? What's on second?

“So, where is it?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know where it is?”

“Exactly.”

“But it's yours?”

“Yup.”

“So where is it?”

“I already told you.”

“Nigga, you said you don't know.”

“Exactly.”

Somehow, and despite the fact that he was incarcerated, the conversation between Donnel and me always ended with him laughing. Which always made me laugh. And so I continued asking Donnel where the money was. Because I hoped he would tell me. But if not then at least I could hear him laugh. And so he could hear me. And without going into emotions and details, we could assure each other we were forgiven; and he could tell me he loved me; and I could prove the truth was I loved him.

I
sat on the couch watching
The Simpsons
with Eric, who was eating the pork lo mein and French fries he'd bought at the Chinese food hole-in-the-wall down the block. A bottle of pineapple soda and a bottle of hot sauce were at his feet. He slurped and chewed loudly. He had headphones on and the volume of the Discman Donnel bought him to replace the stolen one was as loud as it would go. I don't know how Eric heard the TV, but he watched it with a level of intensity that demonstrated he not only heard, but his whole soul was in it. He laughed at opportune times and nodded to the rhythm of his music. He shoveled some lo mein into his mouth, chewed, and, following the rhythm of a song's bass line, he tapped the plastic fork on some invisible drum above his head.

The phone rang. And because there was no sense asking Eric to do anything when he was eating or watching TV, I went to the kitchen and answered the call.

“Good evening,” said the voice on the other end. “I'm looking to speak with a Mr. Abraham Singleton.”

“Speaking,” I said. “Who's this?”

“Abraham, this is Coach Rivers from Brandeis University,” said the man, his voice heavy with authority. “I was wondering if you have a few moments to speak.”

I doubted Rivers was real. I thought a friend was playing a joke on me…maybe it was Cleveland. I listened closely. Hold on, I thought. What was that noise? Was that Jefferson giggling in the background? Maybe it was Titty. No. Could it be Precious? Yusef? Maybe it was a scam, I thought. Maybe it was one of the fulsome Army recruiters who called once a week luring with lies about serving my country.

“I know your uncle,” he said.

“You from Ever?” I asked.

“Brooklyn,” he said. “Brownsville. But I used to coach in the summer leagues out in Ever Park. We were the only team that ever had a player block one of your uncle's shots. You know you're a hard man to find?”

“Why's that?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

I was silent. I leaned back against our brown refrigerator and waited for Rivers to continue talking. For a variety of reasons, messages weren't passed in my home. Sometimes it was simple innocence; sometimes forgetfulness; sometimes it was spite; other times it was worry. I didn't take it personally.

“You know,” said Rivers, awkwardly filling the silence, “I spoke to your uncle. I've heard a lot about you, a lot of good things.”

“Yeah?” I said, still not trusting Rivers was who he claimed to be.

“Your uncle said you're a hard worker; a warrior; a determined, headstrong, smart kid. That not true?”

“If that's what you heard,” I said, shrugging as if Rivers were standing before me.

“How're your grades?” he asked.

“All right,” I said.

“What's all right? You got A's? B's?”

“Some,” I said, still doubting he was who he said he was.

“What's some? You don't know?” he asked. “What you got in English? How 'bout science?”

“I got a B on my last test.”

There was another long moment of silence. Again, Rivers was the one to break it.

“Listen,” he announced, hoping to infuse me with some excitement, “I'm gonna be straight with you. Students come to Brandeis with straight A's. Maybe a B in gym or something like that. What's wrong? The work too hard for you?”

“Nah, it's all right,” I said. “It's just.”

“I might be able to help you out,” Rivers interrupted. “I can't say you'll be a starter or even play on my team. You'll have to try out. I don't even know if you can make it. I've never even seen you play. So don't go thinking you'll be some kind of college superstar. Brandeis ain't like that. But you'll get a damn good education.”

Rivers told me about Brandeis. He said it was a small division-three university where athletics were hardly the most important thing.

“But,” he said, “I can't make any promises.”

But he'd try. He'd advocate for me. He would write a letter to the admissions office, stand before the admissions panel and say that I was worth whatever the risk was. As long as I kept passing my classes. And if I took the SAT.

“You take it?”

“No,” I said.

“Then sign up,” he said. “What you waiting for? There's got to be only one, maybe two more times you can take it before it's too late. You owe it to yourself. And your family. You understand what I am saying?”

“You think I got a chance?” I asked.

“It ain't about what I think. What do you think?”

“What did my uncle say?”

“He said you don't back down from nothing.” Rivers paused. He softened his voice. “Think of it as opening a door. As giving you the key to a lock. What do you think? What do you have to say?”

Suddenly, I was sure Rivers was a liar. So sure, in fact, I had the urge to hang up the phone.

“Have you thought about what you want to be?” he asked. “What type of work are you going to do? What sort of career? If you could be anything?”

Anything?
I thought.

“What about president?” I asked half sarcastically.

“Have you ever heard of Angela Davis?” he responded.

“No,” I said.

“Well, look her up. Do you know where she went to school?”

“Where?”

“Brandeis.”

Rivers talked about Brandeis like it was a new phone service or some kind of pyramid scheme he wanted me to sign up for. Then he told me Brandeis was a Jewish school and asked me if I thought that might be a problem.

“No,” I said. “I don't think so.”

Then Rivers's voice dropped to a serious tone. “Abraham, I know what I'm talking about. You got to trust me.”

Trust him? I wondered what Rivers looked like. Was he tall or short? Thin? Fat? Fatherly in disposition? What was fatherly? And what would Donnel think? What would he want me to do?

“Son,” Rivers said, “Do you know who Plato is?”

He called me son and a thick knot blossomed in my throat.

“No?” he asked. “Well, Plato was a Greek philosopher who said that all a man takes with himself when he dies is his culture and his education. That's it. Nothing else. Think about that. Ask yourself, what does it mean?”

I began to speak but Rivers cut me off.

“Don't answer,” he said. “Just think about what I said.”

When I got off the phone, I returned to the couch, watched
The Simpsons,
and thought about what Rivers said. I thought about Ever and what I had and I thought about my friends and family, Donnel and Eric and my uncle and my mom and my Aunt Rhonda and my grandma, all of us crammed in my grandma's two-bedroom apartment.

Eric shifted one of the earphones from his ear. “Army recruiter?” he asked.

“Air Force.” I said.

He slammed a forkful of lo mein into his mouth. “Fuck those niggas,” he said. He finished chewing. Then he added: “I seen Lorenzo just before.”

“What he say?” I asked, trying to sound impervious.

Eric kept his eyes on the TV. He swigged from his bottle of soda. He swallowed. “Nothing. Same old shit.”

We continued to watch
The Simpsons.
I thought about Lorenzo and the fight at the park and what Rivers said. I thought about what might happen if and when I ran into Lorenzo alone. And I thought about Kaya, about how she said going to college might mean being apart from each other. That thought made me feel empty. I thought about where Donnel was. I wondered how empty, how much nothingness he felt. And sitting on the couch, I knew I wanted more than such nothingness. I wanted more for him. And what I wanted was more than Ever; more than what my grandma had and what my mother had; I wanted more than dying. I wanted no more crackheads; no more brothers selling drugs; no more prisoners and parolees; no more prowling cops, truant officers, and social workers. No more brothers killing one another, inherently killing ourselves.

A
week later, I came home from school and got the mail. In it was a manila envelope addressed to me. I walked across the lobby to the stairwell and opened it. Inside there was a glossy college bulletin, an application to Brandeis, and a short handwritten note on a Post-it that said
Did you think about it? Coach Rivers.
In the dim light of the stairwell, I studied all of it as best as I could. I walked slowly, pausing at each landing. I read Rivers's note over and over again. I devoured it. I didn't lift my foot high enough and tripped on a step. I fell, putting one hand down, holding the application against my chest. I stood and started walking again.
Did I think about it?
Of course, I thought about it. I thought about all of it, Ever Park, the charges pending against me, Donnel. What was in that bulletin was the antithesis of what was around me. How could I not think about it? I scrutinized the shiny pages of smiling faces amidst landscapes of green trees, kidney-shaped flowerbeds, brick buildings and walkways, and students sitting before disheveled
professors in sport coats, shirts, and loosened ties. I read the text and studied the captions. I reviewed the table of contents and titles at the top of every page. I was mesmerized, awed entirely.

I scanned the application, its directions, what I was to write in each blank space, on each black line, what I was supposed to circle and check off and fill in. It was too dark to read in the stairwell. But somehow, I did.

At our apartment door, I stopped and looked through the bulletin more, slowly, all of it once again. I had never seen such a sight, never held such a prize.

I unlocked the door and walked into the apartment, still looking, scouring, picking apart everything, including the finest of fine print. Eric was sitting on the couch watching TV. I crossed between him and his electric lover.

“What's that?” he asked, intrigued by how serious I was, how much I ignored everything in our surroundings.

“Nothing,” I mumbled, not stopping, not looking at him, my eyes planted in what my hands held.

Although I assumed my uncle knew, I hadn't told him about Rivers's phone call. And I hadn't told my aunt or my grandma about it either. I hadn't even told Kaya. The only thing of any importance was getting Donnel out of jail, getting him a decent lawyer, ensuring his freedom. I leaned against the kitchen counter and flipped the pages. I sat at the kitchen table. I went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet. I closed the bedroom door and sat on the floor. I lay on the bed. I took the bulletin, the application, and the note with me wherever I went.

Maybe Titty and Precious stood beneath the window and shouted my name. Maybe they said
Abraham, nigga! Yo, you deaf motherfucker! We know you're home
! Maybe someone was having sex in one of the apartments that surrounded ours. Maybe a sister was moaning and
wheezing and the bed was bumping against the wall, squeaking as its legs scraped and skipped to the cadence of her lover's thrusting. Maybe there was the wail of police sirens, and the blue and red flash of police lights banging off the afternoon. But I wouldn't have known it. I was in Ever, but I was enveloped by Brandeis, encased by the wonderment of what it might be like to exist in a world so different from Ever. I studied the faces in the bulletin. Their eyes were eager. They seemed so innocent; so agape, so aglow with indomitable naïveté.

I heard the door open and my uncle come home and Eric tell him I was in our room. Quickly, I hid the application under the pillow and pretended I was sleeping. The bedroom door opened. My uncle came in.

“A,” he said, shaking my foot. “You feeling all right?”

“Yeah,” I said, putting sleepiness in my voice. “Just tired.”

A short while later, my grandma came home, and some time after—I don't know how long it was. A half hour? An hour?—she shouted my name.

“Abraham,” she said. “There's food out here! Abraham, I'm talking to you! Come and get something to eat!”

I couldn't go without it. I was a toddler with his favorite blanket, a little boy with his most favorite, invisible friend. I walked out of the room into the kitchen, my arms at my side, one hand clamped around the bulletin, the application, and the yellow Post-it. Dinner was spaghetti. Eric and my Aunt Rhonda were already sitting on the couch, their bowls in their hands, their eyes planted on the TV. My grandma and my uncle stood at the stove. She shoveled a heap of spaghetti from the pot and dropped it into the bowl he was holding. Then she saw me.

“What's wrong with you?” she asked. “You sick or something?”

She looked at what was in my hands then tried to read me, decode my expression, my lips, my eyes, the thoughts behind them.

“What you got?” she asked, tipping her chin at what I held. “That homework or something?”

“Nigga hasn't put that shit down since he got home!” Eric shouted.

“Ain't no one talking to you!” my grandma shouted back, her eyes burning on me.

I looked at my uncle. He studied me with a stoic yet slightly hurt expression, as if he knew what I held and wanted to know why I had not told him. My grandma wiped her hands on the dishtowel hanging from the handle on the oven door. Then she reached out and took the bulletin and application from me.

“Let me see,” she said.

She studied Rivers's note for a moment. Then she peeled the Post-It back from the bulletin and studied the bulletin's glossy cover. She opened it, thumbed through the pages. She looked at its back cover. She looked at the front cover again. She read what she saw aloud and struggled with the pronunciation. The schools that recruited my uncle used to send bulletins. She had seen hundreds of bulletins before.

“Brandeeze, Broondise.” She looked at my uncle. “What's this?”

“College,” my uncle said, his eyes on me.

“No,” said my grandma. “What's this note mean?
Did you think about it?
”

I wanted to speak. But I didn't know where to begin. My throat and tongue were lifeless, heavy. I did not know how to balance the excitement I felt over what Rivers said and Donnel, where he was and where that application meant I might go.

“You spoke to Rivers?” asked my uncle.

“He said I got to fill out the application,” I said.

Thrust between joy and suspicion, and the realization that things were occurring in her home that she was not aware of, my grandma looked at me. Her eyes demanded clarification, specific details. She looked like she was reading, turning pages with her eyes, learning my
face from left to right. What was I talking about? What kind of man was I becoming? She had just seen me in a police car for the first time. She had seen me handcuffed. But college? A student? How many times had she prayed for us, her children and grandchildren? How many times had she prayed for the capacity to fill the role of mother, father, grandfather, uncle, aunt, and a plethora of ethical family confidants? After everything that had happened, had she been able to imagine this?

My grandma brought the application and bulletin to her chest. She closed her eyes, took a deep, strained breath in through her nose.

“Oh dear God,” she whispered. “I listened to her. I prayed and prayed on what Kaya said. But never once. Oh dear God, Abraham.”