Ike picked up the bottle again and took a long sip. It seemed like Mya had cried so much her eyes were permanently bloodshot. Those eyes haunted him. Rimmed in red and empty as an abandoned church, they made him feel helpless. Every night her soft whimpering cries tore pieces out of his soul as they slept back-to-back in a bed that seemed to widen until it felt like they were barely in the same room. She was right. He was tired of seeing her hurt. He couldn’t stand to see the pain that twisted her face into a sorrowful mask. Her pain, her sorrow, his powerlessness. He was sick of it all. He pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. He was facing the back door as Mya stood behind him.
“Last night me and Buddy Lee starting handling things,” he said. It came out in one breath. One long exhalation that gathered up all the frailty and ineffectualness and misery and mourning that filled him like the stuffing in a scarecrow and scattered it into the ether.
Mya stretched out her hand in tentative increments until it touched the firm swell of his shoulder. It lay there warm and comforting like a child’s favorite blanket. Like the blanket that had been wrapped around their son when they brought him home from the hospital. Ike let out a sigh. She hadn’t touched him like that since Isiah … since they had gotten the news about Isiah.
The quiet between them changed from something hard and full of broken edges to something softer but still fragile. Ike folded his wide paw of a hand around Mya’s. Over the last few months, death had carved a valley between them as deep as grief and as wide as heartbreak. Now another man’s death had bridged that gap, if only for a moment.
“Good,” Mya said. Her voice was hushed and conspiratorial.
“Grammy. I hungry, Grammy,” a small voice said. Ike twisted himself around in the chair. Arianna stood at the threshold to the kitchen. Her braids had worked themselves loose. Her hair stood up on her head in wild corkscrews. Ike studied her small tawny face. He wasn’t sure how exactly Isiah and Derek had brought this little girl into the world. He knew it involved surrogates and eggs and sperm from both of them but he wasn’t sure how it all worked. All he knew was that the lawyer for Isiah and Derek’s estates had said that Isiah was her biological father, but she had called both of them Daddy. He had never studied her face the way Mya had. He’d refused to. Not in a conscious way but with a seemingly instinctual avoidance. The whole thing was just something he didn’t care to think about. Now he had no choice. The girl standing in front of him now had Isiah’s eyes, which meant she had Ike’s eyes. The slight off-center positioning of her nose was a Randolph family trait. She was lighter, of course, because her mother had been a white woman who was a friend of Isiah and Derek’s, but the Randolph DNA was strong. Stronger that his inability to see past his own hang-ups. If he closed his eyes a bit, she was Isiah at two years old, holding up his arms and squealing “Up, Daddy, up!” as he waited for Ike to grab him and spin him around the room like a living carousel.
Ike turned away and stared down at the table. He felt nauseous. An avalanche of memories washed over him and buried him under the weight of all of his mistakes. So many mistakes.
“Come here, baby girl. You wanna go to McDonald’s?” Mya asked. Arianna squealed in delight.
God, she sounds just like him, Ike thought.
Mya gave his shoulder a firm squeeze, then walked over to Arianna and scooped her into her arms. Ike could hear steps as she moved from the kitchen to the living room, then out the front door. Ike sipped his rum. He wouldn’t tell Mya anything else. She didn’t need to know about the bikers or this Tangerine they were going to try to find. Right now, all either one of them needed was this.
Ike heard Mya’s car start. What that little girl needed was two people to raise her who could look her in the face without falling apart. Ike put the bottle to his lips but didn’t take a drink. Instead he got up and put the bottle back in the cabinet. Buddy Lee was an alcoholic, but at the rate Ike was going, he wasn’t far behind him.
Ike’s phone vibrated. He took it out and checked the screen. Speak of the devil. He touched the ANSWER button.
“Hey, hoss,” Buddy Lee said.
“Hey, we need to talk. Face-to-face,” Ike said.
“Okay. Is it cool to meet at your shop?”
“No. Come by the house. I’ll text you the address,” Ike said.
Buddy Lee coughed. “Everything alright?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you about it when you get here,” Ike said.
He ended the call.