“You need to move that table back three feet or nobody’s getting through that aisle.”
Angela had her phone in one hand and a clipboard in the other and a vendor’s arm in her other hand, which didn’t exist, so she dropped the clipboard. The vendor, a woman selling shea butter in little glass jars, just looked back at her with a blank face.
“Three feet,” Angela said again, pointing at the gap between the table and the next one.
The woman didn’t move. Angela picked up the clipboard, tucked the phone under her arm, and grabbed the edge of the table herself. The woman finally helped. They slid it back. The aisle opened up.
“Thank you,” Angela said. She was already walking.
The parking lot was half-full. Cars lined up along the chain-link fence that separated the lot from the school’s baseball field, and beyond that, Hamilton High sat low and brown against the morning sky. The stage at the far end had a PA system that someone had hooked up to a generator, and the speakers were doing their best with a playlist that kept cutting in and out. A folding table near the entrance held a sign-in sheet and a stack of Black Excellence flyers that kept blowing off in the breeze. Every time one went, Angela bent to grab it, stuffed it back under the clipboard, and kept moving.
She passed the food vendors first, two women with grills set up on card tables, smoke rising into the air, the smell of hot links and onions cutting through everything. Then the jewelry table, the art table, the guy selling custom t-shirts from a rack he’d wheeled in on a dolly. A woman sat behind a table, a stack of pamphlets in front of her, nobody at her table. Angela made a note to send someone over.
Her phone buzzed. She pulled it out, saw the email header, Weekly Report: Action Required, and slid it back into her pocket without opening it. The phone buzzed again almost immediately. This time it was a text.
Running behind, traffic worse than I expected. I know.
She read it, smiled, and stuffed the phone into the back pocket of her jeans. When she looked up, she saw him.
His sprawling afro sat on his head like a crown, big and round and impossible to miss. The hair was different, there were a few more tattoos and his face had started to grow more into his body but otherwise, he looked just about the same as when she first saw him all those years ago, practically crawling into Vic’s back pocket.
“Look at this man,” Angela said, already walking toward him. “Looking like the third member of Silk Sonic."
Keshawn smiled. The smile started slow and then took over his whole face.
“Getting back to my roots,” he held his hands up.
“Literally,” she reached him and they hugged. “Thank you for coming. We could use the star power. Obviously."
“Of course."
They stood there for a second. The PA system cut out, came back, cut out again. Someone near the stage shouted something and the music came back on, lower this time.
“How you been?” she said. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in—”
“Since the last time you were in town.”
“Right. Which was—”
“Two years ago maybe?"
"Wow, it really has been that long," She shook her head. "Hell, the last month has felt like two years by itself. Between the move and the job and trying to get this thing together—”
“And you still threw an event.”
“It’s how I relax.”
Keshawn laughed. “You need to learn about relaxing.”
“Not everyone’s a millionaire, Ke. We do with what we have."
"You’re the one running around like you’re getting paid for this."
"Money isn’t the only form of currency. In fact, it’s the lowest."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Keshawn playfully rolled his eyes as he looked past her at the parking lot. His eyes moved to the school beyond the fence, then back.
“It’s good to be back, though,” she said. “Sort of. Not really. I don’t know. I was excited to come back when Ronnie got the job offer and then I got one so it was like the perfect time to come back, but then I got here, I don’t know. It doesn’t really feel like home anymore except for this kind of stuff."
Keshawn nodded. “Home is still home.”
“Yeah.” She nodded too. “Home is home.”
He looked at the parking lot again.
“I want to do something like this,” he said. “But bigger. No offense.”
She laughed. He laughed too.
"You know what I mean," he offered.
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“We should do something,” he looked at her. “It feels stuck, you know? Like it’s exactly how we left it."
Angela opened her mouth to respond but caught sight of him just as Ronnie was crossing the parking lot, his phone in his hand, coffee in the other.
“My bad, my bad,” he said, reaching them. He set the coffee on a nearby table. “Traffic on Slauson is a nightmare, even on Saturday’s."
“Just got here myself,” Keshawn said.
“Big time NBA superstar, congrats on the success, brother,” Ronnie pulled him into a quick one-armed hug.
“Appreciate it."
Ronnie turned to Angela and kissed her on the lips. His hand found the small of her back for half a second and then he was pulling away, picking up his coffee. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing,” Angela said. “Ke was just telling me about his plans to save the world.”
“I don’t know about the world."
"But saving The Village," Angela scoffed, "You can do that?"
"I can try," Keshawn shrugged, "Ain’t that what you’re doing?"
"Touche," she swayed her head from side to side, "If you’re serious, we should talk about this. For real."
"I am," Keshawn nodded, "It’s our neighborhood. Ain’t nobody else gonna save it but us."
…
Vic had the stool by the wall. Trey sat next to him, his back to the door, his glass already half down.
“How’s the apartment?” Vic said.
“It’s cool.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s different than the Village. Definitely different than being locked up,” Trey took a drink.
Vic nodded. “That’s good.”
Vic turned his glass on the bar. The bartender moved past them, set two coasters in front of a couple at the other end, and kept going.
“I’m glad you’re home,” Vic said.
Trey didn’t say anything. He watched the TV.
“Look. I don’t really know what you got going on with Keshawn. Or what you had going on. And frankly, I don’t want to know. I don’t care,” Vic began as Trey kept his eyes on the TV. “Whatever you had to do, I ain’t judging. I ain’t in a position to judge. You’re home now. There ain’t nothing out here worth going back in there for."
Trey sat there with his glass in his hand and his eyes on the screen.
Vic waited.
“How’s Yesenia?” Trey finally spoke.
Vic let out a breath. He picked up his glass.
“She’s good. Running me ragged.”
“The wedding?”
“We figuring out the date.”
Trey raised his glass. “Congratulations on that by the way.”
Vic tapped his against it.
“I always thought it was gonna be that little Angela Davis girl you was running around with,” Trey took a drink. “But Jessica ain’t bad on the eyes either.”
Vic laughed.
"Yeah, I guess she ain’t. You stop by Charlene’s yet?"
Trey shrugged and went back to watching the TV. Vic did the same.
…
The city sat below him in pieces, the lights along Sunset, the dark stretch of the 405 cutting through the hills, the faint glow of downtown to the east. Keshawn had the phone in his hand and the glass on the arm of the chair and the night air moving across the porch.
The phone lit up again. He didn’t look at it.
It had been doing that all evening. AJ from Hamilton who he hadn’t seen in years, come through, we at the spot on Fairfax. The UCLA group chat that had been going for an hour about somebody’s birthday, a rooftop somewhere in WeHo, just come through for an hour, you don’t gotta stay long. He’d read them without answering. Set the phone face-down on his thigh. Picked it up when it buzzed again. Set it back down.
The glass was empty. He let it sit there.
A car moved along the road below the house, headlights cutting through the trees and then disappearing. The city kept going without him.
The phone lit up again. The notification sat at the top of the screen, white on black. kandibaby started following you.
He watched it for a moment. The screen went dark. He turned it back on.
Another notification. She’d liked a photo.
Another one. She’d like his most recent story at the community event earlier that day, posing with Angela and Ronnie.
He picked up the phone.
there’s nothing wrong with wanting that old thing back
He watched the three dots appear almost immediately. They sat there for a few seconds, disappeared, came back.
boy please, we don’t do reruns over here
He leaned back in the chair. The smile came slow. He turned the phone in his hand once, twice and began typing again.
