Page 37 of The Sweetest Devotion

“Dom,” I started gently.

He groaned. “Keith, man. These my brothers. It ain’t that big of a deal.”

I stroked at my jaw, practicing some patience. “Sometimes you can be too blind to see what’s wrong for you.”

Dominique wasn’t hearing me as he thumbed at the material of my trunk.

Disclosing my past wasn’t something I liked doing, but for Dominique it was necessary. “Me and Von used to own this neighborhood. Or, at least wethoughtwe did. I didn’t like school either. Hated teachers telling me what to do or think. Didn’t like the law. So, I cut class and did what I wanted.”

Despite his tough guy stance, I could tell Dominique was listening as he quietly fingered a path along the pizza boxes.

“Sometimes you’re just walkin’ around mad, and you don’t know why,” I said.

“It be like that sometimes,” Dominique agreed.

It was the simple truth. “I hated the world and everyone in it, and I just couldn’t get a grip on anything. I hung around guys who I felt were like me. Guys, who at the time, I didn’t see didn’t have my best interest at heart,” I confessed. “I got in a lot of fights. I had my mom and my grandma in my ear, and the school in the other. I was pretty hotheaded too. Didn’t want to hear a thing.”

“What your dad say?” Dominique asked me curiously as he lifted his head up.

I shrugged. “Don’t have one. He died before I was born. Can’t say if he would’ve had an influence on me or not, but there was a time my mom couldn’t straighten me out.”

“So, what happened with you?” Dominique pressed for me to go on.

“I just hung around a bad crowd. Made a lot of stupid choices,” I said. “Toted guns, stayed out all night—a lot of reckless shit.”

“Were you scared?”

I shook my head, telling the truth. “There used to be this one guy in the neighborhood. From the moment I met him, I knew there something off about him. One time there was someone picking on a friend of his, trying to jump him, and this guy just takes out a knife and…” I made a slashing gesture through the air as I shook my head at the buck-fifty I’d witnessed. “I just remember catching eye contact and seeing nothing there. No soul. No heart. Nothing. He never messed with me, and I never messed with him. We kinda just had an understanding.”

“He still around?”

That was the thing, not many were from my teen years. Some stayed on that path and ended up in prison. Others moved away, and I could only hope bettered themselves like what I was trying to do. “Nah, haven’t seen him in a grip. A lot of those guys didn’t turn out so well.” I looked over into Dom’s eyes. “Point is, I had a chip on my shoulder for a long time. Didn’t even know why I was so angry, but it took my mom and grandma dragging me out of school and sitting me down to realize I needed help. That I wasn’t making good decisions.”

“I hear you,” Dominique said.

I nodded as I held my fist out. He was a big guy, about as tall as me, almost the same build, and same complexion. Sometimes looking at him felt like I was talking to a mini me. I was sure the kid could handle himself, but only so much.

I wasn’t going to lecture him too long and hard. It was Friday. The weekend. Today was about pizza and catching up. “Point is, I don’t want to see you end up in a rough patch. The thing about hittin’ rock bottom, is sometimes you crack. You only get one shot sometimes, and I want you to make the most of yours.”

Dom smiled a little as he quickly jabbed his fist against mine. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ma stick with this job, or I’ll try to.”

It was a start. And that was all I needed to work with.

I grabbed three boxes of pizza and Dominique grabbed the other three. Together we headed for the back entrance for the center, the warm sun on our backs, and the bright day forging on.

9

I decided to be brave.

There was a reason beyond my anger I wasn’t facing my father. I wasscared. When my father first began experiencing symptoms of ALS, I felt powerless. For my whole life we’d had enough money to throw at our problems and make them disappear. This wasn’t one of those times.

One minute he was this big, powerful man standing at six-three. A man who went on jogs, hunting trips, and ran his business with a kindness you didn’t see often in the world of money and capitalism. And the next, he started losing coordination, having issues with the muscles in his legs, and tripping over himself.

It took nine long agonizing months for them to reach their diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. That was three months ago.

My father was faring as best as he could—or as well he could compose himself around us. My mother had loved him for her whole life. This was a shock to her entire system. She wasn’t ready to face the outcome of a life without my father.

And neither was I.

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