Page 94 of Brother In Arms

“I know, my mom has been really out of character lately. I don’t know if it’s because of Dad’s heart attack or what…”

Dray heaved a heavy sigh and said, “Bales, it’s probably just all of it. You know that feeling you’ve got in the center of your chest like the whole world is flying the fuck apart and you’re just doing everything you can to hold it together,” he put his hands together like he was trying to hold something, spaces between his fingers. “But no matter how you try to hold on, shit just keeps escaping through your fingers and there’s not a damn thing you can do except pretend you’ve got a handle on it, like everything is fine?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?” she asked.

“I may be younger than you by numbers, but I’m way older by experience,” he said. “It was the same fuckin’ thing for me when I was sixteen, watchin’ my mom get killed. I still don’t know why I’m alive, Bales. I’ll never know why I didn’t get hit… I just know that we’ve got one life and we can’t spend it worrying about what this guy or that lady thinks about how we’re living it. My mom knew that… Your mom is just now starting to catch on.”

He leaned back heavily in his chair and stared his cousin down. She leaned back heavily in her seat, and were my feet not planted firmly on the ground, it probably would have set us to swinging. She dragged her eyes back up to Dray’s and said, “What if I can’t be like you, or Aunt Tillie?” She sniffed and took me by the hand, and I think, whispered her greatest fear, “What if this life you lead isn’t for me?”

Dray smirked and shook his head, “You’re listening, but you aren’t hearing me, Bailey. You aren’t supposed to live my life, or my mom’s life. You’re supposed to live your life.”

I laced my fingers through hers and brought the back of her hand to my lips, pressing them against it softly. She looked at me and I murmured against it, “Baby, that’s the thing about living this life. Our life is what we make it. Nobody else gets a say in how we do things, or where we go, or what we do. That’s on us.”

She laid back down, her head in my lap and stared past her cousin at the flickering firelight. We let her. I set us to gently rocking and we all just sat there, not saying another word. Sometimes you sit with people in your life and don’t have to say anything. Sometimes, you get up from those times, and walk away feeling like it was the best conversation you ever had. It was like that for us that night, and when the fire burned too low to really see by, I picked Bailey up, and Dray held doors for us while I took my woman back to bed where we both belonged.

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