Chapter Three

Raven’s foster brother, Cameron, lived in a fourplex on Sugarloaf near to where Raven had her apartment before leaving town to chase Lovelle. The complex was new with clean lines that her linear-thinking brother would consider no-nonsense. He didn’t think of home like most people. Home to him was anywhere he could park his gaming systems, have an occasional date sleep over, and change clothes.

She rapped on his door with their secret knock so Cameron would know it was her who had come a-calling. But the knock was unnecessary. He knew she was coming because he had called her as she left Chastain’s. “Swing by tonight if you can, Sis,” he had said. “We need to talk about it.” She was just glad that it wasn’t about Lamont Lovelle. Cameron wasn’t the type to raise heavy subjects unless absolutely necessary. No, Cameron wanted to discuss a letter that he had received from an old high school flame.

In high school Georgia Height had been the love of Cameron’s life. If it were physically possible he would have sunk right down into her warm brown skin just so he could experience life through her eyes. Raven had tried to tell him that this wish was more like possession than love. But he wouldn’t listen. Maybe that was why Georgia turned tail and ran. Smart and going places, she had big plans. Those plans didn’t involve a foster kid who had been passed from home to home like trash, and was still getting into trouble. She left high school without a backwards glance at the boy with the soulful eyes and tall hair.

“Raven!” Cameron said now from the doorway with both arms flung out from his tall, narrow frame. “How come you gone for so long?”

Instead of answering, she walked into the hug and held him tight, clapping his back loudly. She pulled back to look at him. The skin was tight around his big smile and his eyes held an anxious, worried look. Raven had the feeling that he was about to hurt more than he did when Georgia left him.

“Jeez,” she said as she walked past him into the living room. “You still don’t have any furniture?”

The place looked as if it were furnished by a teenager who had just won the lottery with the ticket his mama bought for him. Four armchairs resembling a row from a movie theatre faced an opposite wall with the biggest flat screen that Raven had ever seen. There were so many controllers and headphones on the coffee table that Raven couldn’t tell if the table was wood, glass or made from two overturned milk crates.

“Don’t hate. I got what I need,” Cameron said. He pointed to a small table next to the kitchen that shared the living space with the sparse living room. “Rest your bones right over there. I’ll grab something to drink.”

Raven sat down while Cameron went to the refrigerator. He returned with two bottles of Fanta – grape for her, and orange for him. Raven took a long drink, not stopping until her throat burned.

Cameron laughed. “Same old Raven. Guzzle it up until you feel the fire.”

“No other way to drink soda.”

She knew it was a kid thing to do, but being around Cameron always made her feel that way. He wasn’t always mature, but his ability to live from laugh to laugh made him a fun person to be around. Reaching past him to grab a stack of envelopes, she said, “What’s this?”

“I dunno,” he said. “Junk mostly. Keeps showing up in my box.”

“You mean in your mailbox?” Raven confirmed, flipping through the unopened mail.

Sitting opposite Raven, one of his bony knees jittering to a rhythm playing in his head, he left the question unanswered. “You said on the phone that you staying at Mama Anna’s?”

“Yes, indeedee,” Raven said still perusing his mail.

“Well, if your rooms don’t work for you, you welcome to stay here. No bed in the guest room but I could fix a pallet on the floor for you.”

Raven shook her head. “Cameron, some of these look like bills. Postmarks are three months old.”

His knee stopped jittering. He looked at her with a face as confused as a toddler’s. “Who in the hell sending me bills through the mail? I pay my bills online.”

She flipped a pink envelope over and showed him the return address. “This looks like your online bill pay didn’t make the electric company happy.”

She expected him to take it, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “Is that why those mo-fos cut off my lights? Electric company needs to catch up with the times. Anyway, I fixed that when it went all dark and creepy up in here.”

“You should open it.”

“Why you busting my nuts? I told you I fixed it.”

“Because I know you. You probably just slapped a Band-Aid over it. You fixed it just enough until it happens again.”

“I ain’t studying that, Raven,” he said. “That’s not why I asked if you could fit me into your busy schedule.”

“Okay, then.” She threw the pink envelope down on the table. “Where is it? This letter from Georgia.”

“Damn,” Cameron said. “Just like that? You got somewhere to be?”

“I’m surprised that you took time to open that one,” she said.

“I had to,” he said. “Her name was on it. Besides…” He stopped.

“Besides what?” Raven asked.

“It smelled like her, like I remember.”

“You still remember how she smelled?” Raven said. “No wonder you can’t stay in a relationship. Give it to me.”

He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a crumpled envelope. He gave it to her. The stationery was light blue, heavy, and expensive-looking. She put it to her nose. Cameron was right. The envelope held the ghost of a faint, sweet smell, like cotton candy.

“Looks like Georgia had so much money that she didn’t mind lighting dollar bills on fire,” he said, motioning his now empty bottle of orange soda at the expensive stationery.

Raven ignored him, her eyes growing wider as she read.

Georgia was dead. Had been for several weeks, possibly more depending on when Cameron had finally decided to check his mail. Raven already knew that Georgia had become a civil rights lawyer, married well, and bought a house with a pool in the Point and a summer home in Florida. She built a reputation for community work, achieved all she dreamed of and more. What Raven didn’t know and now read in the letter was that Georgia was living high off the hog right up until the time of her cancer diagnosis. Although she wasn’t prepared for it, she handled it as she handled everything else in her life, with a courage so strong that she could’ve put out the fires of hell if the task had been on her to-do list.

Bottom line was that Cameron had a son. The boy was fourteen years old, and his name was Noe Cardova. Georgia and her husband had been having trouble, and he made it clear that after she died, he wanted nothing to do with Noe. Georgia ended the letter without drama and without apology. Since Noe now had nobody, he had become Cameron’s responsibility. It was likely the most impractical thing she had ever wanted in her short life, but Georgia wanted Noe to be raised by blood.

“God, she sounds cold,” Raven said.

“Well, she had to be if she left all this,” Cameron said, waving his hands over his face and chest.

Raven shook the envelope until two pictures fluttered onto the table. They were of a boy with clear brown skin and only one dimple on the left side of his beautiful mouth, just like Cameron, who used to joke that the one dimple proved that everything about him was half-ass on purpose. Even God was in on it.

“Well,” said Raven. “What are you going to do?”

He gave her a confused look. “A letter, Raven? Not an email or text? If she didn’t have my number, the broad could have at least DMed me.”

Raven didn’t laugh. Instead she replaced the letter and pictures into the envelope. “You can’t joke this away.”

He took the letter from her and took out the pictures again. He stared at them for a long time. “Looks like my dad.”

There was a wistful look on his face that Raven had never seen before. “Looks like you.”

“I’m thinking that she’s wrong about little dude’s stepdad. They got married when that kid was four. I can’t believe that the brother’s gonna give him up like that.”

Raven raised an eyebrow. “Your parents didn’t mind giving you up.”

She didn’t mean to be cruel, but she wanted to make sure Cameron knew what he was getting into. He had a steady IT job down at the Byrd’s Landing Police Department, but his lifestyle wouldn’t accommodate a kid. Instead of a girlfriend of the month Cameron had a girlfriend of the week. Given the choice between a video game, a week’s worth of groceries or a new pair of shoes, he’d laugh and say, “Who needs to eat anyway? Besides, if I get hungry I’ll just wait for a potluck or until someone has cake in the breakroom.”

“My dad was sick, Raven,” he said. “And so was my mom. My dad may have walked away and left me, but as you like to forget, he came back. That man fought hard to get me back when he got better. He took care of me.”

“Right up until the day he backslid and you watched him overdose.”

“Do you have to be so damned mean all the time?”

Raven spread her hands. “I just call ’em like I see ’em. It’s a big responsibility, Cameron. If you’re going to do this, you have to be ready. You can’t look at this through rose-colored glasses, or because you see it as a do-over for your father.”

“It’s not going to matter, anyway. If the stepdad doesn’t want the boy for his sake, then he’ll want him for whatever she left him. This ain’t going to be a problem for me.”

“So, why did you want to talk about it if it isn’t going to be a problem?”

“You know how we always used to talk about what we wanted to be when we grew up?”

Raven said nothing.

“Well, you wanted to be a cop. I just wanted to be clean. And when you asked what I meant by that, I said that I didn’t want to leave a mark on this world. Not one goddamn mark on the street corner where I had to hold a sign in raggedy-ass clothes begging for my parents’ drug money, not on the foster homes that didn’t want me, or the teachers who said I was no damn good, and I better get ready for the graveyard or a jail cell. I told you that when I grew up, I just wanted to have a job playing on computers and enough money to have fun until the day I died. I wanted to travel, try new things. And when this life was over all I wanted was to be a scent on the wind for a second, and then nothing.”

“I remember that,” Raven said. “No responsibilities.”

“Yeah, right.” He laid the photo on the table. He let out a long breath, reached out a finger and tapped Noe’s face. “This makes me want to jettison that bullshit thinking. I want to fight for him like my dad fought for me, except I want to do right by the boy.”

“This kid isn’t one of your games, or one of your adventures, something you can try and say ‘oh hell, oh well’ if it doesn’t work before moving on to the next bright shiny thing.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“I just think it’ll be fun having a little mini me running around here,” he said. “Keep me company. I can teach him how to level up on Call of Duty, to sing all the words to every song Wu Tang ever wrote….”

“He’s a fourteen-year-old boy who just lost his mother, and is about to be abandoned by the only father he’s ever known. He isn’t going to want to play video games.”

“There ain’t a teenager on this side of the Mississippi who don’t like video games, especially the way I play them. The tournaments—”

“Everyone is not like you. You have a stack of bills that you don’t even know if you paid or not. How are you going to raise a kid?”

“I got a lot of love.”

Raven believed that Cameron indeed had a lot of love and compassion, but it was way deep down inside of him. He was willing to give it, too, as long as it didn’t get in the way of what he wanted.

“You aren’t ready to be a father. That boy will be a stranger to you. You’ll have to help him navigate his new life without his mother. You’ll have to do some very grown-up things, things I’ve never seen you do voluntarily.”

She stopped talking, and sat back. He waited for a beat or two, his face both wistful and serious.

“That’s why I asked you here. I want you to help me.”

“Help you? Help you, how?”

“Well, when you were running around in Cali, I talked to Georgia’s lawyer. She told me that if I want Noe to live with me, I’ll have to prove that I’m fit. Make sure my place is suitable and all, and I’m not after the money.”

“Money?” Raven asked.

“Yeah, the boy has a trust fund. He’s on her insurance policy, too. I guessed Georgia was living large. Like you always say about stuff like this, they gonna be up my ass with a microscope.”

“That’s smart. I’d do the same thing.”

“That’s why I need you to tell me what I need to do, what furniture and shit I need to buy. Help me get him in school and crap. I know I got a problem being a grown-up. So, help me. I mean, who sends bills in the mail anymore?”

“Don’t let sentiment mess with your head, Cam. This is a bit more than you can chew on, I guarantee you that.”

“I know that,” he said. “But he ain’t got nobody, Raven. I was like that, once. You, too. We can make a difference. I ain’t perfect, I know, and I know I won’t be a perfect daddy, but at least I can try. So, will you help me?”

“It’s not like a new puppy.”

“Well, thank God for that. At least he won’t piss on my carpet.”

She folded her arms across her chest.

“Okay, I’m kidding. I know he’s not a puppy,” he said.

“And you’ll have to buy a couch.”

“I can buy a couch, an armchair, hangers, whatever.”

“And you can’t run away when it gets hard.”

“Ain’t about to do that. You gonna help me or not?”

“Of course, I’m in. But, please, Cameron. Please don’t let this child down.”