Malik was our only child. Smart boy. Quiet, until you got him talking about something he loved — music, mostly, or the old trucks he used to fix up with his uncle. My husband, Robert, had other plans for him. Three generations of Carters had run Carter’s Hardware & Supply on Main Street, and Robert wanted Malik behind that counter, not behind a soundboard.
“He’s twenty years old, Robert,” I used to say. “Let the boy figure out his own life.”
“A man doesn’t figure out his life sitting around. He works.”
That was Robert. Deacon at Mount Calvary Baptist for eleven years. Respected man. Proud man. The kind of proud that doesn’t bend, even when bending is the only thing that’ll save you.
Malik had been quiet for weeks before he left. Quieter than usual. I noticed. I just didn’t know what I was noticing.
Then one night in October, a year before that porch, I heard shouting downstairs. By the time I got to the kitchen, Malik already had a duffel bag over his shoulder.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Ask him,” Malik said, and walked out into the dark.
Robert wouldn’t look at me. “He made his choice, Gloria. Leave it alone.”
“What choice? What did you say to him?”
“I said what a father’s supposed to say.”
That was the only answer I ever got. For weeks.
I called Malik’s phone until it stopped ringing and went straight to a voicemail box that was already full. I drove past his friends’ houses. I called the community college he’d dropped out of that spring, though nobody there had seen him either. Nothing.
