him. “I think you’re perfect for me. It’s different.”
“And I’m saying that I’m not perfect for you, because I’m too old.”
“No, I’m pretty sure you’re saying that I’m not perfect for you because I’m too young and hot and someone in the Pentagon who’s married to his third trophy wife might find out and think you’re the exact same kind of scumbag that he is, even though he’d be wrong—and the hell with what he thinks, anyway. Cravenness is also not a good look for you, Grandpa, but I promise that I, with my youth and hotness and a bit of time and patience, can help you learn to be more brave.”
He laughed at that, which was good, because it made him breathe. He’d been sitting so still, she’d been thinking she might need to start CPR on him.
But he was shaking his head even as he laughed, and she saw the resistance in his dark brown eyes. “I know you didn’t see me as a brother, but I... saw you as a sister,” Thomas told her. “You were the age my baby brother would’ve been, if he’d lived.”
“Yes, I know that,” Tasha said quietly.
When Thomas was twelve, his mother had died shortly after giving birth to an infant who’d been unable to survive outside of her womb, turning tragedy into trauma for Thomas and his family.
So he’d now not only just sistered her, but by bringing up the awfulness that had rocked his world and changed his life forever, he’d made it impossible for her to be funny or flip in any kind of counterargument.
She went direct. “But I’m not your sister. As much as I loved Grandma King, she wasn’t my grandma, she was yours. Her real name was Thomas’s Grandma King. I just left off the Thomas’s, but it was always there, unspoken. Same way that Uncle Alan was mine. You never called him that—it was always Uncle Navy—because he was my uncle. So again, I’m not your sister, I’m not your cousin. We were close neighbors for a while, yeah, good friends after that. But you didn’t start little-sistering me until I was thirteen years old. I remember when you started. I asked Grandma King about it, because it freaked me out. You were training with the Team, and you came back early because you were injured, and I went with Grandma King to see you in the hospital. And I got worried because I thought maybe you’d hit your head and had some kind of weird amnesia or vision trouble and actually believed I was Christine.”
When Tasha first met Thomas, he was living with his much older sister Christine and her family, in the same apartment complex where Uncle Alan lived. When Christine got her dream job as a librarian at Yale University, she and her husband and kids moved to Connecticut, and Thomas moved in with his grandmother. Christine was smart and beautiful—she had the most fabulous and varied pairs of funky and stylish eyeglasses—and Tasha would’ve loved to look just like her, but she didn’t. Not even a little.
The painkillers had made Thomas a bit loopy, Grandma King had told her. They’d made him overly emotional and a bit sloppy, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t as glad to see Tasha as he’d exclaimed. Just that he didn’t have the ability to hide what he was feeling.
It was a good thing, Grandma King had also told her, for Thomas to treat her like a sister—a little sister—considering her age.
Tasha hadn’t really understood that at the time. She just knew that she didn’t like it very much.
But Grandma King had more to say—that being in any hospital was always hard for Thomas, since that was where he’d seen his mother for the last time before she’d died.
And that was when Grandma King had told Tasha how Thomas’s mom had died—after giving birth to a baby who’d died, too.
Tash had been stunned. Even though Thomas had told her that his father had gone to prison after being charged with assault because he’d hit the doctor whose negligence had let his mom die, she hadn’t realized that his mother had died after giving birth. This wasn’t the 1800s. Childbirth didn’t have a mortality rate anymore—women didn’t die from it.
Grandma King had corrected Tasha, annoyance in her usually quiet voice. White women tended not to die in childbirth in the twenty-first century. The statistics for Black women were different.