the credit.
“Oh, word?” I asked.
“Yeah. How about you?”
It was the second time she’d done that: how about you?
She didn’t like having the spotlight on her, even in one-on-one interaction.
“One of my homies called me up after what happened and …” I shrugged. “Didn’t feel like sittin’ it out was an option.”
“No,” Lila said. “I know what you mean.”
Her eyes clouded over for just a few seconds, and I knew she was thinking about the video.
I actively try not to think about the video.
When I think about it, I remember my grandfather dying.
He went out in a chorus of slow moans, in a small house in Southern Virginia where my father grew up, way down a long country road where there isn’t another house for about two miles. My uncles and aunts were there, my grandmother, some neighbors, people from my grandparents’ church.
Everyone sat in the living room, talking, and sometimes singing while in the back my grandpa, attended to by his wife and kids, took his last breaths. When the moaning stopped, we knew he was gone and that was when the church folks started singing louder and more energetically. All us kids got wide-eyed and frightened, and the church ladies pulled us against them and rocked us back and forth while they sang.
Later, when the coroner had come and gone with my grandpa’s body, and I was sleeping on the living room floor with some of my cousins—or supposed to be sleeping anyway—my dad walked by, stepping over us to go sit on the porch. I heard the flick-and-whisper of a lighter. He was smoking, something he had quit doing a long while before that.
I went out to join him and he turned to look at me. I was like ten, I think? He batted away the sandflies and gnats, and with eyes squinting against the dark and smoke, patted the space on the step next to him. I sat there, and he put an arm around my skinny shoulders.
You alright, Kai? he asked.
And I immediately started to cry. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t crying. Grandpa was his dad. And I was thinking in that moment that there could be nothing worse than losing my dad, never being able to see him again, or hear his voice. So how come he wasn’t crying?
Between sobs, I asked him, and he exhaled a long slow column of smoke, turning his head to the side so he wouldn’t blow it in my direction.
I’m not crying … he began. I’m not crying because now he has no more pain.
I try to focus on that when my mind goes toward the video. The video is an horrific, stomach-churning, memorialization of prejudice and brutality. Of agony, and fear. Of pain.
But now, his pain is no more.
I reached out and touched Lila’s hand.
She looked up at me, surprised.
But she didn’t recoil. Her eyes softened a little and her lips parted to say something. But our turn finally arrived, and I pulled back. Both of us focused on ordering our meals.
Lila ordered pancakes, scrambled eggs, and bacon, and “on the side, one egg, sunny side up, please?”
Our order-taker looked at her. “You want the extra egg on the side? In a different container? Just the one? Not with the scrambled …”
“Yes. On the side in a different container,” Lila said. “Just one egg. Sunny side up.”
The order-taker scribbled down the instructions and then turned to me to take my order, then handed us our coffees and left us to go into the back.
Lila must have seen how I was looking at her, curious, amused. Because she shook her head and laughed a little.
“I’m not OCD or anything,” she said. “It’s just … it’s a thing.”
“Cool.” I shrugged, not wanting her to think I was judging her or thinking she was strange or anything. Even though it was kind of strange.
“It’s this thing me and my dad do. Or at least …” She paused to sigh. “I used to see him do it. Once in a while, either early in the morning or late at night I would walk into the kitchen and he’d be there, frying just a single, perfect egg. With the unbroken, perfect sphere of a yellow yolk.
“And he’d get his spatula …” She motioned with her hands as she described it. “And carefully slide this perfect egg, yolk up, onto a plate. And then he would sit with it in front of him and look at it for about ten seconds. With …