Page 149 of Raven

M. Maddy. Mahalo.

56

RAVEN

Maddy crouches before the flowerpot that stands next to my balcony door.

“I got it for you,” I confess. “Right before, you know…”

Smiling, she walks out onto the balcony and takes a seat in my wicker chair, her legs folded under her.

I follow, handing her a martini I made for her, and fire up the grill.

She is hungry, she said. Of course—that’s Maddy after sex.

I steal glances of her as she lazily stretches. She’s wearing my T-shirt—my T-shirt—the sight that makes it impossible not to smile.

Two marinated steaks and a plate of vegetables are sitting by the grill, and I feel like a lucky bastard to have her back.

“Your smile is dangerously suspicious,” she says.

And my heartbeat is dangerously high on happiness.

I slap the steaks onto the grill, light a cigarette, and smoke as I transfer the vegetables onto the grill, too.

Maddy lights a joint and tastefully exhales a cloud of smoke, her eyes back on me. That’s another thing I learned about Maddy. She likes to smoke one when she is super relaxed.

“You want help?” She nods to the grill.

I shake my head.

“Where did you learn to cook?”

“Mac taught me.”

Sometime back, during one of our phone conversations, I told her a little about Mac.

“I like Mac,” she says dreamily, squinting just a little as she takes another puff. “Tell me more about him?”

That I can do. I can talk about Mac for hours.

I tell her that cooking was just one of the many things Mac was good at. And when I lived with him, I wanted to be like him. Because he had a house. Because everything was clean and in order. Because he talked properly. Because he read books. Because he had a job that didn’t pay much but earned him the respect of the worst neighborhood in the city and praise among the minority communities. Because even though many houses in his neighborhood were raided, trashed, and robbed, his was untouched. Even the worst thugs who robbed and killed respectfully nodded at him on the streets. When electricity was cut off during a storm once, a Cadillac with tinted windows pulled up at his house. Two guys covered in gold chains and diamonds with guns tucked under their belts asked him if he needed a generator or if anything had to be fixed. A famous rapper called him on every holiday, and when I asked Mac if that was the guy from TV, he said, “I don’t watch TV.” But the rapper won a Grammy, and he called Mac Mr. Wright.

“Mac got me to turn my ways around. ‘You have to take yourself seriously. If you want to deal, make sure you deal something that will benefit others, not ruin them.’ To think that he changed my life with good food,” I murmur, flipping the steaks as Maddy sits completely still, listening to me. “But it wasn’t the food he cooked for me that made me feel normal. It was the feeling of having a family, though it was only Mac. Having a father figure, though his neighbors looked at a white boy like me and knew I must have come from some serious trouble. When I finally got back on my feet, got my business going, got my own place, every place I lived in since, I cooked. It created an illusion that I had a home.

“I once asked his neighbor, Mrs. Jackson, why she thought Mac never moved out of the bad neighborhood. Considering he had many influential patrons who donated to his non-profits. She said, ‘Ain’t no pride in living a fancy life at the expense of others. A shepherd has to be where his flock is.’

“I wish I’d given Mac a reason to be prouder of me,” I say to Maddy who seems to have forgotten about her joint and sits with her head tilted to one side, her eyes never leaving mine. “But I understood that, for him, it was never about achievements. It was about young people like me finding themselves. He gave me his favorite book as a present. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It’s about a seagull who went against the Law of the Flock and learned how to fly for the love of flying. Mac was Jonathan Livingston, and kids like me were his flock. Many of us, I found out later. Mac was a magnet for all things broken that he carefully glued back together. He is a craftsman, that old man.”

I smile and go silent, realizing that I hardly ever talked so much to Maddy about my past, and she hasn’t uttered a word the entire time.

“I like hearing you talk,” she says softly.

The steaks are ready, but I feel bad having this perfect night with her without the little dude.

“Before we eat, wanna call the kid?” I ask.

She nods and laughs. “Yeah. Little trickster.”

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