Page 66 of Flaunt
Me: WHY DO YOU HATE ME?
Banks: WHY ARE YOU SO DRAMATIC?
Me: My dramatics are not new information.
Banks: I gotta go. I have work to do.
Me: I thought you weren’t feeling work-y.
Banks: I wasn’t. See you tonight.
Me: I might not be here.
Banks: Yeah, you will be.
“You are such a …”
The front door opening catches my attention. I get up slowly and poke my head around the corner. Damaris waves as she comes toward me.Thank God I’m dressed.
“Hi, Sara. Good morning,” she says.
“Hi. Good morning to you, too.”
“I hope you don’t judge my parenting by the state of this house.” She looks around and shakes her head. “This child has many strengths, but tidiness is not one of them.”
The pride in her eyes over her son despite the state of his house warms my heart.What a good mom.
“I’ve been picking up all morning,” I say. “I know you probably can’t tell. But Banks put me on a strict list of rules, and I’m not allowed to throw anything away. I can’t go in his room. I can’t move anything to a place that he can’t see it immediately if he looks where it was. Even if there’s a transmission in the kitchen.”
She laughs. “Oh, that boy. He gets it from his father. Don’t tell Kixx I ever told you this, but the man is a disaster on legs. He’s gotten better as the years have gone on, but he wasn’t that far off from Banks when we first got married.”
I go into my room, and she follows me.
“You all have the neatest names,” I say. “How did you come up with them?”
She sits on the arm of a chair in the corner. “Well, Foxx was my grandfather’s name—but it only had one x at the end. I wanted to name my first little boy that since I was a little girl, and luckily, Kixx agreed. And because his mother put two x’s at the end for reasons I’ll never know, we put two at the end of Foxx’s.”
“That’s kind of cool.”
She beams. “Moss was named after Kixx’s grandfather. And then we got pregnant with Jess and realized that our names had the same ending sound—x’s and s’s. So we wanted to keep that trend.”
“I love that,” I say, grinning. “I never noticed that about your names, but it’s a fun little fact.”
“So then we had Jess. He was named after my brother. And then we had Maddox—who only got one x because someone at the health department screwed it up on his birth certificate and forgot the other x at the end. But I didn’t want to go to all the trouble of having it changed, so we just left it.” She sighs. “And then we had Banks. Our sweet, little cherub baby Banks.”
I giggle at the smile on her face.
“He was a handful from the start. And poor Maddox—Banks attached himself to his brother the first time he ever saw him. It was really adorable, to be honest. And then we brought Paige home and those two …” She laughs. “Banks got into more fights over his sister than he did on his own accord. Always defending her, even when she probably didn’t need defending.”
“I love that,” I say, my cheeks aching.
“He’s a good boy. He’s filthy, as you can see. He’s always on the go, always riling up someone in the family. He doesn’t listen to a word he doesn’t want to hear.” She chuckles. “But out of all of my kids, and I have six of them, Banks is the one I know will come see me in the nursing home someday. And that says a lot.”
My insides melt. “Yes, it does.”
She pats her hands on her knees and looks around the room. “Oh, that’s a pretty dress. What’s it for? Do you have something special happening?”
I exhale a breath I didn’t realize I was holding and turn to the bed. I pick the dress up by the hanger and hold it out to the side.
