Nadia heard the pride in Tati’s voice and didn’t have the heart to tell her not to get her hopes up. But she tried. “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing,” she said. “You can’t always put the jack back in the box.” B UT WHO WAS THE JACK? That’s what Tati wondered as she stood inside the warehouse of Roman’s club. They’d shaken hands and exchanged names and that was it. There was no n i c e t o m e e t y o u , or I h o p e y o u f o u n d t h e p l a c e o k a y , just the awkward quiet wrought by a lifetime of curiosity. Tati could hear the low rumble of the furnace gently heating the space as she took in her surroundings. Two bars butted up against the long horizontal walls, and a singular staircase gave access to the VIP balcony levels. “Would you like a tour?” Roman asked. Tati nodded as she turned around in the room beneath the buzzing uorescent lights. They had yet to be switched out for the track theater lights in blues and reds that would create the ambiance for guests who arrived at ten thirty, trying to get in free before eleven. Roman narrated all she saw. “This is the main oor of worship, like an outer court,” he said, his de ep voice sentient and excited. “All the dancing will take place down here. Up there is where the DJ will set up.” He pointed to a corner on the third level where turntables were encased in glass. Tati had heard on the radio that the Bad Boys from WGCI would host a live show until the countdown and midnight. In the shbowl Roman had created for them, they’d be able to see everything happening in the club while also immersing themselves in the music, without being distracted by drunk patrons wanting to put in their requests. “Nice,” Tati said. “What’s on the upper levels besides the DJ?” “The second oor is the sanctuary,” he said, walking toward the staircase. “It’s like a lounge. Plush couches, tables, things like that.” “How much does it cost to get up there?” Tati followed behind him.
“Preordered tickets only.” “And what about the third level? Is that preorder too?” “The confessional? Not quite.” “Then who’s up there?” “Special guests. Personally invited.” He stopped on the second oor in front of a velvet rope and sign that read, WE WORSHIP IN THE SANCTUARY . “Would you like to talk out here or go in my o ce?” Roman asked. “You have an o ce?” “I do. Right this way.” Roman led her behind the velvet rope, past the mirrored wall the couches were pushed up against, to a storage area that held extra barstools, chairs, and crates of liquor. Just beyond the pallets of extras, there was a small door, inconspicuous in its matte gray paint. There was no door handle, and Tati barely noticed the lock before Roman seemingly parted the wall. The oor inside the o ce was thinly carpeted. A heavy desk sat in the center of the windowless room. It was topped with a new, fat-backed i Mac and piles of papers. Sleek oak ling cabinets, made to look like furniture, lined the walls on either side of the desk. Atop them were statues, trophies, and even a few framed photographs. Tati gravitated toward a small silver frame where Roman stood beside a woman, three children in front of them, two boys and a girl. “This your wife? Family?” she asked, picking it up. He hesitated. “Yeah.” Tati r eplaced the picture then sat in one of the dark oak, ladder-backed chairs facing the desk. Roman scrambled to the other side, tripping over his Stacy Adams wingtips, and took his seat in his large leather chair. They looked as if they were going to have a conversation about business and not talk around the reason her picture wasn’t amongst his mantel display. “How old are you?” Roman asked. “Eighteen. I’ll be nineteen in March.” “Is that right?” “How old are your kids? My brothers and sister.”
Roman turned his head away from Tati toward the picture she picked up. Tilting his head and squinting his eyes, he tried to decipher what had emboldened her to possess his paternity, his family, his children, as if they were hers to claim. She followed his gaze. Lingered on the image of his wife. His type apparent. She was the same complexion as Nadia, her hair a reddish brown, probably from a bottle of Bigen. But where Nadia’s eyes photographed hard and stale like week-old bread, Roman’s wife glowed with light. She radiated in a way Tati had never seen before. Roman cleared his throat. Told her about his boys rst. Roman Jr. and Daniel. They were twenty-seven and twenty-three. He paused before he mentioned his daughter. Faith. “She’s eighteen.” “Like me,” Tati said. “Like you.” Roman grimaced. “When is her birthday?” “February eleventh. When is yours?” “March twenty-sixth.” “Is that right?” Roman mumbled to himself. With his elbows on the arms of his chair, he ste epled his ngers in front of his face as he ran the math. Calculations crisscrossed the smooth terrain of his face like quadratic equations, but all he came up with were probabilities. The possibility that he could in fact have fathered two children, two daughters, with two di erent women at once. “What’s your wife’s name?” Tati asked. “Deborah.” “Y’all all got names out the Bible?” “God is the head of our house.” “Then isn’t it blasphemy to name your club Worship Haus? This is the furthest place from church as people can get.” “Let’s just say I’m a di erent kind of Bishop.” He smirked. “God has his ministry, and I have mine.” “Hmph,” Tati grunted, understanding why Mimi didn’t like him. She held her chuckle and asked where he and Nadia had met. “In a club on the South Side,” he answered. “I was promoting parties back then.”
“Were you married back then too?” “Deborah and I were s eparated when I met your mom.” “Did you like her?” “She was cool. Hard. But cool.” “What does that mean? Hard?” “I don’t know. Just... hard. A ballbuster. She ain’t take no shit and didn’t let people in easily.” “People or just you, a married man?” “I see you’re just like her.” “Is that right?” Tati mocked. “She used to do that too.” “Because you say it a lot. Even in your emails. It’s patronizing.” “Is that right?” Tati sighed. Silence covered them. Roman didn’t o er anything more than the answers to what she asked. He outlined but added no color. Tati gazed back around the room, trying to learn something, anything, but there was no art on his o ce walls to indicate taste. His space was re ned but sparse. The awards and trophies monuments to his ego, the image of his family a testament to his legacy. Tati looked back to the family photo and wondered what it would have been like to visit for weekends and on long school breaks, like Desirée did with Lou, had she not been a secret. Would she have been photographed, smiling in the light, with her father and half siblings, while his wife tried to hide her contempt? Would Deborah’s eyes have resembled Nadia’s if she’d known? Tati shook her head and asked after the one answer she’d come for. “Why’d you leave?” “I’m married. My wife... We were going through a rough patch—” “Couldn’t have been that rough.” “She was pregnant—” “So was my mom.” “I don’t know what you want me to do.” Roman sighed. “When your mom told me, I hadn’t seen her in months. I didn’t know if you were really mine.” “Are you trying to say my mama was loose?” “No.” He hesitated.
A pause Tati assumed concealed his real answer. She said, “You were s eparated from your wife, but you didn’t question if Faith was yours?” “She’s my wife.” “And what was my mother?” Roman paused again. “She was a friend,” he said nally. “Your mother and I were friends.” Tati nodded. Stood. On her side of the o ce between the door and the chairs, she rubbed her hands against her thighs in an e ort to bring life back into them after they’d hung limp along the chair. She looked at everything but Roman. Which wasn’t much. She couldn’t take how relaxed he appeared. So in control of his comportment despite the urry of anxiety that whirred through her body, charging every node and neuron in her nervous system. He said, “So tell me something about yourself.” “I run track.” She paused, tried to think of more. “Oh, and my middle name is Merét.” “Your middle name is my mother’s name,” Roman said quietly. “I didn’t know.” “But she did.” It was Roman’s turn to stand. To pace. Tati had nally made him uncomfortable in his own space, his Worship Haus changed from heaven to hell. Tati sat back down and watched him walk. She watched as memories ooded his mind the same way they did Nadia’s. On good days, she allowed her mind to go o into a distance to retrieve a smile and a burnished glow ecked with red and gold of a bittersweet happiness she only deigned to taste. Tati watched as Roman’s eyes opened wider. He faced the ling cabinets and stared at the family picture. He looked between it and Tati before he turned the frame photo-side down. “I always knew this day would come,” he said. “So you always knew I was yours?” His back still turned, he bobbed his head yes. “Then why’d you leave? Why didn’t you claim me?” “I was married. I a m married. What was I supposed to do?” “Stay!”
Tati stood and leaned against the ling cabinets on the opposite wall. A face- o of familial proportions, but she couldn’t help but notice their similarities. Both of them dressed in black and red. Both of them brown-skinned. Both of them tall. Height and color she got from him, as neither Mimi nor Nadia surpassed ve ve, and Nadia was only as brown as a paper bag. She chewed her cheek. He bit down on the inside of his lip until it bled. “I don’t know what you want from me.” He paused. “I mean... it seems like you turned out all right.” “No thanks to you.” “Like I said, I don’t know what you want from me. Just because your mama gave you my mother’s name doesn’t mean anything. It’s not like we’ve had a test done.” “Really?” Tati was incredulous. She felt the stings but blinked them back. Roman continued, “All I know is what you’ve said. What she said. That don’t mean anything. Women lie all the time.” “Now my mother’s a liar?” “I’m not saying that—” “Then what are you saying?” “I’m saying you too old to be barking up the daddy tree. You grown. Live your life. Forget about me. I...” He didn’t nish his sentence. He didn’t have to, but Tati still didn’t understand. How could he not wonder, not dream, about her the same way she did him? For someone who said he’d known the day would come for his bastard baby to return kicking and screaming like the brat she was, he surely didn’t act like it. “So that’s it?” she asked. “That’s all I get?” “What else were you looking for?” “An explanation. An apology. For you to blame my mom and say she k ept you away from me. Something.” He shrugged with both shoulders and both hands. An I ’ m s o r r y f o r b e i n g a d i s a p p o i n t m e n t stance. All Tati recognized was the s o r r y . The word, not the regret or grief behind it. She nally understood why on Saturdays in the shop, most of the women, while under Nadia’s hands, went on about sorry-ass, tri in’-
ass, good-for-nothin’-ass men—when they were being kind. Niggas when they’d been done cruel. Tati had been hearing all her life about men like Roman, thinking he’d be the exc eption to the rule of lived experience. She should’ve listened more to the women when they asked amongst themselves, W h o h a s n ’ t l o v e d a s o r r y m a n ? If she had, she would have known that every woman had loved at least one in her lifetime: husband, ancé, boyfriend, brother, or daddy, it was all the same and she was no exc eption. “I’m married,” Roman said again. It was in answer to her question, yes, but also an excuse for his sorriness. His tri inity. As if matrimony were a bandage for his ways outside of wedlock. Sutures that never showed the gaps in his story. “Where’s your wife now?” Tati asked. “Shouldn’t she be here?” “My God, you sound just like your mother.” “Oh, so you do remember her.” “I never said I forgot.” “How could you when she and your wife look alike? Is that why you fucked my mom? Because she reminded you of Deborah?” Roman walked to the door as Tati seethed in her own anger. It caught her o guard. Leapt before she ever felt it rise. “Like I said”—Roman turned the handle—“ I don’t know what you expect.” “I want to know why you left me.” “I didn’t leave you. I left your mother.” “I wasn’t born.” He smirked. “You weren’t born and I didn’t want you. She did! T h a t ’ s why you’re here.” “And is that why you weren’t?” “Tatiana, whatever it is you’re looking for, it ain’t here.” She walked through the open door. Between the pallets of items shrink- wrapped for storage, she stopped. “Does your wife know about me?” Tati asked. “About me and Mama?” “No,” Roman answered. “You’ve been ke eping us a secret for eighteen years.” “And you’ll be a secret for eighteen more if I have anything to do with it.”
His honesty gave Tati in one bowl what Nadia had been trying to spoon-feed her for years. Roman wasn’t shit, and therefore Nadia was enough. It was the only thought Tati could hold on to. What she’d thought she had to know for herself, she didn’t need after all. After all this time she nally understood Nadia’s demand for validation. She too had been rejected. She too had made a choice in spite of her circumstances, and she hadn’t run when she’d had the opportunity to do so. “So that’s it?” Tati asked. “What else did you expect?” “Not this,” she answered. She walked to the stairwell and down to the main oor of the empty club. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” she said, stopping in the middle. “What’s that?” “Why’d you say you knew this day would come if you don’t even believe me or Mama that I’m yours?” “Who said I didn’t believe you?” “You never said you did.” Roman, again, ran his hand from the back of his head over his hair and face like he was changing theater masks. His sle epy, squinting eyes opened wider and hardened, as did all the muscles in his face. He said, “Just because life-changing shit happens doesn’t mean you have to change your life. Your mama knew where I stood. She let that shit happen to her. I ain’t lettin’ it happen to me.” “By ‘that shit,’ you mean me?” “If that’s how you take it, then that’s how you take it. You’ve seen my priorities. It’s time you and your mama go nd your own.” Tati let the echo of her footfalls in her boots answer for her. She crossed the club to the door and pushed into the cold. It dried the stings in her eyes. The ones she didn’t let fall in front of him. The ones he was never worthy of to begin with. Inside Nadia’s car, Tati drove away from the club as the Worship Haus sign illuminated the darkness. The red neon letters took up two stories, covering the sanctuary and the confessional, blaspheming for blocks the ways of the false bishop inside.
ati as soon as she opened the back door. Nadia had taken clients for most of the day, getting their hair together to ring in the new year. She’d even o ered to do Tati’s. An o er Tati had declined. She hadn’t wanted Nadia to try to talk her out of going to meet Roman. A decision she had to add to her regret of having met him at all. “Tati, that you?” Nadia called from the basement. “Yeah.” “You comin’ down?” “Gimme a minute.” Tati cr ept upstairs to her room and pulled out the notebook she still k ept tucked between the mattress and box spring. Inside, all her old words jumped out at her. All her D e a r D a d d y and D e a r R o m a n entries from when she didn’t know any better. She ripped them out one by one until the metal spirals that k ept the notebook together were bent out of shape and all that remained were blanks. D e a r M a m a , Y o u w e r e r i g h t . H e b e a t m e w i t h h i s w o r d s A n d t h e y h u r t w o r s e t h a n t h e s t i n g o f a n y b e l t . T h e c r a c k o f a n y w h i p . T h e c u t o f a n y c a n e . T h e w e l t B u b b l e d w i t h b l o o d P o o l e d w i t h p u s W a s i n v i s i b l e t o e v e r y e y e b u t m y o w n I w a s t h r o w n