He set the sandpaper down and stood with both hands flat on the workbench breathing through his nose. The threat wasn't nothing. He knew that. He had a son, and he had a small business, and he lived in a world that had never needed much of a reason to decide a black man was the problem in the room. Tasha understood that.
She had filed that knowledge away years ago and kept it sharp. But he was also done letting the possibility of her damage cost him more than the damage itself. He picked up the sandpaper again. The second time came without warning on a Saturday afternoon in front of Diane's house on Linden Street. Ethan had just come out of the front door, a measuring tape in his hand.
He and Diane had been talking about enclosing part of the porch before winter when he heard the car. He recognized it before he saw it, and his entire body understood what was about to happen before his mind caught up. She came out of the car already moving, already talking, her voice pitched at the volume she used when she wanted neighbors to hear. She called Diane names that had no other purpose than to wound. She said things about age and about replacement and about what kind of woman waited around for someone else's man, and her voice was high and relentless and drawing looks from the houses across the street.
Ethan stepped off the porch and put himself between them. "Don't," he said. She shoved him. It was open-handed, not hard enough to move him, but deliberate, her eyes going to the houses across the street as she did it, checking for witnesses, checking for cameras. He understood the architecture of it immediately.
She wanted him to react. She wanted something she could post and caption and turn into a story she controlled. He went completely still. His hands stayed at his sides. He thought about Marcus.
He thought about the specific mechanics of how the world worked for men who looked like him, the way a single wrong move could become the whole story. The way the story could follow a man into custody hearings and business loans and casual conversations with neighbors who didn't know him yet. He stood still and absorbed it and did not move. The front door opened. Diane came down the porch steps at the pace of someone who had decided something clearly and was simply carrying it out.
She was not hurrying. She was not afraid. She stopped beside Ethan and looked at Tasha with an expression that was not anger. It was something quieter and more final than anger. "I sat up for 6 hours the night my husband died," Diane said, her voice carrying cleanly in the still air.