Real Men Knit(6)

Not now. Not today.

So instead of moving, Jesse watched intently as Kerry brought the mug to her lips again.

The mug was yet another from their mismatched set. They had many that Mama Joy had acquired over the years. A mug from here, a plate from there—like everything else, nothing went with anything quite right in this old brownstone, yet it all seemed to fit together. It was how Mama Joy said she liked it. Things didn’t have to match up perfectly to fit, she’d always told him and his brothers. When he was still young, half-impressionable and full of hope and longing, he’d say—he didn’t know why, maybe just to see her smile, because she always did when he said it—“Like us?” “Yes, like us,” she’d answer back and kiss him on the forehead, warming him from the top clear to his toes.

Jesse closed his eyes for a moment against the sight of Kerry as the image of his brothers came to his mind. Four boys from different makeups and ethnic backgrounds, brought together by their shared need of, first and foremost, a home, but probably more so the love that the seemingly irreverent single Black woman had given them. They now had the nerve to call themselves brothers, so much so that they’d taken that woman’s name to seal the deal. But now she was gone, so what would they do with the legacy she’d left them when it was all said and done? Did any of them even know what the word “legacy” meant?

He opened his eyes and looked at Kerry again. They’d be here soon and Jesse didn’t have a clue how he and his mixed bag of misfit brothers would get their shit together and work it all out. Like the mugs in the house, there was nothing about them that really could place them one with the other. There was him, the youngest, or the baby as Mama Joy used to say, though being a baby was something he could never remember, not even when he reached back to his furthest memories. And now at twenty-seven he could definitely not call himself anywhere near a baby anymore. Still, he was the youngest of his bothers, a mixture of Black from his biological mother and something else, maybe white, maybe not, from his father, who could be just about any middle-aged guy with green eyes and a take-no-responsibility attitude.

Then there were Lucas and Noah, who were at least partially from a matched set since they were the only two out of the four of them that actually shared a blood connection, having been born of the same Asian mother, though they had different fathers. Lucas, the older of the two at thirty, was full—or “ish,” because who really knew what without a DNA test—Korean, and Noah, the younger at twenty-eight, was half Korean and half Black—or Black-ish, because once again, DNA. Jesse had only been able to piece together parts of their past from what they had shared over the years, but what he did gather was that their mother died in a fire, which was tragic and more than plenty to mentally parse, given the fact that Lucas ended up being a firefighter. But Jesse got it, he guessed. Demons being what they were and all.

And lastly, though firstly, at least in age and his own ego-inflated mind, was Damian. He was a year older than Lucas and at least twenty when it came to general pain-in-the-ass-ness. Damian was Afro-Latino and, once again, “ish” like the rest of them, with a sketchy, not quite fully put together past, and the self-proclaimed leader of their little motley crew of misfits. As if anyone was fighting him for the position. Nope, not at all. Damian could have it.

As he drank Kerry’s coffee, Jesse’s mind continued to wander back in time, for the most part to when they were first brought to Mama Joy. After the shock of being in a new place, with a single mother and a yarn shop, he remembered the relief of being out of the group home and cautious joy over not being in yet another foster home where the kids were treated like little more than a potential source of income. He remembered the mistrust and weariness on his brothers’ faces and how long it took for those looks to go away. How long it took them all to stop with the territorial jockeying for positions and turn into the brothers they were today. That took years. Years of arguing, screaming, yelling, punishments, but also love and patience. And he—no, they—owed all that to Mama Joy. They were unruly messes, each of them, but somehow Mama Joy, already at what some would consider past her prime in age, was able to whip them into shape and turn them into so much more than the system ever expected them to be.

He would always consider when Mama Joy agreed to take them on and adopted them as her own the best day of his life. The boys no one wanted had found a forever home with a single woman who ran her own yarn and knitting shop. Sure, most everyone told her she was half-crazy, but the way Jesse figured it, it was that wonderful crazy half that was just what she needed to keep the four of them in line.

Jesse felt something in his chest tighten as he watched Kerry bring the cup away from her lips once again. Her round brown eyes were soft and full of an understanding that made him feel like she’d been reading his thoughts, and he was suddenly more naked and vulnerable than his stupid underwear made him out to be. He cleared his throat. “You’re right,” he said. “I think I’d better go and get dressed. Before you know it, Damian will be here barking orders and trying to run things, so I need to be ready.”

Kerry just nodded, which somehow made him feel worse. More than anything, in that moment, Jesse wanted her to give him some of her usual dismissive admonishment. What he needed today was a Kerry-sized kick in the ass, not her sympathy. “You go and do that,” she said softly, and he caught a small hitch in her voice. “I, uh—” She turned and pointed to the back table, which, he noticed for the first time, on top of being packed with the leftovers from yesterday, also now held two large shopping bags. “I’ll sort out this food. I don’t know if you heard, but Mrs. Hamilton was here this morning and she dropped off more. I’ll pull it out, and if you want me to, I can bring some up and put it in the fridge upstairs.”