A BOXER’S BREAK was what Tak had, a fracture of the knuckles that was the perfect complement to his cousin’s shattered nose and concussion. Tak’s injury took a cast and six weeks to heal, during which time he was unable to paint or play his guitar. His father hadn’t required much of an explanation; Tak told him that Mike had simply gotten on his nerves. Interestingly enough, he took that without question.
Deena sipped iced green tea as she sat at her desk. The tea was a gift from Asami. She was at work on a Sunday, brainstorming ideas for a designing competition a few thousand leagues out of her league. It was going to be a so-called “City-Within-A-City”, a mega-resort in the Dominican Republic that was the equivalent of a kitchen-sink dive into the tourism industry. It was an architect’s dream with eighty acres of space and very few guidelines. It was a seven-billion-dollar enterprise with a salary payout of five hundred sixty million. Every architect in the world was salivating at the venture, and Deena realized she had an ice cream sundae’s chance in hell of getting the gig. Still, it was about the process, and as she worked, she remembered Daichi’s words of advice. Study the culture. Remember the culture. Reflect the culture. She wasn’t sure how much it would help her though, since he was entering the competition as well.
She should’ve been at home, curled up with Tak and his newly freed hand. Despite her desire to earn a name for herself, she kept turning to silly and trivial thoughts. Something Tak said, something John did, something Kenji wanted. She needed discipline. In the past, she’d had it in droves. What had the Tanaka men done to her? She could imagine the answer they’d give.
They had this way with her, Tak, and John even, of making her laugh when logic defied joy. She’d been standing at the mirror that morning, staring at her reflection, when she turned to Tak and said, “You know, one time my grandfather told me I looked like a baboon.”
He’d looked up at her with a frown as serious as it was contemplative.
“You want to go kick over his tombstone?”
She’d laughed of course, knowing he would’ve done it had she agreed.
Deena chastised her wandering mind. The “City-Within-A-City” was her ticket to freedom. Win that, and her days of stingy five-figure salaries with Daichi were over. She smiled. Fantasizing was fun.
And now back to work. After all, she had a full day ahead of her. A few hours at the office, a trip to Babies R Us and a baby shower for a fourteen-year-old who was expecting. Somehow, her itinerary failed to excite her.
DEENA STOOD IN line at the Aventura Babies R Us, a baby mobile in one arm and a nursing pillow in the other. She tried not to think of the gift’s recipients, the fourteen-year-old girlfriend of her seventeen-year-old cousin Shakeith, but her thoughts had a will of their own. As she stood, she pondered how such a family could exist—a helter-skelter mix of welfare receiving, low achieving, blissfully satisfied souls content with self-destruction.
It wasn’t that she believed healthy families existed apart from problems. But she knew the difference between that sort of family and one without hope. The day after Tak broke his hand on Mike’s face he pulled his cousin aside and offered an apology. It was important to him that he had his cousin’s forgiveness. And as for Mike, once he realized what Deena was to Tak, it seemed he wanted Tak’s forgiveness too. So, when the cousins parted at the end of the week it was on good terms. Once, Aunt Caroline and Rhonda had argued over the price of postage stamps. The argument escalated, Caroline hit Rhonda, and the two didn’t speak for a year.
Shakeith was Caroline’s son. He was a teenage smoker and drinker and soon-to-be father who idolized Anthony. Whenever Shakeith wanted to emphasize one thing or another, he would do so by invoking the name of his cousin. “Man, I put that on my dead cousin, Tony,” he would say with a shout. Tony, who was third-in-command in the tyrannical R.I.P. gang; Tony, who moved more cocaine in and out of Liberty City than any two dealers combined, and Tony, who’d become so powerful someone believed he had to die. Tony. It was how Deena sifted trash from treasure. Tony versus Anthony. One was a gang member, the other her brother. All it took to separate them was the dropping of three small, yet powerful letters.
Shakeith wanted to be Tony. It was in everything he said and did. It was in the way he’d invoke Tony’s name when he was challenged, as though his cousin had written an evocative and compelling manual on the art of gangsta living. It was in the way he dressed and the way he walked, that funky gait that dared onlookers to test him. And it was in his life’s philosophy, that of doing as Tony Hammond would’ve done.
She gave him another year to live. Maybe a little more, but not much. A single year and the Hammonds would bury another.
Their story would be compelling were it not so commonplace. Prisons were brimming with brothers and cousins, fathers and sons, all harbored within the same maximum facility. What was impressive to Deena was the stories of those who didn’t fill those walls. The Deenas and Rhondas who kept their footsteps high as they trudged through the sludge. To Deena, the honest way was the hard one, and the other way, easy.
She couldn’t understand the lure for Shakeith. Her brother was dead. Despite all those who had feared him, maybe even because of it, Anthony Hammond was hunted, captured, and slaughtered.