Concrete Rose

One of them yell out, “Don’t let them punk you, Li’l Don and Li’l Zeke!”

It don’t matter that my pops been locked up for nine years or that King’s pops been dead almost as long. They still Big Don, the former crown, and Big Zeke, his right-had man. That make me Li’l Don and King Li’l Zeke. Guess we not old enough to go by our own names yet.

“You good?”

Hell no. My life got thrown into a blender and I’m left with something I don’t recognize. On top of that, I’m suddenly somebody’s pops and I wish I had my pops.

Nah, man. I can’t freak out. I gotta handle mine, on some G shit. “I ain’t tripping.”

“You know it’s okay to be scared, right?”

“Scared of what? A li’l baby?”

“Of all the stuff that come with having a li’l baby,” Dre says. “First time I held Adreanna, I cried. She was so beautiful, and she was stuck with me for a father.”

I look at my son, and damn, I feel that.

“I decided I was gon’ be the kind of father she deserved,” he says. “I had to man up. That’s what you gotta do, Mav. Man up.”

“Fool, I’m a man already,” I say.

“I walked out on him last night, Dre.”

“Who? Your son?”

I nod. “He wouldn’t stop—I didn’t know how to make him stop crying man, and I was tired and—” I shake my head at myself. “I walked out of the house and left him crying.”

“Did you go back?”

I look up at him. “Of course I did.”

“That’s what matters,” Dre says. “Parenting is hard, cuz. You gon’ break sometimes. The most important thing is that you pull yourself together and go back, playboy.”

Pops told me the other day that grief something we all gotta carry. I never understood that till now. Feel like I got a boulder on my back. It weigh down my whole body, and I be wanting to cry out to make the pain go away.

Men ain’t supposed to cry. We supposed to be strong enough to carry our boulders and everybody else’s.

“Weak,” P-Nut says, behind a fake cough. The big homies smirk. I’m nothing but a joke to them.

I storm toward the church. I found Dre with bullets in his head. The least Shawn could do is let me handle the dude who killed him.

But nah. I’m just a li’l kid who can’t live up to his pops’s name.

I’m gon’ prove all them fools wrong one day. Believe that.

“Everybody in the set already think I’m soft, Shawn.”

“So?” he says. “Forget what them fools think. You gotta live for you and Dre now, you feel me? You can do everything he didn’t get a chance to do.”

I never thought of that.

“Raise your son. Be the best father you can be,” Shawn says. “That’s how you honor Dre. A’ight?”

“Son, one of the biggest lies ever told is that Black men don’t feel emotions. Guess it’s easier to not see us as human when you think we’re heartless. Fact of the matter is, we feel things. Hurt, pain, sadness, all of it. We got a right to show them feelings as much as anybody else.”

The person who killed my cousin got killed.

It’s been a weird three weeks since it happened. ‘Cause Ant was shot at a school function it was all over the news. His parents cried on TV, and I realized he had parents. Like Dre. Some kids at school were really tore up over his death, and I realized he had friends. Like Dre. At the stadium, he got a memorial in the parking lot with flowers and balloons. Like Dre.

Everybody get mourned by somebody, I guess. Even murderers.

Lisa stare at me real hard. “You’re selling drugs with King again, aren’t you?”

I sigh. “Man, look—”

“You know what? Don’t answer that,” she says. “Do whatever you want, Maverick. Me and my baby will be all right.”

“There you go, acting like I won’t be around.”

“Because you won’t!” Lisa says. “I make plans, knowing that. My baby needs one of us to think about the future.”

She don’t get it. She really don’t get it.

There’s a lot of things I never wanted to know ‘bout my pops. It come with the territory when your father is Big Don. I’d rather hear that he bought kids’ shoes and fed families at holidays. Not that he got people hooked on crack.

Sometimes one person’s hero is another person’s monster, or in my case, father. Yet it’s hard for me to judge him when I’m plotting to kill somebody else’s father. But see, taking Red out is the best way for Dre to get justice. It ain’t much different from a judge sentencing Red to death row.

I think.

“Daddy’s here. It’s okay.”

Them few words do me in. I say them to Seven all the time, but I ain’t heard them myself in years, and they everything I ever needed. “Dre should be here,” I blubber.”

“He should be.”

“He deserve better.”

“He did.”

“I wanna do this for him. I got to.”

Pops smile so sad it’s hard to call it that. “There were a lot of things I thought I had to do, too. Reality was, I only had to be there for you and your momma, and I failed at that.”

But when it comes to the streets, there’s rules.

Nobody will ever write them down, and you’ll never find them in a book. It’s stuff you need in order to survive the moment your momma let you out the house. Kinda like how you gotta breathe even when it’s hard to.

If there was a book, the most important section would be on family, and the first rule would be:

When somebody kills your family, you kill them.