It starts with, “Give you a dollar if you can tell me who’s singing this.” My dad is somewhere in his early forties, a Black man with a penchant for music, and I am his duplicate daughter. Dad drives an old white Monte Carlo, and we ride with windows down, sweat beading our foreheads, music blasting, off key singing along. I end up with a crisp one dollar bill—enough for two quarter bags of chips and a few pieces of single wrapped candy from the corner store. I learn young that knowing my dad’s music, Cameo and Randy Crawford and Con Funk Shun, is currency, is worth something.

I could rely on Sam Cooke to tell my story, his music or his melanin or his murder. The song Saint picked to sing the night we fell in love was a Sam Cooke song, “Bring It On Home to Me.” It was only two weeks prior that Saint asked me if the woman who killed Sam was Black or White. At the time, I didn’t know the details and stood slack-jawed at the question in front of our rainbow coalition of coworkers.

“My old car was champagne colored, the shimmery shade of Malik’s wet skin, my parent’s third car, a 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee, and I was the first of my friends to get a driver’s license because my birthday is in September. This was before the windows stopped working and before a speeding car bashed the back bumper, when my parents were still together but had stopped sleeping in the same room, so our maroon leather couch had the persistent indentation of my dad’s ass.”

He told her his full name on their second date. Zikoranachidi Onyeachu. And it was a seal, a name she could hold onto. And how well she remembered her own name in his mouth.

She liked it best when he imitated the way his father said it when they met for the first time- a flat, dramatic emphasis on Tami, the ka an afterthought, so it sounded more like Tommyka.

In the darkening days of fall, Tiffany listens to the Isley Brothers on repeat, not a rhythm but a mood. She sits waiting in her Harlem classroom, where soon twenty sets of ten little fingers will grip her shoulders.

If there are 100 ways to reach you, then the first is a closed door, maybe the one that was broken into, on West Hilda Circle, a peaceful–but for writhing black bodies–neighborhood street (where I met you)–in Decatur, Georgia. The door makes the sound of a quiet shout when it shuts, and the smell of Dad’s fried pork chops lingers like hot laughter.

Tonight she lay on her stomach on a rug that resembles sheepskin, thinking of the first time they met, how his eyes seemed to burn her, they were so intense. His mouth was intense, too. Even then, she knew his lips were of the largest variety she’d ever kiss, but more substantially, what came out of them was appalling: we should just burn them all. He didn’t mean that of course.

It started when she turned thirty. Like the first spark of a riot’s fire, some see her sexiness as a destructive thing, undignified even. Compare it to the Rodney King Riots or Rihanna’s Work, your choice. For her, and likewise Mario, it is a reckoning.

“Bennett Davis is a home wrecking bitch.” Everyone said it when they heard Michelle had left me. Only our cramped apartment wasn’t quite a home and, from my understanding, Bennett hadn’t meant to wreck it, but the bitch part I’ll let stand.