R. J. just stood there gazing at the cheap light fixture over the table.
“I told you he couldn’t have too much of that honey,” I said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” Sasha said.
“Not you,” I said. I looked back at R. J. “I’m not going to beg you to get off of that seat. You get down right now!”
“We’re going to be late to school,” Cheyenne said almost so softly you might not have heard her. “I have to take my T-shirt—Joe Johnson signed it.”
“Get off of the chair.” Reginald got up from his seat and reached for R. J.
“Don’t pull him down,” I said to him. “We have to talk him down.”
“Talk him down?” Reginald held out a hand to R. J. “Do you see this? Do you see this? What is he doing?”
“I told you!” I said.
“Son, get down from the table,” Reginald insisted.
R. J. folded his arms over his chest.
“Are you saying I don’t know how to take care of him? That I’m doing something wrong?” I asked.
“He didn’t say that,” Sasha said.
“Because I don’t recall you ever offering any advice. Any kind of solution.”
“Boy!” Reginald raised his voice and it shot through my spine. “You get off of that chair or I’m going to take you down myself!”
“Don’t scream at him,” I said.
Cheyenne got up and ran from the table.
“He’s tired from last night. You had him up all night riding around Atlanta,” I said. “You knew he had school today. That was too much.”
“Means Drive,” R. J. said mechanically. Reginald and I stopped talking and looked at him. He covered his ears and said louder, “Means Drive. 255. 255 Means Drive.”
“Shit,” Reginald spat.
“255 Means Drive. 255 Means Drive!”
“I’m not dealing with this crap this morning.” Reginald grabbed R. J. from the seat at the middle of his body like he was a toddler and pulled him to the floor.
“What was that in there?” I asked, nearly charging through Reginald in our bedroom after we’d gotten R. J. calm.
Sasha was in the living room returning some calls she’d written down on a long sheet of paper. Reginald and I were darting around in the bedroom, getting ready to leave the house. I told the twins to wait in their rooms until I was ready to drive them to school.
“You tell me what happened in there,” Reginald suggested snidely as he pulled a tie from the closet.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “You know we don’t handle him that way.”
“We? What we?” he chuckled uneasily. “That’s not how you were sounding. You told me what to do and then you did what you wanted to do. There was no we.”
“He could’ve had a seizure,” I said, sliding on my old penny loafers.
“He didn’t.”
“How do you keep snapping at me when you know I’m right?” I pleaded. “When you know he can’t have all of that sugar and he was up late last night? He can’t go to school like—”