Time Waits for No One

Season 2, Episode 2 - Willing and Able

"I wanna love ya! And treat you right!"

Jacqueline's voice sat thick like honey singing along, hips moving in a gentle sway, to the easy riddim of Bob Marley's latest single pouring from her vinyl.

"I wanna love ya! Everyday and every night!"

Slicking her hair back into a puffed out pony, Jacqueline couldn't help but wine around in a circle to the music, letting her muscle memory guide her bristle brush around the contours of her scalp. With her hands pulled up by her head, the hem of her black turtleneck sweater rose up just enough to show off the bottom of her tummy as her knees bent, allowing her to dip down low while moving to her favorite records.

She couldn't tell you where the energy for her morning dance party came from as she got ready to head to class, but it was there no less despite her having barely beat the sun the night before and running on far less sleep than the surgeon general would ever reasonably recommend. She had yet to go get some coffee from her block's bodega, a pick me up she usually reserved for days like this when she was working with a little less rest than usual. But the dancing got her from task to task — preening, primping, dressing, grooming — all of it carrying her forward on the current of Jamaica's crown maestro.

"I wanna know, wanna know, wanna know, now!" Jacqueline crooned after securing her hair, rubbing it down one last time to make sure it was to her desired smoothness before turning back to check the clock on her bedroom wall. She was a touch more behind schedule than she typically preferred, but being at the point in her beautician program where she had a bit more freedom to get her hours in with some flexibility, she didn't trouble herself with rushing as she headed to the living room to get herself ready to weather the cold.

The living room greeted her the way it always did — quietly, without ceremony, like a room that had learned her rhythms and no longer needed to announce itself. It was small, as Harlem apartments went, but it had good bones. Her grandfather had known that when he'd first taken it, sometime back when the neighborhood was a different kind of alive and a man like Caesar Carter could make a block his own simply by deciding it was so. Jimmy had known it when he'd taken the place over after Granddaddy passed and kept it exactly as it was, down to the curtain rod and the patched plaster by the radiator, as if preservation were its own form of love.

And now it was hers.

She'd moved in at seventeen — her parents' compromise between letting her go and keeping her close, with the practical logic of keeping the property in the family and putting her close enough to her beauty school that the crosstown bus could get her there in under twenty minutes. Her mother had presented it almost like a condition: You take care of it, you hear me? Your grandfather loved that apartment. And Jacqueline had taken care of it. Her daddy's daddy had loved it, and she had grown up spending enough time within these walls to understand exactly why.

She looked around now the way she sometimes did in quiet morning moments — not inventory, exactly, but a kind of fond accounting. Her grandfather's deep green armchair that nobody had dared reupholster. The mismatched pieces from different eras and donors that had somehow stopped feeling like hand-me-downs and started feeling like a collection — like things that had found each other and made their peace. And her own additions among them: a succulent she'd chosen specifically because the woman at the shop said it was difficult to kill, a length of printed fabric pinned above her bed frame in lieu of a headboard, gold and rust and deep brown, the colors of something warmer than February.