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know we could get a big diamond real cheap. It might be stolen from somewhere, but it’ll still be cheap. I’m sure if you got about a hundred or two dollars we could get one. After the rings we can get a car, then an apartment to call our own, and then a house. Remember
when Black had stole that Malibu on 145th, by the library, and we drove up and down FDR all night? You looked so fine behind the steering wheel. I was shocked that you could drive. You never told me you were that good behind the wheel. Then you promised me you would teach me.
    When I was smaller and my feet couldn’t even reach the pedals, my daddy used to let me sit on his lap and take hold of the wheel while he put his hard hands on top of mine. One time I drove almost all the way down 125th when it was Christmastime. I counted all the lighted Christmas trees hanging above the streetlights. That was one of the only ways I even knew it was the holidays. I counted seven Christmas trees in the sky before my daddy bounced me off his knee real fast. He had spotted this cop pulling up behind us when we passed 5th and he was worried about getting pulled over cause his license was suspended. Daddy slowed down, turned off the radio, and I swore I could hear his heart beating as loud as mine the whole way, and I kept looking back to see if a police car would be behind us with its lights flashing and then the cop would pull us over and throw my daddy on the car and handcuff him while his head was down low and I would have to walk to my uncle’s house around the corner on 124th and Lenox and maybe just maybe somebody I went to school with would see me walking and ask me why or see my daddy in the police car and ask me why and I would have to tell them and be laughed at the next day at school. We was quiet
the whole way home until we made it to our building, where my mother was looking out of the window on the fourth floor, waiting for us with Drew in her arms because he was still just a baby. She couldn’t start dinner until Daddy came home with the groceries, and I remember how happy my daddy looked bringing the groceries up the stairs, staring at my mother like he couldn’t wait to make another baby with her. We were a regular happy family back then, before the fire, before Roy, before Drew left to live with Grandma. Me and you gonna have a family like that one day, we gonna start all over again and get it right.
    With love,
    Natasha
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    April 5, 1990
Natasha,
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    Baby, I’m scared. I don’t think I want you to come to the trial. My lawyer said that he might call you to testify, to talk about my character and to talk about my relationship with my mother and father. But he said that most likely he won’t need you, since you can’t—what was the word—substantiate any abuse or anything. He asked me if you knew about it and I told him you didn’t know shit about it because I wasn’t trying to expose you to anything. Tyler and Trevon definitely gonna have to talk, maybe Black since he
my best friend and he was in our house a lot. I don’t think I want anybody I know to come to the trial. It’s a lot of things you don’t know about me, things that have happened to me in my life that I’m embarrassed to have people know. My lawyer been practicing with me, he been schooling me on what to say and how to act and how to look at the jury and the judge and all that so they can be sympathetic for me. He told me that it was only about five of us on the jury, you know, black people. He said that he tried to get more, but he couldn’t. He said that he tried not to pick no old people or no Christians because they was the worst when it came to feeling sorry for somebody, especially me since people think that the worst thing in the world is killing one of your parents. He said if it was my mother, I could have hung it up, but since it was my daddy—a man—that I have a big chance. He