FROM DISILLUSIONED:
“Nika Robinson loaded her Nissan Altima with all the jeans and sweatshirts and toys her children had outgrown during the past year. It was the kind of bright August morning when you couldn’t help but feel good, with a rising summer sun already warming her dark brown arms. For months, everything had been a struggle, leaving Nika drained and irritable, a shadow of her usual bubbly self. But a looming change of season whispered on the breeze. The 2019–20 school year had just begun. So far, things had unfolded smoothly. A few hours earlier, Nika’s husband and teenage son had headed out the door for work and for school, sleepy and cute as they mumbled goodbye. Carter and Cassidy, suddenly second and fourth graders, were happy and laughing as they ate their cereal at the kitchen island. Now, with her schedule free for the first time in forever, Nika felt almost relaxed. The end-of-summer consignment sale at the Gwinnett County Fairgrounds was about to start. It would be like a little reward for keeping everyone intact.
Nika climbed into the driver’s seat and slid forward. At just over five feet tall, she stood a full twelve inches shorter than her husband, Anthony.
Robinson, once a lean and powerful high school linebacker, now built more like a bulky defensive tackle. The two had met in 2003, when they were in their early twenties, back when nearby Atlanta still had space for all the pent-up hopes of America’s booming Black middle class. At the time, she had just earned her master’s degree in public health. He was working as a network engineer. After they got married, there wasn’t much debate. Upwardly mobile families like theirs lived in the suburbs. By 2012, the Robinsons had settled in a six-bedroom, three-bathroom, $223,000 house in one of the whitest parts of northern Gwinnett, forty-five minutes from downtown.
Nika still wanted to believe it had been the right decision. Now in her early forties, it had become habit to push any nagging doubts about the life she’d built below the surface of her busy days, which were typically filled with work, parenting, and courses in the doctoral program she’d recently started at the University of Georgia. Just that morning, Nika had caught her self staring again at the dining-room walls, which remained the same neutral beige as the day they’d moved in. Weeks earlier, she and Anthony had bought several shades of blue paint in the small sample-size cans, then put a series of squares on the wall, one row running from Blueprint to Gentle- man’s Gray, another from Van Cortland to Indigo Batik. But even after hiring a color consultant to offer advice, Nika felt unable to commit.
It was a problem for another time, she thought as she backed her car out into the cul-de-sac, then passed her neighbors’ homes, their still-skinny front-yard trees and empty concrete driveways spaced at regular intervals. The condominium complex for active adults scrolled by, followed by the community’s gated pool and fenced-in tennis courts. Everything was calm. As they so often did, Nika’s thoughts circled back to her oldest son, Corey…”
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