I strolled by the aisle of skin-care products, reading labels and smelling the scents of essential oils. Midsniff, I saw her stacking jars on a shelf. It was a profile shot, but I had enough detail to make a decision about who I was looking at. It had been twenty years since our little reunion in Danville State Correctional Center, where our brothers were locked up together, the day that I found out that she was pregnant.

I could tell by her features that before me stood a grown-up Stacia Buchanan. I didn’t know what to do. I realized that I had been holding my breath, so I let a burst of air hiss out of my mouth, then ran through all my options: Call her name and have an uncomfortable conversation. Walk by her all slow, pretending not to know her, letting her discover me. I decided to avoid the whole thing, just leave the store. While walking away, I heard a high-pitched voice call, “Fe Fe?!”

I turned around and performed some terrible acting. I scrunched up my face a little, squinted my eyes, tried to act like I didn’t recognize her. She tilted her head forward, grinned, then said, “It’s Stacia! You probably don’t recognize me cause I put on all this weight.”

She rubbed her body to show me the fat, I guess. “Shit, five kids will do that to you! How you been?”

I couldn’t say anything. I just looked at her. I nodded and managed, “Good.”

She started unraveling her apron and yelling down the aisle, “Jantay?” When Jantay didn’t respond right away, she called her again, and I almost covered my ears because of the close-range volume. Jantay finally turned around, and Stacia told her, “I’m about to go on break.” Then she smiled at me, and it was pretty, and I remembered this Stacia smile, the expression of a sweet girl, full of energy. “Let’s go to the café,” she said.

We walked to the front of the store, side by side. She talked, but I read the labels of cereal boxes and drifted back to our childhood again. I thought about Meechie and peanut butter Cap’n Crunch and Mama and her boring Raisin Bran and the Browns and Cheerios. It was safer to concentrate on the bright colors and the people who once loved those boxes. I walked in a daze, because I couldn’t believe that after all these years, I’d run into Stacia.

When we sat down, she made a sound like a deflating balloon.

“Long shift?”

It was safer than what I really wanted to know: Did she know anything about Tonya?

“Yes, girl. These damn people and they Thanksgiving shopping,” she whispered. “You look good, girl. Can you believe we fucking thirty-two? Where’d the years go?”