He looked worried, and also a little sad. Damon had really liked Christine, and he’d told me a couple of times that he was looking forward to having a mom again. He’d already begun to think of her that way. He and Jannie missed Christine a whole lot. Twice now they’d had important women taken away from them.

“I was working a little late, that’s all. It’s a very complicated case, Damon, but I think I’m making progress,” I said. I went to the cabinet and took out two tea bags.

“I’ll make you tea,” Nana offered.

“I can do it,” I said, but she reached for the bags, and I let her take them away from me. It doesn’t pay to argue with Nana, especially not in her kitchen.

“You want some tea and milk, big guy?” I asked Damon.

“All right,” he said. He pronounced it Ah-yite, as they do at the playgrounds and probably even at the Sojourner Truth School.

“You sound like that poor excuse for an NBA point guard Allen Iverson,” Nana said to him. She didn’t much like street slang, never had. She had started off as an English teacher and never lost her love of books and language. She loved Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and also Oprah Winfrey for bringing their books to a wider audience.

“He’s the fastest guard in the league, Grandma Moses. Shows what you know about basketball,” said Damon. “You probably think Magic Johnson is still playing in the league. And Wilt Chamberlain.”

“I like Marbury with the Timberwolves, and Stoudamire with Portland, formerly with Toronto,” Nana said, and gave a triumphant little smile. “Ah-yite?”

Damon laughed. Nana probably knew more about NBA point guards than either of us. She could always get you if she wanted to.

We sat at the kitchen table and drank tea with milk and too much sugar, and we were mostly quiet, but it was kind of nice. I love family, always have. Everything that I am flows from that. Damon yawned and got up from the table. He went to the sink and rinsed out his cup.

“I can probably sleep now,” he reported to us. “Give it a try, anyway.”

He came back to the table and gave Nana and me a kiss before he went back upstairs to bed. “You miss her, don’t you?” he whispered against my cheek.

“Of course I miss Christine,” I said to Damon. “All the time. Every waking minute.” I didn’t make mention of the fact that I had been out late because I was observing the son of a bitch who might have abducted her. Nor did I say anything about the other detective on surveillance, Patsy Hampton.

When Damon left, Nana put her hand in mine, and we sat like that for a few minutes before I went up to bed.