I tried to treat people with the same respect and courtesy I’d want in return because that was how I was raised. I put careful thought and consideration into my choices before I made them, and I pretty much played by the rules. But therein was my problem, presenting the troubling quandary that held me in its grip for the last few months. It was the delicate balance between exercising good judgment and throwing caution to the wind so I could finally have what I wanted, however risky it might be.
As I eased off the gas pedal, making a sharp right turn onto another busy street, my car sputtered and ambled along, just like my state of mind. I wasn’t good at city driving, but like many things in my life, it was something I’d have to get used to. So I continued my course, navigating through the congested streets of northwest Washington, DC, my stomach rumbling and turning with the thought of what awaited me once I reached the red brick colonial on Sixteenth Street.
I kept telling myself that I couldn’t give in to the warm sensation that had been keeping me up late at night because it was much too dangerous a proposition. But I couldn’t help it. With each mile I traveled, I inched closer and closer to the man who’d been holding my heart hostage for the past eleven years. He was what I both passionately loved and desperately feared.
It had been seven months since I’d last seen him, and unfortunately, that occasion had been one of great sorrow. I’d been in a haze, barely able to enjoy the sweetness his presence usually brought when he was near. I had searched for him among the small gathering of friends and visitors who surrounded me that sad, dreary weekend.
“God will see you through this, Emily,” mourners whispered to me in somber tones, offering hugs of condolence for the loss of my mother. I appreciated the kind words and genuine show of affection that friends and church members had offered, but I’d been much too numb to really absorb them. Those days whizzed by like blank flash cards. But when I looked up and saw him through the sea of faces gathered at the church, it was the first time in a week that I hadn’t felt dead, too. And even though our encounter was brief, as most of them had been over the years, it was, as always, meaningful.
After my mother’s funeral, my world moved slowly, limping along in a crooked groove. Losing her devastated me. I lost my father when I was ten years old. One evening he went to the corner store for a carton of milk, despite my mother repeatedly urging him not to go. “It’s too late to be out this time of night,” she had said. She told him that she and I could have toast and fruit for breakfast instead of the corn flakes we both loved to eat every morning.
But my father wouldn’t hear of it. “I’m gonna get my two favorite girls what they want,” he told my mother before heading out the door. He was standing at the counter, ready to make his purchase when two thugs shot and killed him for the $21.34 in his pocket. It was my indoctrination into shattered hopes and stolen dreams.
I was an only child, and both my parents had been as well. Mom and I were all each other had left. Even though I was blessed with a small but close circle of friends, nothing could replace the inviolable bond of maternal flesh and blood. To lose your mother, your first connection to the world, is a hard thing to wrap your mind around.
I thought about Mom and sighed as I came to a stoplight at yet another confusing intersection. “Where in the world am I?” I mumbled aloud, glancing down at my iPhone’s screen. The GPS app I’d downloaded had frozen yet again. I tried to gather my bearings as I recalled what my mother used to say whenever she got turned around in an unfamiliar part of town. “I’m not lost, I’m just exploring,” she would announce with conviction. I smiled, remembering her remarkable optimism. I could really use her help right now.
Although it had been seven months since I buried my mother, I still couldn’t believe she was gone. I had braced myself for her death because she’d been sick for so long, and because like other sad things in my life, Ms. Marabelle had predicted it. Mom battled multiple sclerosis until the degenerative disease eventually won the long war it had raged against her body. But when death finally came to claim her, I hadn’t expected the magnitude of grief and emptiness that followed.
Thank goodness I had my ace, my best friend, Samantha Baldwin. Samantha was the sister I’d never had, and she was a lifesaver. She comforted me and helped me to cope with the heartache and pain I suffered after Mom’s funeral. Samantha was also part of the reason why I was driving through a maze of Friday-afternoon rush-hour traffic, headed straight toward what could either make me whole or tear me into tiny pieces.
Samantha had talked me into moving here to DC, which was her hometown; Chocolate City, as she affectionately called it. She said that DC would be good for me, that it was the perfect elixir I needed to help me get on with my life and make a new start. “DC will bring you your heart’s desires,” she told me just a week ago when I was packing boxes.
I literally shook in my sandals when I heard my best friend’s words. I was petrified of what my new start could possibly bring, and I felt that way because I knew what Samantha didn’t. I knew deep down that if I got what I wanted, what my heart truly desired, it could not only change the course of my life as I had known it, it stood to disrupt the foundation of loyalty and trust on which we had built our rock-solid friendship and sisterhood.
The raw, naked truth was simple. What my heart truly desired was the man I had been in love with for the better part of my adult life—and that man just happened to be Samantha’s father.
DAFINA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2014 by Trice Hickman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Dafina and the Dafina logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-8726-7
ISBN-10: 0-7582-8726-7
eISBN-13: 978-0-7582-8728-1
eISBN-10: 0-7582-8728-3
First Kensington Electronic Edition: August 2014
Troublemaker Page 29
