To Build a Vow

by Chencia C. Higgins

  “Alright, that’s enough! Get on up! You’re wearing a dent into this damn couch!”

  The lights switched on and the blanket was ripped off of me. I was tripping. Did I go on a drunken binge, fall into a wormhole, and wake up as a fourteen-year-old? This scene was unpleasantly reminiscent of my school years.

  “Come on, Daddy. You have to get up.”

  There went that theory. I cracked open my eyes and squinted against the bright light. My mama and daughter were standing over me. Ma had her arms propped on her hips and was shaking her head at me with her lips pursed into a frown. Ja’mya had her arms folded across her chest and was giving me a mean stare. I scrubbed a hand over my face and wondered why I didn’t lock my bedroom door the night before.

  Ah, shit.

  That’s right. I wasn’t in my bedroom. The past couple of weeks saw me sleeping on the couch in the living room instead of upstairs in the plush king-size bed that I’d once shared with Lisa. I couldn’t even make myself go into the room, let alone attempt to sleep in there, so I moved a handful of my clothes to the coat closet under the stairs. Now, I didn’t even have to walk past what felt like a tomb.

  So, I’d slept on the couch the night before, and apparently, these two decided to harass me about it. I stretched, reaching my arms way above my head as my feet hung over the arm of the sofa.

  “Why aren’t you in school, Mya?” The Texas clock above the mantel read nine-thirty and I don’t remember elementary schools having open campuses.

  My miniature twin pouted then frowned. “It’s Saturday, Daddy!”

  Was it?

  I leaned over the edge of the couch and grabbed my cell phone off of the coffee table. Sure enough, the display confirmed Ja’mya’s exclamation.

  “Damn.”

  “Mmhmm.” My mama hummed her disapproval.

  I swung my legs to the floor and sat up straight. The days had passed by in a blur. Friday felt like eons ago. Scrubbing my hands down my face to try and wipe away the perpetual exhaustion I felt, I addressed my mama.

  “What’s up, Ma?”

  Ja’Mya climbed onto the couch and wrapped her arms around my shoulders, and instinctively, I pulled her toward me and dropped a kiss onto her temple. My mama sat on the coffee table directly in front of me and gave me a stern look.

  “Your flight, in about,” she glanced at the jeweled watch on her slender wrist. “Three hours.”

  My brows lowered as I tried to climb out of the fog to follow her wit. “What do you mean?” I looked down at my daughter, who had a pleading look in her eyes. What was going on?

  “We’re sending you down south for a little bit.”

  Uh, what?

  “Who is ‘we’? Who decided this? And where down south? To Houston?”

  “We is me and your daddy. We decided this. And no, not Houston. A bit further than that. You’re going to Cabo.”

  My eyes bulged. “Mexico?! Why would you think I want to go to Mexico? I can’t just leave! I have work and Mya. I can’t just abandon my responsibilities for a random vacation. Come on, Ma. Think about this.”

  My mama pursed her lips. Her chest rose and I knew she was gearing up to fuss, but Ja’Mya spoke before she could.

  “Daddy.” I looked down to meet her gaze with tired eyes. “I think you need to go. You’ve been so sad since Mommy left, maybe going and spending some time with Uncle Jer will make you happy again.”

  I blinked. Was I hearing correctly? Had Lisa turned my own daughter against me, too?

  “You don’t want me here, either, Mya? I thought we were a team.” My voice was hoarse.

  “Daddy, no!”

  “Oh, no you don’t!” My mama pushed Ja’mya to the side and shoved my shoulder, causing me to fall back against the couch, then she stood up, towering over me. “You will not do that to her. She is only concerned about you. We all are! You’ve been a zombie since Lisa left and I will not sit back and let you waste away. I will be damned if I let you check out because things didn’t go the way you hoped. I won’t do it, J.”

  My face crumpled and I lurched forward to bury it in my hands. “What am I supposed to be when every woman in my life is trying to get rid of me?” Though the strained words were muffled by my hands, they both heard me clearly. Mya pressed her face into my back and her trembling begat tears into my t-shirt. My mama squeezed into the space between me and the end of the couch.

  “Jeremiah. The only thing I want to get rid of is this dark cloud hanging over you. You have so much to live for, and this right here, what you’ve been doing on this couch for the past few weeks, is not living. I need you to go down and see your brother and recharge. Don’t worry about work, we will take care of that, plus you’ve trained Donny well, and I have no doubt that he can run that open house by himself in two weeks. And you know damn well that I’ve got my cocoa baby. We got this. Now, I need you to go take care of yourself. We need you to.”

  As I sat on that couch, blanketed by my mama and my daughter, I knew I had to get my shit together. What I was doing wasn’t healthy at all, and I hadn’t even been coping. I’d just been existing. Ma was right, as was my baby girl. I wrapped my arms around both of them and kissed the both of them on the cheek. Ja’mya’s nose wrinkled and my mama leaned away from me as she fanned the air.

  “Ooh, Daddy! Please go take a shower before you get on the plane.”

  I laughed. “Damn, it’s like that baby girl?”

  She nodded emphatically. “Mmhmm!”

  I looked at my mama who rolled her eyes. “Go climb your funky ass into the tub and soak, please.”

  “Daaaaaamn, Ma! Y’all ain’t pulling no punches this morning, huh?”

  She stood up and shook her head. “Hell no! Why should I, when your breath ain’t?”

  Ja’mya busted out in giggles and I had no choice but to laugh. Even if it was at my own expense, the action felt good. My mama was crazy as hell and I was immensely grateful for her.

  “Fine!” I stood on a stretch and sniffed my armpit. Oh, shit! I did stink. I glanced at my mama and she gave me a knowing smirk. All I could do was shake my head and take the stairs to my abandoned bedroom. To my surprise, my suitcase stood at the foot of my bed. I went to lift it onto the bed and grunted at the unexpected weight. I zipped it open and saw that it was completely full. They were going to make sure that I got off that couch today and made my way to the airport, they’d even packed for me.

  Okay, I could take a hint. The only work I had to do right now, was the work I needed to do on myself. That’s fine. I’d missed my brother anyway.

  ♥♥♥♥

  “Oh, word? That’s not what I heard.”

  I looked over at Jereth to see him grinning like a Cheshire cat, the two golden slugs on his bottom incisors gleaming under the bright Mexican sun. We were sitting on the patio of one of the mountainside villas he managed in the luxury community of Pedregal. I’d been in Cabo for just under two weeks and I’d felt the positive effects of my visit within days of being here. The weather had been amazing; I almost forgot that clouds existed, since I hadn’t seen one the entire time I’d been here. The sun was warm but gentle, with the temperature never rising above 78 degrees.

  The first couple of days here, I slept almost all day. Jereth would wake me up to eat whatever dinner he had prepared or picked up, but other than that, he left me alone. On day three, he decided that I’d slept enough. He dragged me with him to the beach before sunrise to join him for a run along the shoreline. That was like a jolt to my senses. Not only was the view amazing, with crystal clear water as far as the eye could see and a beautiful blue, cloudless sky, but the clean, fresh, air filled my lungs, and the run itself jump started my body. As with many other things, I had fallen off of my regular exercise regime, and that run had reawakened my muscle memory.

  After the run, we had breakfast at a food stall that was built into the side of a building. We sat at mismatched stools underneath a metal awning on a quiet street where the only sounds
came from the open kitchen in front of us and the seagulls from the ocean less than a mile away. before returning to the villa to shower and plan out the rest of the day. The next several days followed a similar pattern, with the location of breakfast changing between three different food stalls where the owners knew Jereth by name and had his order memorized. It was fun to watch him chat them up in fluent Spanish. He sounded like a native and used it to his advantage, flirting with women old enough to be our mother.

  My amusement was short lived when, after a week of reprieve, he finally started to ask questions. To my surprise—and dismay—instead of starting with why I was banished to Cabo, he wanted to talk about the conversation I’d had with our baby brother more than a month ago.

  “Care to enlighten me?”

  He shrugged, rolling his neck from one shoulder to the other. “Hawk says that you don’t think Lisa is “the one” anyway. He says you don’t even care that she’s got a new man.” Jereth was visibly amused and it colored his tone as he struggled to speak without laughing.

  I groaned. Whoever said women gossiped more than men, had never met my brothers.

  “You two birds are always squawking.”

  Ignoring my mutterings, Jereth rubbed his bare chin thoughtfully, the many rings on his fingers catching my attention briefly. “Imagine my surprise when I heard that, especially knowing what I know.”

  Oh, yeah. That reminded me. Sitting up on the couch, I pinned him with a hard glare. “Speaking of what you know, why don’t you explain to me why Ma knows that I proposed to Lisa more than once.”

  Jereth’s eyes swelled before he bent at the waist, laughing loudly. Since I had been exiled for an undisclosed amount of time, I had no problem waiting for him to finish yukking it up, even if it was at my expense. A full minute passed before he sat back and swiped under his eyes to clear the nonexistent tears.

  “Man, listen. She called me one day, in a full-on rant one day about y’all not being married. I don’t remember the whole conversation, but I distinctly recall her saying that you were being stubborn and holding Lisa’s youth over her head. She was basically implying that you were the reason you two weren’t married because Lisa had said no to marriage that first time—” he coughed and the corners of his mouth curved up in amusement, “I mean, that second time.” He grinned as I flipped him off. “I had to set her straight. So yeah, I told her that you’ve proposed more times than any sane man would, but shit, I was defending your goofy ass.”

  Ain’t that some shit? My own mama had thought I was vindictive enough to pull some shit like that. Damn. I held my hand out for my brother to shake.

  “My bad, Jer. I appreciate you having my back, but since you told her that shit, she’s been out in the streets trying to recruit me a wife.”

  Jereth threw his head back as he laughed hard at that. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. Your ass been dreaming about being married like an eleven-year-old girl.”

  I tossed his hand back at him with disgust. “Nah, nigga! I’ve been dreaming about being married to Lisa. Full stop. I wasn’t even thinking about marriage like that until I laid eyes on the woman I knew—well, thought I knew—was meant to be my future wife.”

  He shrugged. “She hasn’t married the other guy, yet. She could still be the one.”

  I shook my head. “Hell naw. Not after all of this. We’re too far gone, there ain’t no going back.” It hurt to admit it, but that was where we were at.

  “No?”

  “No.” I tried to put as much finality into those two letters as I could.

  “So, you won’t be pulling a Dwayne Wayne?”

  “Hell no! If she walks her ass down the aisle to another nigga, after I begged her ass to marry me, I’d be a gotdamn fool.”

  “Nigga. You didn’t beg her. I was there that last time; you didn’t even say anything.”

  I sucked in a breath as my chest tightened. Fuck. I hadn’t told him about the real last time. My eyelids collapsed.

  “I did beg her. The week before Ma sent me down here. I got down on one knee in the parking lot of the Quik Stop and begged her to marry me instead of whoever this other nigga is. She said no and told me to leave her alone.”

  “Fuck.”

  I nodded. My motherfucking sentiments exactly.

  “You definitely should have told Hawk about that shit.”

  “Man, that happened after he came down. I got the idea from him! He told me to swoop in and marry her first and had me out there looking like a damn fool. Trisha was apologizing and shit but that ain’t mean shit to me.”

  Jereth sat forward. “Trisha was there?”

  “Yeah, she was driving the damn car.”

  “You don’t think that they…”

  I stared at him, waiting for him to finish his sentence before I caught on to what he was saying and had to laugh.

  “What the fuck? Hell no! Lisa ain’t eating pussy, man, no matter how good I tell her it tastes. Naw. She ain’t fucking Trisha any more than she’s fucking me. Even though she didn’t have a problem fucking me twice before walking out on me.”

  “Damn.”

  I nodded. There was nothing else to say.

  Jereth sat forward. “So, why didn’t you just tell him the truth?”

  I scoffed. After everything else we just talked about, he wanted to go back to this. “Tell him the truth? For what? Man, Hawk has a lot on his plate right now, he didn’t need one more thing dropped in his lap.”

  Jereth shook his head, removing the wide-brimmed, leather hat he wore and dropping it to the table that sat in between our two lounge chairs. He swung his legs over the side of his seat and leaned forward until his elbows rested on his thighs, pinning the side of my face with a stare that I felt the intensity of, even through his reflective sunglasses.

  “J, Hawk is a grown-ass man. You don’t have to keep trying to protect him from shit. He doesn’t need that. None of us do. At some point, you’re going to have to realize that everyone has the same capacity as you to take care of themselves.”

  I didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at him.

  “This need to be everyone’s hero, Mr. Dependable, Mr. Responsible, Mr. Don’t-Worry-I-Got-It, ain’t a good look, bruh. And it’s taking its toll on you. You’re so busy trying to appear solid and unfazed that you don’t realize that you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. Dude, lying to Hawk was so fucking counter-productive. How does it benefit you to have him—or anyone—believe that Lisa left you because you didn’t want to get married? How?! Especially when you know that Trina has been crushing on Lisa’s homegirl since forever. Hawk could have had her on some covert shit, trying to get info out of Trisha on what’s really going on with Lisa. I bet your ass didn’t even think of that.” His brows lifted over the rim of his sunglasses.

  Damn. He was right, that never even occurred to me. I wouldn’t have ever gone for a plan like that in the first place, but I could clearly see his point. It was similar to what my mama had said to me as she was kicking me out of my own house. I gave him a side-long glance and he held his hands chest-high in surrender.

  “I’m just saying.”

  Leaning back against the lounger, I folded my arms behind my head and focused my gaze out in the distance where I could the marina in between a few villas further down the mountain. When I didn’t respond, Jereth adopted a similar position and grabbed his hat, settling it over his face to block out the bright sun. Several minutes of silence passed without a word from either of us but it wasn’t idle. My mind was racing with questions. Finally, I voiced the loudest one.

  “How am I supposed to go on?” I turned to my brother to wait for his response. Obviously, I couldn’t figure it out by myself and trying to hold it together for Ja’mya wasn’t working.

  He didn’t even remove his hat before answering me. “You focus on what makes you happy.”

  That sounded good, but…“Lisa made me happy.”

  Jereth’s sigh was audible. He pulled
the hat off of his face and looked over at me. “That’s your problem right there. She made you happy.” He snorted. “Okay, and how did that work out for you? Hear me good, J. Your happiness should never be tied to another person, because, as I’m sure you now realize, they have the power to destroy that happiness with their intentional or even careless actions. You have to be a whole, healthy, happy person on your own. You need to be able to enjoy your own company and depend solely on yourself without even the hint of another person dancing around the edges of your brain. When you can do that, and shit like this—someone you love leaving you out of the blue—happens, it isn’t so devastating. Yeah, it will still hurt, I mean, that’s unavoidable because you loved them, but it won’t wreck you completely.”

  I thought about that. It made a whole hell of a lot of sense. Somewhere along the way in the journey of Jeremiah and Lisa, I stopped caring about me and focused only on her. If she was happy, I was happy, so I put all of my energy into feeding her soul, not realizing that I was starving my own.

  Shit.

  That’s what Ma was talking about when she asked what Lisa did for me! My heart raced with that revelation. I was so dense; I didn’t even see what everyone else so clearly did. My constant pouring into Lisa left me empty because she didn’t reciprocate. Hell, I didn’t even give her the opportunity to. Just as Jereth had said, I worked hard at being the superhero, and what kind of superhero would I be, if I needed my soul recharged with rest and an affirmation or two?

  Damn.

  I really had been my own worst enemy. It’s no wonder Lisa left me; she probably just wanted to be with a man who had no problem admitting he was human long enough to accept help from his equal. And why would she marry a man and call herself his help-meet, when he wouldn’t even let her help him? I had truly fucked up. I looked over at my brother, who had resumed his gaze out onto the horizon. Was I the only one who had failed to grasp this concept?

  “Is that why you’re here, instead of in Houston, with Tonya?”