His First Wife

by Grace Octavia

  Coreenissocute: I just don’t understand how he could do something like this. Just lie to me.

  Dablackannanicole: Lie?

  Coreenissocute: He said he wasn’t sleeping with her . . . so how did she get pregnant?

  Dablackannanicole: You know these dudes lie. I mean, the ass is in the house with him every night. He’s gonna take it.

  Coreenissocute: I know that, but still that doesn’t make it any easier. I really loved him.

  Dablackannanicole: I know you did.

  Coreenissocute: I just feel like a damn fool. Like did I really think he was going to leave her for someone like me?

  Dablackannanicole: Girl, who and what that girl is doesn’t have anything to do with you. What he saw in you was different. And just because he decided to be with her doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. Shit, he probably doesn’t even love her. He’s just there out of obligation like he said in the e-mail.

  Coreenissocute: You think so?

  Dablackannanicole: Hell yes! And, come on, DO YOU REALLY THINK he’s never going to call you again? We’re both old enough to know he will. He’s just trying to play the good husband right now because he realized that he’s about to be a father. But that will wear off and he’ll come running right back around to you.

  Coreenissocute: LIKE THEY ALL DO.

  Dablackannanicole: Shit, she probably only got pregnant to keep him anyway. Don’t you think she knows he’s cheating and that he doesn’t want to be with her anymore? Please, that whole having-a-baby-to-keep-your-man thing is sooooo played.

  Coreenissocute: I know, but that doesn’t change the fact that she has my man and now I have nothing. I’m just so tired of being alone. I’m 33 and I have nothing to show for it.

  Dablackannanicole: Yes you do.

  Coreenissocute: I have no husband. No children. I want that. I want my big house, my nice car, my maid, and my man that is busting his ass to give it to me.

  Dablackannanicole: Well you just have to be patient. He’ll come back.

  Coreenissocute: I can’t eat, girl. Can’t sleep. My shit is just all messed up right now. I don’t know what I’m going to do without him. I know we belong together. I’m crying right now. Damn.

  Dablackannanicole: Girl, come on . . . don’t be crying at work!

  Coreenissocute: I know, I know, but this shit is that real to me. I LOVE JAMISON. I can’t be without him.

  Dablackannanicole: Maybe you should tell him that, Coreen. Like e-mail him or call him. Let him know how you really feel.

  Coreenissocute: He said not to contact him. His wife is pregnant.

  Dablackannanicole: Hum . . . well give him some time and then contact him. I mean, really, I know he’ll contact you, but you have to be patient for that. But in the meantime, you have to get yourself together. I hate seeing you like this.

  Coreenissocute: I know, it’s just soooooo hard. I just know we’re meant for each other. We’re just alike. Even his mother said so.

  Dablackannanicole: Girl, he introduced you to his mother?

  Coreenissocute: Damn. No

  Dablackannanicole: ????How do you know that?????

  Coreenissocute: Never mind.

  Dablackannanicole: Hell no! You can’t be typing shit like that and expect me to take “never mind” for an answer. Don’t make me come to your cubicle!

  Coreenissocute: But it slipped. I swore I wouldn’t say anything.

  Dablackannanicole: About?????

  Coreenissocute: I promised to keep my mouth shut.

  Dablackannanicole: Girl, if you don’t stop this!!!!

  Coreenissocute: OK, look, I met Jamison through his mother.

  Dablackannanicole: What?

  Coreenissocute: She goes to my church. We’re in the same Bible study group. She was helping me out when I moved here after Duane died, so we really got to know each other . . . and she said she wanted me to meet her son.

  Dablackannanicole: Girl, you are fucking kidding me! That’s some Dynasty shit.

  Coreenissocute: I didn’t want to at first. He’s married. But she just kept telling me about him and how he’s so unhappy and married to a woman that uses him and he doesn’t even love the girl. He actually didn’t go to medical school to be with her.

  Dablackannanicole: What?????

  Coreenissocute: Yeah, she said she always wanted more for her son, that she wanted someone like me for him, and that was the only way he was going to leave Kerry. To meet someone new. At first I wasn’t down. I was getting over Duane, but then I was like, this is his mother. She knows what she’s talking about . . . just meet him. I guess I was a little bored. Lonely. Definitely horny.

  Dablackannanicole: LOL. ROTF.

  Coreenissocute: So I agreed.

  Dablackannanicole: How did she hook it up?

  Coreenissocute: She stole his PalmPilot and gave it to me. She said I should e-mail him and claim I’d found it on the street.

  Dablackannanicole: Damn, she’s good.

  Coreenissocute: So I did it. And then he showed up at my house.

  Dablackannanicole: If only you would’ve met him first.

  Coreenissocute: Right.

  Dablackannanicole: I can’t believe all of that. Did you tell him about his mother?

  Coreenissocute: No. I promised I wouldn’t.

  Dablackannanicole: Damn. Well make sure you keep that on the down low.

  Coreenissocute: I know.

  Dablackannanicole: Oh yeah, and don’t e-mail me at my work address anymore. I think Piper’s been reading my e-mails. You’d think she had something better to do.

  TIME END: 1:08 PM

  In Bed

  Thinking about everything Jamison had said to me in the kitchen, I cried most of the afternoon and into the evening. The weight was too much to carry. I wanted to know about Coreen, how it all happened, but when I heard it, that he thought I had something to do with it, I really wished he hadn’t said anything at all. It stung me. My hurt went to aching and I needed so much to know that this wasn’t how things would always be. I hated Jamison for what he’d done, but the thought of him feeling the way he said he’d felt about us terrified me. Was my husband falling out of love with me? Was our marriage really over?

  Exhausted, at bedtime I was lying in bed, half asleep with the baby resting on a blanket beside me when the bedroom door opened. It was Jamison. I thought he was coming into the room to get a sleeping shirt or something so he could go back to the guestroom—he usually did this when I was out of the room, but Tyrian and I had been in the room for most of the night. But, while I heard the dresser drawer open and close, he didn’t leave this time. My back to him, I listened as he stopped. I could feel his eyes on me. Then he started moving again, but his footsteps were coming closer and then the bed moved as he sat down. I didn’t turn around. I just lay there and felt tears well up inside of me again. One dropped from my face onto the pillow and grew into a soft spot. I wanted to tell him to leave, but another side of me really wanted him to stay. I opened my eyes and looked at Tyrian as I felt Jamison lay down beside me.

  “I’m sorry,” Jamison whispered softly into my hair. “I love you and I’m not going anywhere. Not even if you tell me to. I’m not letting anything happen to our family. I promise you that.”

  I felt Tyrian shudder and readjust his body in his sleep. He whimpered a bit and then shifted his head from one side to the next, threatening to wake up. But then his chest moved up and down, and through my tears I watched as he found his way back to a restful sleep.

  Jamison slid his arm over my waist as he’d done a million times before. Only this time, he did not wrap his arm around my waist and cradle my stomach. Instead he reached over and rested his hand on Tyrian’s back, rocking him softly. He kissed me on the back of my neck and before he rested his head against the pillow, a tear fell from his face to my cheek.

  Marital Bliss

  Kerry made everything just right. I’d come home from a day I thought was the worst I’d ever had, and there
she was pretending we were in Mexico, throwing a fiesta in the middle of the living room. And everything would be in order—from the enchiladas she’d order from my favorite restaurant to the little sombrero she’d be wearing when I’d open the door. She’d be determined to make me feel better. Make me laugh and smile. I wanted to be mad and just wallow in my misery, but she wouldn’t let me and I’d break sooner or later. That only made me love her more. She kept our house clean, herself looking pretty, and while she still wasn’t cooking, she’d figured out how to make the only meal that mattered to me—Hamburger Helper. I always told her I didn’t need to be taken care of. My mother raised me to clean up after myself and Moms made sure I could cook before I left her house. But Kerry wouldn’t hear any of that. She had it set in her mind that things were supposed to be a certain way . . . the traditional way. I was sure this tradition didn’t include a file of restaurant menus she kept in the kitchen cabinet where there should have been food, but I went along with it. Kerry was trying to make me happy and that’s all I wanted. The gift was that I got to come home to her. To lie with someone I knew really needed me and loved me more than she even knew.

  And that couldn’t have been an easy task. I wasn’t the cash cow tradition said I should be. My Rake It Up venture wasn’t exactly raking in the dough during its first years. I couldn’t even really afford to contribute to the wedding. Her mother paid for most of it out of some wedding fund she started when Kerry was born.

  In the first three years, I mostly drove my own truck and cut lawns myself with a few people I hired here and there. We lived off my limited funds and the money Kerry was making at a job she had at a doctor’s office. Living check to check was an understatement. We were broke and both my mother and her mother had to pay a few bills. This made me feel bad. I didn’t want to be broke. I wanted to be just as successful as Kerry wanted me to be. Shit, I even wanted to make my mother happy . . . and it would’ve been the icing on the cake to shut Kerry’s mother up. But somewhere along the way Rake It Up shifted from a side thing I was doing until I went to med school to a dream I really believed in. I always liked working with my hands. Because I was good in science, I assumed this meant I was destined to be a surgeon. But once I got those yard cutters in my hands, it just seemed right. There was something so peaceful and calming to be out there cutting grass and shutting out the rest of the world. No one bothered you. And when you were done, you got to step back and see what your work went into. You’d made the world prettier or nicer for other people to enjoy, even if they didn’t notice it. And the scientific mind everyone always said I had helped me do that. For me, cutting grass was a science. It took planning and balance, a vision of how you wanted things to look and feel to the senses.

  I couldn’t back away from that. That grass seemed to grow into my being. It became my patient. I had to give myself to my company. Now, I was no fool. I knew two things: I liked money, and I didn’t want to be cutting grass for the rest of my life. So, because I wasn’t going back to med school, I knew I’d have to grow Rake It Up into something big. Something where I could give everything to Kerry she’d ever wanted. Not to shut her up. Not to shut her mother up. But because my wife deserved it.

  “You need a secretary,” Kerry said one day when I walked into the house from working. I was sweating like hell from being in the sun all day and my body smelled like everything dead. I just wanted to run to the shower, but it was clear Kerry wanted to talk, so I stood there. Plus, I wanted to hear what she was about to say, because I noticed that she’d just hung up the phone when I walked in the door. I didn’t have to ask who was on the other end of the line.

  “A secretary? For what?”

  “For your jobs and stuff. So many people call you now to do jobs,” she said. “A secretary would make the business more efficient and help you get more clients.”

  “Hum . . .” I said. I’d thought of that before, but the business wasn’t there yet. I couldn’t afford it.

  “I know you’re thinking you can’t afford it,” Kerry said, reading my mind. “But I have a proposal . . .” She came over to me and began unbuttoning my shirt right in the living room. She never touched me when I came in from work.

  “My job isn’t really bringing money home . . . and now that the company is growing, you could use me with you.”

  “But we can’t afford it. We’re already struggling.”

  “But with my help, we could really take the business to the next level.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Well,” she pulled my shirt off, “I could do marketing and hook you up with some of my mother’s friends. They all have businesses. They could hire you.”

  “No . . .” I protested. Kerry pulled me to her chest.

  “Don’t say no so quickly,” she said. “Think about it.”

  “I’m thinking about it.” I pulled away. “And I’m thinking it’s a bad idea. You know how it goes with me and your mother.”

  “But you won’t be dealing with my mother. See, now you’ll have a secretary. So I’ll deal with her.”

  “But Kerry, what about your job? Didn’t you say you wanted to stay there until you took the MCAT again?”

  After Kerry didn’t get accepted to the medical schools of her choice the second time around, she decided that instead of applying to different schools, she’d pull up her MCAT scores to prove herself. She signed up for the next test, but I didn’t see her crack one of the study guides I’d gotten her when we got back from our honeymoon. Then Kerry said she’d been too busy planning the wedding and working to study, so the date came and went. She decided not to take the test that year. She’d wait and study for the next one.

  “I’m studying. It’ll be fine. I can work for you and study when I’m free,” she said. I could tell it would be a bad idea to push the issue about the test. I realized before we even got married that it was a sore spot for Kerry. Between her mother constantly implying that Kerry had done something wrong and the stack of rejection letters Kerry still hadn’t thrown out, she seemed to have enough anxiety about the whole thing.

  I didn’t say anything. I stepped away from Kerry and walked into the bedroom. I didn’t want to fight with her.

  “What, Jamison? What?” She was following behind me.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “I think I’ll have to keep thinking about it.”

  I walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. When I went back into the bedroom, Kerry was sitting on the bed. I could tell she was crying.

  I walked over to the closet and threw my pants into the laundry basket, trying to figure out how to avoid the drama. This was how Kerry got me to react. She knew that. She knew I couldn’t just sit there and let her cry. What kind of man would do that? Not one who wanted to live in peace.

  Wrapped in a towel, I sat down beside her on the bed.

  I exhaled and looked at the wall next to the bed. There was a vase Kerry had filled with some of the rose petals that were on the ground when I proposed to her.

  “I guess it won’t be too bad,” I said finally.

  She sniffled.

  “We can try it for a little while, but if it doesn’t work out, we have to stop.”

  She sat up and wiped her tears.

  “Okay?” I asked. I just wanted her to stop crying.

  “Jamison, I want us to be a team. Is that so bad?”

  “We are a team,” I said. “I just never imagined you working with me. I thought you hated the company.”

  “But this is what’s best for us,” she said. “I want to do what will be good for us in the future.”

  “What about what’s best for you?” I asked. “Your dreams.”

  “Well, I can put that on hold for a while, so this can work. So we can make sure it works. Then, with the money we can focus on med school,” she said.

  “Doesn’t sound bad, I guess,” I said, getting up and heading toward the shower. “But only until we
get things together. Then we can focus on getting you back in school.”

  “Exactly.” She got up too and came behind me. She started taking off her shirt.

  “Woman, what are you doing?”

  “Well,” she said, smiling as if not one tear had fallen from her eyes, “if we’re going to work together, we may as well shower together.”

  She slid off her pants and I watched as she walked naked into the bathroom. And, Lord, just like that old saying goes, “I hated to see her leave, but I sure liked watching her walk away.”

  “You coming in?” she called from the shower. God permitting!

  In two years, I’d learned two things about being married:

  1. The worst part is fighting.

  2. The best part is making up.

  E-MAIL TRANSMISSION

  TO: Jamison.Taylor@rakeitup.net

  FROM: coreenissocute@yahoo.com

  DATE: 9/11/07

  TIME: 12:42 PM

  Hello. I just wanted to say hi. Today is 9/11. The day Duane died. It’s a very sad day for me. I wish you were here.

  E-MAIL TRANSMISSION

  TO: Jamison.Taylor@rakeitup.net

  FROM: coreenissocute@yahoo.com

  DATE: 10/19/07

  TIME: 4:51 AM

  It’s my birthday. I don’t know if you remembered that or if you even care, but I wanted to let you know that I have been thinking about you and I do miss you. Whether you miss me or not, that doesn’t change how I feel.

  Tonight I went out with one of my friends from work and when we were sitting at dinner I kept seeing all these couples walking around together and it made me so sad. I wanted that to be us and because of the lies you fed me, I thought that would be us. I really did love you and every day I spend without you makes me sick. I can’t eat. I’ve lost twenty pounds and while I tried to go to the classes you got me into at Perimeter, I’m too sad to be focusing on stuff like that.