I guess it was his turn to stumble.
He held my arms at my side.
“What’s wrong?” Now, I was the one asking that question.
“Uh…you look good, babe.”
I grinned.
“But,” he said.
“No, buts.”
“Yes. But. Because I have to work.”
I frowned. I stepped back. I looked down at my body that was covered only with that two-hundred and twenty-eight dollar teddy and thong that I’d bought for the other night. These ten inches of satin and lace were supposed to get me something better than, ‘Uh’. These ten inches of satin and lace should have gotten me at least ten minutes with his ten inches.
He said, “Babe, I’m sorry, but I can’t even take lunch today.”
I shook my head. “I’m not asking for lunch.”
His eyes glossed over my body. “I know, but….”
I held up my hand. “Don’t say ‘but’ anymore.”
“Baby, I really wish I could take the time, b— and, I can’t do it today. I have a big meeting at two, a new client and that’s what Ashley and I were doing. I was reviewing the portfolio.”
“Really? It didn’t sound like you were working. When I walked in, you were laughing. So, you have time to have a laugh with your assistant, but no time to take care of your wife.”
He dipped his head a little. “Oh, come on, babe. I didn’t expect you.”
“That was the point.”
“And if I’d known, if you had called….”
“You would have shut me down.”
“Only because….”
“I know.” I sighed. There was no point to my trying to continue this. “You have to work.”
He nodded. “Please understand.”
“I. Understand.”
He moved toward me and hesitated a moment before he wrapped his arms around my waist making me shiver. “Do you?” I lowered my head, but with his fingertips, he lifted my chin. “This was a really good idea, and I so wish…that I could, but….”
I said nothing.
“It’s just that today. It’s not a good day.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that no day was good. But then, I pressed my lips together. There was no need to say more, my words weren’t going to change anything.”
So, all I did was step back, and pull the lapels of my raincoat together.
“Wait,” he said. “Let me do that for you.” He pulled the coat open and stared at my body for a moment, before he sighed, then closed it and wrapped me up inside. Once he tied the belt so that it was really secure, he hugged me again. “You are such a beautiful woman. And as soon as all of this is behind me, I’m going to make this up to you.”
I almost asked him for a timetable, but changed my mind. I already knew when he was going to make this up to me — my husband and I had a date for ‘never’.
A tap on the door made me and Preston take a step away from each other.
Ashley peeked her head in. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but….”
There was that word again.
“No, come on in.” Preston walked away from me and around his desk. “We have to get back to work.”
I turned, picked up my tote, and then, without saying goodbye, I moved toward the door. Right before I stepped into the hall, my husband called out.
“Get home safely.”
I didn’t turn around because if I had, I would’ve embarrassed him. I would have told him that the least he could have given me were three other words. Instead of saying, ‘get home safely’, he would have done much better with, ‘I love you’. But he didn’t even think about it and I didn’t even bother.
My steps were quick, and I kept my eyes away from the receptionist so grateful that the elevator came within seconds. Inside the chamber, I blinked and blinked and blinked.
I blinked until I jumped back into my SUV and only then, did I allow that first tear to fall.
Grabbing my cell from my purse, I opened the Words With Friends app. I clicked on the game with Blu and sent him a message:
What are you doing?
But I couldn’t see if he replied because a tear rolled from my eye and dropped right into the center of my screen, blurring everything.
CHAPTER 7
Blu
I grabbed the six-pack that I had set in the passenger seat, but then I turned off my car, silenced my music and just leaned back inside my Tahoe. Did I really want to do this? Glancing at the two-story, modest house across the street, I knew Lamar was home; the garage door was up. I couldn’t see inside, but if I knew my boy, he was in there working out, or he had just finished since it was already after ten. He always got his workouts in before noon. It helped that he didn’t have to drive twenty minutes to do that…he had put together a serious home gym inside the garage of the home that his parents had left him when they passed away in a car accident the year we graduated from college.
But still, did I want to do this? Did I really want to have this conversation?
Lamar had been my boy from way back, since we were both the new kids on the block in the seventh grade. We’d bonded over being the outsiders since the other kids in the neighborhood had known each other forever. And even though we’d eventually made friends with the other guys (especially once we joined the basketball team) Lamar was still my bruh.
For the last thirty or so years, we had shared everything — from how our parents just didn’t get it, to deciding to go to Texas A & M University together, to choosing our careers. But what we talked about the most — the girls (and later, the women) in our lives.
But we had never talked like this. Because there was never a need for this conversation.
Before.
I rested my hand on the car door knob and then paused again. On Thursday, when Monica and I had connected, I never thought I’d be in a place like this. In those few moments, she’d given me so much hope and even now, I couldn’t figure out how that hope had just floated away:
Grabbing the bags of food, I hopped out of the car with all kinds of expectations. I knew Monica would have to take it slow, she had been down for a long time. But if she just got active around the house and in the children’s lives again, that would be enough. I was sure she’d want to go back to work eventually, now that she was feeling better, but I was going to advise her to take it slow. I didn’t want any kind of stress that would send her back into a depression. I didn’t want any chance of any kind of a relapse.
The moment I opened the door from the garage, Raven dashed to me.
“Daddy!”
“What’s up, Munchkin?”
“You’re home early.”
“I know. And look what I have.” I held up the bags.
“Yay,” Raven said, jumping up and down. “Did you get me an egg roll?”
“I did.” I chuckled. I didn’t even have to tell her what was in the bags. Chinese food was her favorite and she probably smelled it before I’d come into the house. “I got you two.”
“Two? Yay!”
“It was your mom’s idea to give you two.” Stepping into the kitchen, I dumped the bags onto the counter.
“Can we use paper plates?”
I shook my head. Raven thought eating off of paper plates was the coolest thing. I guessed it reminded her of the picnics I took her on sometimes, just to get her out of the house. I nodded, then asked, “Where’s your mom?”
My daughter’s smile slipped away. “She’s upstairs.” She sighed. “She’s in bed.”
“What?”
“She’s always in bed.”
I wanted to tell my daughter no. I wanted to tell her that less than an hour ago, her mother was up and out and back. “I’ll be back, sweetheart,” I told Raven before I ran out of the kitchen, then took the stairs two at a time.
I busted into our bedroom as if the house was on fire…and then, I stopped. Raven was right; Monica was in bed, the covers pulled to her chin, as if she’d never been downstai
rs.
She lay on her side, her back to me and I walked slowly toward the bed. When I stood over her, I whispered, “Monica.”
“What?” she asked, her voice monotone.
“What…what happened?”
She rolled over, faced me, and that look in her eyes, the glossy vacancy was back.
“What are you talking about?”
I kept my voice low, calm, hoping that alone would remind her of the conversation, the connection we’d just had. “I bought Chinese…for dinner.”
Her stare was blank, almost as if she weren’t seeing me.
I said, “Remember…moo goo gai pan for you and….”
“Blu, I’m tired. Can you please just leave me alone?” She rolled over. “Please.” She turned her back on me and the hope that I’d allowed to build up inside.
I’d walked out of our bedroom just stunned, thinking that my wife had been lucid less than an hour before. Thinking that maybe it was my fault — I shouldn’t have left her.
That was my thought as I made sure Raven and Tanner had their dinner, and that was my thought when I finally joined Monica in bed and tried to talk to her again. But she had returned to her pattern: she snapped, she complained, and then, she cried….
By yesterday morning, I’d let the guilt go — whatever had sent Monica back to her state wasn’t my fault, this was all Monica’s illness.
And by the time Monica got through with me yesterday morning, I was ready to move out of our house. And I was certainly ready to talk to Angelique.
But even though I’d spent half of my time at work staring at my phone, I hadn’t sent Angelique a message at all. Not even when she’d sent me one yesterday afternoon. Because I was trying, trying hard to stay away. I just had a feeling that if we connected again, it wouldn’t be good for her, it wouldn’t be good for me.
But the more estranged I felt from Monica, the more engaged I wanted to be with Angelique.
That was why I needed to talk to someone. Someone who could talk me out of this trap that I was about to stick my neck into.
This time when I grabbed the knob, I pulled the Tahoe’s door open and jumped out, not talking myself out of it this time. I trotted across the street, up the slanted driveway and then, peeked inside.
My friend was laid back on his weight bench, holding a sixty-pound dumbbell in each hand, doing double bicep curls.
“What up, Lamar?”
Without looking up, he did one last curl, then dropped both weights heavily onto the garage floor.
He sat up, straddling the bench, his biceps still bulging and on display with the white wife beater he wore. He leaned forward, gave me some dap, then cocked his head. “What’s up with you?”
I plopped down on the LazyBoy recliner in the corner.
"Let me guess," Lamar said, shaking his do-rag covered head. “Monica.”
I didn’t have to say a word, Lamar knew. He’d been by my side through this struggle, so my body language spoke before my mouth did. My only spoken answer was, “I brought beer.”
“Man, it’s just ten o’clock in the morning. I haven’t even had my orange juice.” He laughed.
I chuckled with him. “Look, it’s noon somewhere.”
“Oh, and that’s your start-up time now?”
I nodded, twisted the cap off a bottle, and took a long swig of the cold beer.
Lamar kept his eyes on me. “Wow. It must be bad.”
I took another swig, then nodded. “It is.”
“What’s up?”
Shaking my head, I didn’t even know where to begin because Lamar had heard it all before. Still I needed to get it out. So, I told him about Thursday and how I’d seen some semblance of my wife.
“Dang,” he said when I finished the story. “What happened? Why’d she revert?”
“I have no idea and that’s the frustrating part. I’d gotten my hopes up….”
“And she dropped them, lower than you’d been before.”
Lamar had summed it up. That was what years of friendship did, I guess. Or maybe it was his engineering education and it was some kind of law of physics.
“What does her doc say?”
I shook my head. Lamar always asked that question, even though he knew I didn’t have the answers. Because of the law, Monica had to grant me access to her doctors and her medical information — and she didn’t. “I talked to Doctor Nichols, told her what happened, but that was it. She couldn’t tell me anything.”
“So, what you gonna do?”
“What are my choices?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “I can’t leave.”
He locked his eyes with mine for a moment, and then looked away.
“What?” I said, my forehead creasing with my frown.
He shrugged. “Nothing.”
“Nah, bruh, we been too close for all these years for you to….”
“Okay, okay.” He swung one leg over the bench, so that his whole body faced me. “Man, you are one committed brother, but I’m just thinkin’, how much longer can you go through this? How much longer can you expose the kids to this?”
“She’s not doing anything to the kids.”
“She’s not doing anything with the kids either. When was the last time she interacted with her own children?” He didn’t give me room to respond. “Man, I feel sorry for Tanner, but I’m not worried about him ‘cause he’s too old to want all those motherly hugs and stuff. But what about Raven? At least Tanner can remember the way she used to be, but Raven?” He shook his head. “I worry about her.”
I didn’t tell my friend that I worried about Raven…and Tanner, too. I just defended my wife. “She’s sick, man, you know that. She’s doing the best she can.”
He waited a moment before he said, “Okay, if you say so.”
“Nah, you’re not gonna do that,” I said, shaking my head and raising my voice at the same time. “Keep talking. Just say what you feel.”
“I just did.” He waved his hands as if his gestures would make his point, too. “I just told you. You’ve put up with a lot.”
“So, what am I supposed to do? Just leave her?” I asked him that question because I knew what his answer would be.
But he shocked me with, “Yes.”
My eyes widened.
“Look,” he lowered and softened his voice, “you know how much I love Monica.” He held his hand over his heart. “But this, what you’re going through, it’s just too much.”
“What about for better for worse, in sickness and in health?” I paused. “Would you be saying the same thing if she had cancer?”
“Nah, that’s different.”
I shook my head. “See, that’s the difference between us. Cancer, mental illness, it’s not different to me. Mental illness is as real as any other disease.”
“But she’s not getting better.”
“And there are people who never go into remission, who have terminal illnesses and we don’t blame that fact on them.”
He nodded, though I wasn’t sure if he did that because he wanted me to calm down or if he really agreed. Finally, he said, “So, what you’re telling me is that you’re willing to hang in there for the long haul…forever.”
My answer: I took another swig of beer.
He paused for a moment, then said, “I gotta ask you this.” He let a couple of beats of time go by. “Now, don’t get mad about it ‘cause it’s just a question.”
His hesitation made me shift a bit in this recliner. “Would you just say what you gotta say or ask what you wanna ask?”
He nodded, still paused, then said, “Are you staying with Monica because of her money?”
I didn’t hesitate at all. “Monica doesn’t have any money.”
He chuckled as he spoke, “You know what I mean, bruh. Her family.” Then, he stopped again. “You’re not staying because her family is related to Jed Clampett on the black side.”
He’d made that joke to take the edge off of his question, but I stayed serious bec
ause there was nothing to laugh about when it came to this. “I got my own money. I don’t need her family’s.”
“I know that, I’m just asking.”
I looked straight into his eyes when I said, “And I just answered.”
“Asked and answered, then.”
“Done.”
Lamar leaned forward, resting his arms on his legs. “Look, bruh, you know me. That wasn't meant as any kind of an insult. All I can say is that I’ve got nothing but respect,” he banged his fist against his chest, “for you. But I keep wondering why you’re being the martyr? Man, I know you got needs. What you gonna do about that if Monica doesn’t get better?”
My needs.
It was true, I needed some serious healing of the sexual kind.
But I didn’t say that to Lamar. I didn’t say anything. I just took another swig, though this time, I took a long, long, long one. So long that I emptied my bottle.
Lamar’s eyes narrowed. “Wait…a…minute….” He paused. “What’s up with you? Talk to me. What’s going on?”
And there it was. The opening. The reason I’d come over here. To talk to my best friend.
So, I did. “Now, I’m not saying that I would ever step out on Monica….”
“No one could fault you if you did.”
I shook my head. “You and me. We always said we were going to be the most faithful men this side of the Mississippi.”
“We’ve tried to be.”
I nodded and thought about the fact that it had always been so important to me to be faithful. Because I’d heard too many sisters talk about men and dogs as if they were the same breed. And Lamar and I didn't want to be those black men.
But still, I told Lamar what I’d come to talk about. Still, I told him the truth. “I’ve met someone.”
Lamar let out a long breath.
I held up my hand. “Not in that way.”
“Well, in what kind of way? How long have you known her?”
I calculated the time in my head. “A couple of weeks, but I only met her Thursday.”
Lamar frowned. “Where’d y’all meet? Work?”
I shook my head. “I met her…playing Words With Friends.”
If Only For One Night Page 6
