Road to Love

by Nicole Falls

  The trip started off on a good note. We were staying in Detroit since it was Bobby’s first time visiting Michigan. We decided to make it a long weekend since I wanted to show Bobby every place that was integral in shaping me into the woman he’d grown to love. We were going to hang out in some of my old haunts, and make time for him to get to know my family. The plan was to chill out when we first arrived in town that Friday night. We’d get up early Saturday morning so that I could show him some of the tourist sites that afternoon. Saturday night was meant to be spent with my siblings and cousins, a semi-reunion since my cousin Evelyn and her husband Jake were also in town. It had been years since our entire group of cousins had been in the same area for an extended period. The trip would conclude with dinner with my immediate family at my parents’ house.

  I should have known it was a bad omen when my niece suddenly got violently ill hours before we arrived on Friday night. I spent Saturday morning with Grace at the hospital, much to the chagrin of Bobby. He insisted on still going to see the sights instead of “being stuck in a hospital room where we couldn’t help in any way regardless.” How I didn’t know then that Bobby wasn’t the one for me I don’t even know!

  Tamia ended up being admitted to the hospital with appendicitis, so I wanted to cancel the cousins' reunion and spend time supporting Grace and Ted. Grace insisted that we still get together and was sure she would meet Bobby at a later date. The cousins' reunion went fine, with a few awkward moments here and there. Now I will admit that hanging out with my cousins was not for the faint of heart as we spent most of the evening cracking jokes at each other’s expense. Bobby was a bit tense when my cousin Chad insisted on calling him Carlton for the rest of the night due to his preppy look.

  I thought Bobby seemed to fit in with everyone and had a good time until we got back to the hotel. He wouldn’t stop complaining about how much time we spent reminiscing about times we spent together as kids at my grandmother’s house. These were great memories and every time I got to see my cousins we spent a nice chunk of time replaying the good old days. Bobby thought it was weird that we were so close despite the number of our group being so large. He came from a small family, with only one other cousin with whom he wasn’t close. He was also upset because I hadn’t stopped Chad from calling him, Carlton. The truth was I found it hilarious because he did look like his outfit came straight out of an old episode of Fresh Prince with his sky blue checked button-down shirt, khaki slacks, and royal blue bowtie. The outfit was topped by a camel colored blazer, with chocolate suede elbow patches.

  The next day at my parents’ house things got even worse. Before we could even get in the door good, my father started in on his what are your intentions with my daughter speech. My parents were ignorant of the fact that Bobby and I lived together until he let it slip, accidentally he claimed, but the self-satisfied smirk on his face as my father’s temper rose upon hearing this fact proved otherwise. We returned home at each other’s throats and on the cusp of break up until Bobby broke down pleading with me not to leave him. Eighteen months later, shortly after I'd traveled home for my brother’s funeral, we were broken up for good.

  “Wrote my initials with a crow barrrrr and then I drove into the darrrrrrrk, I bust the windows out your carrrr,” I screeched loudly along with Jazmine Sullivan.

  I had been on the road for about three hours, and I was cruising along. I’d decided to take the northern route back home. I’d be driving through parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and finally, Michigan. I took my sister and niece’s advice and embraced this as the adventure I’d always wanted to take. Before leaving, I spent a few hours mapping out my route, planning rest stops and overnights, as well as any neat places I could find to stop off that wouldn’t take me too far off course. It was a little over 30-hour drive, but with my planned excursions, I was giving myself six days to make it. Some days I'd be in the car for ten-hour stretches. I usually couldn’t suffer through being in the car for any stretches of time over four hours, so this was going be an interesting journey, to say the least.

  Years ago, when I first headed West for undergrad, the idea was that my best friends at the time, Rocki, Charli, and I would drive the entire journey. My car at that time was reliable enough, but wouldn’t you know a week before we were to embark on the journey of our lives, the transmission went out. So, we never got to go on our epic adventure. Instead, I flew out to Cali solo. Man, I hadn’t thought about that in years. I hadn’t thought about Rocki and Charli in years either. Those girls were my rocks. From ages seven until eighteen we were inseparable. Wherever you saw one, you saw the others. When we decided on different paths after high school, however, we kinda just drifted apart. We talked about making plans for them to visit me at Vista Valley University, but never actually brought any of those plans to fruition. Lives got increasingly busier, and soon their presence wasn’t all that missed from my life; as I am sure mine wasn’t missed from theirs.

  Tonight, I would drive from LA to Las Vegas, the shortest leg of my trip. My cousin Evelyn and her family lived in the suburbs of Vegas, so I was going to hang out with them tonight and begin the most extended leg of my journey bright and early tomorrow. I was really excited to see Evie, Jacob, and their kids. Evie and I were the only ones in our family who didn’t stay in our hometown metro area past our teen years.

  High school sweethearts who were still as in love as they were the day they met, my cousin and her husband have been married for more than twenty years. They married fresh out of high school against the wishes of everyone in our family. No one thought that they were going to make it past twenty-one, but not only had they made it, but they were also still happy. Which, in our family, was a great feat because the divorce track record was real. In fact, my parents are the only ones from the elder generation who are still on their first marriage. Evelyn’s mom was on marriage number four last I heard.

  Evie and Jake had lived all over this great land thanks to Jacob’s job as a traveling nurse. They settled in the Vegas burbs about two years ago when their children were school aged and needed a more stable environment. I thought it ironic that they chose Vegas as a place to settle down but later found out that Jake had been accepted into a Master’s Level Nurse Practitioner program at UNLV. It was an excellent opportunity for him that would only increase their opportunities for more adventures in life, so it was a no-brainer.

  My music was interrupted by a call coming through from Grace.

  “Hiiii, sister.”

  “It sounds too quiet for you to be driving. Where are you?”

  I laughed loudly, ‘Oh my God Grace, I’m like forty-five minutes away from Evie and Jake’s. I am still coming.”

  Grace sighed into the phone and said, “You’ve faked me out before, Emerson. I mean, I’m not gonna lie, I googled that whole airport fiasco to make sure it wasn’t something you were making up not to come home yet again.”

  I gripped the steering wheel and let out a deep breath before answering. Grace did have due cause to worry about me not coming, but I did not take well to being called a liar. Especially since of all people, she was the last one that I would lie to.

  “I’m still coming, sis. It’s time. It’s been time, really.”

  “Ok, I just wanted to check in really quick because I hadn’t heard from you since this morning. Tamia and I are on the way out. When will you be here again?” Grace asked.

  “Late Sunday night or early Monday morning depending on how this drive goes.”

  “I know I encouraged you to turn this into an adventure, but I really wish you would just drive it straight. We wanna see you now!”

  “Be careful what you ask for, Grace,” I said, quietly.

  Looking out into the endless sky as I drove, I worried about my homecoming. I admit, I probably could have made the drive in a couple of days, but I decided to extend it to give myself more time to adjust. Going home meant facing some drama and unfinished business head o
n, and I wasn’t quite ready.

  “Okay, Emerson. Be safe and call me, please.”

  “Yes mom,” I said while rolling my eyes, “I’ll call you later. Love you.”

  “Love you more. Bye!”

  Half an hour later, I drove down the tree-lined street that led to my cousins’ home in Henderson, Nevada. The neighborhood seemed to be much like those from our childhood in the Midwest. Children played in a park that I passed, running about carefree and unencumbered by anything. I longed for that feeling of freedom once again. I’d been so bogged down by work and life in general that I’d forgotten what it was like to just let go and have fun. I pulled into the driveway at my cousin’s home. I expected the house to be one of those stereotypical Southwestern styled homes with the adobe clay tiled roofs, but it actually reminded me a lot of the home I’d grown up in. It was a split-level, Craftsman style house in shades of grey and white, with a huge bay window in the front.

  I noticed Evie and Jake were sitting on the porch swing as I got out of the car. Evie was snuggled up to Jake’s side, with her legs draping over his lap. He leaned over and whispered something that made her laugh. I watched them for a second, envious of their seemingly easy love. I walked up the steps, and they finally noticed that I had arrived.

  “Cousin!” Evie yelled and jumped off the swing to come to hug me.

  We hugged for a good five minutes before she released me from her grasp. Jake and I exchanged a much briefer hug, and we all moved into the house.

  After dinner, I settled into the oversized recliner in my cousins’ family room and sipped from the mug of spiked hot chocolate that Jake made for me before disappearing with the kids. He had taken the kids out of the family room to give Evie and I some alone time to catch up. Despite LA being a mere four hours from Vegas and them having lived here for a couple of years, this was the first time in a while that I’d actually seen all of them. The kids had grown tremendously since the last time I saw them. Little Jake, LJ as they called him, was an adorable little guy with his two front teeth missing. He spent most of the dinner chatting my ear off about the tooth fairy leaving him a whole twenty-dollar bill for two teeth and how he was already scheming to make more fall out faster, so he could have enough money to get a Nintendo Switch. Their daughter, five-year-old Jourdan was shy at first, which I was told was atypical behavior for her. She finally warmed up around dessert time when I showed her how to make a sandwich with her cookies and ice cream.

  “So, you're finally taking your ass back to Ragston, huh? What made you decide to go back after all of this time?”

  I let the warmth of the heated beverage spread through my body before answering Evie’s question about why I finally decided to go home for the first time in years.

  “I mean, my mom is always talking about how much Auntie Di misses you and ever since Mikey…” Evie started.

  I interrupted her before she could finish her sentence. It was an unfortunate coincidence that the last time I had been home was my brother’s funeral, but I had decided long before then to not return to my parents’ house until my father learned to respect that I was a grown woman.

  “I’ve offered to fly mama out, but she doesn’t wanna fly without my father, and I refuse, so...” I shrugged.

  “Well I’m just glad you’re finally heading back to Ragston because I’m tired of hearing about you and your mama every time I call to talk to my mama,” Evelyn laughed.

  “Is it really that bad, Evie?”

  I worried because even though I made sure to keep in regular contact with my mother at least once weekly, I could tell that the distance between my father and myself put a hefty amount of strain on her. I tried to tell her not to worry about the irreparable chasm between us. There was just too much pain there for it ever to be healed any time soon. I’d tried extending that olive branch too many times only to be smacked in the face with it at a later date.

  “You know who asked about you the other day? Sharon. You remember her?”

  Typical Evie. She was growing uncomfortable with the topic at hand and changed the subject awkwardly.

  “Of course, I remember Sharon!”

  Sharon was one of my sister Grace and Evelyn’s best friends. She, Evelyn, Grace and, another friend of theirs from elementary school, Ami were as inseparable as Rocki, Charli, and I once were. They called themselves SEGA. My friends and I spent most of our formative years following SEGA around and tried to do and be everything that they were. We even formed an acronym with our names to refer to our little crew. We were the REC Shop Divas.

  “I didn’t know you guys still kept in touch.”

  “Why would we not? You know SEGA never died. What’s it the young people say, A1 since day one? All that. I do hate that you and your girls grew apart though. I just knew that y’all were gonna be friends forever like us. Speaking of, what happened there? Y’all went from being peas in a pod to not even talking at all,” Evie asked.

  I had no distinct answer to Evelyn’s question really as I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what happened between us, either. Honestly, I just attributed it to distance claiming another friendship casualty. My freshman year at VVU I was damn near paralyzed with homesickness. I remember calling my friends all of the time for the first three months complaining about hating it there and wanting to come home. After a while, it seemed like I was bothering them because whenever I called, they were either entertaining someone or on their way out. After that, I stopped calling at all.

  Soon, I joined the Black Student Union and met Kellee. She became my new bestie. Somehow, in my mind, it was easier to cultivate a new friendship than try to exhaust myself trying to keep up with old ones that seemed to be fading before my very eyes. If you had told me that by age twenty the two people in this world who knew all of my deepest darkest secrets, fears, hopes, and dreams would no longer be in my life, I would have called you all kinds of liars. I missed our easy friendship and at times thought about reaching out, but figured they wanted nothing to do with me.

  “Nothing happened really, I guess. I dunno…”

  “Something had to happen there, Emerson. Bonds like that don’t dissipate overnight.”

  Same thing I thought, but hell I’d lived through it to see that is not always the case.

  I shrugged and looked over at Evie who was staring at me with a look of disbelief.

  “So, you’re just gonna sit up here and lie to my face, Emerson?”

  This was the second time today someone accused me of being a liar, and I was not amused. I didn’t know what it was about me that was giving off a vibe that I was holding something back, but that people were jumping to this assumption was starting to piss me off. I’d opened my mouth to give Evie a piece of my mind when Little Jake came barreling into the room, crashing into his mom’s lap. She pulled him in for a brief snuggle and tickle session as I sat there watching, envious. Although he was his dad’s namesake, he was Evie in male form. Little Jake had Evie’s dark brown skin, large rounded eyes, and lashes that every woman of a certain age envied. He was currently boycotting haircuts, so his curly locks made him resemble Sideshow Bob—crazy corkscrews jutting out at precarious angles.

  Jake came into the room moments later with Jourdan wrapped around his back.

  “Sorry babe, I tried keeping them occupied for as long as I could. Apparently, I don’t do the voices right, so your presence is requested for the bedtime stories.”

  Evie sighed and rolled her eyes dramatically, “Ask the man to do one thing, and I swear...” She looked over at me with a little grin as she moved to follow the kids out of the family room and to their respective bedrooms. Twenty minutes later all stories were read, and the kids were tucked in tightly on their way to slumber.

  Evie and I resumed our previous discussion, and she encouraged me to reach out to my girls once I got back to Ragston, but I reminded her that neither of them was actually living there anymore. Rocki had been splitting time between the coasts as her acting career took off
and last I heard Charli was living in Arizona or someplace similar. I'd deleted my Facebook a few years back, so I couldn't even use that as a means of keeping up with the girls from afar.

  “Sharon said something about some folks trying to plan a reunion for your class coming up within the next few weeks. You know her little sister Tracey graduated with y'all. Have you heard anything about that? I think Sharon was saying that Tracey was pretty heavily involved with the planning of it,” Evie said.

  I chuckled, of course, Tracey was heavily involved in planning an off-peak reunion. This year would make fifteen years since I'd graduated high school and Tracey, former student body president and perennial Ragstonian has planned a reunion of some sort for our class every five years. I had chosen to decline the invites to the five and ten years, but maybe I'd give this fifteen year one a shot. Depending on when it was, that is. If I were still in Ragston, I'd look into it, but I definitely wouldn't be making any special trips home for it.

  “You think you can get Sharon to get the details, so you can pass them along to me?” I said.

  “Already on it,” Evie said, phone in hand, sending a text message, “When are you cutting outta here? I can't believe you are seriously driving the whole way, cuz.”

  “Early, probably before six if I can swing it. I'm driving from here to Denver tomorrow,” I replied, “Ten daggone hours in a car...most likely longer because of food and pee breaks. I don't know if I'ma make it.”

  “There's no other place for you to stop?”

  “Not unless I'm tryna risk my chances in some random small town in Utah and er...uh...yeah, I'ma just have to rely on some bomb playlists and sheer will and determination to get me through all of the miles before I crash in Denver.”

  “You can also use the motivation of a little herbal respite once you breach the city limits,” Evie joked.