“You look beautiful,” I said to her, reminiscing in the feeling when things were safe and predictable.
Shane reached over and handed me a fresh tissue. The other in my hand was balled up and shredded. “You gon’ have to stop all that crying if we’re ever going to get through this day. Please. This is supposed to be a joyous relieving experience. You will walk out of here every bit as lovely as any diva you’ve dreamed of being. Now buck up. Get it together.”
“Don’t rush her, Shane,” Josie said, interrupting again. She sprayed the finishing sheen on her calm happy customer.
Shane unleashed the clip on the right corner of my hair. He held up one of the plastic bowls of chemical cream and dived straight in with his little black paintbrush.
“Wait.” I held up my hand and stopped him from slathering it on. “I can’t.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I’ll pay for everything, but I can’t do it.” I stood up and pulled the plastic cape off my shoulders. I dived into my purse and pulled out the hundreds. I laid them down on his counter. Then put one more bill down. Knowing the going rate of therapy, Shane had been a bargain.
I reached out and hugged his burly shoulders. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. I salute you,” he said with mock courtesy.
I turned to the rest of the ladies in the salon and put up a hand. “Thank you, guys, thanks for helping.” I pushed the money into Josie’s hands for the unruly weave customer.
Everyone had the same pained look of confusion on their faces. I was walking out of there with my hair sticking up like koala bear ears. Still unkempt or worse than when I walked in a couple of hours before but with something far more valuable. My dignity. My strength. Belief in myself and Jake. So what if things were messy. I didn’t need to remake myself. Why start over? Lessons were learned that could only make me stronger, us stronger.
When I got into my car, I pulled the clips out and fluffed myself into some form of normalcy. Back to my Spice Girl persona.
Later, parked in front of the JP Wear studio, I put on lipstick with a shaking hand. Every step I took was like walking underwater. Hard burrowing steps to the front door and inside. The open interior of the vaulted ceilings buzzed with energy. I was afraid I’d see Beverly, or worse, Jake with Beverly.
“Mrs. JP Wear, right?” Fenny Maxwell moved away from the few people she’d been talking with at the lobby entrance and beelined toward me.
“Right.” I felt like pushing her in the face. “Excuse me.” I went around her.
She turned to follow me, moving too close. I was sure her aqua-satin-covered breasts grazed me on purpose. “Jay’s not here. In fact I don’t think he’s coming back. He doesn’t have a reason to,” she said with pleasure.
“What do you mean?”
She narrowed her eyes. “You seem surprised. He sold the rest of his interest in JP Wear. He’s no longer an owner.” Her soft translucent eyes twinkled.
I backed away and sprinted out the door and drove home at lightning speed.
Going Once
I knew exactly where to find him. Jake sat on the shoreline with his pants rolled up, his feet burrowed in the sand. The water was still a safe distance away, but there was no guarantee the current wouldn’t sweep up with a wave out of nowhere, leaving a crop of stranded seaweed in its wake.
I sat next to him. “What happened? You just walked away from everything you built.”
He took another handful of sand and poured it over both our feet. “I couldn’t fire Shaun without a serious sexual harassment suit headed my way. She made it clear she wasn’t going anywhere without a fight,” he said squinting against the sun.
“No one means anything to me but you. No one, nothing. It wasn’t a hard choice. Going once, going twice.” He improvised like an auctioneer. “Sold.”
“It’s still sad. Doesn’t seem fair.”
He hunched his shoulders. “It’s cool. I sold my interest to Legend.” A mischievous smile rose on his face. “We have an understanding. Before long he’ll drive them all mad.”
“Now that’s revenge. All this time I thought you just ignored his misogyny.”
“I know exactly what and who he is. But at least I know him, what he’s capable of and what he’s not. And I know you.” He reached out and touched my chin. We kissed lightly. “Do you know me?” he asked quietly.
“Yes. I do.” I wrapped my arms around him and relished in his strength.
“The past is the past,” he said with quiet resolve. “It’s just you and me, babe.”
I held on to his arm and leaned on his shoulder. “If I could, I’d turn this whole world upside down, shake things up to make them right.”
“Sounds like a song,” Jake said. “Maybe we can start our new career together as lyricists.”
“I’ll do anything as long as it’s with you.”
“Um, a duet. I’m loving this song.”
“It’s not a song. It’s the truth.”
He draped his arm around my shoulder. “You want to hear my truth? Nothing happened that day. What you saw wasn’t what was happening. I don’t want anyone but you,” Jake said, taking a handful of my wild do. “But I seriously don’t know about the Afro puffs. What’s going on back here?”
I reached up and felt two clips I missed left by Shane. “Oh, yeah. I was going to get a perm today. Make myself over, long and straight like—”
“Don’t even say it. Don’t. I love you, everything about you.” We leaned back in the sand holding hands side by side, burying ourselves as one big mountain and waited for the big wave to roll through and wash it all away.
“Something we haven’t done, something adventurous. Hey—” he exaggerated his novel idea “—maybe we should go to the grocery store and actually get food that you cook instead of microwave.”
I popped him on his shoulder. “I cook.” Top Ramen noodles and frozen vegetables entered my mind.
“We’ll stop at the bookstore and pick up a couple of cookbooks.”
I bit him, or attempted to on his firm chest before he shifted out of the way. “You know I can cook.”
“I’m just playing with you, babe.”
“I know you are. I’m seriously the queen of cuisine.” I rested my head against his chest. “I’m open for any suggestions, though,” I conceded. He was right; it was time to stop being afraid of my oven and stove. As Trina had pointed out, that’s what 409 was for. I used to love to cook. I’m almost sure of it.
We showered, shampooed, and shined, picked up Mya from my parent’s house, and were on our merry way to being a family again. I couldn’t remember the last time all three of us were in one car. First stop, the bookstore. Jake was completely serious about the cookbooks. Not any cookbooks. We had to drive a solid forty-five minutes on surface streets to the independent bookstore in the solidly black part of town.
“You want me to make bean pies, or something?” I smiled while we piled out of the car.
“Nah, I want some serious soul food, some collard greens, corn bread—”
“Neckbones? Pigfeet?” I whispered, not to interrupt the quiet atmosphere as we pushed through the heavy glass door of the bookstore. A slim man with a thick mustache waved from behind the counter. He was too busy reading an issue of the Black Revolution Newsletter to look up.
We found our way to a small section of cookbooks. Mya picked out everything at her eye level and handed them to me. Jake grabbed Patti Labelle’s cookbook and winked, and nodded.
“Oh please,” I said, “I bet Patti’s not throwing down on no pork.”
Jake took Mya to the kid’s section. I kept browsing. That’s when I heard it, the voice. The laugh. “Jaaay, what’re you doing out here? Look at my baby, look at you. Give me a kiss.”
“Hey, girl, you’re looking good.” Jake’s response was laced with a bit of apprehension. “Nice to see you.” Apprehension and phoniness.
“You’re looking good for a man who was on his death bed.”
The f
amiliar twang against the high-beam ceiling bounced off the walls. I spun around, unsure which direction to follow. The voices were hollow, looming over me like angry spirits. The ground seemed to swell. I couldn’t move, at least I thought, until the final step sent me stumbling over a raised piece of carpet.
I landed at the feet of Jake and a pair of shiny red toes in pretty yellow stilettos. My stilettos. I recognized the worn lip of the Jimmy Choos where I’d actually used a glue gun to meld it together for one more summer of wear.
“Venus, hey, long time no see.” Trina peered down at me, holding Mya.
“Babe, you all right?” Jake reached and was lifting me from the waist. I slapped at his hands. My heart was beating faster and faster with each breath.
“I see you put good use to all those clothes.” I swallowed more air.
For a friend, huh.
“Yeah, worked out. Thanks,” she said. For an awkward moment, she and I stared each other down. “Jay, don’t be a stranger,” she said, cutting her eyes slowly toward him. “See you later, Mya.” She put Mya down and did a slow turn walking away in the too-tight pants and sleeveless turtleneck sweater. The sweater wasn’t mine, but the pants, she was too damn big for the pants.
I stood stupefied. My eyes continued to dart in her direction long after she was gone.
“Whoa … hey, what’s this about?” A look of mystery hovered over Jake’s dark brows. He blinked. “What’s this about, babe? Tell me.”
“That’s her … that’s the voice in the bathroom.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“She’s got on my clothes!” I screamed loud enough for the thin man with the heavy mustache to wrestle with his newspaper and come find out what all the shouting was about.
“Y’all going to have to leave. We can’t have this kind of thing going on in here.”
I brushed past the thin man, scooping Mya up and out the door just in time to see the little sports car with the canvas top pull away. Jay is miserable, it’s about time he realizes his marriage is the reason why.
Jake followed. “What? Trina? You think I was messing with Trina?”
I broke free and opened the back door, pushing Mya to climb into her car seat.
“Don’t you dare lie to me. Don’t you dare. I heard it all, but I didn’t know who it was until now, Miss Queen of the Makeovers. Now I see, squeezing her ass into my clothes, my shoes. Fake hair and that stupid car. Did you buy that for her?”
“Babe, please, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Don’t you lie to me!” My screaming made Mya cry out. We both peeked to see her struggling in her car seat, trying to get a view of what all the yelling was about.
“Calm down. I swear none of this is making sense.”
“You sure talk a good game, Jake. I trusted you. I went against every instinct in my head and I trusted you. All my common sense out the window to believe in you.” I shoved a finger in his chest, hoping it hurt him as much as it did me.
“That night at Gotham Hall, she was bragging about how you were finally going to be hers, how I was too busy running off with my ex-charity-doctor to focus on our marriage. I heard her in the bathroom. I couldn’t tell who she was, but now I know. Why do you think I went to the studio that day, huh? I was going there to ask you about what I’d heard. Now I find out it’s someone completely different.”
“Babe,” Jake tried to interrupt, but I couldn’t be stopped.
“So what else are you not telling me? Let’s just clear the air, shall we. I know about Byron Steeple.”
What did I say that for? I felt my feet lift off the ground. Jake’s arms tightened as I struggled. He effortlessly opened the car door and pushed me inside with one shove then climbed in beside me.
He held up a warning finger. “Watch what you’re saying.”
“Or what?” I had already broken down, he could have told me anything and I would have said, okay, whatever, so what, because it didn’t matter anymore. I was tired and disgusted, ready to walk away and never look back. “What!” I screamed. “Are you threatening me?” Mya screamed, too. I faced her and had an instant flash of the accident. This one may have been worse. This accident would leave us in pieces, ruined and broken, unable to put ourselves back together again.
“Listen. I’m never going to lie to you. But if you ask a question, you sure as hell better be able to handle the answer.”
I bit my lip and tried to stop the tears from streaming. “Get out. Get out of the car.”
“Yeah, I talked to Trina and probably told her some things I shouldn’t have, but you weren’t there.”
“Oh, here we go again. My fault, right?”
His face twitched. “You want some more truth? Is that what we’re doing, being honest? You need to stop worrying about Byron Steeple ’cause I was this close … this close.” He held up his hand and pressed his thumb and index finger to the front of my face. “This close to taking your boy out.”
I had no response. Still too stunned. He was talking about Clint.
He opened his palms. “Some things are better left unsaid, right?” Jake got out of the car and slammed the door. I scooted to the driver’s side, started the engine, and took off. Mya cried all the way home.
Mya picked up a handful and put it on top of her head. She turned up her nose.
“You can have it, sweetie.” I snipped and cut to the song playing in my head, soft, melodious, and refreshing. No specific tune, nothing I could identify, just new, and revived. I never thought this day would come. I hadn’t planned for it, really, starting over. I wanted this place of security and hope, real life to stay forever. Jake was my hope. My security. My love.
I washed the soft texture, what was left, and wrapped a towel around my head. Next step was to pack. It was simple as that. I couldn’t stay. I had no choice in the matter. As I put things in the bag, Mya took them out as if she refused to let this happen and would do everything in her baby power to stop it.
I braced myself when I heard Jake coming up the stairs. He rushed into the bedroom and stopped midstep when he saw me come out of the closet holding the last of my clothes. His eyes went straight to my leather bag. I ignored him and continued packing.
“Don’t do this,” he said, grabbing for the bag. I reached for it and he pulled it farther away.
I hunched my shoulders and went for something else. The Samsonite was a bit large, more overstated but it would do. I rolled it out and began to put the few things I had left inside.
“I’m asking you to listen to me. Everything we’ve been through and you can’t hear me now? Just listen,” he whispered. “Please.”
The truth of the matter was, I didn’t want to hear him. People like me were meant to be alone. I was convinced now. I’d fought against it for long enough, believing in the magic of togetherness. Marriage. But I couldn’t hide from the natural order of things.
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” I said, not sure which part I was sorry about. The fact that he’d sold his company for me. The fact that he’d spent the last couple of years loving me, or that I loved him, still. None of those things mattered now.
“I have to go.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t have to do anything except what you want. Remember? You don’t have to do anything.” He sounded as if I were standing on a ledge and he was sent to talk me down. “Please don’t go, babe. Don’t leave. You promised we were going to always be there for each other.”
I shook my head because I didn’t remember making any such promises.
“You did, babe. You promised to love me always. Just like I promised to love you. We can’t go back on our promise.”
“You did. When you stopped trusting me, you stopped loving me. I don’t know you, Jake. I thought I did.”
“You do know me.” He slapped his fist into his open palm. “I promise … all new … all over again. Promise, from this day forward to love you with all my heart, do you
hear me, babe, all my heart. No negotiation. You love me, don’t you? I know you do. And I love you. Don’t deny what it’s worth. Don’t pretend like that’s not enough, because I know it is.” He took a step forward, one cautious step at a time as if I would jump from the imaginary ledge at any moment.
When I looked down, there was no danger. I could walk or I could run. There was nothing keeping me there.
“Babe, please. Look at me. Just look.” Another step closer. I felt his hand entwine into mine. Then the other. The smooth pat of skin met his lips one hand at a time. He took the sign as a chance to rest his case, leaning in and cupping my face for a lingering kiss. I pushed him back. The towel fell away, revealing my new haircut. His mouth fell open slightly. Shock, then sympathy. He tried a smile.
I stepped away, zipped up the bag, and slung it over my shoulder. Mya leaned against the bed watching us both, knowing what she was a witness to wasn’t quite right, but beginning to get used to it the way children do. I picked her up, hugging her tight. Jake still hadn’t said a word.
I wanted to laugh out loud, but the silence felt safe. I was home free to live my life as nature had planned. The same way I realized the night of the fire in the hospital, regardless of what decisions I’d weighed and prayed over, some things were just meant to be.
“If you walk out that door, I’m going to lose you forever,” he said from behind me. “I can’t let you walk out of here like that.” His breathing became labored. I forced myself not to turn around. Not to respond.
“I’m leaving. I don’t think there’s much you can do about it.” I stood at the door, feeling strong. I had the natural order of things on my side.
“If you walk out of here, I’ve got no chance of getting you back because…” He took a long pause. “Okay. You don’t need me. Fine. You don’t need me, but I need you. I don’t want to be without you.”
Nappily Married Page 25
