His First Wife

“Hear what? I don’t want to hear anything from your lying ass. Did she know you were married? Did she know you had a baby on the way? You bastard!”

Marcy pulled me back from the window.

“Stop it, Kerry,” she said, wrapping me in a sheet.

I was bawling so hard my chest was heaving like a child’s and I could feel my heart beating, pounding all the way in my uterus.

“He can go . . . he can go,” I kept rambling as Marcy sat me down on the bed, “go and be with her.”

She got up to close the window, but we could still hear Jamison yelling for me to come out.

“I have to get rid of him before someone calls the police,” Marcy said. “They’re probably already on the way. Just promise me you’ll stay here.”

“Let them arrest him like they arrested me,” I said, wiping my face with a little pink tissue she’d handed me.

“Just stay here,” Marcy said. She ran to the door and I heard her flip-flops clacking down the steps.

“Kerry, I need you,” Jamison hollered. His words flipped around in my gut.

I just sat there on the bed and waited to hear Marcy’s voice on the other side. I slowly began to pull the sheet off my body. I needed to go back to bed.

The First Fight

“You’re going to forget all about me when you go to Harvard,” Jamison said. We were wrapped around each other like two pretzel halves in the lumpy twin-sized bed in his dorm room. We’d been nesting there for two days straight. It was hot and musty and the only real air in the room came from a box fan Jamison had set up in the window—what he’d called “ghetto air conditioning.” It wasn’t the best of accommodations: I had to sneak in and out and Jamison insisted on playing OutKast on continuous loop in his CD changer.

“Whatever.” I laughed and repositioned my arm because it was falling asleep, scrunched between the poster of Janet Jackson on the wall beside the bed and Jamison’s back. “You’ll forget me long before I forget you!”

“So you admit you’ll forget me!”

“No, I didn’t mean that,” I said, laughing again. He had a way of keeping me laughing as he twisted my words. We’d been dating for about a month and Jamison seemed to know me better than anyone in the world. He anticipated what I’d say, how I’d feel, and was careful to be sure I was happy. I was a long way from vagina-grabbing Preston Allcott. It was more than refreshing. Enough so that I was able to put up with the music and his long-lost lover, Janet Jackson, looking over us.

“It’s okay; I can take it. I’m a big boy,” he playfully said. “Leave me woman; leave me be!”

“Please, you won’t be too far away when you go off to Cornell for med school . . . and you already have your acceptance letter, so stop jinxing mine.”

“I can’t jinx fate. You were born to go to Harvard Med,” he said. “And everyone knows that a wait-list means that you’re practically in.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, girl, they accept half of the people on the list each year,” he said reassuringly. “And when you get finished . . . if you haven’t forgotten about little old me . . . I’ll come up to Boston and sweep you off your feet.”

“Even if I’m working on a cadaver?”

“I’d hug the dead dude too!”

“How romantic.”

“Then we’ll get married and have eight boys.”

“Eight? Boys?” I laughed.

“I’m not a girl maker. Only boys will come from my nuts. Soldiers.”

“Ill; don’t be crass.” I plunked him on the head with my only free hand.

“Yep, all boys and they’ll all be Mo

rehouse men like their father and then be doctors too . . . like their father. I’m building a legacy, baby.” He jumped up and began tickling me. “I need an army and you’re going to give it to me.”