His Third Wife

“I’m in the hospital.”

“What? Why are you at the hospital?” Jamison had already reached for his car keys. Val turned to him and asked what was going on.

“Don’t go all crazy. I was just breathing heavy when I woke up this morning. Was about to go on out to the church, but my breathing wouldn’t get right, so I came on to see my doctor.”

“What did he say?”

“They’re running tests. My pressure’s high again.”

“I’m on my way over there,” Jamison said. “You stay right where you’re at.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Val asked when Jamison hung up the phone. “Is everything okay?”

“Leaf, cancel everything for the rest of the day,” Jamison said, walking toward the door. “I’ll call you later.”

“Jamison, what happened?” Val pushed. “Is everything okay?”

I damn near had to run Jamison down in the driveway to get in the car to go to the hospital to check on a woman who hated me and who I hated back—maybe more. But what I hated more than that was knowing that if I didn’t get in that car, it would give that woman more ammunition to convince Jamison to hate me. Call it duty or defense, I wasn’t letting my husband leave that house without me. I left Leaf standing right there in the kitchen.

I tried to calm Jamison on the way to the hospital, but there was something that just got into him wherever his mother was concerned. If she told him the sky was purple he’d believe it without concern. Like he owed her something. For a long time I kept telling myself it was just that I’d never seen the insides of a mother-son relationship—I only had sisters and for most of our lives we hadn’t wanted anything to do with our mother. But the more Dorothy Taylor dug her nails into my back, the more I kept thinking there was more to it. She had it in for me and I knew she wasn’t the type to stop things at “good enough.” She was going to cat fight me into a corner and force me to claw my way out. And when I didn’t, she’d look at her “baby boy” and say, “See, I told you so.”

Jamison stopped the car in the front of the hospital and I had to park before walking over to find him and his mother.

When I walked inside and approached the nurses’ station in the emergency room, I felt all eyes on me and my stomach and wished I’d taken my sweater out the backseat of the car. I asked a male nurse in a fuchsia smock for Mrs. Taylor and the other nurses all went to whispering about me.

“She’s right down there, hunny,” he said, smiling at me and pointing to the right of the desk as a nurse behind him pretended to be sending a text to a friend, but she was really taking a picture of me. A month before I would’ve snatched her skinny nurse ass up in that emergency room, but Leaf and Jamison’s publicist Muriel kept talking to me about watching how I acted in public. That “everyone” was watching me and that I didn’t need to give people more news than they already had. I funneled my hate through a smile before I walked to the room the other nurse had pointed toward.

Jamison looked like he was about to climb into the bed with his mother. They were whispering and huddled up so closely, I stood in the doorway for a second thinking they were praying.

When Jamison finally stepped back, there was Mrs. Taylor in a red jogging suit with her blond wig perfectly styled. Nothing about her looked sick. She looked like she could slide on a pair of sneakers and jog around the hospital a few times.

“Hey,” I said, waving from the door.

“Oh, you came, too?” she said like I was some crackhead Jamison had to peel off of the floor of a crack house just before he pulled up.

“Yeah, we wanted to make sure you were okay,” I said, making sure she heard “WE.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to get you two all riled up. I just wanted to let my baby boy know I’m okay,” Mrs. Taylor said.

“Any of the tests come back? What’s your doctor saying? Where is he?” Jamison rattled off, sitting at his mother’s side with his back to me. He was cradling her hand in his so desperately I wanted to walk out the room and vomit in a corner. There I was, pregnant with his child and running behind him to the hospital, and he hadn’t even asked me one time how I was feeling or if I needed anything.

“They said I need to relax. Too much stress in my life. Got to stop getting my pressure all up like this,” Mrs. Taylor said, and I was happy Jamison couldn’t see me because I was mocking every ridiculous statement she made. What stress? She didn’t work. Her only job was chasing Jamison around. That and fucking with me.

“See, Mama, I told you to take it easy. You get yourself too worked up.”

“I know, baby boy, but it’s just all this stuff with you and . . .” She looked over at me. “. . . and Val. I get so worried. Can’t let nothing happen to my family.”

“And we can’t let anything happen to you,” Jamison said, turning to me. “Right, Val?”

“That’s right,” I said, backing him.

“Oh, that makes me feel so good, ya’ll. My family is all I have,” Mrs. Taylor said so softly I could nearly smell the salt she was trying to toss into my ocean. And then Jamison opened up the flood gates.

“You know what, Mama, I can’t have you alone like this anymore. Let’s just do it,” he said, looking back at his grinning mother. “Let’s just move forward with our plan.”

“Really?” she asked.

“What plan?” I asked.