Take Her Man

Epilogue

What’s Worth Fighting For?

Seven years ago, I decided what kind of man I wanted to marry. It was the fifth anniversary of my parents’ second marriage to each other. My parents decided to throw a huge party at Tavern on the Green. They invited everyone they knew and requested that they all arrive dressed in white. My mother had the Tavern decorated with bouquets of assorted white flowers and candles, and she had black and white pictures of the three of us put up everywhere.

It was a beautiful evening. The Tavern looked like heaven and my parents and all their guests looked like angels. That night, one week after my eighteenth birthday, was the happiest I’d ever seen my parents. They danced and danced, kissing each other like teenagers who’d just met. Before dinner they had a short ceremony where they renewed their vows. My father surprised my mother by restoring the original engagement ring he’d bought her when she was eighteen. A single tear fell from my mother’s eye when he slid the golden solitaire ring on her finger. Her face turned completely red, and while I’d never seen my mother look quite the same, I knew that she felt like the most beautiful woman in the world.

Looking at my parents—half drunk from champagne and the idea of spending the rest of their lives together—I made a vow to myself that I would find someone who loved me the same way my father loved my mother. No matter how much they fought, or how much they disagreed, he loved her for who she was—the good and the bad. And no matter what happened, as had been proven once before, he would always come back to her. That’s what I wanted.

When I met Julian five years later, somehow I forgot about the look on my mother’s face. I was so concerned about other things—how things looked to other people and what I could gain by being on his arm—that I couldn’t even be honest with myself about how I was being treated. All that was important was the man and being with him. And for a short while in my life, I thought that was all that mattered. But then…along came fate in the form of a six-point plan and a man named Kyle.

While the Take Her Man Plan is far behind me now, and the drama surrounding it serves to bring me and my girls lots of laughs as we play with Tasha’s new baby girl, Toni (yes, we’re the 4Ts now), looking back, I realize why I had to go through what I did with Julian. While it hurt me so bad in the beginning, in the end, every tear I cried forced me to turn the mirror I was pointing at everyone else toward myself. The breakup wasn’t about Miata, it wasn’t about my mother’s curse—hell, it wasn’t even about Julian. It was about me and the changes I needed to make inside of myself to find the love I deserved. And when I finished looking at my own reflection in the mirror, there, standing beside me, was Kyle.

After Kyle and I discussed everything that had gone on between us, we finally decided to date each other. Nothing serious or heavy—Kyle needed his space to work through some things and I needed some time to focus on myself.

On our fifth “real date,” I bought Kyle a bouquet of wildflowers and made him dinner at my place. Kyle looked so happy when he walked in the door. He pulled me into his arms and hugged me so tight I could hear his heart beating.

Standing there in Kyle’s arms, I thought about the day I almost lost him. While I fought so hard to ignore it at first, Kyle reawakened in me the love I saw between my parents on that starry spring evening at Tavern on the Green seven years ago. It was the sweetest thing, the most indescribable feeling I felt so deep inside of me that I knew it was right. I could fall in his arms and know Kyle would be there to catch me, and if he ever needed it, I’d fight like hell to hold him up. What it was between us, as we stood in my living room slow dancing

to the music in our heads, was hard and strong and more real than anything I’d ever felt. Listening to Kyle breathe, I realized that I was in love with him.

Just then, before I could open my mouth to say to the man who would later become my husband, “I love you,” for the first time, Tamia’s question came to my mind: What’s worth fighting for? The answer came to me so quickly that I began to cry.

Like my mother’s love, my friends’ support, and my man’s forgiving heart, the best-loved things—the things that are truly worth fighting for—are not things that you have to take from other people. They are simply the things that come to you…willingly.

So, in the end, I did have my man; it just wasn’t the one I’d set out to get. Life is funny that way. God is funny that way. As I said in the beginning, I’m a fine, successful, educated black woman. The situation God put me in made me question and respect all of those things. I just had to find my way out.

The Guide to Riding Off into the Sunset and Living Happily Ever After Because You’re a Fine, Successful, Educated Black Woman and You Don’t Have to Put Up with Anyone’s Crap…

Patience ‘p-sh n(t)sn 1: the capacity, habit, or fact of being patient—bearing pains or trials calmly or without complaint (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary) 2: Knowing that the best things come to those who wait (The Real It Girl Guide by the 3Ts)

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HIS FIRST WIFE

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Foolish

October 26, 2007

It was 5:35 in the morning. I was doing 107 on the highway, pushing the gas pedal down so far with my foot that my already-swollen toes were beginning to burn. It was dark, so dark that the only way I knew that I wasn’t in bed with my eyes closed was the baby inside of me kicking nervously at my belly button and the slither of light the headlights managed to cast on the road in front of me.

I-85 South was eerily silent at this time. I knew that. I’d been in my car, making this same drive, once before. I kept wiping hot tears from my eyes so I could see out of the window. I should’ve been looking for police, other cars on the road, a deer, a stray dog that had managed to find its way to the highway in the dewy hours of the morning, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see anything but where I was going, feel anything but what I didn’t want to feel, think anything but what had gotten me out of my bed in the first place. My husband.

Jamison hadn’t come home. I sat in the dining room and ate dinner by myself as I tried not to look at the clock. Tried not to notice that the tall taper candles had melted to shapeless clumps in front me. Knowing the time would only make me call. And calling didn’t show trust. We’d talked about trust. Jamison said I needed to trust him more. Be patient. Understanding. All of the things we’d vowed to be on our wedding day, he reminded me. My pregnancy had made me emotional, he said. And I was adding things up and accusing him of things he hadn’t done, thoughts he hadn’t thought. But I was no fool. I knew what I knew.

Jamison’s patterns had changed over the past few months. And while he kept begging me to be more trusting and understanding, my self-control was growing thin. The shapeless clumps on the table in front of me resembled my heart—bent out of shape with hot wax in the center, ready to spill out and burn the surface. Jamison had never stayed out this late. And with a baby on the way? I was hot with anger. Resentful. I was ready to spill out, to spin out, but I held it in.

I helped our maid, Isabella, clear the table, told her she was excused for the night. Then I moved to the bedroom, and while I still hadn’t peeked at the clock, the credits at the end of the recorded edition of Ten O’Clock News proved that any place my husband could be…should be…was closed. I wanted to believe I was being emotional, but that would’ve been easier if I didn’t know what I knew. Maybe he’d been in an accident. Maybe he was at a hospital. Yeah…but maybe he wasn’t.

I laid in bed for a couple of hours; my thoughts were swelling my mind as round as my pregnant stomach. I knew what was going on. I knew exactly where he was. The only question was, what was I going to do?

Then I was in my car. My white flip-flops tossed in the passenger seat. My purse left somewhere in the house. My son inside of my stomach, tossing and kicking. It was like a dream, the way everything was happening. The mile markers, exit signs, trees along the sides of my car looked blurry and almost unreal through my glazed eyes. The heat was rising. My emotions were driving me down that highway, not my mind. My mind said I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with my first child. I didn’t need the drama, the stress. I needed to be in bed.

But my emotions—my heart—were running hot like the engine in my car. I was angry and sad at the same time. Sometimes just angry though. I’d see Jamison in my mind and fill up my insides with the kind of anger that makes you shake and feel like you’re about to vomit. And then, right when I was about to explode, I’d see him again in my mind, in another way, feel betrayed, and sadness would sneak in. Paralyzing sadness, so consuming that it feels like everything is dead and the only thing I can do is cry to mourn the loss. I wanted to fight someone. Get to where he was and kick in the door so he could see me. Finally see me and see what this was doing to us. To our marriage.

I didn’t have an address, but I knew exactly where she lived. My friend Marcy and I followed Jamison there one night when he was supposed to be going to a fraternity function at a local hotel. But having already suspected something was going on, I called the hotel and learned that there was nothing scheduled. That night six months ago, before he left, I gave him a chance to come clean. I asked if I could go. “No one else will have their wives there; it’s just frat,” he said, using the same excuse he’d been using for three weeks. He slid on his jacket, kissed me on the cheek and walked out the front door. I picked up my purse and ran out the back where Marcy was waiting in a car we’d rented just for the circumstance. When Jamison finally stopped his truck, we found ourselves sitting in front of a house I knew I’d never forget. The red bricks lining the walkway, the yellow geraniums around a bush in the middle of the lawn, the outdated lace curtains in the window. It looked so small, half the size of our Tudor in Cascade where the little house might envy a backyard cabana. It was dark and seemed empty until Jamison climbed out of the bright red “near midlife crisis” truck he’d bought on his thirtieth birthday. Then, the living room light came on, my husband walked in. And through the lace I watched as he hugged her and was led farther away from me. I fell like a baby into my best friend’s arms. What was I to do?