Should Have Known Better

“I’m telling you now. I figured that since she’s your friend, she’d follow up by calling you on your cell phone,” he said smugly.

I rushed over to my purse hanging on one of the chairs and pulled out my cell phone. I clicked it on.

“You know I can’t keep this thing on at work,” I said. I had a text. It was Sasha saying everything she’d left on the machine. She planned to be at my house at noon. She’d come to town for the same conference.

“What’s the big deal anyway, Dawn? Isn’t she your special sorority sister—your soror?” Reginald joked sarcastically.

“I can’t believe this.” I tried to ignore his crack. “I wonder why she’s coming here.”

I walked over to a little magnetic mirror on the refrigerator. My edges were gray. I had so many split ends my hair wouldn’t hold a curl.

Reginald, even in his sarcasm, was right about Sasha being my special friend. She’d been the only best friend I’d ever had. She’d been my roommate at Spelman. We pledged Alpha together. We shared secrets in the dark, whispered dreams into each other’s ears. And so far, she was making good on all of hers. Sasha Bellamy had gone from being a flamboyant country girl from North Carolina to Ms. CNN, queen of the black liberal female voice. America saw her every night on television. But I hadn’t seen her in person in nine years. We kind of lost touch when I left Atlanta.

“I’m so unprepared. Maybe I should just call her and tell her not to come. We could meet for lunch.”

“Great idea. That’s the direction I was going in,” Reginald said quickly.

“Oh, wouldn’t you love that?” I snapped. “You probably waited so late to tell me so I’d have no choice but to cancel.”

Reginald hated CNN. He called it fake news for rich liberals. And he especially hated Sasha’s show, which was taped at the national headquarters in downtown Atlanta. He called it “The Wannabe Watch.” Needless to say, he wasn’t exactly fond of Sasha. But Sasha also wasn’t fond of him. They’d met when I started dating Reginald my sophomore year of college. Reginald thought she was bourgeoisie and stuck up and Sasha thought Reginald, who wasn’t a student in any of the schools in the Atlanta University Center and worked at Spelman cutting the grass and cleaning up flower beds, was a bum preying on college girls.

“I’m just saying, no sense having people in the house who are going to cause a bunch of chaos,” Reginald said.

“ ‘Cause a bunch of chaos’? You don’t even really know her.”

“She’s a tramp.”

“Don’t say that. That’s a bunch of old gossip.”

“So, you’re saying she didn’t sleep with half of the frat boys at Morehouse?”

“She was in relationships with some of those guys. Plus, that was a million years ago.”

“OK. I’m sorry. You’re right. She was a tramp,” he said. “Things could be different with her now, because we all know tramps change,” he laughed.

“We’ve all grown up and changed,” I said. “And you know she has some issues with men.”

“Her issues weren’t with men. They were with herself. Sasha can hardly take her eyes off of herself long enough to keep a man.”

I looked in the refrigerator. There was nothing but leftovers. Not even an apple. I’d need to go grocery shopping. I closed the door and looked back into the mirror. The thin hairs between my eyebrows were connecting.

“And if we’ve all grown up, then what’s the problem?” Reginald asked. “Why are you even thinking about what you need to do around here? You have two kids. She should understand.” He looked up from his little stack of crumpled papers and at me like I was Cheyenne complaining about not being able to go to the mall with her friends. “Do you really care what that woman says about”—he looked around the room—“anything?”

I didn’t respond.

He leaned back in the chair, pushing it onto its back legs, and exhaled exaggeratedly.

“Yeah, you’ve all grown up!” he said. “I’ll never understand your people.”

I walked out of the kitchen quietly. There was nothing to say. Reginald was ready to pounce into one of his favorite topics and he would’ve loved for me to get aggravated and call Sasha to tell her not to come. That, of course, was something that had occurred to me, but then I was more afraid of how that snub would look than my bummy, aged house and battered hair.

Five little bottles stared at me from the bottom of my bathroom sink. Hair sheen. Hair grease. Hair dye. Hair

glue. Hair remover. I removed the last bottle and dabbed a little pink glob onto the hair between my eyebrows. There was no way I could dye my hair and still have enough time to clean the house, get the twins washed and in the bed, and somehow lose thirty pounds. I looked down at my hips. It was the years, not the babies, that had them spreading the way they had. For years, I’d tried to blame the twins, but once they’d started walking and talking and I’d passed the weight I was on the scale the morning I’d gone into labor, I knew it was me. And I was OK with that. I was even OK with my husband having more toiletries than me. I’d never been a particularly gorgeous woman and the sheer work it took to keep the charade going was exhausting. Nails and hair appointments. The gym and the clothes. Did this match that and was it riding up too high on my thighs? I had no time for it. I had a family to run and a husband to keep happy. Reginald never seemed to care how I looked; in fact, he was annoyed when I spent too much time on myself.

“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when I heard the message,” Reginald said, standing in the doorway of the bathroom. I was leaning over the sink, wiping the hair remover from my forehead. “I just hate to see how these people always get to you. I mean, if anything, you should be proud of what you have. Yeah, Sasha is on television every night, but does she have a husband? Does she have a family?”

I just looked at him.