To Break a Vow Page 18

  They both stared at me in silence.

  “Well,” Tasha began, clearing her throat to break the silent stare-off, “I’m not saying all of this is your fault—“

  “Good, because Angelo’s ass has been coming for m—”

  My baby sister drove her hand towards my face. She would have mushed me if I hadn't jerked back.

  “No, heifer! Angelo is 100% your fault! I’m saying that all of this with your husband isn’t solely your fault.”

  My nose scrunched up like I’d smelled something rank. “Uh, excuse me? None of this is my fault! I’m not the one who treated my wife like a side chick!”

  Toya snorted.

  Tasha rolled her eyes. “No, you’re the one who married a man four hours after meeting him then had the audacity to get mad that you didn’t know everything about him after only a year.”

  “Daaaammnn!”

  Ignoring Toya’s instigating ass, my mouth hung open as I stared at Tasha who gave me a knowing look, lips pursed.

  “You know I’m right.”

  I did. She was. But fuck if that wasn’t what I wanted to hear at this point. Not when I’d already filed for a divorce. Turning around, I walked over to the counter to finish preparing the teas. Tonya’s cackle grated on my ears.

  “I guess that read was a little too accurate for you, huh?”

  “Are those tills ready, Toy? Or are you just running your mouth for something to do?”

  “Nah, don’t try to come for me because Tasha pulled your card!”

  “Actually, Toy,” Tasha interjected, “your behavior has been off the chain lately as well.”

  “Uh uhn. No, ma'am.”

  I heard the swinging of the double doors and craned my neck to find only my baby sister behind me. Cutting my eyes in her direction, I propped a fist on my hip.

  “Damn, Tasha. Can you dial back the Iyanla so we can get some work done?”

  Her lips stretched into a grin filled with crooked teeth because she’d refused to get braces as a teenager after calculating how much bacteria could get caught in them. “Oh, deflecting, are we?”

  Slapping the lid on the pitcher of steeping tea, I turned to face my baby sister. “You know what, Tasha? You’re right. We do need to examine ourselves, and since you’ve so generously lain my and Toy’s issues out, bare, it’s only right that we dig into yours.”

  The grin slipped from her face and reappeared on my own. Mmhm. Things weren’t so enjoyable when the shoe was on the other foot.

  “We can start by discussing why you avoid relationships or intimacy of any kind.”

  “That’s not entirely accurate.”

  “Oh, isn’t it, though?”

  With a blank face and sad eyes, she linked her hands in front of her.

  “No, it’s not, and you know that. I might not seek it out but when it comes to me I’m always completely open and receptive. It’s when I reveal all the ugly parts of myself that things fall apart.” She shook her head and I could feel her disappointment in me permeate the room like a heavy cloak around my shoulders. “The difference between the two of us is that I knowingly embrace my shortcomings whereas you pretend yours don’t exist.” Pushing away from the counter, she disappeared into the backroom without giving me another glance, leaving me feeling like a pile of horse shit in the middle of the road.

  Chapter Twenty

  When The Truth Tries To Set You Free

  “I’m surprised Lisa didn’t plan a honeymoon. I thought for sure she was flying y’all asses to Hawaii or something.”

  J frowned as he handed me a beer. “Bruh, she tried but I shut that shit down. She’s too far along in her pregnancy to get on somebody’s plane, and I’m not taking any chances with my son.”

  “Where is she anyway?” They’d just gotten married two days ago in our parent’s large backyard and I hadn’t expected to see J again before I left tomorrow, assuming he’d wanna lay up under his wife.

  He took a seat on the barstool opposite where I sat at the island in his and Lisa’s kitchen. “She’s out somewhere with Trisha on a ‘bestie date’.” He used air quotation marks, coupled with an annoyed look. “Trisha just told Lee that she’s moving to Houston in six weeks. Apparently, she was offered an opportunity to join a group of therapists in an exclusive office down there.”

  “Exclusive? That sounds like some happy endings type of shit.”

  J laughed. “That’s the same thing I said, and Lee got pissed. I told her if the shoe fits…”

  I nodded, still unsure what I was doing here. With less than twenty-four hours left in town, I should have been checking in with my pops or visiting DB, but J had called and asked me to come by so here I was, sipping on a pale ale while he stared me upside my head.

  “Nigga, what is it? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  He shrugged as if he hadn’t been giving me the same look you give a slow driver in the fast lane.

  I shook my head. “It’s something. You’re mugging me right now and I ain’t did shit, so what’s up?”

  He stared at me so long without saying anything that I got ready to get up and walk out. Finally, he took a long pull from his bottleneck and wiped his mouth.

  “Where’s Tonya?”

  Rubbing a hand over my head, I sighed. “She’s at home.”

  A solitary brow rose like an unspoken question. “Whose home?”

  My face pinched into a scowl. “What the hell kind of question is that?”

  He shot an amused smirk at me. “The kind you’re trying to avoid answering—unsubtly, I might add.”

  “I’m not—” J laughed, cutting me off before I could get my lie out good.

  “Yes, you are, nigga.

  Shit. I was avoiding the question, avoiding going back to her, all of that. Seeing my brother broken down like he was when he arrived in Mexico really shook me. He was down bad behind Lisa. I’d watched him pour out his love for her for years, and all he ever asked her was to get married—the one thing she refused to give him. When she broke up with him, it crushed him, and I thought that maybe Tonya cutting me off was a good thing. Maybe it was better for me to walk away than to have her cut my heart out once I gave her everything she was demanding. Everything did happen for a reason, after all. Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something by constantly creating roadblocks every time I tried to make my way back to her.

  It was why I returned to Cabo after J and I rushed home after hearing about the tragic murder of a Hawkins Realty agent. It was why my current flight out of Little Rock would be passing over Texas instead of landing in the southeast part of the state when all I wanted to do was be with Tonya. I knew what it felt like to give my all and have it thrown back in my face, and I’d be damned if I signed on for another episode of that shit show. I wouldn’t have said she was capable of hurting me like that, but after seeing how miserable J had been, I knew anything was possible.

  “I thought this incognegro shit was funny at first, but shit, Jer. I never thought you’d carry it on for this long. I’m surprised she hasn’t left your ass yet.”

  “Fuck,” I groaned, draining the last of my beer and tossing the empty bottle into the trash can on side of the island. “Don’t put that shit out into the universe. It’s bad enough she told me to leave; I don’t want her to get any ideas while I’m waiting on her to cool down.”

  J straightened his spine, eyes bugged out like there were prepared to pop out of his skull. “She told you to leave?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, man.”

  “When was this? Is that why she didn’t come to the wedding?”

  “Naw, she didn’t know about the wedding. This happened in April.”

  J slid off his stool and walked out of the kitchen without saying a word. The heavy sound of his footfalls on the steps let me know he’d gone upstairs, and I stared wordlessly in that direction, trying to figure out what happened. Immediately, I heard him coming back downstairs, and I opened my mouth to ask him what the fuck he was doi
ng. But when he reentered the kitchen, he instantly slapped me across the back of my hairless skull.

  “Yo, man! What the fuck?”

  Casually, like he didn’t have a care in the world, he crossed the room and pulled another beer from the fridge, popped the cap off and downed half the bottle in seconds. Turning to me, he leaned against the refrigerator and shook his head.

  “You’re stressing me the fuck out, Jer.”

  Rubbing at my still stinging scalp, I frowned. “I ain’t tryna hear anything you have to say right now, Ike.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t apologize.”

  “Fuck you!”

  With a nod, he sipped on his beer and stared disappointedly at me. “I ask you about this girl every, single time I see your ass, and you always give me some bullshit line about protecting your union and cultivating a positive energy bubble or whatever the fuck you be saying. And, to be honest, I don’t even understand what the fuck you be talking about half the time, but I let it rock because you’re my brother and I love you, but I can’t be silent about this shit here. This shit here.” Pointing his finger to the ground, he twirled his hand in a circle. “This shit is dead-ass wrong. If ever there was a moment to announce to the family that you had a secret wife—hell, a woman in your life, period!—my wedding was that moment.”

  I was shaking my head before he’d even finished his last sentence. “Naw, man. I couldn’t do some shit like that. That’s insensitive and takes away from your day—”

  “You know I don’t give a fuck about no shit like that! Don’t even try to use me as an excuse, and you damn well better not try to say you were thinking of Lisa because I know better. I’m not saying you had to get up in the middle of the ceremony or reception and yell into the microphone that you eloped a long-ass time ago, but bringing her to The House and introducing her to your immediate family would have been enough. What you’re doing is fucked up. That ain’t how we do in the Bluff, and that sure as shit ain’t how Pops taught us to treat the woman we love.” He glared at me. “I oughta tell on your ass. You know you ain’t too old to get an ass-whooping.”

  I stared at the small circle of condensation on the counter, leftover from my beer, and let my big brother’s chastising wash over me. I know he strongly believed in what he was saying to me, and while I’d be lying if I said there weren’t kernels of truth in it, our situations—our relationships with our wives—were completely different.

  “You listening over there?” He pulled a magnet from the door of the fridge and tossed it at me. It hit my shoulder and fell to the countertop. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands to see it was a small rectangle with Do The Right Thing, in the trademarked style of Spike Lee’s classic film, emblazoned on the front.

  I nodded, message from the universe received. “Yeah, old man. I hear you.”

  ♥♥♥♥

  When Time Waits For No One

  “Tell me this is a joke.”

  Frowning in the direction of the shoreline, my eyes bounced around the nearly empty beach before they focused on the rock formation in the far distance. What was supposed to be a peaceful and relaxing view did absolutely nothing to cure my anxiety. J had told me I needed to go home before we parted ways last but he was high off of whatever endorphins you get from finally getting the only woman you’ve ever loved to put a ring on your finger so that didn’t seem like a good idea.

  His exact words were “Carry your ignant ass back to Houston and see about your wife before you don’t have one anymore”.

  And…sure, that was sound advice, but now I was the one who needed time and space. I needed to figure out why I was having such a hard time with something so simple. So, I used the second half of my round-trip ticket to fly back to Cabo until I was ready to make a change—or, until Tonya stopped being mad, unblocked me and called me home, whichever came first.

  “What are you talking about, Ma?”

  “Tell me that this is some prank and that there is no way my son would get married more than a year ago without me knowing. That he wouldn’t hide his wife from me like he was fifteen again and tried to hide a girl in his room under the bed.”

  Fuck. Trying to sit down, I missed my chair completely and dropped to the sand, perching my elbow on my knee as I rubbed my suddenly throbbing temples. Had J followed through with his promise to tell on me? If he had, I couldn’t even be mad at him, not with all of the shit I’d spilled on him on the low.

  “I thought I’d have another couple of years before you found out,” I spoke carefully, trying not to inject too much emotion in my words. Thick panic had begun to claw its way up my throat and I’d do nobody any favors if I let it consume me without at least figuring out what Sabrina Hawkins planned to do with this news.

  She gasped. “This isn’t funny!”

  Maybe not but I still chuckled. It was a dry, unseasoned sound, but it was all I had to offer.

  “Am I that horrible? Have I done you so wrong that you felt the need to hide this from me?”

  And there was my mother.

  I groaned. “Stop being so dramatic, woman. This wasn’t about you at all.”

  “I’ll be as dramatic as I want to be,” she snapped. “In all your years of being the hardheaded one, the smartass, the rebel, I never thought you’d do something like this.”

  Rolling my shoulders back to ease some of the tension out of them, I grinned at the well-earned monikers. “It’s not a big deal. People get married every day.”

  “And divorced too, apparently! If your father and I had known about this, we might have helped you to avoid this. We could have suggested a counselor or something to help you get out of whatever rut you fell in, but as usual, you just have to do things your own way.”

  Sighing, I leaned back against my lounge chair and closed my eyes. The sun had begun to set, but I couldn’t even enjoy the way the orange and yellow sky melted into the cerulean ocean. Here was another person in my family saying basically the same thing. If I wasn’t dead set against hearing it, I’d have taken this as a sign.

  “No one is getting divorced, so you can chill out with all of that. I know I’m the screw-up, but even I can manage to maintain a marriage without your assistance.” If we ignored my current separation, that is. It was just a break, after all.

  She started to speak but paused before getting the words out. Had I managed to do the unmanageable and fluster Sabrina Hawkins? Damn, I needed to call one of my brothers and have them play the lottery on my behalf.

  “Well,” she drawled in a syrupy tone that I didn’t understand, “that’s not what these papers say.”

  “What papers, Ma?”

  “The papers that arrived at the office this morning,” she announced smugly. “They were delivered by a courier.”

  Heartbeat skipping up a notch, I sat up as my eyes flew open. “What do they say?”

  The sound of rustling papers filtered through the line, then, “Final decree of divorce…”

  Whatever she said after that became white noise as my head filled with static. Tonya had filed for a divorce? Is that what she’d been up to these last few weeks? Why she’d blocked me a month ago? Those daily phone calls had been like manna from heaven for me. If I couldn’t see her face, hearing her voice was enough, even if the conversation had been strained towards the end. Why didn’t she tell me she wanted to file when we last talked? Why was it so easy to give up on what we had been building? I was so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t realize that my mother had been calling my name for a while.

  “Jereth!”

  “Huh?”

  “Huh?!”

  I cleared my throat. “Yes, ma’am?”

  She did that thing where she paused before speaking but this time it wasn’t to drop a bomb on me. Her voice was soft and concerned when she asked, “You okay, baby?”

  Hell-the-fuck-naw!

  “No—oh” I cleared my throat of the lump that had formed. “No, I’m not.”

  “Did you know she was
wanted a divorce?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  For a full minute, my mother was uncharacteristically quiet. “Do you want to lose her?”

  “No, ma’am.” There was no way to hide the pained crack in my voice that time. “The last thing I want to do is lose her, Ma. I love her.”

  “Oh.”

  She sounded genuinely surprised at my admission, and why wouldn’t she be? This was the first she was hearing about my marriage—about Tonya.

  “Well, alright. Don’t you worry about a thing; I’ll take care of this.”

  It took me a second to realize that she had hung up and another one to grasp what had just happened, but once I caught it, I immediately redialed her only to be sent to voicemail. I was up and running toward my villa within seconds. It looked like all of my scheming to keep my mother out of my relationship was for naught because I had a pretty good idea of what she meant by “take care of this”.

  On an impulse, I dialed Tonya’s number, hoping against hope that she had unblocked me at some point in the last few days since I’d tried calling her again, but when the automated service came on in lieu of a ring, I threw my head back and screamed into the sky.

  “Fuck!”

  My time to think had come up short, and I was being forced into action. And although I had no idea what Sabrina Hawkins planned to do, something told me I needed to be on the next plane to Houston as soon as possible.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  When The Gloves Comes Off

  A few weeks after the disaster with Angelo, I was elbow deep in suds when Toy burst into the back room of the coffee shop and made a beeline for me.

  “There’s a woman out there asking for you.”

  I grabbed at the sprayer to rinse off my hands. “What’s she drinking?”

  “A small, nonfat, raspberry mocha latte.”

  That didn’t sound familiar. I knew my customers by their drinks, and this one didn’t ring a bell.

  Moving to the handwashing sink, I asked, “Is she a regular?”