Epilogue 1 Monk
Monk
Two Years Later
“Girl, if you don’t get down!”
My sister’s screech startles her daughter so badly, she almost topples from my back and to the floor. Lucky for her, I’m in the gym on the regular and do yoga with Verity just about every morning, so my catlike reflexes save the day.
I catch my niece Kelsey before she falls, but her little body is trembling, and in her fright, she lets out one extended wail.
“Hey, hey.” I hold her close to my chest and scoot until my back rests against the sofa. “It’s okay. Nothing to be scared of. I got you, lil’ bit.”
Her bottom lip quivers. Tears tremble on her long lashes. She’s pretty much breaking my heart.
“Now see, this your fault.” I glare at Shrieva and pat Kelsey’s back, bouncing her a bit. “She was fine before you terrified her using your Big Mama voice.”
“Shut up!” my sister shouts, even as she laughs.
“Mama!” I yell. “Shrieva told me to shut up.”
Mama comes around the corner from the kitchen, a dishcloth tossed over her shoulder. “Then why don’t you? You always did love running that mouth.”
“Ooooooh!” Shrieva pokes her tongue out. “She told you.”
“Wow,” I reply dryly. “So mature. And to think you’re a mother of… how many? Five? Six? I’ve lost count. The saying goes it takes a village, not you gotta birth one. Y’all still using the pull-out method, and we see how effective that is.”
“Ha-ha. Very funny.” Shrieva rolls her eyes. “Verity, come get your man. He’s bullying me again.”
Verity charges in, with dukes up, bouncing from foot to foot, lips poked out like she’s about to do something.
“Where he at?” She can barely keep a straight face, though, as she collapses beside me on the floor and takes Kelsey, whose tears have begun to subside, from my arms. “Did he make you cry, sweetie? He’s a mean ol’ uncle. I know.”
“You’re supposed to be on my side,” I laugh.
Verity cuddles Kelsey, who has forgotten about her near-death experience and is swiping her fist wildly at Verity’s glasses.
“You know I’m a girl’s girl.” She winks at the double entendre, but shoots my mother a cautious look.
She isn’t always sure how my family feels about her “lifestyle choices,” as my parents call them.
Verity’s sexuality probably would never have come up, but she’s open in interviews about the intersectionality of being a bisexual, bipolar Black woman.
She never tries to erase any part of her identity, and I don’t need her to, even though I know it raises questions for my very conventional parents about how this “works” if Verity “likes girls, too.”
Is she a lesbian? Bi? Queer or whatever they call it? The LMNOP army?
God, my parents.
Whatever Verity is, I want it. Whatever she is, she’s mine and I identify as hers.
To their credit, my parents never make us feel unwelcome, unloved, or awkward. When I brought Verity home last Christmas as my girlfriend, they greeted her with open arms and have never shown her anything but respect and affection.
We don’t come to Virginia much, a few times a year, but we flew in for my mother’s birthday party.
We wanted to make it special, since it’s been a rough season for her.
My stepfather, Ray, suffered a massive heart attack and died late last year.
It was sudden, completely without warning.
Verity only met him the one time at Christmas, but she attended the funeral with me.
And when Shrieva and Charlie suggested making Mama’s birthday special, we were both eager to come.
“I’ll remind you whose side you took,” I tell Verity, “when I’m the one you have to look at for the next twelve days.”
“Ahhh.” Verity nestles Kelsey into the crook of her neck and sighs. “Say it again.”
“Twelve days, baby.”
We share a look that’s as intimate as anything we do behind closed doors, but no one would ever know. There is a place we’ve made in this world that is only ours. It’s not geographical. It’s not even our home together in LA. It’s the spot we’ve carved out for each other in our hearts, in our lives.
“Where y’all going again?” Mama asks, an indulgent smile on her face.
“It’s called Sommar?y.” I reach over to smooth Kelsey’s little Afro puffs with their rainbow ribbons. “It’s in Norway.”
“Norway!” my brother, Charlie, says, coming in from outside just in time to be obnoxious. “Ain’t no Black folks in Norway.”
“We’ll be there,” Verity replies sweetly. “There’s no traditional twenty-four-hour clock. Lots of people hang their watches on the bridge that leads to the island because Sommar?y doesn’t acknowledge time. The summer is like sixty-nine days of midnight sun. No real nighttime.”
“No nighttime? And you call that a vacation?” Shrieva asks.
“I call it a real vacation,” Verity interjects. “In the summer, schools, businesses, don’t operate on normal hours. You might see folks swimming at two in the morning, doing yardwork in the middle of the night. No set schedule.”
“We’ve been working so much,” I add. “I can’t wait to leave my watch on a bridge somewhere.”
“Congrats on your show, Verity, by the way,” Charlie says. “When do the first episodes drop?”
“February.” Verity releases a long breath. “I’ll be promoting the heck out of it and back in production for season two before you know it. That’s why this trip is so needed.”
“Nobody can accuse y’all of not resting,” Charlie says. “’Cause you travel every chance you get.”
We do travel whenever we’re not working.
Our schedules are so demanding. I’m scoring another movie now, not one that requires me to be on set or as involved as Dessi Blue did, but a huge undertaking.
Verity is just as busy. Last year we did Christmas in St. Barts because we were both exhausted and needed to be somewhere else.
Leaving America from time to time feels like self-care for Black folks.
“What else they gon’ do with no kids?” Shrieva teases. “Though looks like you got the magic touch, Verity. I could see you with one of your own.”
Shrieva nods to where Kelsey has fallen asleep on Verity’s shoulder. Verity’s smile freezes and falls. I can’t read her expression. She pats Kelsey’s back lightly and presses her face into the toddler’s rounded cheek.
“You okay?” I ask, low enough for only Verity to hear.
“Yeah. I’m good.”
I make a note to ask her again later. Sometimes I think I’m as tuned into Verity’s moods as she is.
I’m no expert, but I’ve learned a lot about bipolar disorder over the last two years we’ve been together.
I never want to suffocate her with my concern, but we share every aspect of our lives, including the vigilance it requires to keep her healthy and stable.
Good sleep hygiene, daily yoga, and meditation.
She stays in contact with her therapist and psychiatrist, of course, but I joined a support group for people whose partners have bipolar.
We check in with Dr. Palmer occasionally as a couple, too.
“Hope I didn’t miss the cake!” says my father from the front door. “I heard we got a birthday girl to celebrate.”
A big, brightly wrapped box is tucked under his arm, which I’m guessing is a hat. My mother may not be anybody’s first lady anymore, but you’d have to pry elaborately designed hats from her cold, dead hands. That one is probably for Easter.
“Now you know you didn’t have to do that, Wright.” Even still, as she says it, there’s an eager light in Mama’s eyes when she takes the gift and sets it on the table with the others.
My father is around more than he has been in a long time, especially since Ray passed.
He was here for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
All his kids and grandchildren are here, so it’s convenient to come to Mama’s for family celebrations and holidays, but he’s not just here for us.
He’s here for Mama. They have an interesting dynamic.
It’s not romantic, but they’re good friends who care deeply about each other.
Who know each other. It’s a different kind of forever.
The marriage certificate is long abandoned, but this connection—the friendship they found a way to restore even after my father’s betrayal—has endured.
And that’s what Verity and I have. A different kind of forever.
Not the one I originally envisioned when I was a kid, with the bride in a white dress and the ceremony, my dad officiating and all the trappings culture wraps forever in.
Our love is stripped of all those things, but so rich and so true and so real.
I’ve seen Verity at her lowest, and she’s seen me at mine.
I don’t need vows about sickness and health to know I won’t leave her.
Our love goes beyond being of able body or mind.
Till death do us part? That’s what it will take to separate us.
If one day Verity decides she wants marriage and a wedding, we can do that, but I can truly say I don’t need it.
She is the fairy tale. There’s no happy ending without her.
If this love is our song, it’s the deep cut of human emotions.
Not that thing everyone thinks they know, assumes about what it is to be committed, but the lovingly worn groove of how it feels to stay.
To stick when it would be so easy to slip.
I have to believe it’s rare because if everyone had this, the world would be better.
We would care more. We would lend more grace.
So I’m convinced this—what we have—happens once in a lifetime… if you’re lucky.
Later after we’ve eaten ourselves into food comas, and the kids break out Taboo and video games, I look around, ready to taunt my girl into playing a hand of cards. I walk from room to room, but don’t spot her anywhere.
“You seen Verity?” I ask Shrieva, who is in the den with a sleeping Kelsey on her lap.
“She was in the kitchen helping Mama clean.” Shrieva gives me a shrewd look. “You better keep that one.”