Chapter Seventeen
Jo
I knew from a very young age that my mother didn’t love me because she told me so herself. She’d been drunk, sprawled out
on our ratty sofa with a leg propped up on its arm, an unstrapped heel hanging from her foot, her usual post-Saturday-night-party
position. I—being ten years old and already accustomed to taking care of myself—had asked for ten dollars and her signature
on a permission slip for a school trip to the history museum. She’d looked me dead in the eyes, released a long-suffering
sigh, and said, “I think I’m broken. I was supposed to love you by now.”
“That’s horrifying,” Ezra said, sputtering, when I’d told him. We’d been lying on his bed in his house on campus, my feet
braced against his headboard, his crossed by my head.
I disagreed. If anything, by telling me outright that she didn’t love me, Prudence Boateng had given me clarity. She’d spared me the torment of disappointment, assured me that I was, in fact, alone in the world, and as a result, I’d behaved accordingly. From that moment on, I signed my own permission slips. Told my teachers never to expect my mother for their scheduled parent -teacher conferences and made excuses so that they wouldn’t call Child Protective Services. Worked odd jobs, cooked my own meals, managed my own schedule, and made myself as unobstructive a roommate as possible so that I could continue to have a roof over my head. The second I turned sixteen, I moved out and filed for emancipation. As expected, my mother didn’t show up for my hearing to contest.
What she had not successfully eradicated, however, was hope.
Because no matter how much I tried to convince myself that Prudence Boateng meant nothing to me, that the relationship I had
with Renata was enough, there was still a part of me that hoped. Maybe she struggled with depression too , I thought. Maybe she was young and overwhelmed and was forced into motherhood against her will. Maybe she didn’t know how to mother a
child but might know how to befriend an adult.
And then one day, Prudence called.
I’d just been pictured in a Marie Claire magazine article alongside Renata at an event for New York Fashion Week. Ezra was out in LA shooting a pilot for a series
that never made it off the ground, and Paul had long established himself as too busy to make it to Renata’s little parties,
and so she had asked me to be her plus-one. We had a fabulous time shopping for my outfit and an even more fabulous time cutting
up on the dance floor, and when an unfamiliar number flashed across my screen the next morning, I’d been too giddy and exhausted
to think twice before picking up.
“I see you’ve made friends in high places,” Prudence had said, skipping even a perfunctory attempt at small talk. “Look, I
was wondering if you could ask them if—”
I’d felt like I’d been dropped into a wind tunnel. Her voice sounded just as I remembered it, a clipped, resonant tenor, an American accent layered over the Ghanaian one like paint-on plaster. But instead of apologies, I heard demands. Instead of contrition, I heard derision.
Stunned, I hung up, increased my therapy sessions to biweekly, and tried, with limited success, to piece my self-esteem back
together.
And now, five years later, Prudence was calling again, and this time she didn’t even bother to say hello.
“I need help, Josephine,” she said. “I know you don’t want to hear from me. But I did one good thing by bringing you onto
this earth, and—”
I hung up before she could say another word, unsure if I could hold myself together. Suddenly, Mal’s living room felt too
bright, the sun shining through his windows searing hot. Haphazardly, I slapped two fingers to my pulse at my neck, following
the second hand on the analog clock hanging on the wall across from me. One two three four five six seven eight nine. Sixty divided by six seconds is ten. Nine times ten is ninety, regular rate, regular rhythm, physiologic. I inhaled through my nose, let the breath round my belly, hollowed it with a slow exhale through my mouth.
In the kitchen, I could hear the clang of dishes hitting the sink, Mal humming contentedly as he ran them under water. Some
people, I thought, were born good, and Mal was one of them. Others were rotten.
I wasn’t quite sure what category I fell under yet.
“Hey,” I said to his broad back. “Um... sorry, but I’ve got to head out.”
Mal whipped around, surprise rounding out his face, and I felt a pull in my chest, knowing that if he asked me to stay, I might like to cry in his arms. They would be good arms to cry into, bigger than Ezra’s, warmer than Renata’s, his scent spicier, his hold necessarily closer. The arms of a man who was in love with me.
But Mal was respectful, and not at all selfish, and granted me the space that I had requested without fanfare. So instead,
I cried in the backseat of my Uber.
“Ummm, you good, girl?” my driver, a woman with cherry-red locs named Kayla, who I suspected might have recognized me, said.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. It was an obvious lie, given the mess I’d made of my face, but Kayla, who was making three dollars
and twenty-two cents to cart me from Bronzeville to Lincoln Park, didn’t seem in the mood to play therapist. That was just
as well. I was busy emailing the person I paid to help me process my Big Feelings, and oh, was I going to get my money’s worth.
Dear Rochelle, I typed to my therapist.
Sorry for the long disappearance! Busy busy! Anyway, wondered if you had any availabilities this week for an appointment.
Thank you,
Josephine Boateng
I received a response instantly.
I am currently out of the country from July 14 until July 23, and will have limited access to my email and phone. I appreciate your patience. If you are in crisis and need to speak to a mental health professional immediately, please call the office phone number and dial 8 to reach the on-call team. Otherwise, I will return your message when I return.
Thank you for your patience,
Rochelle Washington
Damn. There was being abandoned by your mother, and there was being abandoned by your therapist while she drank mai tais on
a beach in Malta. (Not that Rochelle going on vacation constituted abandonment. Rochelle, bless her, needed a vacation more
than the best of us.)
Luckily, I had the next best thing: Dahlia.
“You whore ,” Dahlia shouted from her bedroom, after I opened the door to our apartment. She leaped into the living room, her bangles
clashing against each other musically, short black A-line dress swishing around her thighs. It was ten thirty in the morning,
and she already looked ready for a night out. “I saw the most ridiculous couple at the Audi dealership yesterday, and I came
home all ready to make fun of them with you—seriously, nothing against sugar babies, but this guy looked like he’d just stepped
out of the crypt and the girl was definitely serving barely legal — and come to find that not only are you nowhere to be found , but you’re not even answering your texts! And at first I freaked out, but then I checked your location and there you were,
in Bronzeville, probably getting dicked down and... oh .”
Oh meaning that I looked worse than I thought. The downside of having lusciously melanated sun-soaking skin was that I could hardly ever get away with crying without leaving salt tracks on my cheeks, and the picture always made me more pitiable, like I was a child walking around sticky-faced after a meltdown. I rubbed my cheeks, and Dahlia sighed mightily, taking my bag and guiding me to our sofa by my wrists.
“Do we have to kill him?” she said, stonily.
“No.” I laughed.
“Okay, then was it bad ?” she said, looking even more horrified. “God, I hope you don’t feel like I pressured you into this. I usually have a good
read on these things, I’m so sorry if I led you astray—”
“You didn’t lead me astray,” I assured her. It was moments like this when I really appreciated Dahlia; if I’d answered in
the affirmative, she would have climbed mountains to avenge me. “And you know better than anyone that you didn’t pressure
me into anything. I’m a grown woman and I made grown woman decisions, none of which I regret.”
“Then what happened? Is sweet Writer Boy into some freaky shit? Like, does he like to make girls cry or something?”
“My mother called,” I interrupted, before Dahlia’s imagination could get any more colorful.
Shitty mothers were something Dahlia and I shared; mine absent, hers oppressive, both of us now without contact. Most of the time, I considered myself lucky—my mother had so little interest in me that the daily chance of her reaching out was close to zero—but Dahlia’s was constantly hacking at her defenses, writing diatribes about her on Facebook, convincing bewildered cousins to lend her their phones so she could chastise Dahlia for “living an ungodly lifestyle” and “abandoning her own mother when she only wanted the best for you.” Dahlia had blocked her on email, text, and all her social media outlets (including LinkedIn), but every three months or so, Dahlia would waltz through the door with a bottle of wine and a Jewel-Osco cookie cake and I would know that Cecilia Cortes had successfully slithered through another crack.
But today was a first for us, because this time it was my mother who had made an appearance.
“Oh wow,” Dahlia said. “What did she want?”
“Probably money,” I said with a shrug. “Don’t know for sure. She started with the whole at-least-I-didn’t-abort-you-when-I-had-the-chance
schtick, so I hung up before I could hear more.”
“Good girl, enforcing your boundaries,” Dahlia said. She squeezed my hand. “And don’t you dare feel guilty about it either.”
I shrugged. Not feeling guilty was easier said than done. The little girl who had once held out her report card to her mother,
hoping that she would hear more than a that’s nice , had never quite gone away, and a part of me wondered what would have happened if I had lingered on the phone longer. But
Prudence had never let me dwell for long in my delusions that she wanted to reform our relationship. What she wanted had never
been me .
“All right, that’s it,” Dahlia said. Ever energetic, she launched herself off the couch and back into her room, then reappeared
seconds later with a purse slung over her shoulder and her key fob spinning around a finger. “Get changed. We’re going for
a ride.”
Once I was suitably dressed, Dahlia led me to the parking garage, opened the passenger door to her brand-new, tags-still-on
Audi coupe, and set the map in her console to take us to the AT I’d
thrown them away alongside my old number. Girl talk was so much more fun .
“He did,” I said, tucking my lips into my teeth. “A full meal. With pancakes. And he made them from scratch .”
“From what ? You mean... like, not from a box? No Krusteaz? Bisquick? Aunt Jemima? Are you sure he didn’t just add egg and milk and
call it a day?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Like, there was baking powder involved. And buttermilk.” I settled a hand on my chin, reminiscing. “They were divine .”
Scowling, Dahlia poured herself another mimosa and downed it in three gulps.
“I guess God really does have his favorites,” she grumbled. Then she added wickedly, “Ugh. I just know he talked you through it.”
Suddenly, I was back in Mal’s bed again, dusk dyeing his white walls blue. The high points of his cheeks flushed and shining,
dark eyes half-lidded, body pressed hot and slick into mine. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you , he’d said, and I hadn’t known what to ask for, because, in that moment, I had wanted it all. Everything he had.
“That good, huh,” Dahlia said, catching my faraway stare.
“Honestly... yeah.” I clenched my thighs, feeling the ghost of him between them. “I didn’t even know it could be like that.”
“Wow. You’re sprung,” Dahlia said. “But, more importantly, sounds like he is too.”
I winced, all of my latent horniness passing like it had been blown away.
“He’s a bit more than sprung, I fear,” I confessed. When Dahlia raised her eyebrows in a question, I told her what he’d whispered
to me the next morning when he thought I was still sleeping.
Dahlia’s mouth rounded into an O.
“Oh my,” she said after a moment. Then: “How do you feel about that?”
I gave her a knowing look, and she returned it, and then we both erupted into helpless giggles. I knew Dahlia understood,
because she was just like me. Both of us battle worn, reveling in our hard-won independence. Both of us, as she’d said, as
I’d said before her, used to moving in fear.
Dahlia wagged her head, her shoulders still shaking, then raised her glass.
“Go ahead, Writer Boy, put your whole heart out there,” she said. “And for you! Cheers to new beginnings. And being brave.
And not letting our exes kill our inner goddesses.”
“I don’t have an ex,” I said, probably for the third time this week.
“Didn’t Ezra Adelman pay our doorman thousands of dollars just to ensure you picked up your apology bouquet?” Dahlia said
flippantly. “I don’t care if you weren’t sleeping together. That man is your ex.”
“Yes, but...” I sighed, already exhausted by the turn of conversation.
But before I could redirect it, a glass shattered at the bar.
Instinctively, the sparse brunch crowd in the restaurant whipped toward the sound, then lingered when they found the source:
a pretty blonde with Farrah Fawcett hair who’d managed to spill the contents of an electric blue cocktail down her ivory sheath
dress. She stood, still as a Banana Republic mannequin, in the middle of her mess, staring down at an expanding splotch on
her chest as if she were unsure how it got there.
I stared too. Even when a waiter rushed to sweep up the shattered glass, the woman didn’t move, only jolting back to life
after he tapped her on the shoulder. She laughed sheepishly, accepting his offered bundle of napkins, and stumbled back to
her seat with the jointless fluidity of someone who was totally, gloriously plastered.
“Oh Jesus,” Dahlia observed. “Someone’s having a rough morning.”
I watched the woman hoist herself back onto her stool. One of her falsies had lifted off the corner of her eye, and she peeled it off and attempted to stick it on the bartender’s forehead, and at that point I sighed mightily and made a decision.
“I know her,” I said.
I didn’t like Ashley Biernacki, but I liked the predatory way the guy a seat over was sizing her up a lot less. I kicked back
my chair with my heel and made my stand.