Chapter 17 Monique #2
“Chickie, from my support group. She’s been in hospice for weeks, but…” Monique’s voice cracked. “She kept fighting, kept showing up. It’s almost over now.”
“Oh honey,” Deb said, rushing forward as fast as her body could manage. Cassie was right beside her. “I’m so sorry.” Her hand rubbed Monique’s back.
“You going home?” Cassie asked, holding her hand.
Monique shook her head. “She made me promise not to. Threatened to haunt me if I did.”
Nervous laughter poked through the tense quiet.
“That’s good, right?” Lanie tried. “That she wants you to stay and enjoy—”
“Enjoy what?” The absurdity of it all barreled at her.
Nobody said anything, but Lanie reached for her. Monique took a step back. “That girl is twenty-eight and finna die. And you want me to do what?”
The edges of her vision darkened. Breathe…
“Monique Renee,” Don said, her voice full of warning.
“You don’t get to pull rank on me. Not anymore.” She turned to her father’s sister. “Where were you?”
Don took a step back. “Deb, she—”
“You sent her to do what you should have. You’re my blood. Not Deb. The last bit of my daddy that I have left in this world. And you weren’t there when I was trying to stay alive. When I woke up alone after nights that I thought would be my last.”
Cassie pressed a warm, steady hand on Monique’s forearm. “Maybe we should—”
Monique’s hard, heartbroken eyes moved from Cassie’s concerned face to her hand on her arm, and she shook her head. Cassie let go.
“Monie, sweetie,” Deb said, pleading. “We did our best.”
“Did you, Auntie Deb? Really? ’Cause from where I sit, it looks like you were in town making deals and remembered that I was still here.”
Deb’s tawny skin flamed red. “Now, that’s not fair.”
“No. It’s not.” Monique’s voice got louder. “Even when you’d pop up, you couldn’t bother to sit with me. Yeah, you filled my fridge. You and Avery would fix shit, and then you’d disappear again.”
Her eyes were wild. “And this?” Monique gestured. “This whole thing with Maurice. It’s vile. What did you think would happen? You’d parade him in front of your sickly niece, see if we both were so desperate that we’d take the bait?”
Everyone stood in silence.
Deb finally said, “We hoped that you’d connect, but we never—”
“What? Never tried to manipulate us? Never treated me like a project to fix? Both of us?” Her voice broke.
“My friend is dying, and I’m here being told to pretend that I’m happy, that I believe in love and second chances and all that when I’m scared out of my mind that I’ll never get a taste of it for myself. Not for real, anyway.”
Lanie reached for her again, and Monique pulled away.
“I can’t be here right now. Not in all this fakery. This place reeks of money and bullshit. It’s making me sick to my stomach.”
Don was full-out crying, sobbing at Deb’s side. Cassie and Sunny stood with sympathetic expressions and watery eyes. Monique didn’t need nor want their pity. She’d had enough to last a thousand lifetimes.
“Act like I was never here,” she said, walking toward the door. “Y’all got plenty of practice.”
She walked out.
Behind her, voices, concerned and crying, called her name. She kept walking.
She went even farther, past the reception desk, where that young woman from a few days ago stood in a crisp uniform and smiled like nothing was wrong. Past the gardens that she once thought were a gateway to somewhere magical.
Disoriented, just like when she first arrived, Monique stepped out onto the cobblestone street. Uneven, precarious. She just kept walking.
Walked past buildings painted in pastels that the sun had faded to something gentler—coral and butter yellow and a blue that might have been robin’s egg once but now looked like the sky after a storm.
Tourist shops with their doors open and salsa music spilling out.
Past an old woman sweeping her stoop. Past two men playing dominoes on a plastic table, the clack of the tiles sharp in the afternoon heat, striking her ears at a different register that made her flinch.
She walked past life happening. Regular life. The kind where people woke up, did their jobs, and loved each other, or didn’t but still kept going anyway. And Monique walked past it all like a ghost. Like she wasn’t really there.
Like she’d already left.
The streets narrowed and the buildings seemed to get older the closer Monique moved toward the water.
Local life spilled from the homes around her, thick walls and small, deep-set windows, laundry dangling from balconies, cats sleeping in doorways.
The scent of something cooking teased her nose and excited her stomach.
It was early afternoon on New Year’s Eve, and the streets were quiet with that in-between time when morning had been spent and evening hadn’t begun.
The wind pushed through the narrow stone street whose sidewalks were barely wide enough for one.
The breeze left a symphony in its wake, pushing against tin signs and stone posts, rattling puka shells suspended on jute strings against brass bells that mingled between them.
Shutters softly clacked and flags and tapestries cracked at the disruption.
She felt it too, the sudden comfort and encouragement in the wind’s song.
A voice came from somewhere beside her. Monique hadn’t noticed that she’d stopped walking, nor that she’d brought her hand up and was stroking the peeling paint on an ancient brick archway.
She looked down. A Dutch door, and the top half was opened like a service counter. An older Black woman, whose brown skin had a story for every wrinkle, stood waiting.
“Hola,” the woman said with the enunciation of someone who had learned the language like she had—through experience. “You like?”
Monique nodded.
The woman stepped back and opened the lower half of the door, beckoning her inside.
Monique hesitated. Girl, you don’t know what’s down that corridor. That damn board in her head chose now to chime in and press her to be a reasonable adult.
But this wasn’t the week to be reasonable.
She stepped inside. The doorway led to a covered walkway with thick, rustic wooden beams overhead wrapped in vines dotted with purple flowers.
The walls were a series of archways leading deeper into the building.
Through one archway, she could see what might have been a dining room.
Through another, a courtyard where two people sat silent and close, shelling something at a low table.
The woman walked ahead with a curve in her spine that only age could create.
Monique followed, past walls covered in portraits—generations of faces.
Black-and-white photographs fading to sepia.
Color prints with the distinct red saturation of the seventies.
More recent glossy pictures of children and grandchildren that Monique knew could only have been taken with digital cameras.
“What is this place?” Monique asked, her voice full of wonder.
“Home,” the woman said, turning to her with a satisfied smile. “Mi esposo—mi corazon—loved me and the sea.” She gestured toward the portraits and led them out to a terrace and to worn tables and chairs, evidence of decades of meals, conversations… proof of life.
“This is…” Monique sucked in a long breath that she only realized after she’d let it out was cleansing. The saltwater-rich air provided recalibration. Or better yet, a reminder of what mattered. This place vibrated with remembering.