Chapter 1
Rose
Some days, you wake up, and you’re supposed to feel different, but you don’t.
Take, for example, your birthday, your anniversary, the first day of the year.
You want to be excited, but it’s just another day, like all the days before it.
I mean, it’s definitely a blessing that most of the days in my fifty-nine years of life were just normal.
No big, huge, breath-snatching tragedies, unless you count the day my husband left me for another woman, which I do not count as a tragedy because the truth is: my husband wanted a wife, but he didn’t want to be a husband.
Kind of like when you want to be fit, but you don’t actually want to be one of those exercise-y people.
And you want to eat dessert every night.
Dessert is good. So are wives. Really, who wouldn’t want a wife? Somebody tending to hearth and home, somebody society says should be loyal, faithful, and respectful to you? Shoot, I want a wife, myself.
I know the ideal is for men to reciprocate for women.
But that’s not the everyday reality—especially not the faithful part, because we have an actual dictionary-word for a husband’s other woman.
Right there between “mistreat” and “mistrial” lies the word “mistress.” Wives, however, don’t have a word for our “other” man in the entire English language.
I’m not advocating for us to have a cheat-word.
I’m just saying us not having one declares, “It’s so unacceptable for a woman to do this, we ain’t makin’ a word for it, ma’am. ”
Maybe our word could be misteress?
Anyway. David leaving me was not tragic, nor was it unexpected.
Neither was my retirement day. Except it actually was a pivotal day, marking a line in my life’s sand.
That morning, I got up, washed with my winter vanilla bean–scented scrub, whipped the bonnet off my head, moisturized my platinum-blond kinks, and let them point wherever they pleased.
I pulled, zipped, buttoned, and buckled my uniform into place.
The light-blue short-sleeve knit shirt bore the United States Postal Service logo, a white eagle on a darker blue square.
How many times had I caught sight of this patch out of the corner of my eye and thought, “Is that a spot? No, it’s the eagle. ”
I took one last look in my bathroom mirror and, mentally blocking out the bottles of beautifying potions strewn across my countertop, gave myself a once-over.
Not bad for fifty-nine and retired. Not bad at all.
I had beat the system a little by dyeing my short Afro blond before the gray could claim victory.
My waistline was still present, aided by a standard-issue leather belt.
Okay, the waist got exaggerated by the belt, but I was still glad to own one.
That belt was the only “sexy” thing in my wardrobe, if one could count a black garrison belt as “sexy.” My fashion preferences and penchant for jewelry died soon after I started working for the government.
What hadn’t suffered was my smooth, barely wrinkled skin.
It brought plenty of speculation from strangers.
I could tell by their age-related questioning. “Do you have kids? Or grand—”
I’d shake my head before they could finish, not offering an explanation. In my thirties and forties, the question about children gut-punched me every time. David and I never had children. We couldn’t. Actually, I couldn’t.
People need to mind their own business.
I slid balm across my full lips and gave them a solid smack. I smiled at myself. My dimples winked back. It was time to go to work one last time.
After warming up a frozen frittata and pouring coffee into a thermos, I breezed past the refrigerator and headed toward the garage door.
I’m not sure exactly what happened, but somehow my knee caught the corner of the wall, and I swear it felt like an ax whomped my left kneecap.
Glass broke. Time collapsed. I dropped the thermos and grabbed my knee, as though holding it would relieve the pain that became my entire existence in an instant.
Somehow—I must have hopped?—I made it to a chair in my dinette and sat, rocking back and forth, as I rubbed the throbbing knee with both hands.
That’s when I saw the picture of Momma on the floor.
The glass protecting her airbrushed photo had split in three places, but her dark, beautiful face wasn’t scratched.
I’d get another frame. A better one, which was something I’d been meaning to do, anyway.
Momma deserved to be remembered in something more than a cheap certificate holder moonlighting as a frame.
The thought that I’d be late to work tried to enter my consciousness. I was too busy rocking my knee and thinking about my mother. Besides, I’d been late to work before. What could they do to me today?
Ten minutes later, I’d recovered enough to free Momma from the broken glass and attempt to reset her picture in the frame.
That’s when I saw the words written on back of her photo.
My Rose, Keep God first, family second, and you will bloom into all your dreams coming true.
If memory served correctly, my sister had given me the picture, already mounted inside the frame.
So I had never seen these words before. It was a good thing I’d never seen Momma’s handwriting, her demands, the promise she didn’t have the authority to make, on the back of her picture.
For the thousandth time, I disagreed with my mother. I laid the picture and the frame on the dining table, unassembled. No time to ponder her presumptuous words.
I hobbled into my car and drove the seven miles from my home to the post office, something I had done for the previous fifteen years.
Before then, I had driven twelve miles, back when I lived in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas.
After the divorce, I moved into a smaller place and prayed I wouldn’t get relocated due to all the cutbacks.
My prayers were answered. I’d remained at the closest post office most of my thirty-one-year career with the United States Postal Service.
Traveling the familiar—dare I say mundane—route to work, I wondered for the first time if I should have prayed that prayer to stay at the post office.
Not just the location, the job itself. What if I’d gotten laid off, fired, or forced into early retirement?
Would my desperation have driven me toward a different destiny?
Bloom into all your dreams coming true.
There’s no way to change the past. I let the idea flitter out of my brain again as I pressed my badge against the sensor and entered the employee parking lot for the last time. I settled back into the heated seat of my five-year-old Honda SUV and watched the gate slide to the right.
Hmph. Appropriate. Been waiting all my life for an open gate.
The gate seemed more rickety, slower than it had ever been. Why hasn’t somebody fixed or upgraded it in all these years? Surely the technology existed.
Yet I idled as I had done countless times, sitting in this identical spot behind the steering wheel of four different cars over the years.
My knee still aching. Waiting for the gate to open.
Wondering about the past and the future.
What could have been if I hadn’t spent the previous thirty years playing it safe with this good government job?
What lay ahead of me without it? I hadn’t envisioned myself after employment until that very morning.
I had put off thinking about my future, fearful that I might find more of what I’d accomplished lay in the past. Nothing significant.
Nothing worth filling a book, a diary, or even an interesting conversation.
A burst of heat reminiscent of perimenopause flashed over me. Anxiety wormed through my veins. I couldn’t delay this internal conversation any longer. Today was my retirement day. The beginning or the end—or both.