But she’d embarrassed herself enough by letting that joker kiss on her and use her for a free haircut on top of that. She stayed where she stood.
So many times she would see all those gorgeous black men in their fancy designer suits walking to their fancy corporate jobs with their briefcases and covered coffee mugs and she’d try to smile at them and be polite to them but they wouldn’t give her the time of day. It was as if they knew they wanted a sister to share in their success, but she had to be as successful as they were. She had to be on their level. They always looked at Ricki as if she was nowhere near it. And neverwould be. Leaving her the Byrons of this world to ease her deferred dreams.
But she was done settling, she thought as she began cleaning up his mess.
She was done.
CHAPTER TWO
It was the day after his divorce was final. The very morning after. But why was he still feeling so uneven? Why did he feel as if he still had a ball and chain to drag around?
He stood at his floor-to-ceiling window in his massive penthouse apartment at the Watergate, and looked out over Foggy Bottom. With a cup of coffee in one hand and his other hand buried deep inside of his suitcoat pocket, he was a man who still felt unmoored. Adrift. A divorce from was a bitch like Cynthia should have been a feeling of triumph. A freeing. But although he celebrated last night with his group of friends, and even managed to get himself pissy-drunk, that euphoria didn’t last. That triumph wasn’t as long as a nightcap.
Not because he regretted getting rid of Cynthia. It was good-riddance as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t wait to get rid of Cynthia and her gold-digging ass. But maybe because it wasn’t his first rodeo. She was divorce number three after all. Three hits. Three misses. Maybe it was just old to him now.
He felt old himself. A week ago he turned forty. The big Four-0. No wife. No kids. No life. At least not the one he had envisioned. Work was all he had. Work and money. Neither of which had any capability whatsoever to warm his lonely soul at night.
Not that he was some eunuch. He was nowhere near it. But as far as a committed relationship of any kind? That was over.
Not that his women friends agreed. They were blowing up his phone already. He picked up his phone and looked at themissed calls. From Cecily to Gwendolyn to Amber and Ashley, they all had dreams of being Mrs. Vincent Fontaine number four. But they were wasting their time. There was never going to be a number four. They could rest assured of that. No wife. No kids. No life. That was his fate and he was going to embrace it.
But as he took another sip of his coffee and looked out over the whole of Washington, D.C. where he could see the top of Fontaine-Bachman, his skyscraper of an office building, the fact that his heart’s desire was never going to come true felt almost debilitating. It felt like such a letdown.
“Sir?”
It was his butler.
“Yes?”
“You told me to remind you of the time. It’s time to leave, sir.”
Time to go to more meetings and more discussions and more disagreements and more, more, more.
“Tell Jason to bring the limo around. I’ll be right down,” he said as he made his way to the kitchen to pour out his remaining coffee. And he felt like T.S. Eliot’sJ. Alfred Prufrock: For he, too, hadmeasured out his life with coffee spoons. Nothing grand for him anymore. Nothing substantive. Just the motion of life without living.
That was him.
But at least he was rid of Cynthia.
That was him too.
He smiled at that sweet fact as he made his way to the exit.
CHAPTER THREE
Three Months Later
Rise and shine boys and girls, rise and shine. Get up, get up, get up. Time for you to get your asses up! And don’t forget to bathe them butts. Nobody wanna smell that! And don’t forget to brush them teeth. Nobody wanna smell that! Get up, get up, get up. And once your asses finally get up: Good morning!
Ricki heard that same wakeup call blare out over her phone every single morning, and she always woke up. Even though she didn’t have to be to work for another five hours (she worked from noon to nine at the salon), she volunteered at a homeless shelter a few mornings per week. And even on the mornings when she didn’t volunteer, she always got up by seven anyway. She was a creature of habit.
But as she sat on the edge of her bed, still trying to fully wake up, her head was already spinning. She listened to that same DJ go on and on about what Trump was up to now and what the Congress was letting him get away with and which one of his enemies he was indicting this time and all of those ICE raids in all of those American cities and the high cost of groceries nobody was talking about and Ukraine and Russia and the chaos and the confusion and on and on and on until she couldn’t take it anymore and turned it off! It felt like a drag on her promise to only embrace positivity in her life this year, and she refused to entertain that drag.
She, instead, dragged herself to the toilet. Then to the sink to wash her hands. And then she got into the shower where Calgon took her away if only for those quick fifteen minutes it took her to bathe.
When she got out of the shower, she removed the shower cap and looked at the reflection staring back at her in the mirror over the sink. Although she knew nobody on the face of this earth gave a damn, she wasn’t going to let that stop her from acknowledging it to herself at least. Because today was her birthday. She was the big three-0minus one, as her boss Geraldine would say.
But as she stared at herself in that mirror, it wasn’t a pleasant feeling to be twenty-nine years old and still struggling like she was a teenager. Still living paycheck to paycheck. Still trying to make those stubborn ends meet when they weren’t even in the same city.
