Though he remained very active with work, he still had small ways he let me know that I was a constant on his mind. He’d send me flowers to either my home or the café. When he was away, he mailed a postcard that had a picture of a beach in Tulum on it. He’d written ‘thinking of you’ on the back of the postcard. We talked almost every evening.
Those talks were when he would try to convince me that I had made the colossal mistake of moving back into my house. As I looked around my bedroom, a room that I typically loved, a sense of emptiness stirred in my chest.
Although my house was my sanctuary, I couldn’t ignore the empty feeling that came over me when I lay in bed at night. It was as if my body sensed that Brutus wasn’t nearby, nor were we any longer in his space, and it rebelled. I’d had more than one sleepless night in the two weeks I’d moved back in.
My phone rang, pulling me out of those thoughts. It was a video call from Carlene.
“What do you think?” I greeted before turning my head from one side to the other to show her the two different earrings I wore. I couldn’t pick which one to wear for the night.
“The studs. Definitely the diamonds.” A contemplative expression crossed her face. “The dangly ones are beautiful, but with your hair up like that, the studs show off the column of your neck more.”
“Thanks, friend.” I set the phone down on my vanity at an angle that she could still see me while I changed the other earring.
“Let me see the total fit,” she said when I again picked up the phone.
I moved back to the mirror and turned the phone around. I wore a light brown, high-waist, asymmetrical skirt paired with a cream, puffed sleeve top. I’d removed my braids a few days earlier and decided to wear my naturally kinky coils in a high puff.
“You look good enough to eat,” Carlene gushed. “I know Brutus will want to devour you tonight.”
“That’s the plan,” I joked.
Carlene frowned.
“What’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I don’t want to bring you down right before your date.”
“Talk to me,” I insisted before plopping onto my bed. I still had another fifteen minutes before Brutus would arrive.
“Jason and I went over invitations to the wedding last week.”
“Right.” I nodded. Carlene and Jason’s wedding was about six months out, and they were starting to step up their planning.
“He brought up whether or not I was going to invite my mother.”
“Ohh.” I blew out a breath. Carlene’s mother was a sore spot for her.
“Yeah.” She tutted. “Girl, I thought I’d done all of this work in therapy. I had healed or whatever they say you need to do, right? Hell, you know that even agreeing to marry Jason is a huge leap of faith for me.”
I nodded in agreement but kept silent to let her talk it out as needed.
“So, I discussed the issue with my therapist. Then I went to Jason and told him that I would invite her. He was supportive.” She paused before launching in. “I had to reach out to my uncle to track down my mother’s address. I didn’t think the right thing to do would be to send her an invite in the mail, not after three years of no contact. Instead, I called her up and asked if she was free. She was a little nasty, but I figured it was to be expected after so many years without speaking.”
A sinking feeling for my friend started to form in my belly. “What happened?”
“The same thing that always happens with that woman. First, almost as soon as I got to her house, she launched into a big ordeal about how ungrateful I was after all she’d done for me. And you know, I kind of snapped. I asked what the hell she had done for me. Don’t you know that bi—” She cut herself off. “That woman, and I’m using the term very generously, had the nerve to tell me that giving birth to me was what she’d done. That I needed to show her some damn respect because she sacrificed her body for nine months to bring me into this world.”
“That’s terrible,” I said because I knew the abuse Carlene had suffered at the hands and mouth of her mother and her mother’s boyfriends over the years.
Carlene huffed. “Like giving birth to me was some damn favor she did for me.”
I could see my friend pacing back and forth.
“What did you say? How did you respond?”
She stopped pacing. “You know, I started to tell her exactly what was on my mind. To let her know what a horrible mother she was and why I hadn’t spoken to her in years. But I didn’t. When I was about to lay into her, a calm came over me. My therapist’s voice popped into my head and reminded me that my mother was an imperfect human who probably couldn’t comprehend how she hurt me. Then I remembered how old she was when she had me. She was only fourteen.”
I blinked because I never knew her mother was that young.
