My eyes rolled toward the ceiling even though he couldn’t see them. “I’m not doing this with you.” I prepared to end the call.
“I don’t appreciate the fact that you went and filed on me. Seems to me like you were just looking for the opportunity to get out of this thing.”
“Stop trying to gaslight me, Xander. I don’t have the energy or the mental bandwidth to wade through your bullshit right now. I’m busy dealing with my grief! I?—”
He cut me off. “I hope you drown in it, you stupid bitch!”
Then there was nothing but dead air.
Perkins found me in the bedroom I’d claimed. “You okay?”
Somewhere in the recesses of my logical mind, I knew that the things Xander had said to me should make me angry. Livid even. But feelings and emotions were luxuries I didn’t have. It took energy to argue and cuss people out. It took every ounce of energy I had to get myself out of bed each morning. I had nothing for Xander or his temper tantrum. “Ugh. As if I don’t have enough to deal with. Here he comes with his . . . theatrics. Now, he’s pretending like me filing the divorce papers came out of nowhere.” I took a deep breath. “I guess he thought that I was gonna let him play in my face and take his sweet time deciding whether to file or not.”
“Well, the joke’s on him.”
“Yeah,” I said with a sigh.
She sat down on the window seat while I perched on the wobbly white chair that was pushed up to the desk. “Bailey Boo.”
My heart immediately softened when she called me by my familial nickname.
“I know how important your marriage is to you,” she continued.
She was right. My marriage was important to me. “Well, when you’re raised by a single mother with four daughters by four different men, the thought of marriage hits different.”
“I know.”
“I know Mom was doing her best, but some of her choices, Perk.”
“I know,” she repeated.
“Giving us our dad’s last names as first names? What the hell was that?”
She laughed aloud. “You need to shut up, because of the four of us, you won the war of names. Bailey actually makes sense as a last name and a first name. Perkins and Collins? Not so much. And poor little Church. She didn’t stand a chance.”
We laughed together and it felt good to laugh from way down deep in my stomach.
“Thank God none of those dudes had the last name Dix or Cox,” she joked.
I laughed more. “Or what if they had colors for last names? One or two of us could’ve ended up being named Brown Kingsley or White Kingsley.”
“Or Black Kingsley.”
I shook my head. “And she thought that was a cute idea.”
“Like you said, she was doing her best. She was young, single, stressed out, and surviving. She was trying to give us a permanent connection to our dads, even though they didn’t want a permanent connection to her.”
“Yeah. I’m not mad at her or anything. I just realized that her choices had an impact. I love Mama. I love that woman so much. I just really didn’t want to be like her. The way she struggled with us?—”
“You don’t have to tell me. I followed right in her footsteps,” she confessed. “I mean, I didn’t name my girls after their dad. They all have the same father, so that would’ve been weird.”
We cracked up again.
“Plus, his last name is Bishop. Girls named Bishop 1, Bishop 2, and Bishop 3?”
We could not pull it together with the laughter.
“You did the normal thing and gave them his last name as a last name. That’s normal, Perkins.”
