She didn’t argue with that. Which told me everything.
We stayed on the phone for another while after that. Talked about smaller things, nothing significant, just the rhythm of two people who had gotten comfortable with each other’s voices. She told me about a situation at the Houston office she had to handle remotely. I told her about a deal I was working through with Deuce on some investments.
She asked about Raja and I told her Raja was good, doing better than she had been when she first arrived, that being around Malani and the babies had done something for her that nothing else had managed to do.
“She’s going to hate me,” Ivy said. “After the parking lot.”
“She doesn’t hate you. She does think you’re crazy though.”
“I came at her wrong. Send my apologies.”
“She understood it. She said she wasn’t even mad, just that there was a better way to go about it.”
“There was a much better way to go about it,” Ivy said. “I just—” She stopped. “I heard that woman laughing and I heard my dog and something just left my body.”
“I know. Shit, you got that dog in you too. I joked.
“I’ve never done anything like that. I haven’t had a real fight since high school.”
“It showed,” I said. “You was about to get your ass beat. I didn’t know what to do.” I laughed.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m just saying your technique needed some work.”
“My technique—” She cut herself off and I heard her try not to laugh and fail. “You are the worst.”
“You were about to fight a woman in a PetSmart parking lot over a dog and a man that technically—”
“Don’t say technically wasn’t mine. Don’t say that.”
I smiled. “I wasn’t going to say that.”
“You were absolutely going to say that.”
“Go handle your business Ivy.”
She got quiet again. The easy quiet this time, not the heavy one. “Okay,” she said. Just that. Small and real.
“Call me when it’s done.”
“Okay.”
“And Ivy.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re making the right call. Not because of me. Because you already know you are. That lame ass nigga, and that boring ass life would have never been what you truly wanted.”
She didn’t say anything for a second.
Then, “I know.”
We hung up and I sat on that patio for a while after with my cold coffee and Goldie eventually came and put her head on my knee and I sat there scratching her ears thinking about all the ways a man’s life could turn in directions he never mapped out.
Three weeks ago I was getting pulled out of a chair in a warehouse by a man I had come to call a brother. My brotherswere somewhere out there living with the decisions we had all made. I had a business to run and a position to hold and enough weight on my back on any given day to flatten most people.
And I was sitting here on a Tuesday morning thinking about a woman with red curly hair and too much mouth who was about to walk away from a good life to come home to mine.
