Man, that ballplayer is something else.
He’s still living inside of her from however many miles away in New York, but that’s how men like him are. It’s like they fusetheir brains to their women’s brains, and it’s almost impossible to pull them apart.
I swipe my moist hands down the sides of my shorts to stop them from reaching out for her.
“Look at me,” I mutter.
She shakes her head as a lanky egret waddles from the creek and through the brush at the end of the road. Her eyes follow its white body. I stoop to her level, and our eyes meet just as it flies toward the sky. She tries to look away from me, but every time her eyes dart one way, mine follow them until she’s got no choice but to look into them.
“I don’t hit women,” I whisper matter-of-factly. “I pay their bills when they can’t. I feed them and their kids when they’re hungry. I listen to them complain about their niggas. And I fuck them when they’re lonely. But I don’t hit ‘em. So ain’t no reason for you to be scared of me. You understand?”
Her body goes stiff until she nods, and my shoulders droop like it’s me hiding from some stupid man that can’t keep his hands to himself.
“This the first time you left?” I ask.
I shouldn’t have asked that either, but it came out like every other question comes out with her. They just slide out no matter how bad I want them to stay in.
“No, but it’s the first time I got away.”
My stomach tightens.
“So does he know where you at?” I ask.
“Maybe. It wasn’t very smart of me to come back home. The agency that helped me was trying to send me off to Colorado because of who he is and the access he has, but I don’t know anybody there and I couldn’t do it again.”
“Do what again?”
“Be somewhere else alone because of him. So I…I came home to put myself back together.”
It all pours out of her mouth in a garble like he’d taken his time and broken her into little bitty pieces.
“So what you gon’ do?” I ask.
“About what?”
“When he comes back into your life while you putting yourself back together?”
She shakes her head. “I did the one thing he said I couldn’t do—I left. I think he’s done with me. He has Kenny and Faye’s numbers, and he hasn’t even bothered to call.”
“Men like him don’t just let women like you get up and walk away to ‘put yourselves back together’ after they break you, but I think you know that.”
She belts out a bitter laugh. “You don’t believe in sugarcoating anything, do you?”
“Ain’t no use in pouring sugar over shit.”
She laughs again, swiping a stray tear from her cheek with her shoulder. “Faye said that all the time when I was little. She told you that before or something?”
“Nah…my ole’ man did.”
She pinches her eyes shut. “I don’t even get a ‘congratulations on leaving’ or…or a ‘you did the right thing’?”
I shrug. “If that’s what you want, I’ll give you that.”
“Why do I feel like your dad says that too?”
“Because he does.”
She laughs, eyeing the road.
