She blushed and tucked some unruly strands of hair behind her ear. “Okay,” she muttered.
When the food was ready, we took our plates to her small table. We blessed it, then dug in.
“I got a question for you.”
“What is it?”
“We have a game on Thanksgiving. We’re playing the Leopards in Londynville. I’m kinda hoping you’ll come home with me. Come to the game, come to Thanksgiving dinner. We’re actually having dinner on Wednesday, since my whole family will be at the game on Thursday.”
“My mom—” she began, but I cut her off.
“Your mom is welcome to come. I know y’all are a package deal.”
She gave me a small smile. “Thanks for thinking of and including my mom. That’s why she likes you so much.”
I chuckled.
“But what I was gonna say,” she continued, “is that my mom is hosting Thanksgiving at her house this year. Everybody’s coming over there.”
“So, you need to be there?” I concluded.
“I’m not sure. Let me talk to her.” She sighed heavily. “She invited my ex, the one I was gonna marry, and I’m not sure if I’m ready to see him. I haven’t seen him in, like, four years. And the last time we spoke, . . . it wasn’t good.”
“Wasn’t good how?”
“Remember I told you that he developed some mental health issues?”
I nodded.
“Well, I tried to stay with him at first and support him. I mean, he was my best friend and my man. I didn’t want him to feel like I would drop him just because things got dicey. But he was so angry at the world. He was angry at his brain, angry at his mind, his body. Channing is brilliant. He was always academically successful. Only person in our entire high school to get a perfect score on the national standardized test. He had scholarship offers and acceptances from every university you could think of. His brain power was everything to him. For him to be told that something was going on with his mental? With his brain? He couldn’t accept that. He got pissed. I was his woman. We lived together. Guess who he took that anger out on.”
I sat up straighter in my chair. I was about to have to fuck up somebody with mental health challenges. The shit sounded wrong, but I didn’t give a damn. “He put his hands on you?”
“Not his hands. His words. Verbal abuse. Mental abuse. Emotional abuse. I was his punching bag. I was dying on the inside, but I didn’t want to tell anybody. It was Channing. I lovedhim. I wanted to protect him and protect myself from him at the same time. But that was like, I don’t know, an oxymoron. I couldn’t have it both ways.
“The last time I saw him, he’d had an episode at work. He exploded on one of his co-workers. He checked himself into the hospital. They admitted him on the psych floor, and he didn’t want to be there. He begged me to try to get him released. For the first time, I admitted that I couldn’t handle his illness. I called his mother. He was pissed. He cursed me out. Berated me. Made me feel small. When she made the decision to move him back home, I breathed for the first time since the ordeal started.”
“Damn, baby. And you were how old going through this?”
“Twenty-five. Twenty-six.” She inhaled and exhaled. “I’m getting worked up just thinking about it.” She fluttered her hands and took a few more breaths. “Everything went bad so quick. I mean, one minute we were the love of each other’s lives, and the next, we were . . . nothing to each other. We’ve never spoken since that day. We’ve never seen each other since that day. My mother said he has a new lady. She’ll be at Thanksgiving with him.”
“Does that bother you?”
Her eyes flew up from her plate and found mine. “Hell no. When my mother told me he had a lady friend, the very first thought that popped into my mind was,he’s her problem now.”
“Okay.”
She took one last deep breath. “Going to the game with you might be exactly the excuse I need not to have to be in the same room as Channing. Let me think about it.”
