“She’s gorgeous, man. Congrats.”
"I know. I'm excited." He grinned, but then his smile faded. "We were waiting for ages for her student visa to get approved. Bryce was good enough to call in a few favors for us. For some reason I can't put my brown finger on, her application was taking a lot longer to process than mine did eight years ago." He let out a mirthless chuckle that I returned in understanding, and he stood to leave, tucking my envelope under his arm. "You might want to think about settling down yourself." He tapped me on the shoulder. "Now that you've got a kid and all."
My parents have been together for almost thirty years and got engaged after a couple weeks of dating. My mom's also a psychiatrist, so she'd probably do a decent job of finding me a wife if I could ever stop thinking about my neighbor.
I also thought of the weird coincidence of never seeing Lisa after living next door for months, then meeting her the night Crystal died and wondered if it meant anything.
cole
eight
My first weekback was rough. I was still exhausted all the time, but the kid and I were settling into a routine. I couldn’t work the long days that I usually did because the daycare closed at seven, so I found myself bringing work home more often and staying up after CJ went to bed.
Friday night, I bumped the stroller up the stairs and pushed it into the foyer and was greeted by a clean house. The faint odor of dirty diapers was absent, and I could smell food, hot food. There were only two people who could have been responsible for this miracle, and I knew one of them was in Barbados.
“Mom?” I called out.
“In the kitchen, baby.”
I dropped my bag, kicked off my shoes, grabbed CJ, and walked into the kitchen to find my mother wiping down the stove. She loaded a plate with collard greens, candied yams, and sliced turkey with biscuits and placed it on the island. I grabbed a biscuit and shoved it into my mouth whole, but I wasn't fast enough to avoid getting popped on the hand with her spoon.
“Boy, if you don’t wash your hands…”
“I’m going,” I said through a mouthful of biscuit, planting a kiss on her cheek on my way to the kitchen sink.
Five minutes later, I was shoveling food into my mouth like it was my last meal. Mom filled the kitchen sink to give CJ a bath while he worked on a small pile of mashed yams. He was mostly smearing them around the tray of his high chair with his hands. Some of them made it to his mouth.
“You’re gonna bathe him in the kitchen sink?” I asked, gulping down my second glass of iced tea.
"I bathed you in the sink, and you were barely older than him." She laughed, and her smile faded. "Honey, how are you holding up?"
"Fine. You know." I sighed. "It's a big adjustment. I need to get into a rhythm." I was lying through my teeth. I was not fine. It didn't hit me how not fine I was until I was face to face with my mother, the person I always depended on to fix whatever was not fine in my life. I was burning out and unsure how long I could keep this up. This wasn't something I was going to admit, but I had a sense I didn't have to.
“We have not seen hide nor hair of you all week. You don’t answer your phone. All I get from you is the occasional text message.”
“Sorry, Ma. I’ve just been busy with work and CJ.”
"And why are you back at work? I thought you had six weeks’ paid leave."
“I did, but I didn’t want to fall behind. It’s like a shark tank. You can’t show weakness. Dad would understand.”
"Oh," she said in a clipped tone, which let me know I'd fucked up. She wrapped CJ in a towel and lifted him out of the sink. "You think I don't understand what's going on here?" She perched CJ on her hip with one hand, and with the other hand, pointed at me, making a circling gesture. "I understand better than you know. Because, as a psychiatrist with not one but—“
Two Ph.D.s, I thought to myself, knowing it was coming.
“—two Ph.D.s. It is literally my job to know, and as yourdad’swife, I watched him go through the same thing when he started at Hollander and Cameron. The difference was your father was already a practicing attorney for five years. He had a wife, multiple streams of income, and, most of all, he had help. You are trying to do this all on your own, and you've just lost a mother."
I looked at her, then down at my plate. I'd almost forgotten about Crystal. Forgotten isn't the right word. She was always buzzing around somewhere in my brain. Sometimes the buzzing was too loud to ignore, and sometimes she just hovered in the background, barely perceptible while I focused on other issues.
"I'm gonna put the baby down, and then you and I are gonna have a talk."
Twenty minutes later, Mom came back downstairs. She started tidying the kitchen, and I helped. Finally, I collapsed on my couch, and she sat beside me.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“You're welcome, baby.” She sighed. “So, how are you, really?”
“Honestly, I don’t know.”
