I am currently out of the country from July 14 until July 23, and will have limited access to my email and phone. I appreciate your patience. If you are in crisis and need to speak to a mental health professional immediately, please call the office phone number and dial 8 to reach the on-call team. Otherwise, I will return your message when I return.
Thank you for your patience,
Rochelle Washington
Damn. There was being abandoned by your mother, and there was being abandoned by your therapist while she drank mai tais on a beach in Malta. (Not that Rochelle going on vacation constituted abandonment. Rochelle, bless her, needed a vacation more than the best of us.)
Luckily, I had the next best thing: Dahlia.
“Youwhore,” Dahlia shouted from her bedroom, after I opened the door to our apartment. She leaped into the living room, her bangles clashing against each other musically, short black A-line dress swishing around her thighs. It was ten thirty in the morning, and she already looked ready for a night out. “I saw the most ridiculous couple at the Audi dealership yesterday, and I came home all ready to make fun of them with you—seriously, nothing against sugar babies, but this guy looked like he’d just stepped out of the crypt and the girl was definitely serving barely legal—and come to find that not only are younowhere to be found, but you’re not even answering your texts! And at first I freaked out, but then I checked your location and there you were, in Bronzeville, probably getting dicked down and...oh.”
Ohmeaning that I looked worse than I thought. The downside of having lusciously melanated sun-soaking skin was that I could hardly ever get away with crying without leaving salt tracks on my cheeks, and the picture always made me more pitiable, like I was achild walking around sticky-faced after a meltdown. I rubbed my cheeks, and Dahlia sighed mightily, taking my bag and guiding me to our sofa by my wrists.
“Do we have to kill him?” she said, stonily.
“No.” I laughed.
“Okay, then was itbad?” she said, looking even more horrified. “God, I hope you don’t feel like I pressured you into this. I usually have a good read on these things, I’m so sorry if I led you astray—”
“You didn’t lead me astray,” I assured her. It was moments like this when I really appreciated Dahlia; if I’d answered in the affirmative, she would have climbed mountains to avenge me. “And you know better than anyone that you didn’t pressure me into anything. I’m a grown woman and I made grown woman decisions, none of which I regret.”
“Then what happened? Is sweet Writer Boy into some freaky shit? Like, does he like to make girls cry or something?”
“My mother called,” I interrupted, before Dahlia’s imagination could get any more colorful.
Shitty mothers were something Dahlia and I shared; mine absent, hers oppressive, both of us now without contact. Most of the time, I considered myself lucky—my mother had so little interest in me that the daily chance of her reaching out was close to zero—but Dahlia’s was constantly hacking at her defenses, writing diatribes about her on Facebook, convincing bewildered cousins to lend her their phones so she could chastise Dahlia for “living an ungodly lifestyle” and “abandoning her own mother when she only wanted the best for you.” Dahlia had blocked her on email, text, and all her social media outlets (including LinkedIn), but every three months or so, Dahlia would waltz through the doorwith a bottle of wine and a Jewel-Osco cookie cake and I would know that Cecilia Cortes had successfully slithered through another crack.
But today was a first for us, because this time it wasmymother who had made an appearance.
“Oh wow,” Dahlia said. “What did she want?”
“Probably money,” I said with a shrug. “Don’t know for sure. She started with the whole at-least-I-didn’t-abort-you-when-I-had-the-chance schtick, so I hung up before I could hear more.”
“Good girl, enforcing your boundaries,” Dahlia said. She squeezed my hand. “And don’t you dare feel guilty about it either.”
I shrugged. Not feeling guilty was easier said than done. The little girl who had once held out her report card to her mother, hoping that she would hear more than athat’s nice, had never quite gone away, and a part of me wondered what would have happened if I had lingered on the phone longer. But Prudence had never let me dwell for long in my delusions that she wanted to reform our relationship. What she wanted had never beenme.
“All right, that’s it,” Dahlia said. Ever energetic, she launched herself off the couch and back into her room, then reappeared seconds later with a purse slung over her shoulder and her key fob spinning around a finger. “Get changed. We’re going for a ride.”
Once I was suitably dressed, Dahlia led me to the parking garage, opened the passenger door to her brand-new, tags-still-on Audi coupe, and set the map in her console to take us to the AT&T service store.
“It’s beautiful, girl,” I said, admiring the sleek dashboard. “Damn.”
“Listen, you’ve got to get into travel medicine,” she said. “Sure,you’ve got to go live in bumfuck for a few weeks, and the work is tough... but the pay? The check is fat for us nurses, so I can’t imagine what they’re giving doctors.”
“Maybe,” I said, noncommittal. I had about a hundred emails from recruiters from small towns across America, offering five-figure paychecks for ten-day hospitalist contracts in desperately underserved areas, that I’d yet to respond to. It felt wrong, to turn my nose up at the very money I’d busted my ass in school to someday earn, but I still wasn’t ready to go back.One crisis at a time, I reminded myself. “I’m proud of you.”
Dahlia beamed. When we first met, online of all places, I’d been impressed by how free she’d seemed in her posts, how untethered she was by traditional concepts ofprofessionalism. Her perspectives as a nurse in the intensive care unit gave me insight into aspects of health care administration I’d largely been shielded from as a resident physician, and her quippy skits on patient care regularly made me belly laugh through my shifts. When she went dark, during what I later found out was her tumultuous divorce, I reached out to ask whether she was okay. Dahlia had responded truthfully. She needed a place to stay, and fast, the kind of charity she’d never thought she’d have to ask of a stranger.
Offering her my spare bedroom while she got back on her feet had seemed foolhardy at first. But when Dahlia had shown up on my doorstep, with a brand-new platinum-blond buzz cut, septum piercing, and the beginnings of a sleeve tattoo that she definitely hadn’t had a month before, I’d sensed that I’d made one of the better decisions of my life.
And now here she was, being hot, paying her rent on time, and speeding down Lake Shore in the impractical, sexy car of her dreams. Talk about a come up.
“Proud of you too,” Dahlia said.
I scoffed. “For what?” The last time I’d done anything worth her pride was graduate residency, and even that had not come easy.
“You know. For following through on what you said in that one post.” She turned to me for just long enough to wink. “For no longer moving in fear.”
