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“Hey, girl!” Tamia heard a loud and familiar voice from just outside the door. “Your boss lady in there?”
In poked the head of another demon Tamia dreaded. Only this one was that of a peer.
“Hey, Tamia. You free?”
“Yes, Jones,” Tamia answered wryly. “Come in.”
?
Tasha couldn’t answer Tamia’s phone call because she was busy thinking about maybe holding one of her daughters in her arms. But they were getting so heavy now, even little Tiara, and she didn’t want to wrinkle the silk shirt she was wearing before Lionel had a chance to see how good she looked.
She was standing in the lobby at Newark Airport, awaiting Lionel’s return from Miami. Around her stood an eager crowd of drivers holding pickup cards with secret names the players had selected, in-the-know fans, a few mistresses (whom she’d identified by their ridiculously long hair weaves), and some of the other wives of Knicks players who’d also made the move to New Jersey in search of suburban sprawl and a small chance of marital bliss.
While Tasha had long separated herself from the drama and backbiting that provided the unstable backbone of the NBA wives’ club, she still knew many of the faces of these women and when she’d arrived at the airport had smiled sociably at them and chatted just long enough to hear the latest gossip.
Naturally short tempered, she hated the fakeness associated with carrying on long conversations with women she considered less than associates, but knew that she had to know what they knew in order to remain an educated NBA wife. An uneducated NBA wife was sure to become a former NBA wife as an ambitious groupie with a ridiculous weave became a mistress with a more ridiculous weave, waiting for another woman’s husband at the airport. There was a long list of critical rules in surviving this hoop dream universe, and something as trivial as not knowing where and how to await the arrival of one’s husband at the airport could lead to a drawn-out and embarrassing demise.
“Look at my girls!” Lionel was the picture of pride, his long, lanky frame crouched down before his family. He kissed a gurgling Tiara, pinched Toni’s cheek, and should’ve stood up to hug his wife, but instead he handed Tasha his shoulder bag and pulled Toni from the twin-seater stroller to play.
To this, Tasha smiled pleasantly. The other husbands were doing the same thing as Lionel, and their wives were looking on adoringly as the men inspected the little ones for boo-boos and gave out kisses. There was no reason to vie for attention. No reason at all. But still, behind the most pleasant of smiles, Tasha was thinking, Do you not see me standing here? Look at my shirt. Hell, just look at me! She’d stuffed herself into Spanx so she could fit into Lionel’s favorite jeans, lifted up her sighing breasts and put them into an armorlike bra, and pushed the heavy stroller through the airport in a pair of red devils.8 Someone had better look at her!
“You look nice, baby,” she heard Lionel say. She batted her eyes and looked at him to see that he was speaking to Toni. The little girl couldn’t talk yet, but intelligently responded to her daddy with the one word she’d been practicing: “Dada.”
“You want me to drive?” Lionel asked when they’d finished walking to the car. Tasha was quiet. Her feet
were burning from pushing the stroller back across the lot as Lionel carried and played with Toni and she still held the shoulder bag. “What?” Oblivious to her condition, Lionel looked at Tasha’s screwed-up face. “Why are you so quiet?”
Tasha was about to either spit or curse, but the pot of her anger wasn’t fully to a boil yet. While she was annoyed, she still had missed Lionel and a tiny part of her was just happy to be reunited with his scent, a masculine mix of woodsy shaving cream and spicy cologne that never left him but dissipated to nothing whenever he went away.
Lionel stood there looking at her for a second and then put the girls into the car and got behind the steering wheel.
Halfway to the house, he tried speaking again.
“Why do you come meet me, if you know you don’t like it? I can get a driver like some of the other guys.”
Request a driver? Like the other guys? None of those guys were happily married. Not one of them. Their wives were either too busy being too busy for their husbands or too angry being angry about their upcoming divorces. The good, happy wives were team players, pictures of perfection, the trophies the players retrieved happily upon their return home like soldiers back from war. They weren’t too busy or too angry, they were just there—at the airport, at the game, waiting with open arms, their cups running over.
But no one had cared about Tasha’s open arms, and now her pot was boiling over.
“You want to request a driver? Look, I came to the airport because I’m your damn wife, but it seems you forgot that, seeing as how you haven’t paid me any attention.” Tasha turned to look out the window. She was too angry to put on her seat belt. “You hand me your damn bag like I’m some kind of groupie…and then you have the nerve to—”
“Jesus, this is exactly what I didn’t want to happen. When you said you were coming to get me, I knew—” Lionel stopped and looked at his sleeping daughters in the rearview mirror.
“What? You knew what?”
“That you’d get all touchy. You always do this when you come get me from the airport.”
“I always do what?”
“You always—”
“Don’t tell me what I always do.” She cut him off, though she had asked the question. “I’m a grown woman. I know what I do and how I do it.” Tasha’s voice had already been loud and now it was getting louder. “This ain’t even about what I do. It’s about what you don’t do!”
“Can you keep your voice down? You’re going to wake them up.”
“Wake them up?” Tasha turned to Lionel. Her forehead was crowded with angry wrinkles. On her tired, frustrated ears, Lionel’s request sounded more like an accusation. “I take care of our daughters all by myself. I don’t need you or anyone else to worry about if I wake them up. They wake up when and where I choose. And if I want them up right now, then so be it!”
That must’ve been what Tasha wanted, because they were up, and they were crying, and later that night, when they all got back to the house, she put them to bed alone.
