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Dablackannanicole: If only you would’ve met him first.
Coreenissocute: Right.
Dablackannanicole: I can’t believe all of that. Did you tell him about his mother?
Coreenissocute: No. I promised I wouldn’t.
Dablackannanicole: Damn. Well make sure you keep that on the down low.
Coreenissocute: I know.
Dablackannanicole: Oh yeah, and don’t e-mail me at my work address anymore. I think Piper’s been reading my e-mails. You’d think she had something better to do.
TIME END: 1:08 PM
In Bed
Thinking about everything Jamison had said to me in the kitchen, I cried most of the afternoon and into the evening. The weight was too much to carry. I wanted to know about Coreen, how it all happened, but when I heard it, that he thought I had something to do with it, I really wished he hadn’t said anything at all. It stung me. My hurt went to aching and I needed so much to know that this wasn’t how things would always be. I hated Jamison for what he’d done, but the thought of him feeling the way he said he’d felt about us terrified me. Was my husband falling out of love with me? Was our marriage really over?
Exhausted, at bedtime I was lying in bed, half asleep with the baby resting on a blanket beside me when the bedroom door opened. It was Jamison. I thought he was coming into the room to get a sleeping shirt or something so he could go back to the guestroom—he usually did this when I was out of the room, but Tyrian and I had been in the room for most of the night. But, while I heard the dresser drawer open and close, he didn’t leave this time. My back to him, I listened as he stopped. I could feel his eyes on me. Then he started moving again, but his footsteps were coming closer and then the bed moved as he sat down. I didn’t turn around. I just lay there and felt tears well up inside of me again. One dropped from my face onto the pillow and grew into a soft spot. I wanted to tell him to leave, but another side of me really wanted him to stay. I opened my eyes and looked at Tyrian as I felt Jamison lay down beside me.
“I’m sorry,” Jamison whispered softly into my hair. “I love you and I’m not going anywhere. Not even if you tell me to. I’m not letting anything happen to our family. I promise you that.”
I felt Tyrian shudder and readjust his body in his sleep. He whimpered a bit and then shifted his head from one side to the next, threatening to wake up. But then his chest moved up and down, and through my tears I watched as he found his way back to a restful sleep.
Jamison slid his arm over my waist as he’d done a million times before. Only this time, he did not wrap his arm around my waist and cradle my stomach. Instead he reached over and rested his hand on Tyrian’s back, rocking him softly. He kissed me on the back of my neck and before he rested his head against the pillow, a tear fell from his face to my cheek.
Marital Bliss
Kerry made everything just right. I’d come home from a day I thought was the worst I’d ever had, and there
she was pretending we were in Mexico, throwing a fiesta in the middle of the living room. And everything would be in order—from the enchiladas she’d order from my favorite restaurant to the little sombrero she’d be wearing when I’d open the door. She’d be determined to make me feel better. Make me laugh and smile. I wanted to be mad and just wallow in my misery, but she wouldn’t let me and I’d break sooner or later. That only made me love her more. She kept our house clean, herself looking pretty, and while she still wasn’t cooking, she’d figured out how to make the only meal that mattered to me—Hamburger Helper. I always told her I didn’t need to be taken care of. My mother raised me to clean up after myself and Moms made sure I could cook before I left her house. But Kerry wouldn’t hear any of that. She had it set in her mind that things were supposed to be a certain way . . . the traditional way. I was sure this tradition didn’t include a file of restaurant menus she kept in the kitchen cabinet where there should have been food, but I went along with it. Kerry was trying to make me happy and that’s all I wanted. The gift was that I got to come home to her. To lie with someone I knew really needed me and loved me more than she even knew.
And that couldn’t have been an easy task. I wasn’t the cash cow tradition said I should be. My Rake It Up venture wasn’t exactly raking in the dough during its first years. I couldn’t even really afford to contribute to the wedding. Her mother paid for most of it out of some wedding fund she started when Kerry was born.
In the first three years, I mostly drove my own truck and cut lawns myself with a few people I hired here and there. We lived off my limited funds and the money Kerry was making at a job she had at a doctor’s office. Living check to check was an understatement. We were broke and both my mother and her mother had to pay a few bills. This made me feel bad. I didn’t want to be broke. I wanted to be just as successful as Kerry wanted me to be. Shit, I even wanted to make my mother happy . . . and it would’ve been the icing on the cake to shut Kerry’s mother up. But somewhere along the way Rake It Up shifted from a side thing I was doing until I went to med school to a dream I really believed in. I always liked working with my hands. Because I was good in science, I assumed this meant I was destined to be a surgeon. But once I got those yard cutters in my hands, it just seemed right. There was something so peaceful and calming to be out there cutting grass and shutting out the rest of the world. No one bothered you. And when you were done, you got to step back and see what your work went into. You’d made the world prettier or nicer for other people to enjoy, even if they didn’t notice it. And the scientific mind everyone always said I had helped me do that. For me, cutting grass was a science. It took planning and balance, a vision of how you wanted things to look and feel to the senses.
I couldn’t back away from that. That grass seemed to grow into my being. It became my patient. I had to give myself to my company. Now, I was no fool. I knew two things: I liked money, and I didn’t want to be cutting grass for the rest of my life. So, because I wasn’t going back to med school, I knew I’d have to grow Rake It Up into something big. Something where I could give everything to Kerry she’d ever wanted. Not to shut her up. Not to shut her mother up. But because my wife deserved it.
“You need a secretary,” Kerry said one day when I walked into the house from working. I was sweating like hell from being in the sun all day and my body smelled like everything dead. I just wanted to run to the shower, but it was clear Kerry wanted to talk, so I stood there. Plus, I wanted to hear what she was about to say, because I noticed that she’d just hung up the phone when I walked in the door. I didn’t have to ask who was on the other end of the line.
“A secretary? For what?”
“For your jobs and stuff. So many people call you now to do jobs,” she said. “A secretary would make the business more efficient and help you get more clients.”
“Hum . . .” I said. I’d thought of that before, but the business wasn’t there yet. I couldn’t afford it.
“I know you’re thinking you can’t afford it,” Kerry said, reading my mind. “But I have a proposal . . .” She came over to me and began unbuttoning my shirt right in the living room. She never touched me when I came in from work.
“My job isn’t really bringing money home . . . and now that the company is growing, you could use me with you.”
“But we can’t afford it. We’re already struggling.”
“But with my help, we could really take the business to the next level.”
“How?” I asked.
“Well,” she pulled my shirt off, “I could do marketing and hook you up with some of my mother’s friends. They all have businesses. They could hire you.”
