Should Have Known Better

by Octavia, Grace

  Reginald forgot all about the beer. Within what seemed like minutes, he was outside on the front steps in his Hawks jersey with R. J. at his side in a smaller one. I stood in the doorway holding a bag of cut-up squares of lasagna.

  “Eat these,” I said. “No sense spending money on those vendors at the game.”

  Reginald took the bag.

  “Tell Cheyenne I said I’ll bring her something nice,” he said.

  “I will.”

  “See you in a bit.” He kissed me lightly on the cheek before running to the car like the roads to Atlanta would evaporate at any moment. He’d already packed all of Sasha’s bags into the trunk. The plan was to drop her off after the game and be home by midnight.

  R. J. waved from the window and I blew him a kiss.

  “Let’s not make this our last good-bye,” Sasha whined. She tossed her big, heavy designer purse over her arm. She was also wearing a Hawks jersey. Later, as I lay in bed and watched the news alone, I’d think of how odd it was for her to have the jersey in her bag not knowing she’d be going to a game and all. She hugged me tightly. “I want to see you more.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “It’s been so nice being here—with your family. I really enjoyed it.”

  “We enjoyed it, too.”

  “I insist that you come visit me in Atlanta. And I’ll come visit you again. And—”

  Reginald honked the horn. We looked at the car. He pointed at his watch.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, laughing at Reginald’s anxiousness. “We’ll keep in touch.”

  “Dawn, I want you to know that all of that old stuff from the past, it’s in the past,” she said. “I love your family. We were all wrong. You made a great decision marrying Reggie. You guys have the perfect life. Everything a girl could want.”

  “You think so?” I said.

  “You have it all.” She looked into my eyes. “Maybe I’ll be as lucky as you one day.”

  The minutes after Sasha left with Reginald and R. J. went by slowly and without any form of exclamation. The house was silent. Nothingness pushed its way through the hallways the way it does at a funeral home before a family has come to grieve some lost love. I walked through the empty rooms, fixing and reorganizing, putting away and tucking, reminding myself that Sasha was right: my life was great. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. And I was so glad she could see it. I needed her to see. I know that sounds petty or childish, but I’d been living for too long with the idea that everyone thought I’d messed up my life and now everyone would know that I was doing fine. Hey, I wasn’t some Spelman alum interviewing people on CNN, but I had a good life of my own. I had a husband and two children. A home. It was no fantasy, but it was mine.

  I found one of R. J.’s battered action figures in the dining room and went to take it to his room. As I neared the end of the hallway where the room was just across from Cheyenne’s room, I remembered that she was there in the house with me. She’d been so quiet since Reginald told her that she couldn’t go to the game. I expected some big fight. Some big show— while she pushed me away when she didn’t have a use for me, she tended to cling to her father—but there was nothing. She’d stomped off to her room and closed the door.

  I set the action figure on R. J.’s bed and tiptoed to Cheyenne’s door. I pressed my ear against it. There was silence. I stepped back and looked at the door. I wasn’t in the mood at all to fight with Cheyenne. If she was handling her anger with her father by being silent, I wanted to leave her alone and just hope she’d come out of her funk a little happier than she’d been before it appeared.

  I stood there and looked at a group of floating pastel balloons Cheyenne had painted on the door a few months ago. I was about to walk away, but then I stopped myself. Maybe, I thought, maybe we could just have a good time. Just me and her. We could talk or watch a movie together until Reginald and R. J. got back.

  I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again and then I opened the door slowly.

  The lights were on in the room. Cheyenne sat on the floor in the middle of a little purple carpet she’d set in front of her bed. Everything in the room was purple—picture frames, stuffed animals, a comforter set, and curtains.

  She was playing one of her handheld video games and didn’t look up at me.

  I knocked on the inside of the door.

  “Chey, what are you up to?”

  “Nothing.” Her voice was flat and tight.

  “Nothing?” I repeated, walking into the room. “Doesn’t look like nothing to me.” I sat on the bed. A purple canopy stretched over the frame.

  “Well, if it’s not nothing, what is it?” she asked.

  “Looks like one of your games. Nintendo?”

  She laughed. “No. Playstation.” It had been a setup.

  She clicked the game off and chucked it onto the bed.

  “It’s so boring,” she said, getting up from the floor. “I hate it here.” She went and flopped into a furry purple beanbag she’d gotten for Christmas.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said. “I’m here.”

  She stared at me like I was crazy. Sometimes talking to her was like going into battle.

  “All R. J. is gonna talk about when he gets back is that stupid game,” she went on like I’d said nothing.

  “Chey, I know you wanted to go to the game, but they only had three tickets. Daddy will take you next time,” I said. “Who wants to be at a funky old basketball game anyway? And with the boys? We can spend quality time together. I can play Playstation. Or we could watch a movie.”

  Cheyenne cut her eyes at me again and I felt it right in my throat.

  “You don’t know how to play my games,” she said. “You play R. J.’s games.”

  “Come on. Let’s not go down that road. You know I spend time with you. And what I do for your brother, I have to. He just needs more attention than you,” I said. “You know that.”

  Cheyenne rolled her eyes and let the bottom of her mouth hang low to show her disgust.

  “Do you want to watch a movie with me?” I asked, trying to ignore her demeanor.

  “I think I’m going to go to bed,” she said.

  “Bed? It’s so early.”

  “Test tomorrow.” She got up from the beanbag and went to grab her bathrobe. She wrapped it over her arm like she was ten years older and looked at me. “I’m going to get into the shower.”

  “OK,” I said. “Well”—I started getting up from the bed—“I’ll be in my room if you change your mind. We can watch something scary. You like scary movies.”

  “Not anymore,” she said. “But I’ll let you know.”

  She turned and walked down the hall toward the bathroom. I was left standing in the middle of her room alone with my hands in my pockets. I wanted to scream for her to come back and make her talk to me. But it would only make things worse. We’d had this argument before. I wasn’t a bad mother. I knew that. She knew that. I was doing what I had to do. And no matter how angry Cheyenne got with me, the fact was that R. J. was always going to need me more. He just would. And she needed to be strong enough to understand that. Another fight wasn’t going to get us there.

  I carried a bottle of wine to bed that night. I don’t know how it got into the refrigerator, or how it got so quickly in my hand, but I hadn’t been in bed alone in years. And after dealing with Reginald leaving with Sasha and Cheyenne’s attitude, I needed something to ease my nerves. Everything seemed so impossibly upside down—and in two days.

  “She’s gone,” I told myself, lying in the sheets with an emptying second glass of wine in my hand. The light from the TV crept along the blanket over my lower body in the dark room. Sasha was on the screen wearing a thin yellow sweater and huge diamond earrings. She was sitting next to a woman holding a book. The word “bliss” was on the cover.

  “All women need to chase what they want,” the woman said. She had blue eyes and a blue broach on her blouse to match. “They need to aggressively
pursue their dreams.”

  “At all costs?” Sasha said, leaning into the woman and smiling the same way my family had smiled at her around the table this morning—it was expectant, taken. “No matter what? That’s what you say in the book.”

  “Well, that’s what aggression is. It’s about fighting. About chasing. Women need to learn more of this. You don’t hear men questioning whether or not they should go after a job because another man has it—no, they go in and they fight for their position. They chase bliss relentlessly.”

  “If only all women knew this,” Sasha said firmly. She reached out and held the woman’s hand. “Thank you for coming on the show.” She looked at the camera, at me. “This has been Sasha Bellamy with a little message every woman ought to hear: chase your bliss. Good night.” She smiled at me with her blush and glossy lips, and winked.

  I finished my wine and poured another glass, hoping it would keep my eyes open long enough to catch Reginald coming in the door.

  So when Reginald did finally get home, I was asleep alone, for four more hours. I’d stay that way. Whispers from the living room pulled me from a dream at about 3:00 a.m.

  “Reginald,” I called, shaking myself awake. I looked at the clock. The room was dark. I could hear laughing outside the door. Murmurs. A hush and a warning for quiet. I was about to get up, but then Reginald came creeping into the room. He slid into the door and snapped it behind him.

  “Babe?” I called sleepily. I bent over and turned on my night-light beside the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Did I wake you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I tried to get up. “Where’s R. J.?”

  “No, no, no,” Reginald said. He came over to the bed. “He’s fine. He’s in bed. I already put on his nightclothes and everything.”

  He went over to his side of the bed and sat down to take off his sneakers.

  I looked at the clock again.

  “It’s after 3:00 a.m.,” I said.

  “You know,” Reginald started, “I have no idea what time it is!” He laughed and I could tell that he’d been drinking. “No idea.” He pulled off his socks and tossed them across the room.

  “So, what happened?” I asked. “How was the game?”

  Reginald got up and started removing his clothes. Even in the dull light from my lamp, I could see his tight stomach muscles, a little patch of hair over his pelvis.

  “Hawks lost, but they still have a shot.”

  “Well, what time did it end?”

  “I don’t remember. Why?”

  “Because it’s 3:00 a.m., and I know it didn’t end at midnight,” I asked. “So, what happened?”

  Reginald looked at me as if I’d just asked him seven questions and told him to take out the garbage.

  “So?” I repeated.

  He looked at my nightstand where the empty bottle of wine sat beneath the lamp.

  “You been drinking?” he asked.

  “I’m fine. I can have a little glass of wine.”

  “Hum.”

  “What’s ‘hum’ for?”

  “I’m just surprised to see you drinking so much. It’s not like you.”

  “Whatever, Reginald. You’ve clearly had your fill, too,” I said. “Anyway, what happened? Why did you take so long?”

  “We went by Sasha’s house.”

  “You had to drop her off. But where does she live that it took so long?”

  He got up and pulled some shorts out of the dresser beneath the television.

  “No, no. It wasn’t far. She just wanted us to see . . . inside.” Reginald put the shorts on and got into bed.

  “Inside? You went—”

  “It was amazing. She has an indoor pool.”

  “An indoor pool?”

  “Yeah . . . in Atlanta! She swims a lot. I guess that’s how she keeps her body so tight.”

  “Her what?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. You know, I mean, she has good taste. Flat screens everywhere. Leather couches. All white. And the yard out back. Must be half an acre.”

  “Half an acre?” I couldn’t imagine just how much land that was, but I knew it must’ve been a lot based on how wide my husband’s eyes were.

  “Six bedrooms. Three-car garage. A Maserati.”

  “She has a Maserati? I didn’t know journalists made that kind of money.”

  Reginald laid back contentedly on his pillow. He stretched his hands behind his head and smiled at the ceiling.

  “Well, it was her father’s before he died. She let me drive it.”

  “You drove the car?” I sat up. “What was R. J. doing?”

  “He stayed at the house with Sasha. Don’t worry; lil man was cool.”

  “I’m not worried. You know he doesn’t like being left with people he doesn’t know.”

  “I don’t think Sasha is someone he doesn’t know. He likes her,” he said. “Anyway, I drove that car up 85 doing 100. I felt the air moving through my fingers on the steering wheel. That car is beautiful.”

  I could feel something in Reginald—something settled and just easy. He was happy in a new way.

  “I never thought I’d say this”—he paused—“but if that’s Atlanta living, it’s pretty cool. And get this, the house is on Lover’s Lane.”

  “Lover’s Lane? Really?” I laughed in a show, hoping he’d jump in. He couldn’t mean what he was saying. Not Reginald. He couldn’t be serious. It almost sounded like he was impressed by all of these things.

  “What?” he looked at me. “Why are you laughing?”

  “What’s ‘pretty cool’? The hustle? The showboating? The ‘Who’s Who in Black America’ parade?” I listed his common judgments of the city and city folk. “You hate that stuff.”

  “I know, but it’s not all bad. Some good things. Hey, I’m not complaining. We actually got to go into the player’s club after the game. Joe is a cool cat.”

  “Joe?”

  “Joe Johnson. We were going to go out for drinks with some of the players, but we had R. J. with us . . . so . . . Well, Sasha said—”

  “Sasha said?”

  “Oh God! Here it comes—”

  “Here what comes?”

  “You’re doing that thing. That jealous thing.”

  “I’m not jealous,” I said. “I just think it’s odd that you were referring to you and Sasha as ‘us’ and ‘we’ and you just quoted her. Like twenty-four hours ago, you hated her. And the day before that, you practically begged me to tell her not to come here.”

  “You asked me to get along with her. I was just being nice,” he said defensively. “And she’s not so bad. She’s actually really smart.”

  I fell back into my place in the bed and folded my arms over my chest.

  “Listen, Dawn, I didn’t mean anything by that. She’s just smart is all. She’s talking about helping me expand my business. You know, get some new clients.”

  “Expand your business? I’ve been trying to get you to do that for years and you never said I was smart.”

  “But she has contacts. And she said that she might be able to hook me up with some folks. One of her friends, this Kerry Jackson, her husband owns a landscaping company that has the lion’s share of business in Atlanta. She could hook me up with him.”

  “I’ve told you about Kerry and Jamison before. And they’re divorced.”

  “Really?” He looked at me confused. “Anyway, look, I believe her and I think I want to try to do something. Make a move in Atlanta.”

  “But you said you wanted to keep the business small and personal. That you have relationships here you want to build on. That’s why we moved here.”

  “I know what I said,” Reginald said in a detached way. “But things change. It’s kind of like how Sasha explained it to me in the car—you have to chase bliss relentlessly.”

  “Chase bliss?” I flipped through my memory, trying to recall where I’d heard that line before. I sat up again and looked at the television. “Sasha didn’t
say that. That’s some dinky thing some woman said on her show.”

  “So?”

  “So, it’s not her advice. She got it from someone else.”

  Reginald looked annoyed and exhaled.

  “What?” I asked after a second. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not jealous. That’s not what this is. It’s not about me being jealous. You’re just—”

  “I’m going to sleep,” Reginald said abruptly. He reached past me and turned out the light before turning to face his side of the bed.

  I sat there stunned. Alone, half drunk, and stunned. What was happening here? Reginald could be a nice guy, but never this nice. And certainly never this nice to one of my friends. And that was why I had so few.

  I turned away from him. I’d never seen him like that. Not in over twelve years had I seen him so giddy over a thing like a nice car or front row seats at a basketball game. He usually found a way to make fun of those things. It just wasn’t who he was. Yeah, he’d smile at me and the kids. Laugh at something on television, but never too much. He was a worker. A hard worker. He believed in principles and family. Work ethic and holding on. But now, his eyes were shining. And it was about none of those things.

  I turned back toward him.

  I looked at the deep crease in his back, how sharp and hard it was. His body was a record of how hard he worked. I’d always wanted him to have more. To be more. But I never wanted to push him. I was afraid I’d lose him.

  I reached out to him. Raked my dangling index finger up the small of his back.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered in his ear. “I didn’t mean to ask you all of those questions. I’m happy you had a good time.”

  “It’s fine,” he said emptily.

  I kissed his shoulder and opened my mouth for a quick bite and lick. I slid my arms under his and pushed my breasts into his back.

  “I love you,” I said before kissing his shoulder again. I closed my eyes and wrapped my leg around his waist, pulling him back toward me. He didn’t move though. And soon I noticed that his body was as heavy as it was when he was asleep.