Take Her Man

by Grace Octavia

  Four short days later, it was Thursday, the night before I was to get on to the plane en route to Los Angeles for a weekend with my girls. I’d dropped Pookie off at her usual weekend kennel earlier that afternoon, so I didn’t have to worry about getting her situated the day of my flight. I was alone in my apartment trying to figure out just what I was going to put into the one suitcase I’d committed to carrying with me. I usually packed about three cases full of things I knew I would never wear during my trip, but I thought better than that this time.

  The phone rang just when I’d finally managed to stash an extra pair of shoes in my suitcase and mash it closed.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll make my flight tomorrow, Tamia,” I said, answering the phone. I saw her name on the caller ID and I was sure she was calling again to make sure I was prepared for my flight. I had a bad history of missing flights. She’d already called me three times that day.

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Mia?” I called again. “You there?” I was about to hang up, thinking she’d mistakenly hit the Call button on the phone. It was already after 2 A.M. in New York, so I knew it was long past what should have been her bedtime in Los Angeles.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” a whisper said on the other end. It was Tamia’s voice but it was soft and low like a child’s.

  “I can hardly hear you,” I said.

  “I’m scared, Troy. I’m really scared.”

  “What? Did you say you’re scared?” I sat down next to my suitcase. “Are you crying, Tamia?”

  “Yes…” She paused. “I just don’t know what to do. I’m so scared.” Her voice was shaking.

  “Scared of what?”

  “I can’t sleep,” Tamia said.

  “You’re still taking those pills?” I couldn’t believe what she was saying. “Please say you’re not.”

  “No, I stopped. That’s not it. I’m just scared. I don’t know what to do here. I don’t know why I’m here. I just don’t know if I can do this.” She sounded erratic.

  “Don’t be silly.” I tried to sound light to calm her down. “You know why you’re there. You broke the case. Right? You’re there because you had the wit to do it and Professor Banks wants you by her side.”

  “But what if I can’t do it? What if I can’t do what they’re asking me to do?” She sounded restless, like she was walking around in circles as she spoke to me.

  “What do you mean they?”

  “Everyone,” she cried. “Everyone. I’m falling apart and everyone sees it.”

  “Hold up,” I said. “Why do you think you have to please everyone, Tamia? I told you that you don’t have to do that. Forget about everyone else; just live for yourself. Just do what you want to do. You have to let some of this weight off your shoulders.”

  “No, no, no. I can’t,” she screamed. “I can’t let it all fall apart.”

  “Yes, you can, baby. You just have to let it go and breathe. Take a breather.” I kept trying to think of something to say to calm her. She sounded so upset, I was afraid she was going to do something to herself. I wanted to get off the phone to try to get her some kind of help, but I couldn’t think of the name of the hotel she was staying at and I was afraid if I let her go I might regret it forever.

  “There are so many things in my head. They won’t let me sleep. I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep. I feel like if I sleep, I’ll just fall behind and then everyone will know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That I’m a phony. I’m a fake. A failure.” She started crying again.

  “Tamia, none of that is true,” I said. “You’re not a phony. You’re the smartest person I know.”

  “But what if I’m not anymore? What if I’m not smart? If I can’t keep up?”

  “No one will love you any less. Come on, look at Tasha. She’s crazy and we both love her.” I tried a joke. I was happy when I heard Tamia laugh a little.

  “I’m serious, Troy,” Tamia said, sounding a bit lighter.

  “Girl, I’m serious too. Tasha is crazy. And so am I. We’re both crazy women. Sometimes I wonder why you put up with us. I know you’re embarrassed by us.”

  Tamia laughed again, this time longer and with the little snort she usually made.

  “Stop making me laugh,” she said. “But what if I’m not the smart one anymore? If I stop being the smartest girl in the class Tamia Dinkins, I don’t know who else to be.”

  “So then you can be one of us…the crazy Tamia Dinkins. The craziest woman in the courtroom,” I said, laughing at myself this time. “I’m serious. We’ll love you either way. Everyone will love you either way.”

  Tamia took a deep breath into the phone.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s just hard. It just gets so hard.”

  “We all feel like that sometimes, Tamia. Like we’re so behind and that we’ll never catch up, but you know what, one time I heard Oprah say this quote on her show.”

  “What was it?” Tamia asked. She loved Oprah.

  “She said that wherever you are in life is exactly where you should be. You just have to accept it, find some beauty in it, and prepare for your future.”

  Tamia was quiet, obviously letting the wise words settle into her mind.

  “That makes sense,” she finally said. “I don’t know how I missed that show.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. The truth was, I wasn’t even sure if it was Oprah who said it. Maybe it was Jennifer Aniston after she broke up with Brad Pitt. Or was it Sharon Stone?

  “Thank you, Ms. Lovesong,” Tamia went on.

  “Okay, I think I can lay my head down now.”

  “You sure, baby?” I asked. “’Cause I have plenty more Oprah quotes.”

  “I’m sure,” she said. I listened to her for a while to see if I could hear any more pain in her voice but she sounded as good as anyone could expect from someone who had just been crying her eyes out. We said a prayer together and then we got off the phone.

  When I hung up and finally got ready for bed, I said another prayer. This time I prayed for everyone—for Tamia, and Tasha, and Mommy, and Daddy, and Nana Rue, and Grandma Lucy, and Piero and Bartolo, and Lionel and Baby Prada, and Kyle, and Julian, and the girls in my class, and even Pookie Po and Ms. Pearl and their doggie cousin Miata. The world was a hard place. Things happened to all of us that sometimes we couldn’t understand or take. We all needed a little bit of sunshine in our lives.

  Mother Still Knows Best (The Remix)

  “Hurry up and get in, Troy. I’m blocking traffic,” my mother said, watching me in the rearview mirror as I stuffed luggage into her trunk.

  “Mom, no one’s behind you. You’re fine.” I put my last bag in and closed the trunk.

  I’d called my father early in the morning to ask him to give me a ride to the airport and he wasn’t home. “Off at the golf course with Dr. Williams,” my mother said. I could tell she was still in bed. “I’ll come and take you, Troy.”

  Bad news.

  My mother was good at a lot of things, but driving just wasn’t one of them. Having been chauffeured around by Grandma Lucy’s drivers all her life, my mother hadn’t learned to drive until she was well into her twenties and she drove like it. She darted in and out of traffic like a madwoman, cutting people off and cursing through the window. What was worse was that to add to her reckless driving skills, she still wanted to carry on regular conversations with people in the car. My mother was famous for doing 90 down the FDR while on her cell phone. And she had the tickets to prove it.

  “Oh, I thought I saw someone behind me,” she said nonchalantly, eyeing herself in the mirror as I got in. “Hey, baby.” She smiled and leaned over to kiss me. “I’m so happy you called me.”

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, returning the kiss. As usual my mother looked stunning, sitting across from me in the car. Even though she didn’t have on a dab of makeup and her hair was pulled back in a bun, she looked flawless. She was fifty-six, but you’d never know. There wasn�
��t a wrinkle on her face. She once had told me it was “a blessing from the melanin gods.” I prayed they’d bless me, too.

  “I think it’s just great that you’re getting away from the city with your girlfriends.” She pulled into traffic without looking in her side mirror. “It’s always a good idea to get a break, you know? To say goodbye to the city for a while.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I looked in my bag to make sure I had my e-ticket. Tasha and I weren’t able to get the same flight going into L.A.; she had an early appointment at her doctor’s office. They wanted to make sure everything was okay with her pregnancy before she got on the plane.

  “And I know you could use a break from that Julian, too,” she murmured in a motherly way.

  “Mom, I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’m serious. The best thing you can do is just forget about that boy.”

  “Jesus, Mom. I’m not going to talk about Julian all the way to the airport.” I looked out of the window.

  “Oh my, she’s calling on Jesus and cursing her mother. What’s wrong with the world?”

  “I didn’t curse you, Mom,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Well, the point is, you could’ve, and I don’t appreciate it.”

  “How are you going to say you don’t appreciate me doing something I didn’t do?” I looked at her. We weren’t even out of Manhattan yet. There was no way I’d survive all the way to JFK. “Okay, you know what, I’m not even playing into this. I’m just going to be quiet,” I said.

  “Fine, don’t talk to me. You can ignore the problem, but it won’t just go away. I know I taught you that.”

  “Fine,” I agreed.

  “Fine.”

  We were both silent. I looked at the cars disappearing behind us. She was weaving in and out of traffic like I was about to miss my flight.

  “So how’s Kyle doing?” my mother asked, breaching our agreement of silence. I knew it wouldn’t last long.

  “Mom!”

  “Okay, okay. I’m sorry, Troy. Don’t get so touchy.” She reached over and rubbed my knee. “I know this is a stressful time for you, but I just want to know what’s going on.”

  “Kyle is just my friend. That’s it. But I’m not saying anything else about him. I don’t want to talk about men right now. This weekend is about me and my girls.”

  “That’s fine, baby. Just let me say one more thing and then we can drop it.” She looked at me. I nodded my head just to make her stop. “Okay, let me say this—”

  Someone jumped into our lane, cutting her off. “Watch it, speedy,” my mother said, sliding her window down. “Can’t you see this is a damn Mercedes?” She closed the window, beeped her horn, and swerved around another car.

  “Mom, you’re going to get us killed,” I said, holding on to the glove compartment. Thank God for seat belts.

  “Well, like I was saying”—she readjusted herself in her seat—“I know you get mad at me, but there’s a reason why I’m so hard on you with these men.”

  “Why, Mom?”

  “It’s because I know what you’re worth,” she said. She looked over at me again. “And I don’t mean money. I know what your heart is worth. And I don’t want you to accept any man who doesn’t know your worth. Do you understand me?” She paused. “I know it’s hard for you, Troy. You see these men out here and they seem like they’re everything you want—in more ways than one…”

  “Mom!” I put my hand over my forehead. This was almost as painful as our sex talk when I was fifteen.

  “I’m serious, Troy.” She laughed. “My point is, there are a lot of men out there, but you have to be selective.”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah, I know how you and your friends rate men.” We both laughed. “But that’s not what I mean. See, you can find a man with a good upbringing, a great career, and lots of money, but if he doesn’t know what you’re worth, then he’s not worth your time. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, that’s why I don’t like this Julian,” she went on. I exhaled and looked away. She was cursing him just like she had Champ. “No, hear me out, Troy. Julian doesn’t know your worth. What kind of man just walks away from a beautiful, intelligent, warm woman like you? Saying he needs time?” I couldn’t believe my father had told her everything I said about the breakup! “I’ll tell you, Troy: a foolish one who’s so worried about his own worth and everything else going on in the world that he can’t see what’s right in front of him.”

  “I know. You’re right, Mom,” I said, fighting to hold back tears. I didn’t want to hear it, but she was right.

  “And your grandmother told me all about your little plan to get him back,” she added. I almost had a heart attack. Grandma Lucy—a traitor, too? “And that’s okay. You’re young, and your ego makes you do crazy things when you’re young sometimes. I was there too myself when I was your age. But listen to me good, Troy.” She slowed the car down and locked her eyes on me. “You can’t ever make a man do something he didn’t want to do in the first place. No woman has ever made a man do something he didn’t already want to do. Now, when and if your plan goes as you want it to and Julian comes back to you, I want you to ask yourself one question.”

  “What, Mom?”

  “Ask yourself if you really want him back,” she said, “and if he was worth all of the energy it took to get him. And, Troy, what it will take to keep him. Because the energy you put out to get him, it will take double that to keep him. And you can quote your mother on that.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said, noticing that her eyes were growing teary too as she watched the other cars around us on the road.

  “No problem, baby. That’s just what mothers do—we tell our little girls the truth.” She pat me on the leg warmly as tears began to fall from her eyes.

  “Mom? What’s wrong? I was listening. I heard what you said about Julian.” I turned to her.

  “It’s not that…I’m just going through something.”

  “What is it? Is it Dad?” I was growing concerned. My mother had always been emotional, but something in her eyes was broken, heavy.

  “No,” she said. “It’s something I’ve been dealing with on my own. I didn’t want to tell anyone…I couldn’t.” She began crying and wiping her tears as she fought to control the wheel.

  “Pull over,” I said, looking to see that there was no one in the lane to our right. I had over an hour before I had to be at the airport, and she was in no condition to drive. She pulled the car over to the side of the road and rested her forehead on the center of the wheel. “What’s going on? Just tell me.”

  “I promised myself I wouldn’t tell anyone. Only your father knows.”

  “Mom, you’re scaring me.” I kept thinking she was about to tell me about some awful disease she was dying from. I couldn’t take that kind of news, but I had to know.

  “Before my father died, I…I…”

  “What?” I asked. My grandfather had died of kidney cancer, just hours after his old kidney had been removed and a new one had been inserted. Before the doctor walked out with the bad news, we were all outside the hospital room, crying happily as Grandma Lucy thanked God that he had been spared. While my mother had been quiet, seemingly meditating in her own space, I’d assumed it was because it had been such a long time that my grandfather had been struggling with his illness. For two years, as the cancer progressed, the doctors had searched all over for a kidney that would save him but he had a semi-rare blood type, so even with his money, it was a difficult process. Even my mother tested out, as she’d inherited Grandma Lucy’s blood type and wasn’t a suitable donor. By the time the B-type kidney came in, we were rejoicing and looked forward to Grandpa beating the cancer. But then the doctor came out of the room with the bad news. He wasn’t strong enough; his body had been weakened by two rounds of chemotherapy and he’d passed. “What happened before Grandpa died?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t a match. I couldn’t be a donor.
I…I wasn’t his child,” she cried banging on the wheel. “There was so much going on and I just had to watch my own father die. All those years and there was nothing I could do. Just watch.”

  “What are you talking about? Not his daughter? He was your father…right?”

  “Not according to the blood test.” She looked over at me.

  “But you have Lucy’s blood type. Mom, this is crazy.”

  “Troy,” she reached over and grabbed my arm, “your grandfather was a B-type.”

  “Yes.”

  “Lucy is an A.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m an A.”

  “What? What are you saying?” I was no scientist, but my years of watching soaps in between classes in college made it clear where this was going. Then, just then, I looked out at the street in front of me and began to realize how slow the world moves. While they beg to look fast, people slip by slowly, cars meander in sluggish motion, and even the air sits still if you really pay attention. Maybe it wasn’t the entire world that was slowing down. Maybe it was just my world, the one I knew that was coming apart in slow seconds.

  “If two people with A and B blood types conceive, the child is always an AB.” She looked out of the window. “My father had to have been an A.”

  “What did Lucy say?”

  “What could she say? She lied. The man she claimed was my father was dying and there was nothing any of us could do.”

  “Did he know?”

  She turned to me and wiped a tear from my cheek. She shook her head no and turned to the look out of the side window, placing her hand over her mouth.

  “Why did she lie? To you? To him? To me? All these years, Lucy’s been lying?”

  “My father was a black man. She’d been having an affair with him for years, even before she met my father. He lived in Harlem.” She gave a short, sad laugh. “His name was Oscar. He was mixed. Had short blond hair, hazel eyes, freckles like mine across his nose….”

  “But Lucy loved Grandpa.” I ran my hand along the freckles above my cheeks.