My jaw dropped. Misunderstanding, my ass! How many times had Momma lectured Tabatha and me about going to church, adding on that we might happen upon a nice, virtuous man there, just as she had?
“You’re joking,” I said.
“I’m not,” she said, and regaled me with the true story of how she and my father had met—in their secondary school statistics class. Their story played out like a rom-com: my mother, the stern, sharp village girl, and my father, the jokester from a family of scholars. They had fallen in love over their books, but Daddy’s mother, who had her sights set on him marrying the daughter of a close family friend, had discouraged the relationship. Upsettingly, Daddy had bent to his mother’s wishes and dumped my mom. Still, they had kept in touch over the years, sending a letter here or there, scheduling slots at the telecoms office so that they could speak over the phone. When Daddy announced that he planned to move to London to pursue his clinical pharmacy degree, Momma had suggested he meet her at her downtown church.
And the rest was history.
“Can you imagine if I’d decided that I would never speak to him again after he told me he was going to take Agatha out instead of me?” Momma said, chuckling. “You wouldn’t exist. Your father was my friend. After he left, I didn’t put my life on hold for him, or sit around worrying myself about what he was doing. I just kept on living, and eventually he found his way back to me.”
I sat in stunned silence, digesting my mother’s words as she diligently worked on my head. Her voice was gentle now, soothing, the way you would talk to a baby you were rocking to sleep.
“From everything you and your sister have told me about this Ricky, he sounds like a good man,” she said. “But I don’t know him from Adam, and you do. Maybe I’m wrong.” She hunched down, crossing her arms over my chest and pulling me backward into an embrace. “But, ?d?,* what if I’m right?”
I thought about that question long after we changed the topic, after we turned on the TV to burn through four episodes of House Hunters and Momma dipped my finished twists in hot water. Long after I wrapped my hair under my scarf, popped a Tylenol, and painstakingly lowered my tender head onto my pillow. It was impossible to sleep after that. Every time I managed to doze off, another image of Ricky appeared under the curtain of my closed eyelids—Ricky, face blanched in red light, telling me it was an honor to know me. Ricky, then just another Cute Boy, directing me to sit in a patch of sunlight. Ricky, pressing me into a brick wall, his body solid against mine.
“I don’t act right with you,” he’d said, and when I awoke it was with a gasp, my lips tingling with the memory of his affection.
I sat up in bed, dropping my head into my hands. Dumping Ricky had felt like the right thing to do. He’d given up on me. He’d disappeared, and when he came back, he couldn’t contend with the pain that he’d caused. That was enough, right? Love was supposed to be simple. You loved someone, they loved you, you got together, end of. All other encumbrances were manufactured, symptoms of larger problems.
Ricky’s fingers, tracing the planes of my face with the focus of a man possessed—I’m in love with you . . .
“Oh my god,” I whispered. I grabbed my pillow and screamed into it as loud as I could. Oh my god, I had made a mistake. Ricky knew me. He knew that I was judgmental and opinionated, and that I had no filter. He didn’t roll his eyes at my lack of restraint or hide from the important people in my life, like Frederick. He knew who I was, and he liked me for all my faults, and instead of giving us a chance to grow into more, I had thrown him away—and for what? Hadn’t the ferocity of the way Ricky loved been why I’d fallen for him in the first place? A man who loved his grandparents so completely, his father so unquestioningly, would surely love his unborn child. And when that love had to be measured against his feelings for me . . . of course Ricky had felt stuck. Maybe he’d felt stuck the way Nia felt stuck, trapped between deciding on choosing himself and fickle, silly, cowardly, selfish me. Angela Appiah, so petrified of being hurt, so terrified of being loved, that I preferred to hurt myself first.
I scrambled in the dark for my phone, wincing against the blue-toned light. It was just after midnight. My face felt hot as I scrolled through my “recently called” list, my finger hovering over a contact. Sucking in a breath, I called Nia.
She picked up right away. I could hear ambient voices in the background, followed by an abrupt silence; I must have interrupted a movie.