Case in point: The day I moved back from Birmingham this summer, anxious and bone-tired from driving thirteen hours straight, there was Jen bounding out of the coffee shop next to my new building, where she’d been waiting for me to arrive for who knows how long. Her hands were full with not one but two housewarming gifts—a spiky houseplant and an eight-by-ten framed picture of us from when we were kids.
“You can’t kill a succulent,” she insisted, hugging me tightly before thrusting it into my arms.
I did kill the plant in record time, but the picture is still there on my mantel. It’s one of my favorites, taken when we were six or seven. We’d spent the afternoon running through the Logan Square fountain with a hundred other sun-drunk kids and the camera caught us lying on the wet cement, side by side in matching pink polka-dot bikinis, clutching each other’s hands.
While we waited for the super to get my new keys, we sat on the curb in the sticky heat. Jenny reached out to wipe my face. “You’re here,” she said.
I hadn’t even realized I was crying. I was just so… happy, or maybe it was more relieved. After everything that had happened over the last year, my fresh start was real. Sitting there together on the warm concrete, it was one of those rare times when, for a brief, glorious moment, the pieces in your life fall into place. I was home.
Jenny gestures now toward two stools to her left. “Here, sit.” She removes the denim jacket she’d spread across the top, oblivious that the man next to her is irritated to have been so abruptly robbed of her attention. She’s already forgotten him. “I saved three seats. One for you and two for my fat ass.”
“You wish you had a fat ass,” I joke. “You look great; you’re glowing,” I tell her.
“You too. But you always look camera-ready, so no surprise there. Your bangs are growing out. That’s good.” She reaches over to touch them. Jenny is the only white woman in the world I would let get away with that. Or talk me into cutting bangs.
“You know, I used to think you were such a weirdo for getting annoyed when people want to touch your hair, but now that I’ve got this”—she places a hand on either side of her stomach—“I get it now. I’m like Aladdin’s lamp. No one asks. They just rub.”
It isn’t the same thing at all, but I let it go.
I finger my bangs, which look even frizzier next to Jen’s smooth bob, which is now starting to grow on me. “So why did you talk me into this again? Chopping these two days before a brand-new job?”
“I know. My bad. We thought it would be very Kerry Washington in season two of Scandal.”
“Yeah, but it ended up more like Kim Fields in The Facts of Life. All I need is roller skates.”
“This’ll make it all better, Tootie.” Jenny slides over one of the sweating glasses. She doesn’t need to tell me it’s a vodka tonic.
“That’s why I love you.” A long sip sends the cool liquid flooding into my stomach, reminding me that, once again, I’ve gone the whole day without finding time to eat.
“I’m jealous.” Jenny raises her glass. “Ginger ale for me.”
“Oh, come on, have a glass of wine with me,” I beg her, because it’s not as much fun to drink alone. Now that I’m here, all I want is to get buzzed with my oldest friend.
Jenny looks down and clutches her belly protectively. I feel like I’m intruding on something private.
“I don’t want to chance it, Rye.”
I shouldn’t have suggested the wine. Not after all those years of trying, then the miscarriages, and all those rounds of IVF. Jen shakes her head. “I just can’t.”
“I understand.” It’s true, I do, but the role reversal is ironic given that it’s been Jen’s mission all these years to loosen me up, to get me to “live a little.”
I make a show of downing another gulp. “Then I’ll have to drink for the both of us.”
“I’m so glad you’re here. God, I’ve missed you so much!” Jen grabs my hands as soon as I set down my drink.
I don’t know why I’m suddenly self-conscious in the face of her effusive affection—and guilty too. “I’m sorry I’ve been so MIA. Work’s been brutal.”
Even with a top-of-the-line “miracle” concealer, I can see the dark circles and deep lines around my eyes in the long beveled mirror above the bar making me look closer to forty than thirty. So much for Black don’t crack. Clearly, the twelve-hour days, the six to ten packages I’m producing a week, and the almost nightly live shots are taking their toll. It’s the work of three people, but I’m used to that by now. You gotta work twice as hard to get half as far as them, baby girl. It was a mantra most Black kids were all too familiar with, as ubiquitous as reminders to lotion up ashy knees.
“No worries, I get it. And you’re totally killing it. I loved your story last night on how the city needs to invest more money in the West Philly school lunch program. I had no idea how many kids went without lunch every day because they couldn’t afford it.”
“You caught that?” It had taken several weeks to convince my boss, Scotty, the news director, to let me do the piece, and then when all the positive emails started rolling in, he’d conveniently forgotten that he’d said, “Not sure anyone’s going to care, Wilson.”
“Are you kidding me? Of course I did. I always catch your broadcasts, Rye! You’re the only reason I watch the crappy local news. And soon you’re gonna be anchor!” Jen raises her soda and clinks my glass so hard I’m worried she cracked it.
“We’ll see.” I half-heartedly toast, scared that I’m going to jinx it somehow. Don’t go counting your chickens before they hatch. Jen was the first and only person I’d told when I heard Candace might be retiring soon. I always assumed Candace was the type to be carried out of the studio in a coffin, but sure enough, when Scotty took me to lunch last month, he confirmed the rumors that she may “soon be exploring other opportunities,” and that he’d probably be looking for someone “internal” to replace her. It was clear from the way he said it that she, a woman just past sixty, was being pushed out after more than two decades at the station. I should have been outraged by that, but I was too focused on what it could mean for me—a chance at the anchor desk. Given that I’ve only been at the station a few months, it’s a long shot, but ever since Scotty dangled it as a possibility, it’s a shiny prize that I’m reaching for, greedy as a grubby-handed toddler grabbing for candy. The more Jen acts like it’s a done deal though, the more anxious I feel about the fact that it might not happen.
“Trust me, it’ll happen,” Jen continues. “I know it. Anchor by forty! Right? You always said that was the goal. You’re gonna get the job, and your bangs are gonna be a mile high on that billboard. You’ll be so famous, and then I can tell everyone that I knew you when you used to practice French kissing on a pillowcase with Taye Diggs’s face on it.” She looks down and rubs both hands over her belly again. “It’s all happening for us, Rye. All the things.”