1 Chapter 1
The dream should have been a tip-off nothing was going to go the way I planned. It was always the same; me slipping on my wedding dress, the shiny satin slipping down my skin as Yolanda, my twin sister and maid of honor, zipped and buttoned. I could hear her smoke-tinged voice in my ear, “Yvette, I told you to lay off those BBQ sandwiches or else get a better girdle.” My mom’s heels tapping out an impatient song as she walked back and forth in the kitchen making sure everything that should be there was not here and vice versa.
Then the dream would change; my uncle Ross and I standing in the foyer of Friendship Missionary Baptist church listening to the wedding march and each other’s breathing. His Old Spice giving me an olfactory kiss of assurance on the forehead as we waited for our—my moment. The doors of the church open and we start to walk and then—I wake up. If that is not a foreshadowing of bad things to come, I do not know what is.
* * * *
Let us start four months before my wedding. I am sitting on the couch in my Raleigh apartment with the patio door half open, enjoying the balmy June night. Armed with my drink of choice for the evening, cranberry juice with a little something extra added, I was yet again shocking the hell out of my best friend.
“Yvette, you did what?” Danita’s astonished tone contrasted with the smooth jazz playing in the background. We were in the middle of one of our standard nightly phone conversations. They usually started around 8 P.M. and lasted until our sides ached from laughter.
“I put an ad in the paper to meet a white man.”
“Why in the name of all that is right in the world would you put an ad in the paper for another man, least of all a white man? Aren’t you and Martin supposed to be getting married in a couple of months?”
In the background, I could hear her two children, eight-year-old Nia and six-year-old Devon, bicker about whatever kids bicker about. Why do kids think when their parents get on the phone, they lose the ability to hear?
“Exactly, I always wondered what it would be like to be with a white man, and this is my last chance to do it before the big day.”
“That doesn’t make sense. You never cease to amaze me. I thought you participating in the Civil War re-enactment in Johnston County for a story last year was a little off. Honey, this trumps that like a big joker.”
I could almost see Danita roll her lime-colored eyes and shake her head. Our friendship sprang from a letter to the editor she wrote three years ago about my first big feature for NC Magazine. The story focused on basketball rivalries across the state and quoted fans and alumni of Atlantic Coast Conference schools. After all, when people here dream of basketball they dream in color—black, gold, red, white, and two shades of blue. Mrs. Danita McSwain Wallace took us to task for forgetting about other collegiate sport rivalries in the state, such as the one among the member schools of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association.
Most of the historically black colleges and universities in the state belong to that conference, including my parents’ alma mater, Johnson C. Smith University, my sister’s North Carolina Central University, and Danita’s Fayetteville State University. My omission of the CIAA in my story was even more embarrassing, as Raleigh hosted the final games of the conference for several years running. From that point forward, the 5’10” Irish-African-American registered nurse became my reality checker.
“Girl, in all the years I have known you, I would have never thought you would put yourself out there to hook up with a stranger just to satisfy some curiosity. Now don’t get me wrong, if it was not for an Angela Davis Afro wearing sister named Ella Hooper stopping to give directions to a redhead dude named Ian McSwain some thirty years ago, my black ass might not be here to talk to you on the phone. Still, you are getting ready to get married. Y’all have been together for a while and you just now getting an itch?”
“How are your mom and dad doing,” I asked, trying to divert which I sensed was going to be a lecture of the dangers of sexual impropriety.
“Tom and Helen from The Jeffersonsare doing fine,” Danita said, laughing. “Now back to what we were talking about.”
“I see your point, D. I have been with Martin for a while now; maybe I just want to make sure I got the best catch before I retire my fishing pole.”
“Well hell, maybe you should have thought about that before you committed to just fishing in Lake Martin Davis. But girl, let me let you go so I can do something with my hair before I go to bed and it’s way past my children’s bedtime and I knowI still don’t hear the TV on,” Danita said, her voice rising as she finished her sentence. I hope that Nia and Devon got themselves together because if they didn’t it was not going to be pretty.
