Choose Me (11 page)

“And you believed her?”

“Either it’s true, or she doesn’t want to be bothered. Either way, she wasn’t interested in me.”

“Why don’t you call her? Or do you want me to ask Maya to ask
her
what she thought of you like we’re in high school?”

“I’m not going to call her and no, I don’t want you to call your mistress to get the four-one-one. Just leave it alone.”

“She’s not my mistress,” he retorted. “I don’t pay to keep her. I knew her long before I married Lisa. We were friends before
we … fell in love.”

“Secret lovers …” I sang under my breath.

“Man, shut up. You’re just jealous ’cause you ain’t got nobody to love, bruh.”

“Yeah, that’s it. You hit it right on the head, bruh.” I could’ve added something really crude, but I had matured in the last
year and no longer felt a need to one-up him.

He got up and went to the fridge. “I can’t believe you haven’t gone grocery shopping. How do you get nourishment?”

“Man, do I look like your wife? Oh, yeah, that’s right. She kicked you out.” I hoped he would take my quips seriously and
shut up.

“I told you. She just wants to take a little break.”

“Mm-hmm.”

It was obvious I wasn’t going to get any more work done. I saved my document and closed the laptop. Without bothering to smell
the pants and shirt from the night before, I quickly dressed.

“You going shopping?” he asked, perking up.

I grabbed my keys and laptop and headed for the door. “I’m going to buy a few things.”

“Yo, get some steaks and I’ll grill ’em.”

I hate grocery shopping, which was why I waited until I was down to the bare minimum before I went. I loved kids, I did. But
one place kids did not belong was the grocery store. I glanced at two rug rats in the cereal aisle tearing coupon after coupon
out of the dispenser and letting them litter the floor as their mother examined the price on a box of instant potatoes, totally
oblivious.

After leaving the loft, I had driven to the neighborhood park and in a half hour typed up ten more pages before finally dragging
myself to the store.

Absentmindedly, I pitched a couple of boxes of cereal into my cart, not really caring what brand they were. Farther down the
aisle, I heard a young girl whining. I could feel my eye beginning to twitch as her voice squeaked higher and higher.

“Please, Mama, can I have this one? You promised. Please,
please.
You said I could. Yes, you did. Please.” I cringed and slowly looked over at the little girl begging her mother for a box
of Cookie Crisp.

“That one has too much sugar,” the mother said calmly.

They all have too much sugar,
I thought.
Just give it to her.

“You said if I did my homework early and cleaned my room, I could. Please, Mama,
pleeease
.”

The twitching in my eye quickened and I pressed my finger to steady it. The mother smiled weakly at me as she allowed the
girl to put the box of cereal in the cart.
Thank you!

I steered my cart out of the aisle and quickly went to the fruit and vegetable section. All I needed were oranges, lettuce,
and some milk and I’d be done. I had already filled half the cart with meat for the days I felt like cooking and frozen pizzas
and dinners for the days I didn’t.

Amid the cilantro, collard, and mustard greens, I thought I recognized the woman scrutinizing the avocados, pressing her thumb
into their bottoms. It was Ms. Celibate-with-an-Attitude from the night before. She was wearing white pajama pants and a buttoned-down
man’s shirt with big turned-up cuffs. A red chiffon scarf was tied on her head, her hair flowing loose, frizzy and thick.
I picked up the first head of lettuce I touched and tried to sneak away. Halfway down the aisle, I realized it was a cabbage.
I wheeled my cart back around to exchange it and, from the corner of my eye I saw her glance over at me, then turn casually
away, pretending she didn’t know me.
She
was ignoring me?

It was then that I began to wonder what was wrong with me. Maybe my hair threw her off. Not all women appreciated natural
hair, particularly light-colored kinky locks. A girl once told me she could never marry me because she was afraid her kids
would be born albino. Considering we weren’t even in a committed relationship, the girl’s comment was presumptuous as well
as ludicrous. Maybe it was my clothes. Because I spent five days a week in a suit, I liked to dress casually on the weekends,
even a bit carelessly, bypassing the iron if I could get away with it. I conceded that I was a little wrinkled the night before,
but that was because I had fallen asleep waiting for Luciano and Eva’s sister to finish kissing, which to date, he claimed
was as far as they had gone. Or maybe it was the fact that I was Black. Maybe she had a phobia about Black men, not exactly
a bias, but a fear of the unknown. I recalled being turned down by a multiracial woman who told me that she didn’t have anything
against me, she just did not date Black men. The fact that she was part Black made her comment sting even more, but I got
over it.

Then I thought,
hold up.
I couldn’t believe I was doubting myself because of this woman. Obviously Chanel and Zina had seen something she was overlooking.
There was nothing wrong with me, it was her.
Who did she think she was?
I thought angrily. Determined to make my presence known, I pushed my cart toward her and deliberately bumped hers. She turned
to face me slowly like a robot and undressed me over her shades in one sweep. I knew she recognized the clothes from the previous
night because women notice things like that, but I didn’t care.

“I saw you,” she said.

“Oh, you did? Why didn’t you speak?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Hi.”

“Hello.” She glanced into my cart, inspecting my groceries. Likewise I looked into her cart of spices, Caribbean tropical
fruits, and vegetables, some of which Luciano had introduced to me, like plantains—
platanos.
They were great fried with white rice and black beans. In the front basket sat a bouquet of fresh-cut flowers.

“Who’re the flowers for?” I asked.

“Me,” she answered, a little defiantly, sticking out her chin as if daring me to say something. I noticed she had a slight
underbite, something I hadn’t realized the night before.

“You always buy flowers for yourself?”

“Always.”

“Where are the plantains?” I then asked.

“Right behind you,” she said, pointing over my shoulder.

I turned around and picked out a few. She looked at me with a distrustful brow. “You know how to cook those?”

“Peel ’em, slice ’em diagonal, and fry ’em up in some oil. They’re sweet. I’ve eaten them at Luciano’s mom’s house. She’s
Cuban.”

“Yeah, so I heard.” She turned up her lip and I gathered there was no love lost between her and Luciano. “But if you want
the sweet ones, you have to get the ripe ones,” she suggested. Without asking, she returned the green ones I had picked out.
“These are
verde,
too green. You can still cook them, but they won’t be sweet. You’ll have to smash ’em down and add salt. Not as healthy.”
She picked through the display of plantains and pulled out some yellow-colored ones with a lot of dark spots that looked spoiled.
“These are
maduro,
ripe. They’ll be nice and sweet.” I couldn’t help but watch her mouth as she spoke and noted that her bottom lip was wider
and thicker than the top one, giving her a pouty appearance. I guess I was staring too hard because she gave me an odd look,
her right eyebrow cocked.

I cleared my throat. “So, you like to cook?” I asked.

“I thought my sister told you about me?”

“So, you don’t like to cook.”

“I
hate
to cook,” she said. “I steam and boil as much of my food as possible. That’s the extent of my chef abilities.”

“A modern woman,” I said. I meant it as an affront but she took it as a compliment and smiled. It was a real smile, not the
constipated one she had continuously flashed me the night before.

“I take it
you
don’t cook,” she said.

“I can throw some stuff together on occasion.” The truth was all the men in my family knew how to cook. My mama had taught
me how to cook when I was ten after warning me that she wasn’t always going to be around. The thought of losing her, not just
her delicious meals, scared me into devouring all of her recipes. But the real truth was that cooking was too much work. I
would rather clean out toilets than cook, so the future Mrs. Black would have to enjoy it as much as my mama once did.

“Huh,” she snorted, not believing me.

“Next time we have a barbecue, you can check it out for yourself.”

“Barbecue don’t count,” she chided in that sarcastic humor of hers.

I laughed, but didn’t challenge her and divulge the Louisiana cuisine my mom had passed down to me.

“Well, I got to go,” I told her, happy I was the first to dismiss her.

“Yeah, me too.”

She went left and I went right. We ended up in checkout lanes next to each other. She gave me the fake smile as I picked up
the
Chicago Tribune
and she got the
Sun-Times.
She had two people in front of her; I had one, the oblivious woman with the coupon-delinquents. The woman had awakened from
her stupor and was engaged in a lively debate with the cashier over the price of dried potato flakes.

“I know what the sign said and it said two-fifty-nine!” she screamed like she was being cheated out of a million dollars.

“I still have to call it in, ma’am,” said the teenaged cashier, who I could tell was trying hard not to lose her temper.

I happened to glance over at Eva in exasperation and she raised her eyebrows in empathy.

“Price check on Betty Crocker’s thirteen-ounce mashed potatoes,” the cashier screeched over the loudspeaker, a little too
loudly.

“I’m telling you, it’s two-fifty-nine!”

“It’s ringing up two-eighty-nine,” the girl retorted.

I got out of line and went to the next opened checkout, which contained three customers, but I didn’t care. I had no tolerance
for ignorant people who showed out in public. I was a consumer advocate’s worst nightmare, the kind of shopper who accepted
prices as they were scanned, not advertised. Unless of course, we were talking about something important like a DVD player
or a stereo.

In a matter of minutes, the two-fifty-nine dispute had turned into an incident as the manager and security were summoned.
I had left the line just in time.

In the parking lot, I saw Eva ahead of me unloading her groceries into her blue Mustang. I felt a slight kinship with our
distaste for foreign cars. I ended up behind her in the exit of the parking lot. In her rearview mirror, I thought I saw her
checking me out, but she could have been checking for clearance. She turned right, I turned left.

Luciano was out on the balcony with his cell phone, and judging by the sleepy smile on his face and his low voice, I figured
Maya had found some way to call him. I noticed he had the gas grill going.

I walked out to the balcony and gave him the grocery bag with the steaks. He pulled out the plantains.

“What’s this?”

“What does it look like?”

He grinned and spoke into the phone. “Hey Maya, babe. Our boy brought home some
pla-ta-nos.
You know what that means. He got bit by a Puerto Rican ladybug.”

I narrowed my eyes and flung the bag with the loaf of bread at him. He caught it before it fell over the balcony. His laughter
resonated in my ears as I went in to take a shower.

I AM NOT
the kind of woman who chases men. My mother died at a very crucial time in my life, just when I was becoming interested
in boys, but before I started dating. From the time we were little girls, she always told Maya and me that as long as we keep
our hands folded and our knees together, we would stay out of trouble. As we got older, she told us that when it was time
for us to date, we should always pay for our share so nothing was expected of us, and that we should always, always take cab
or bus fare, just in case we were left stranded. But the main thing my mother taught us was that men were the suitors, women
were the courted. Throughout my dating years, I never approached men first, no matter how interested I was. It wasn’t that
I was shy or stuck-up, I just didn’t feel comfortable being the initiator. It was just the Latin way, the old-fashioned Southern
way, the way God intended it and what had worked for centuries to make marriages last. I thought of my parents, both sets
of my grandparents, and my aunts and uncles, who had all been married for decades until death did one of them part.

The day after the party, Maya called to tell me about a dream she had. Both Adam and I were in her dream, though in what capacity
she couldn’t remember since she had the unfortunate knack of forgetting the details of her dreams as soon as she woke up.
But it was enough to convince her that Adam and I were destined to be together, not only because of our namesakes, and because
we were both writers, but more inanely, because we were both left-handed. She tried to sell me on what a great guy he was—how
he wrote screenplays and poetry, had even published a book of poems, and that back in college, one of his screenplays won
first prize in a competition and was later sold to Hollywood. I countered that this was not enough information to make a man
great. What did she know about his past, about his intentions, or more important, his relationship with God?

I opened the top drawer of my desk where I had put away the card.
Adam Black
—
Juvenile Probation Officer.
On the back, he had scribbled his home phone. A couple of times I thought about calling him, but I kept getting mixed feelings
and usually I took that as a sign that God was trying to tell me something. Adam seemed like a nice enough guy, but I found
myself concentrating on the cons rather than the pros. His hair left something to be desired. It was intriguing but at the
same time somewhat radical. Then I thought about his comment that he didn’t pray “as much.” Even before I was saved, I prayed
almost every night. But then again, a man who worked with juvenile offenders couldn’t be that bad. In a way, we were in the
same field, steering young people in the right direction. And there was something about him, like he was holding something
back, some secret I couldn’t quite discern. I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that the flags were flapping all over the
place. And yet … No, I thought resolutely, I could never be with a man who smoked.