The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (43 page)

“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Mike said, bending down and picking the script up from where my father had tossed it. “You do need to read it, because you obviously don’t know anything about your daughter. She fought me hard on writing that script. When I approached her about writing it, she was raw from a breakup with her last boyfriend that had happened less than an hour before. And even though she was desperate for money, she advised me against choosing her to write it, for the exact reasons that you’re accusing her of. She said she hated you. She said she was too biased. She said that she wasn’t the right person for the project. She said that, and then she went and wrote the best script I have ever read about a fellow black man.

“Sir, if anyone wrote anything approaching this about my life, I would be honored. So with all due respect, read the goddamn script. And if you still don’t want it to get made when you’re finished reading it, then I’ll kill the project, even though it’s already been green-lit. Because if you finish reading this, and you don’t want it to get made, then you’re a fucking idiot, and I don’t want to play you in a film noways.”

That all threatened, Mike pushed the script into Rick T’s chest and walked out of the room, leaving me in the awkward position of sharing Rick T’s shocked silence.

Rick T looked at the script, looked at me, looked back at the script again, and to my great surprise, took a seat, turned to page twenty-three, and started reading without a further word of protest.

Not knowing what else to do, I followed Mike and found him in the bedroom, standing there as if he had just been waiting for me to come in so he could say, “So that’s where you got all that stubbornness from. I was beginning to wonder.”

Now, I could have teased Mike about losing his positivity religion when he confronted Rick T, or I could have said, “Ultimatum much?” A few quips swirled around in my mind, but when I opened my mouth, the only thing that I wanted to say, that I needed to say, was, “I love you, too.”

“You love me, too.” He threw me a grin so cocky and sure that I wanted to slap him … and then kiss him afterwards. “And once again,” he said. “Mike Barker gets what he wants.”

SHARITA

I
had believed in black love for as long as I could remember. One of my earliest memories was watching
The Cosby Show
in the front room with my sister and mother and thinking, “Yeah, that’s how I want my life to be.”

I loved black men. Loved their lips, loved their eyes, the way they looked you up and down when they wanted to get with you, the rhythmic way they talked—even the ignorant ones—and their slow smiles, which usually revealed perfect white teeth, even if they had never known a dentist in their life.

Truth be told, I thought as I tied my hair up in my silk scarf the night after Ennis kicked me out of his car, I wasn’t quite sure what I had been trying to do with the Scot in the first place. Sure he was funny and nice and smart and cheap like me, but he was also white, pushy, and foreign. Not my taste at all.

Despite this decision, it took me over three hours to get to sleep that night. And the next day at church, my mind kept on wandering to the point that I knew it would be useless to try to attend the women’s Bible study group afterwards, so I went home.

Weirdly enough, today was the day I was supposed to have gone to church with Ennis. On our first date, he had casually brought up the fact that he had been attending church every week since his last breakup.

“It was that bad?” I had asked.

“No,” he said. “But it made me see how far I’d gotten away from my roots. Right when I finished uni, I got involved in a business venture that I really needed to work out. So I started attending service at the little Episcopalian church up the road from my home and literally prayed that the venture would succeed.”

“And did it?” I’d always been fascinated by stories about the power of prayer.

“As a matter of fact it did,” he’d said. “I built a right nice nest egg, enough so that I could move to the States and have a wee bit of adventure. I stopped going to church, but after the breakup with Abby, I realized I’d prayed harder over that business than I’d ever had over our relationship. So I started going back to church after that. Once a week again, good and proper.”

“And what do you pray for now?” I’d asked.

“Nothing in particular,” he’d answered. “World peace, a new season of
Torchwood
, a Scottish Cup win for the Albion Rovers. Same stuff everybody prays for, I suppose.”

Back then I had been charmed to meet a fellow single person who attended church on the regular. Today I just wondered what Ennis prayed for in church that morning.

I decided to take a nap when I got home. I was too tired to watch TV or go out or do any of the things I used to enjoy just two days ago when I was still dating Ennis.

I had almost gotten to sleep when the phone rang. I snatched it out of my purse, faster than I wanted to, hoping it would be Ennis. But to my surprise, I saw Nicole’s name staring back at me on the caller ID.

“Hello?” I said, tentative, because we hadn’t talked since the wedding.

“Sharita,” Nicole said, her voice wobbling. “I didn’t know who else to call.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, fearing for the niece I hadn’t met, but that, according to my mother, had been born beautiful and precious three months earlier.

“I’m tired,” Nicole said.

“You’re tired?” I repeated.

“Graham’s working, he’s always working. And I’m here with the baby. And I’m so jealous of him, because he gets to leave all the time. But I’m here twenty-four/seven. I don’t even have time to get my hair done right, because weaves take too long. I just want to be pretty again.”

“You’re pretty,” I said.

“No, I look so throw down, you should see how bad. And I’m bored. You have no idea how boring this is. They make it look fun in the movies, but it’s not. It’s so not. It’s boring and it’s disgusting. All she does is poop and spit up on me. I can’t wear anything nice anymore. Not that it matters because nothing fits. I’ve only lost, like, five pounds.”

“Maybe you could order something in your new size off the Internet while the baby is sleeping. And have you thought about getting a baby—”

“Don’t even say babysitter. I’ve tried. But I don’t trust anyone to look after her but me. And I know she’ll freak out if she wakes up and I’m not there. I hate being needed like this. I keep on thinking that I should divorce Graham.”

“What?” I said, barely able to keep up. Nicole was jumping around so fast.

“If I divorce him and we share custody, then he can have her for one week and I can have her for one week, and I get half of the year to myself to do whatever I want.”

“If you’re divorced, you’ll have to get and keep a job to get by,” I said.

“I want a job. A real job. Acting can go to hell. I want to go to an office and sit at a desk, and not have to take care of somebody who shits on me. I’m asking him for a divorce as soon as he gets home. Or should I get a lawyer first? You’re supposed to get a lawyer first, right?”

Nicole sounded hysterical, and it surprised me how easily I fell back into the role of reasonable big sister—despite my little sister status. “How about instead of asking your husband who loves you and your daughter for a divorce, we fly Mom out there for a week or two.”

“No,” Nicole said. “I love Mom, but it was terrible having her here when Ella was born. She doesn’t cook, says she doesn’t remember how to change a diaper. All she wanted to do was shop. With what money? I don’t know, since I had to pay for her to get here in the first place.”

I stifled a smile, thinking about how Nicole who had defended our mother the last time I had complained about having to pay for her to come
out to California, only to have her drag me to one shopping mall after another, adding brighter and brighter colors to her already ridiculously loud wardrobe. “At least you have money to fly her out,” Nicole had said two years ago. “I wish I could see Mommy more often.”

Now she knew.

“If Ella and I get on a plane today and come stay with you for a while, does that count as kidnapping?” Nicole was saying now.

Nicole, I realized then, hadn’t gotten over on life like I’d thought. Yeah, she’d achieved black love, while I had not. And yes, her husband was well off and they lived in a fabulous apartment with their camera-ready baby. But Nicole was still Nicole. Easily overwhelmed, overly dramatic, weirdly drastic, and in constant need of her younger sister’s guidance.

“How about this?” I said. “It’s pretty slow here. How about I come out next weekend?”

“Really?” Nicole said, tears in her voice. “You’d do that for me, even though I’m a terrible sister and a terrible human being and a terrible mother?”

“You’re not a terrible mother,” I said.

“Yes, I am,” Nicole said. “Women have been doing this for centuries and I can’t handle it. Who decides to divorce her husband just so she can have some more time to herself? I’m terrible and selfish.”

“You’re not,” I said. “If you were really as bad as you think you are, then you would have just done it. You wouldn’t have called me first.”

“I didn’t want to have to call you,” Nicole said. “That’s what you never understood. I didn’t want to ask you for money all the time. I didn’t want to be a leech like you said I was at the wedding. I wanted to make it as an actor and pay my own rent. But Sharita, even when I’m trying my hardest, I can’t do this life without you.”

I put a hand over my heart, touched speechless for a second. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” I finally said. “I can’t wait to see you again, sister.”

After hanging up, I realized what I needed to do. I went into my guest bedroom, which also served as my home office, and got out two manila envelopes, one of which I addressed to my sister. Then I went into my bedroom and got out my grandmother’s pearls. I had always imagined wearing them at my own perfect black wedding, but now I could see that wasn’t going to happen. I wrote my sister’s address out and dropped the pearls in the envelope. Then I fingered the Sharpie I had used to write my sister’s address and picked up the other envelope.

Scottish movies weren’t like American ones. From what I had seen, they were usually pretty dismal tales about alcoholics and other tragic figures. And if there was any love story at all, nine times out of ten you could bet it wouldn’t turn out well. The Scots didn’t seem to even know the meaning of the words “romantic comedy.”

Which is why Ennis was probably more than a little surprised when he opened the door to find me standing there with a sign written on the front of a manila envelope that read, “I’M SORRY. WILL YOU BE MY BOYFRIEND?”

The Scots weren’t “a romantic comedy lot,” as Ennis might have said, but that didn’t stop him from opening his arms wide when he found me outside his door.

“Ah, wee Sharita,” he said. “I prayed for this exact scenario in church this morning. How did you know?”

Don’t worry about if a guy likes you. Worry about if you like him. You’d be surprised how long it takes some of us to figure out we never even liked the guy in the first place.

—The Awesome Girl’s Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men
by Davie Farrell

THURSDAY

A
fter the Rick T showdown, Mike and I went down to the hotel’s five-star, Michelin-rated restaurant for a late breakfast. We lingered for a while, both wanting to avoid the Rick T elephant back in the hotel room, but when we came back upstairs, the study door was still closed, which meant Rick T was still reading.

“Say it again,” Mike demanded as we re-entered the
Gone With the Wind
front room.

“Say what I again?” I asked, knowing perfectly well what he meant.

“I love you,” he told me. “It feels good to be able to say that without worrying about you freaking out and running away.”

“I love you, too,” I said, even though I could hear my mother’s engine revving in the back of my consciousness.

We turned on a movie to pass the time while we waited. The red-eye, followed by the emotional fight, followed by a large breakfast must have tuckered me out, because I fell asleep, my head resting against Mike’s chest. The next thing I knew, Mike was shaking me awake.