“How areyourkids, Yasmen?” Soledad asks, sipping the cosmopolitan the server set down after taking our orders. “Deja and Kassim okay tonight?”
“They’re good. Grabbing dinner at Grits. Josiah’s taking them to the house for homework once they’re done.”
“You two manage your…” Soledad closes one eye and twists her lips, apparently searching for the right word. “Your dynamic so well.”
“Dynamic?” Hendrix casts me a look I’ve fondly dubbed sly-slutty. “Is that what you call it when your fine as hell ex-husband is there 24/7 for the screwing and you do nothing about it?”
There was a time when Hendrix’s brashness would have left me sputtering and spewing my drink, but I’m used to her now. She spent all her shock value on me months ago.
“It’s called co-parenting,” I say. “And running a business together. If we want to do both of those well, it’s best to keep things simple and platonic.”
“You don’t even want the occasional dip into that yummy honeypot?” Hendrix asks, a knowing smile gracing her full lips. “Josiah is—”
“Fine as hell.” I smile at the approaching server carrying our food. “I’m aware. I was married to him.”
“I bet Josiah put it down,” Hendrix says. “You can look at him and tell he can fuck.”
“All right. Enough.” I try to play it off with a laugh, but talking about our former sex life is not what I want to do. “Don’t creep on my ex.”
“I mean no harm.” Hendrix lifts both hands. “I come in peace and with the purest admiration for a man in his prime and a prime piece of man. I was just saying it seems like you probably got some good dick out of that marriage. Amirite?”
I did, but that was the last thing on my mind at the end. Our animosity and grief doused the passion we’d always taken for granted. Those last few months, we rarely even slept in the same room. My bed has been cold and empty for a very long time.
“I obviously don’t know everything that went down with you two,” Hendrix says. “But that’s the kind of man I’d miss.”
“Like you said,” I tell her, staring into my drink. “You don’t know everything that went down.”
They never knew Josiah and me as a set, as the couple everyone envied. When I was going through my dark season, I lost touch with most friends I was closest to. Not their fault. I shut many of them out. I met Hendrix and Soledad through the yoga class my therapist recommended to help reduce anxiety and improve my mood at my lowest point. Soledad lives a couple of streets over, so I knewofher,but it wasn’t until yoga that we really connected. The three of us hid on the back row watching everyone do their dog, cat, and cobra poses while we struggled to contort our out-of-shape bodies into the most basic positions. Maybe because I was so in need of reconnection, and they seemed to be, too, we grew close quickly. They don’t look at me with that careful sympathy I see in the eyes of everyone who knew me before.
“I know you guys went through a lot all at once,” Soledad says.
“Yeah, we, um…It was a lot.” I take a fortifying gulp of my drink. “You know Josiah’s aunt Byrd passed away soon after we opened in Skyland.”
Pushing down the emotion that tries to break through the surface, I force myself to continue. “Business tanked. In that state, we couldn’t hold our own in Skyland. Not with the quality of restaurants around here. Maybe we would have fared better if we’d stayed where we were. Stayedwhowe were.”
But Josiah had always seen us turning the restaurant into an upscale destination spot. And it would have gone off without a hitch had life not hitched every which way but loose.
“You don’t talk about it much, the divorce I mean,” Soledad says. “Did you guys try therapy?”
“Josiah’s allergic,” I say wryly. “He doesn’t do therapy. I wanted to, but…”
“At the church where I grew up,” Hendrix says, “they always said you ain’t got a problem God can’t fix. What can a therapist do that God can’t? That mindset kept a lot of folks from getting help.”
“Josiah’s reasons had nothing to do with faith,” I say with a twist of my lips. “He just thinks it’s a load of bullshit. Deja and Kassim talked some to a grief counselor at school, but aside from a rough patch or two, they bounced back okay. Couples therapy? Josiah didn’t think it could help, and by the end, neither did I.”
Things had gotten so bad, I felt like I was suffocating in that house, in that marriage, and I had to get out. It felt like the whole world was resting on my chest every morning, and it was all I could do to get out of bed.
And everything hurt.
That’s the part of depression people don’t consider, that at times it physically hurts. My therapist helped me understand that the back pain and the headaches I developed were most likely related to stress, and stress hormones like cortisol and noradrenaline contributed to my apathy and exhaustion. Which exacerbated my depression. It was an inescapable cycle that left me looking up at my life from the bottom of a well, the walls slippery, and seeing no way out.
And it all hurt, including being with the man I’d loved more than everything. After how we’d loved each other, the way we hurt each other was destroying us.
I’ve made a little bubble for my friends and me, one that protects my fragile joy and wards off the hurt of the past. I know I’ll have to tell Hendrix and Soledad everything soon. If therapy has taught me anything, it’s that you run from your pain in a circle. You end up exhausted, but never really gaining ground. I have to stop running, have to share with them all the ways life popped the seams on a world perfectly sewn together. For now I share a little at a time, and for tonight, I’ve shared enough.
I clear my throat and push out a laugh. “Is this a celebration or what? Let’s eat before Sol ages another year.”
The night turns out to be just what I needed, and I hope what Soledad deserves. She’s the hardest-working woman I know and sees her life’s mission as raising three beautiful humans to be confident women who make the world a better place. Some might judge that, say a woman as smart as Soledad could do so much more. I see the power in choosing yourownmore.