Page 62 of IRL: In Real Life
I checked the time.
8:17.
My pulse kicked again.
“You all right?” my father asked, cutting his eyes at me over a paper plate loaded with ribs and potato salad.
“Fine.”
“Mmm,” my mother said.
I ignored both of them and typed:
Me: You are very sure I’m coming.
Three dots.
Micah: No. I’m hoping you are. Big difference.
I looked across the yard at my mother. She was laughing now, one hand at her chest, telling Aunt Denise she was too old to be cutting up like this in front of company. Fireworks had started popping somewhere a few streets over, quick bright little bursts above the trees. The yard was full of food and smoke and music and people who had known me before I knew how to protect myself properly.
This was the kind of evening a woman should have been satisfied by.
And I was. That was not the issue.
The issue was that somewhere under my dress and jewelry and all the sense I had spent years building for myself, I wanted to go see a man in low light and let the week finally have a body again.
I typed back.
Me: I can be there by 10.
Micah: I’ll be there.
I locked the phone and slid it into my purse.
Then I looked up and found my mother already looking at me in a maternal way that made me feel briefly fourteen and fully seen.
“You leaving early?” she asked.
“A little.”
“For what?”
I reached for my cup, buying myself a sip I did not need. “I’m meeting somebody.”
That changed the yard in the smallest possible Black-family way. Nobody gasped. Nobody clutched pearls. But the air shifted. Aunt Denise went quiet on purpose. Shay’s eyeswidened. My father leaned back in his chair like he had just become casually interested in absolutely everything.
Then my mother said, “Okay.”
That was all. No interrogation.
Just okay.
Maybe because I was thirty-six and not sixteen. Maybe because mothers knew when a daughter needed to walk into something on her own feet. Maybe because some part of her recognized the look on my face and remembered being a woman before she had to become somebody’s mother.
Still, when I stood to gather my purse, she caught my wrist lightly and said, low enough for only me:
“Make sure he meets the woman you are. Not just the one he likes looking at.”
