I guess it’s just a fact of life that when you get out of a relationship, even a shitty one with a no-good lying piece of shit, you need some time to heal. I’d been with Derrick for seven years. He was the only man I’d ever known. When I stopped messing with him and finally let go of the idea that we’d ever be a happy TV family, it felt like more than a breakup; it was like I’d cut off my arm.
During the day, I tried to keep busy making money; at night I’d sit in front of the TV and try not to cry. I didn’t want to admit I felt so lonely without him, so when anybody asked how I was doing, I’d just say, “Fuck that nigga, I’m good!”
“Oh really?” my friend Niecy asked skeptically, when she came over one night and found me laid out on the sofa watching The Golden Girls.
“Yeah,” I said. “Staying positive, doing me.”
Niecy was Dre’s baby mama. She’d shown up to my house dressed in hot pants and a black leather vest, looking like the missing member of Xscape, and ready for a night out. She pointed to my outfit: “Honey, just look at you! Rabbit, you a hot-ass mess.”
I was dressed in a faded red and green extra large nightshirt with a picture of Santa Claus’s happy face and the words ho ho ho on the front. “What are you talking about?” I protested. “These are my relaxing clothes. I’m relaxing.”
“Girl, please,” Niecy said, rolling her eyes. “It’s July and you dressed like it’s Christmas at the crack house. Stop playing and get your ass up. Chile, you need to get out of the house and have some fun.” They were having a lip-syncing contest at Harlem Nights, Niecy said. We were going and she wasn’t taking no for an answer. She dragged me to my bedroom, pulled an outfit from my closet—a cream-colored version of the exact same outfit she had on—plugged in my flat iron, pressed my weave, gelled my edges, and sprayed my hair with firm hold Spritz. Then she stood back and gave me the once-over. “Yeah, girl, you gonna find you a new man tonight!”
The club was packed when we got there. At the front of the room, a contestant was killing it onstage, lip-syncing Diana Ross and Lionel Richie’s “Endless Love,” in a half-man, half-woman costume. Every few bars, he’d pivot so we’d see either the long-haired Diana in a bedazzled gown or a white-suited Lionel with a ’fro.
Someone in the crowd yelled, “Saaaaang, bitch!” as Niecy and I made our way to a table near the stage where some of her friends were already sitting. I took a seat beside a big-boned brother with a friendly smile and low fade. He had on a blue button-down shirt, looking just like Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
“I’m Michael,” he said, leaning over and shaking my hand. “And you are?”
“Rabbit.”
“Rabbit?” he repeated, looking confused. “That’s the name your mama gave you?”
“No. My mama named me Patricia, but nobody calls me that.”
He leaned back in his chair and looked at me through squinted eyes.
“Well, you don’t look like a Rabbit to me,” he said. “You’re too pretty to be named after an animal.” I could feel my face getting hot. This was way better than sitting at home watching The Golden Girls. Michael asked if he could call me Pat and I nodded yes, thinking to myself, As long as you keep sweet-talking me, you can call me whatever the hell you want.
Onstage, a three-hundred-pound Mariah Carey was adjusting her half shirt, lip syncing, “You got me feeling e-mo-tion . . .” When Michael turned his eyes to the show, I gave him the once-over. He definitely wasn’t my type. I liked the roughneck Jodeci look, and Michael was so clean-cut, he looked more like the fifth member of Boys II Men. Still, there was something about the way he smiled at me and called me pretty that got me interested. “You live around here?” I asked, leaning forward. I could feel my one good boob pressing against his forearm.
“I been in the military,” he said. “I just got back from Desert Storm.” He took out a pen and drew me a map on the back of a napkin, pointing to a gulf. “That’s where I was deployed, in Kuwait.” I knew about the war from watching the evening news with Hood on the little TV in his office. But I’d never met anybody who’d been there.
“What’s it like over there?” I asked.
“Hotter than hell,” Michael said, over the music. “But at nighttime, when it’s quiet, the desert is real pretty. There’s nothing but sand all around, and when you look up you can see every single star in the sky.” Michael was leaning in so close I could feel his breath on my neck and smell his soapy scent. He wasn’t the kind of guy I went for. But I couldn’t help but picture him in his army fatigues standing in the middle of a war zone admiring the stars in the sky.
Maybe I should have told Michael I had kids before I invited him over. But I was so excited when he called me a few days after we met at the club that I just blurted out: “You want to come over and watch TV?” Half an hour later, he was knocking at my door.
The first thing he did when he came inside was ask me why I had so many pairs of sneakers, which he noticed lined up against the wall. “They’re not all mine,” I said, explaining that some of them belonged to my nieces Cece and Little Cee, who still stayed with me from time to time. “And the little-kid Nikes belong to my kids,” I added. “My son is five and my daughter is almost seven. She’s real smart, her teacher just put her in accelerated reading.”
He stared at me hard as we sat down in the living room. “How old are you, anyway?” I told him I was twenty and could see him doing the math in his head. But all he said was “Okay.”
“You have any kids?” I asked.
“Nah.”
“Why not? You look like the family type.”
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “I guess I always wanted to wait, settle down, and do it right. You know,” he nodded toward the TV, “like that.” On the screen, Aunt Viv and Uncle Phil were sipping tea in the living room of their Bel-Air mansion, while The Fresh Prince made fun of Carlton’s dancing.
“Oh, you mean you wanna be rich before you have kids?”
“No, I just meant married and settled down.”
That night Michael and I talked for hours. He asked me about my mama and I told him how she’d take us to a different church every Sunday to get baptized so we could eat. Michael kept shaking his head in disbelief. “Golly,” he said. “I never heard anything like that before.”
Michael had grown up with his two parents in Cascade Heights. The neighborhood was only fifteen minutes away from where Duck and I sold dope on Baldwin Street, but it might as well been a different planet. Around that way, you never saw women walking out the house in a roller set and their bedroom slippers, and nobody parked their broke-down hoopties in the yard. Michael didn’t know shit about caseworkers, eviction notices, or eating ketchup sandwiches for dinner.