Later that afternoon, Monica sat in her office, just staring at her desk phone. Unbeknownst to her, Tabatha was standing just within the door and had been watching her for the last minute.
“I can’t take it anymore! Are you gonna make a call, or what?”
“The annual Women in Business Ball,” Monica said, tilting all the way back in her chair. “I haven’t told Lewis about it yet. Is that wrong of me?”
“What are you waiting for? It’s Thursday.”
“I know. But if I have him go with me, would that be running the risk of—”
“Him acting like a baby, complaining about going? Then once he got there, drinking too much, talking badly about people, calling all the black folks white wannabes because they decided to go to school, work jobs, and make lots of money, and if a man happened to look at you too long, would you be risking Lewis clubbing that man over the head? I’d say yes. You’d definitely be rolling the dice on that one,” Tabatha said.
“I know all that. But I’m asking would I be running the risk of finding out that he really doesn’t care about any of it? Before, when I thought it meant nothing to him, I just accepted it, told myself I had to deal with it. But now that I know that there is someone who feels as passionately about all this as I do—”
“You mean Nate?” Tabatha interjected.
Monica ignored Tabatha’s interruption, saying, “I told you what Lewis said when I showed him our quarterlies.”
“Yeah, that neither he, nor Layla, who might actually be smarter than her father, wanted to hear anything about it.”
Monica stood, walked out from behind her desk. “Doesn’t he know how important all this is to me? And if he cared, wouldn’t he act like it? Hell, even if he didn’t care, shouldn’t he at least fake it?”
“This is how he’s always been. Why are you acting like this is new information?”
“I don’t know,” Monica said, turning in a circle, pushing her hands through her hair. “No. I do know. This morning I told Nate I’m thinking about another store and he just went and got in touch with someone he knows who’s selling some retail space. He says he can get it for me for cheap if I’m interested.”
“Wow,” Tabatha said. “That’s juice.”
“It totally just came out of nowhere. But just with that one gesture, I could tell that he really wants me to succeed with this. It felt like he sincerely cared. And that made me wonder. Shouldn’t I be getting that feeling from the man I’m about to marry, not the man I just divorced?”
Tabatha just sat there, looking up at Monica. “You’re right.”
“So what does it say about a man who doesn’t care about something he knows the woman he’s supposed to love cares about?”
“Hmmm. Or you could ask,” Tabatha said, grinning, “what does it say about a woman who doesn’t care about a man who loves the same things the woman he once loved cares about?”
“What?” Monica said.
“Think about it. You’ll get it eventually.”