Happily Even After
Marilynn Griffith

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every book I write seems to require more and more help. I’m thankful to have a great family, good friends and a great publishing team to help me out.

Fill, Ashlie, Michelle, Fill Jr, Ben, James, John and Isaiah:

Thank you for putting up with me while this book came together. I hope that all the harried hugs and microwave dinners leave you no worse for the wear. Each of you is an amazing story that I’m blessed to be able to read every day. Without you, none of this could happen.

Calvary Chapel Tallahassee and all the amazing moms I’ve met over the years in the nursing mothers’ room:

Thanks for your support and your friendship. You’re the best.

Jessica Alvarez, Diane Dietz, Joan Marlow Golan, Megan Lorius and all the Steeple Hill Books staff who worked on this book:

Thanks again for believing in me and allowing me to tell another story with you. I appreciate it.

Mom, Maurice, Shay, Mya and Maxwell:

Thanks for giving me plenty to laugh about while writing this book. You all are incredibly talented and giving. I miss you much.

Claudia, my wonderful mother-in-law, and Grafton, my father-in-law who treats me like a daughter:

Thank you so much for your love and support. (And for giving me your son. He’s a keeper!)

Mrs. A. Smith, Mrs. Dupont, Mrs. Sperling, Mrs. Shaner, Miss Dot, Miss Sonia, Mr. Gillmore, Mr. Hankerson, Principal Gayle, Miss Wimberley and all the other teachers and staff who have cared for my children this year:

Thank you. Your hard work has been a blessing to me and my family. Sorry I haven’t always been around. This is some of what I was doing.

Dave Talbot, Rachel Williams, Dick Foth, Sharon Hinck, Susie Aughtmon, Wendy Lawton, Cyndy Salzmann, Janet Eckles, Marci, Vicki Tiede and everyone from the Mount Hermon shuttle van:

Thanks for the great time at Mount Hermon 2007. It helped me a lot with this novel.

Mair, Barbara Joe, Jen, Staci, Amy, Angie, Jess, Heather, Gail and all my other writer friends:

Thanks for putting up with me when I disappear. I believe in you.

For all the readers who continue to support my work and my family by buying my books and telling others about them:

Thank you. You make it all worth it.

Jesus, who picks me up when I fall:

You did it again.

Chapter One

A ll hail the Queen!

My gold dress drapes the floor as I approach, taking my seat beside the King of all creation. He’s called me forward, invited me into His throne room. I’m blessed and embarrassed. I haven’t seen Him all week. With only a slight tiara adjustment, I stand before the King and step onto a tiny, tiny scale….

“Tracey! Don’t you hear this baby crying out here? You’ve been in that bathroom for, like, an hour! And now you’re in there screaming? What’s that about?”

The heavenly throne room faded. My velvet gown became a pink terry-cloth bathrobe. The toilet in my secret bathroom, the only one of the six lavatories in my home far enough away from my bedroom for me to feel safe enough to step on a scale, was no longer my throne. The overhead fan, which usually drowned out my screams when I stepped on the scale, must have finally failed. It was my favorite and most dreaded day of the week.

Sunday.

Church with my mother-in-law and weigh-in day wrapped into one morning. And after months of escape in my purple bathroom, my husband had found me out. Was nothing sacred?

“Coming!” I grabbed my throat, realizing that I was still speaking in my regal tone. I paused in front of the mirror and removed the plastic crown my friends gave me for my last birthday. No time to remove the face paint or the body glitter, though. Oh well. After almost two years of marriage, Ryan should know that I’m a little crazy by now, shouldn’t he?

Armed with a wet washrag, I scurried out of my secret room, scrubbing my face like a dingy wall as I went. By the time I reached my bedroom on the other side of the house, my husband was snoring, with Lily, my baby daughter, resting on his chest. I sighed with satisfaction at the sight of them. As I tiptoed back to my retreat, though, I groaned at the sight of myself in the hall mirror. Despite my spa treatments, not much had changed.

I’m no queen. I’m not even a princess. I’m just Tracey Blackman, a fat girl from Illinois.

Stop it. You are not fat anymore.

Okay, well, I used to be a fat girl. Sometimes I feel like I still am, like I’m one Oreo away from inflating into a balloon and floating out my window.

I wondered if my husband would notice.

Probably not.

My baby girl would notice, though, since I’d be taking her favorite sources of sustenance, also known as “the girls,” which were currently overflowing my nursing bra, with me. (I like that word, sustenance. It’s so…purposeful. Don’t you think?) Since I’ve got the booby juice and because I know that Ryan really loves me, I’ll forgo the Oreo and settle for my life as a slightly lumpy postpartum person. I read that in a parenting magazine over the weekend, that men can get postpartum depression too, so the term should apply to “postpartum people.” I canceled my subscription after that, though the laughing fit did keep me from finishing a pint of ice cream that I hadn’t realized I was even eating.

That’s how I became a fat girl, silently polishing off the ends of cartons and bottoms of boxes like an efficient little machine. My grandmother taught me not to waste anything. Perhaps I internalized that message a little too deeply. I wish she’d lived long enough to see me at this size, let alone the size-six wedding dress packed up in the attic.

I felt like a fake that day in that itty-bitty dress. I still feel like that sometimes, though a lot less often since my dress size has doubled to a twelve. I walk around thinking that any minute somebody is going to find me out and scream, “fat girl undercover!” Once I was on the elevator and a big girl got off and a lady started joking to me about how overweight the woman was. I felt like some kind of spy from the fat side. After several attempts to say something nice without becoming physically violent, I explained that I thought the girl was beautiful. That was one quiet elevator ride. About as quiet as it is in my bathroom now.

After the weigh-in trauma, I was usually in here getting my praise on with Donnie McClurkin or Fred Hammond, but this morning it was just me, God and my scale. And one of us was saying the wrong thing.

Maybe I wasn’t standing up straight. Right. That was it. I looked around my royal bathroom for a good laugh, taking in the purple-and-gold decor and crown furnishings. I keep it locked all week and far as I knew, my husband didn’t come in here. I sure hoped not. This place was for praying, pampering and fighting the digital dragon also known as my scale.

The whole thing started with collecting princess decor for my daughter’s future bedroom. Every little girl wanted to be a princess, right? Then one day I found myself crying after a tongue-lashing from my mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth (yes, that’s really her name). I decided to claim a throne of my own. Sure it’s a gold-plated toilet seat from eBay (it had never been opened, don’t worry) but I’m so glad I did it.

Not wanting to take the chance of Ryan waking up again, I locked the door and took a deep breath before climbing on the scale one more time. I leaned forward, looking past the belly my La Leche League leader promised would be gone by now (“Nursing really burns those calories, you’ll see!”), so that I could see the numbers, numbers that I never thought I’d see again.

161.

There it was in bright red numbers, making a fool of me. Before I got skinny and got married I would have celebrated a scale that showed me those numbers (it’d probably have a bathroom to itself) even though it would have been defective. But now, a hundred pounds and four karats later, those LCD digits scare me silly, especially with today being Sunday. Though this scale is accurate to the pound Queen Elizabeth (I call her Liz to annoy her) can size me up to the ounce.

“You’re almost one-sixty, you know. About a quarter pound from it. You’d better push back from the table, baby. You can’t blow up like you did before. You have a family now,” she said to me last Sunday on her way to the sanctified section at the front of the church. I’m surprised nobody heard the air hissing out of me, she deflated me so fast.

All that air must have followed me home from church last week and puffed me back up, because despite little sleep, little food and more exercise than I’ve done in I don’t know how long, I gained weight. Again. And what scared me most was that I was starting not to care. When that happens, watch out, because Queen Liz hadn’t seen anything yet. I can blow up faster than an air bed when I put my mouth and my mind to it.

I paused for a moment and closed my eyes, picturing myself exploding out of the tiny skirts my mother-in-law keeps buying me and splattering a crowd of people. I guess it’s like being an alcoholic or something except I’m faced with the reality of my food addiction at least three times a day.

Though my husband thinks I’m kidding, I’ve told him more than once about the binge that could be around the corner. It could happen at any moment if I’m not careful. And I’m not usually; careful, that is. Counting things—calories, points, carbs, pick your poison—makes me nervous after a few months. I just have to believe that my thinking has changed at this point, even if I am little jumpy most of the time.

I was a much calmer person when I was fat, even if a cardiac event was imminent. Though the pictures of me back then are pretty shocking, I never really felt as fat then as I do now. Looking down at the numbers on the scale, I feel something that I’m not familiar with—desperation.

Last week, I overheard a woman in the grocery store blaming her belly on her son. He was the twenty-year-old pushing the cart! My daughter is six months old and I’m running out of excuses. After hearing that lady, I vowed to lose at least a pound. Instead, I gained two.

Figures.

Before Queen Liz shrunk me down (or blew me up) to size, I’d actually thought I was looking cute last Sunday at church. This week, I look a hot mess…and I know it. Seven nights of a colicky baby crying paired with two server crashes for my Web design clients leave a sistah looking a little tired. Not that Queen Liz will accept that as an excuse. To hear her tell it, all I need is a good hair relaxer, better use of my college degree and of course, one good round of Jenny Craig.

“We don’t have to mention it to Ryan or anything. It’d be just between us girls. You can rip off the labels on the meals and tell him that they’re TV dinners. By the time he figures it out, you’ll be too cute for him to care!” my loving mother-in-law typed above the forwarded e-mail with the latest Jenny Craig special. She’d tucked a Weight Watchers gift certificate in the diaper bag she bought me months before.

Since I never mentioned the gift certificate and obviously didn’t use it, the Queen moved on to Jenny Craig, citing a friend’s success with the program. “That girl was big as a house before.”

Wow, Mom. That makes me feel good, I remember thinking. Yeah, Mom. As evil as she can be, that’s what the Queen wants me to call her. The sad thing? I want to call her that. Getting a wonderful husband would have been enough, but getting a mother seemed too good to be true….

It was.

This probably would be easier if I had more memories of my mother or if my grandmother was still alive, but I don’t and she isn’t. I thought I’d worked through all my “Are you my mommy?” issues until I got married and had my own baby girl, my sweet Lily. She looks a lot like my mother, same cinnamon skin and upturned nose. Nobody else recognizes it though since my mother isn’t around. What people do notice about Lily is Ryan’s eyes and laughing mouth, everything from him, nothing from me. Sometimes my husband works so much that the most I see of him is in Lily’s eyes. Except for Sundays.

Sundays are the days when my husband turns off his phone for a few hours and leans into me, whispering funny things in my ear. Sundays are the days when we sit in the pew knee-to-knee, arm-to-arm. Together. A family. So, fat or not, I’ve got to get moving. Jesus is waiting by my prayer stool, calling me to put on my battle gear, to settle my soul—

“Tracey! What are you doing in there? Didn’t you hear me before? Lily’s hungry. She doesn’t want me.”

Oh well, so much for soul settling. Duty calls.

Ryan had stayed up too late working. I could hear it in his voice.

Lord, don’t let it be one of those Sundays.

“Sorry, honey. Here I come.” One kick sent the scale back under the sink (which felt good even if it hurt my toe). When I stepped into the hall, they were both there, my husband and my baby. They both looked happy to see me.

Ryan held a finger to his lips and shook his head when I reached for Lily. “You know what? She’s okay. Sorry for yelling. I had a long night. Do you forgive me?”

I nodded and caught my breath, surprised as I often am by how good he looks, even in the morning. He is what my friend Dana calls “carelessly handsome,” so good-looking that he doesn’t even seem to be aware of it. Every woman in the church is aware of it, though, especially me.

He kissed Lily’s forehead before kissing me lightly on the mouth and looking me up and down, pausing at all the parts I was trying so hard to hide. “You look so pretty this morning that it doesn’t make sense. I’m supposed to be thinking about God, you know. It’s the Lord’s day. You do know that you’re beautiful, don’t you?” He took my hand and led me—us—to the baby’s room where he put her in her crib.

Words didn’t seem adequate for the moment, so I ran a hand up my husband’s arm instead, thinking of how good he was to me, even before I lost the weight. His mother would have flipped if she’d seen me then. Ryan saw me, though, all of me. And he looked at me then just like he was looking at me now. Words came to me in a rush as we headed back to our room. “You look good this morning, too. Maybe we should take a few minutes to thank the Lord for what He’s made.”

Ryan opened the door to our room and pulled me inside. “I think that’s a wonderful idea.”

“Babe, can you do something with Lily? I can’t drive with her screaming like that. Seriously.” Ryan switched lanes and took a back street before stealing another glance at his watch. Late is not in my husband’s vocabulary. Unfortunately, when you look up that word in the dictionary, you’ll find my face beneath it. Though abstract concepts come easily to me, I’m often easily confused by the basics, like the location of the only skirt I can currently fit into. It’s a cute skirt, thank goodness, but since we lingered too long over our thanksgiving for one another this morning, Ryan’s probably done with me for a while. At present, he’s a man with one mission—getting to church before his mother.

He didn’t have to worry about me fighting him on this one. For once, I had his back. I prayed like crazy on the passenger’s side, all the while reaching back to comfort Lily in her car seat. Things seemed much easier when she was tiny and still facing the back. I guess there’s a limit to how much black leather a kid can look at, because she always fell asleep in spite of herself. Now, with a whole blaring world in front of her, there was a lot to be fussy about.

Her daddy seemed to think so, too. “Oh, come on. Get out of the way. That’s not even a parking space. What in the world is wrong with this guy? Can’t he see that I’m trying to get around?” Ryan honked the horn and hung his head in disgust.

I did the same, minus the honking. When Ryan’s like this, there’s no room to give, not a second to spare. If he could, my husband would leave the car right here and sprint to the sanctuary just to keep from being a few minutes late for service. Knowing how painful this is for him and that’s it’s pretty much my fault, I touched his elbow, made him an offer. “Sweetheart, I’ll park and bring the baby in. You go on ahead.”

His head snapped up. “You sure?”

See? I know him so well…in some ways. “Absolutely,” I said, though I didn’t sound totally convincing, even to myself.

Ryan picked up on it, too. He sighed. “Thanks, but no. You’re just trying to help and I appreciate it. We’re a family. We should go in together, late or not.” His jaw set into a tight line.

I got out of the car, still stuck behind the line of traffic in front of us, and walked around to the driver’s-side door. I opened it and tugged at Ryan’s arm, gave him a kiss on the cheek. He didn’t respond in kind. It’s okay. I know he was just worried about the time. In my head, I was thinking of Adrian, Dana’s husband. He’s a model guy, the kind of man women want their daughters to marry, but he can’t stand being late, either. He’ll leave Dana at home on a Sunday morning in a minute. Ryan could have easily done the same. “Go on in, honey. I’ve got the car.”

He looked relieved as he got out, but then the cars moved and he saw it. We both did. A salmon-colored Lexus parked in the pastor’s space.

Queen Liz had struck again.

My first Sunday at my husband’s church, I’d been amazed at the procession of ladies. It was amazing to watch, no matter how many times I saw the women file into Promised Land Worship Center. The first row curved in sharply, much shorter than the others. Those seats were reserved for Pastor Dre and First Lady Hyacynth, along with the other ministers, full-time staff people and their families. The first lady’s friends, the special ladies of the First Ladies and Friends Society, sat there also, usually in matching hats. On occasion, my stomach lurched at the sight of them.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, looked as though her mouth watered when she saw those women. Ryan had told me before he married me that his father had served as an interim pastor of this church for a few years, but that another man had been sent to take his place. The son of that man served as pastor now and Queen Liz didn’t seem too happy about it. Once one had a taste of the first row, evidently, it was hard to take being moved back. And moved back she was.

Row number two was what I like to call the Mama and ’nem section, reserved for all the cousins, aunties, parents and assorted other relatives of the pastor and first lady. The only person I could point out on that row was Pastor Dre’s mother, who despite her advanced age would sport a pair of stilettos and a fierce suit in a minute and walk better than me while doing so. I need to get to know her better….

The third row, Auxiliary Alley, I call it, is for the older women of the church who did most of the work: the Altar Club, Missionary Circle and Women’s Auxiliary all sat there, though none of us had any idea what most of them did. Queen Liz sat prominently on that row, even though no one, including her pewmates, was sure which ministry she belonged to. Personally, I thought she belonged to the I-ain’t-sitting-back-no-farther-than-this club, of which she was both founder and president.

All the other ministries, groups and programs filled in the remaining seven rows that comprised the top ten. To try to pose your way into one of those rows was to invite scorn that could last a lifetime. I’d tried to shake hands with a woman at the restaurant we went to after church and Liz had almost karate chopped my wrist. “She’s that woman who lied about being in the choir. Don’t fool with her.”

It turned out that the incident in question had occurred when she was in the fifth grade. Church drama dies hard. So does the ill will my mother-in-law sends my way every Sunday when I take my seat with Ryan in the back near the door. It’s as far as I can get from the Queen and still be in the sanctuary while also offering the option of quick exit. Best seat in the house. Although there is a place in the balcony that would be just perfect….

Ryan won’t hear of it, though. He tries to act like he’s so different from his mother, but he has a thing about the balcony. “That’s for latecomers, sleepers, visitors and other nonessential folk,” he’d told me in the only imitation I’d ever heard him do of his father. The message hit home. I was all of the above except maybe a sleeper. Pastor Dre wasn’t boring, that much was for sure. If his preaching didn’t keep you up, the reflection of the lights off his cuff links, watch, bracelet and other assorted bling could definitely do the job.

And Hyacynth? Well, let’s just say that though all that stuff in my bathroom was a joke to me, the first lady probably had the real thing in her house. Howard undergrad, Harvard graduate school, Miss Black America two times over. Yeah. That’s what I was dealing with. The few times I’d talked to her she seemed pretty down to earth, though. For a beauty queen, anyway.

There I was, being ugly again and in the house of God at that. My real problem wasn’t with any of these people, but with my scale and my mother-in-law.

Your real problem is with God, I dared to think for just a second. That would have to keep for later, especially with my husband next to me about to break into a sweat.

“Why did Mama have to park in Dre’s space? Can you tell me that? Sometimes I think she just wants some attention.”

You think?

For my husband to be such a computer genius and great businessman, he could be a little dense when it came to his mother. Okay, a lot dense.

I settled myself down into the movie-theater-type chair, wondering for a moment if I’d have been able to fit in it a couple years back. Probably not. Black folks need pews. Room for your butt, your purse, your program and of course, a few inches to swing your mortuary fan if it came down to it. We had fans here. I’d seen them, but I’d never seen anybody use one. It was all about climate control these days.

The service started and no one noticed as I sprang the trapdoor on my nursing blouse. Lily gulped once or twice, but the music was too loud for anyone to hear. Everything seemed to lift off me as the choir sang, that is until the songs ended and they got to the announcements.

Ryan shifted in his chair as the first message blinked across the screen in all caps.

PLEASE DO NOT PARK IN THE PASTOR’S SPACE. IT IS PERMANENTLY RESERVED AT ALL TIMES.

It was all I could do not to laugh and not because it was funny, but because I was terrified. Queen Liz could get a little crazy sometimes and Ryan didn’t do well with public displays of madness. He liked to keep his crazy at home.

As she did in my nightmares, Ryan’s mother stood in the third row, talking to the church secretary as if there weren’t fifteen hundred other people in the room.

It was hard to hear her, but I’d been cut by the Queen’s sharp whispers enough times to make it out.

“I don’t even appreciate that, Pastor. Who gave you that space, anyway? I’ve been parking there for thirty years.”

I looked over to see what Ryan had to say, but it was too late. The brothah had used my exit.

My husband was gone.

Chapter Two

“S ometimes I think you make this stuff up,” Dana said on the phone the next morning as we ran through the updates for her bath-and-body Web site. She had a new product line for babies, called Water Lily. It was based on the products she helped me make for my daughter’s sensitive skin.

Lily hasn’t had one rash since I started using the products and all the moms at church ask me what I did for her. I felt good about that until I realized it meant my baby must have looked bad enough for everyone to have noticed. I told them about Dana’s shop, Made of Honor, and most of them knew about it already since they’re franchised all over Illinois, but she hadn’t made the baby stuff available in her stores yet. Some drove a few hours to Leverhill, unable to wait. Thanks to my daily needling, she’d finally agreed to at least put it on the Web.

The keys clicked under my fingers as I typed the changes she’d given me. “I wish I did make this stuff up, Dane. It’d be a lot funnier to watch on TV or something. But you know what they say, truth is stranger than fiction. It happened just like I told you.”

God must have been with me to let me get some love in before service, because after his mother’s announcement about how that parking space had been hers for thirty years and she didn’t notice the five-inch-tall neon letters saying Reserved for Pastor, I hadn’t gotten so much as a kiss out of Ryan. He’d dived back into work a day early and he’d dived deep.

I’ve only seen the back of him, wandering down the hall, his voice shouting into the phone, since. I must say, though, it wasn’t a bad angle. I could have done without the screaming, though. He needed a management-style makeover. And he needed it, like, yesterday.

Just then, an e-mail from Dana popped into my box with attached photos and descriptions of the new products. I’d twirled the phone cord around my elbow, about to explode with glee. Nothing like a click-chat, where we talk and e-mail back and forth. It drives Ryan crazy, but a man who e-mails people in the same house with him has no room to talk. None. Besides, everybody can’t go blind and break their thumbs on a PDA like him. The prescription on my glasses is strong enough as is without trying to read some tiny screen.

I opened the files and smiled with satisfaction at the product photos. “I really like how these came out. I don’t know why you seem so reluctant about the baby line. It’s some of your best stuff yet.”

I could almost see Dana shrugging two hours away. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess it’s the baby thing. I don’t feel qualified. The wedding stuff I can do in my sleep, though sometimes it’s a nightmare. I’ll have to tell you about our latest bride when we have more time. Remind me. Anyway, I almost feel like this is your line, Tracey. I made suggestions, but you researched everything, tested everything…”

Wow. Dana sounding insecure? Too weird. Too much like we were discussing infertility treatments. “Wait? Are you guys trying to get pregnant or something? Is that it?”

A pause on the line. A long breath. “Yes, we’re trying. Sorry I didn’t tell you. I guess I thought we’d be pregnant the first month and all I’d have to announce was a baby on the way. It’s turning out to be harder than we thought. God knows, though. I guess I shouldn’t have been so concerned when you got pregnant so fast with Lily. You were the lucky one.”

Sometimes I wonder. “Don’t sound like that, okay? Now that I know you guys are trying, I’ll be praying and available for random Googling on any topic you need. You know I’m good for that.”

“Yeah.”

The gaping silence, a rarity between us, widened until we both fell in. Refusing to accept it, I climbed out first. “Okay, I’d love to sit here and quietly contemplate this with you, but the boob buzzer is going to go off any minute now, so if you want to talk about it—”

“I don’t.”

Right. No more than I wanted to talk about the comment Queen Liz gave me after church on Sunday.

“Oh come on, Tracey, what size is that skirt, a fourteen? You’re better than this. I know your mother died, but she must have taught you something.” She’d said this easily, my mother-in-law, like a knife slicing through butter.

I refrained from telling Liz that despite our short time together, my mother did teach me something that seemed to have been left out of her own home training: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

As the alarm next to my breast pump rang in the bedroom, I hung up with Dana and scrambled down the hall, stopping to smile at myself in the mirror on the wall. If there’s one thing that thirty years as a fat girl had taught me, it was that I had a pretty face.

Such a pretty face.

Ryan was the first guy I dated who didn’t say that. He was more fascinated that my laptop had a Linux partition. Go figure. Now it seemed I was doomed to just a pretty face again. Only, this time, it didn’t look quite so pretty.

Please join the Queen for a breakfast of scones and tea on the veranda….

I wake up then, just as I’m about to drown in my bowl of Raisin Bran. Not a very royal way to die. I sit up in the tub and push the bath tray forward so that I can stand up. Dana always thought it was weird that I could eat breakfast in the tub. What she doesn’t realize is that I could live in there (at least for a weekend). A good stock of food, a stack of books and basket of Dana’s products and Princess Tracey would be good to go.

Today, though, I’ve just got to go. I pushed my reign back a day this week, so as not to encounter the natives. Lily was sleeping on the floor in her carrier. It was her first time in the royal restroom, but I thought she could be trusted.

I got out of the tub, toweled off with my secret thousand-thread-count towel and applied Smooth, my favorite product in my friend’s new product line for mothers. This week’s scent was Mango Mama and I was feeling it from head to toe.

“This number does not define you. God does,” I whispered to myself as I stepped onto the scale, adorned only with my crown and a hopeful smile. My belly looked smaller in the mirror at least. I got up the courage to look down, again having to strain a bit to see over my stomach. Mirrors were deceiving. The numbers, happy ones, blinked back up at me.

159.

Maybe my scale worked after all. I certainly hoped so. Funny how the numbers on this thing appeared so rosy and cheerful all of a sudden. Last Sunday, they looked like something out of a horror movie. I glanced into the steamed-over mirror, and traced the circles under my eyes with the tip of my finger. I should have added a facial, as well. No time now. Despite the good news about my bubble butt and its imminent demise, my face looked like I’d been kicked around the farm a few times.

Then Lily started screaming, like she’d been doing for the past five days. Straight. One more reason that I was just now getting to wear my crown. I didn’t think I’d make it this week at all. We were going to the doctor today to see what was wrong. Of course, that meant another day’s work pushed back. Another all-nighter. I patted my cheek.

A queen has to do what a queen has to do.

Today was supposed to be Ryan’s day to watch the baby so that I could catch up on my site maintenance and start working on the new logo for the church, but with the way Ryan’s been acting lately, I didn’t bother to remind him.

A call to our family physician got us an appointment that I hope will answer some questions. Both Lily and I are going crazy. It would have been nice to have Ryan tag along, but again, I’m not going to bring it up.

One feeding, a diaper explosion and two outfits later, we were on the road, heading to the doctor. Ryan remembered that it was his day to watch Lily, called to apologize and said he’d meet us there.

More than an hour after his call, I tried to stay away from a bunch of sick children in the waiting room. I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for the doctor or Ryan to appear. Ever the optimist, I gave my dear husband a call. “Hey, you anywhere near?” I asked in my neutral, just-checking-in voice.

He answered back with the force of a megaton blast. “No, I’m not anywhere near! I’m working, okay? I would think that you could handle taking the baby to the doctor alone. I wanted to make it, but there’s some stuff going on.”

I’ll say. Our little nuclear family has had another explosion. Man down! Man down!

“No problem,” I said, although there was definitely a problem. My man was losing his mind. Ryan’s business had always been pretty much his life, but now I was worried that it would be the death of him, too.

Something would have to give, but right now I was more concerned with getting Lily well so that she and I could get some sleep. She had to be as tired as I was. Or at least as tired as I knew I was going to be when I looked up and saw my mother-in-law coming into the doctor’s waiting room. And she was smiling.

Oh, Ryan. Why?

For a moment, a millisecond perhaps, the Queen seemed normal and I wondered, not for the first time, if I’d just pegged her wrong. She was wearing her sugar-cookie lip gloss and wheat-colored linen suit. Her open-toed Coach slides matched her bag. She was one hip grandma, to be sure. As I softened toward her, her words rained down on me from where she was standing above us, like a bucket of hail.

“Well, look at you! You’ve lost what, two, three pounds? I can see it in your face. Definitely in the one-fifties again. Good girl.” She patted me like a stable horse before plucking the baby from my arms. A woman chuckled behind us while flipping through a six-year-old issue of Sports Illustrated. Her husband, a little plump himself, looked on in horror while trying and failing to hold in his own stomach. I felt his pain. And mine, too.

“Hello, Liz. You needn’t have come, though I do appreciate it.” Did I appreciate it? Yes, I did. I think. I didn’t like it, necessarily, but I did appreciate it. She was my family. “I know you’re not much for doctors. You don’t have to stay. We can meet for lunch later if you’d like.”

She glared at me at the mention of lunch. “No, thanks, dear. I’m not hungry. I usually fast lunch from the approach of spring through the end of summer. Then I have a big salad for dinner. You should try it. Even when I miss my walks, it keeps the numbers down. Besides, this is what grandmothers are for. I wouldn’t think of leaving.”

I didn’t have to ask which numbers she was referring to. The same digits that had made my morning, of course. Liz would have needed a sedative, though, if she’d seen the numbers that I’d rejoiced at today. Her scale has never gone that high. Ever. Not even when she was pregnant with Ryan. “Doctors didn’t just let you eat for two in my day,” she’d said when I explained that my doctor recommended that I gain at least twenty-five pounds with Lily since I’d been underweight by their chart when I conceived. Now that I’d added another fifteen pounds to that, Liz and Dr. Thomson were last on my list of people to see.

The nurse called us back just the same. “Lily Blackman?”

I tried to take the baby from my mother-in-law, but she was already up and sashaying down the hall with my daughter. She moved like only a former model can. Liz looked very comfortable chatting with the nurse, who was about her same size. Lily was weighed and had her temperature taken and we were led to an examination room. Once inside, Liz whispered to me that the nurse had four children and that perhaps I should talk to her to get some tips.

My throat tightened as I remembered the tips that my friends had tried to give me when Ryan and I had first started dating. “This thing with his mother, how he always talks about her, always calls her on the phone? Don’t you think that’s weird?”

In too deep and stupid enough to think such things endearing, I didn’t think it was weird. Now? We’d left weird a year ago. We were firmly residing in the desert of madness and I needed a drink of water.

Living water.

Lord, please don’t let me act a fool with Liz today. I know that she means well. Show me how to love her.

There wasn’t long to contemplate that thought. Dr. Thomson entered the room with a big grin. His booming voice filled the room with Caribbean notes that reminded me of the preacher who’d presided over Dana’s island wedding. The good doctor shook the Queen’s hand. “Morning, Grandma. Nice to meet you.”

Queen Liz didn’t look very happy to have been so easily identified as a grandmother. Most people took her to be my aunt or friend. Though she was obviously disturbed by his greeting, Liz gave him her best smile just as well. “Hello, Doctor.”

Before I could explain about Lily’s problem (and my problem, all fifteen, no forty, pounds of it), the doctor picked up my daughter and cradled her as though she were his own grandchild. “Fussing, are we? No sleep for your mother? That means less milk for you, young lady, which is no good. No good a’tal.”

Lily promptly smiled and fell asleep as she always did with our doctor, who’d raised nine children of his own. Sometimes I wanted to ask him how much he charged for house calls. At least maybe I could take a nap. At present, my spare thirty-minute block of the day was spent doing workout DVDs. It had worked this week though, so I couldn’t complain.

“Coughing?”

“No.”

“Just crying then?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Before feeding or after?” Lily whined once. He bounced her one good time and she went quiet again. Amazing. He should bottle that for Ryan.

“After.”

Dr. Thomson nodded, then looked over his glasses at me. “Have you lost weight?”

My mother-in-law beamed. “Doesn’t she look good?” She gave me an affirming look.

The doctor gave a disapproving one. “Tracey, now is not the time for dieting. I told you that. Trust me, the weight will stabilize after the first year of nursing. Right now, though, you are building your daughter’s brain. Your body is holding on to fat reserves so that it can make milk. Your daughter doesn’t have colic, honey. She just doesn’t like the skim version of her food.”

Words escaped me. I just sat there, blinking. Could this be true? Had my dieting turned Lily’s stomach? Sure, I tried to avoid nursing her after I worked out because some of the books said it soured the milk, but surely I wasn’t starving the kid. I mean, look at me!

My mother-in-law recovered much faster than I. “So what you’re saying is that perhaps it’s time to switch to formula so that both mother and baby can get what they need? It’s the only sensible solution based on what you’ve just said.”

Dr. Thomson peered over his glasses. “It is not the only sensible solution, Grandma. It’s not even a solution that I want to consider at this point. I realize that in our generation, breast-feeding was frowned upon, but my goal for all the mothers in this practice is to breast-feed as long as possible. For a year, at least.”

Liz looked faint. “A year? Why, that’s downright…strange. The baby will be walking by then. Talking, practically. It’s gone on too long as it is. And the way it makes Tracey eat, Lily’s brain will be too big for her head with all that fat milk. It may even make her fat, too—”

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.” The doctor turned sleeping Lily away, as if hearing such things would crush her psyche. “Words are medicine, too, and I’m afraid you’ve come equipped with poison today. Your daughter-in-law is courageous and smart. She and her husband asked me to support them in the decision to breast-feed. I can’t do that with you here confusing things. And for the record, Tracey is not big. You’re just very…petite.” The look on his face said the rest—that Queen Liz could stand to gain a few pounds and a better attitude.

It would have been easy to gloat as my mother-in-law huffed toward the door, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. She was Ryan’s mother, even if I never would be able to accept her as mine. She gave birth to my husband. That meant something. It had to. “Please stay, Queen,” I said, before I realized it. My friend Rochelle would have been proud of me. Dana would have thought me gone soft. Maybe so. It’d be fitting. The rest of me had congealed into a Jell-O sculpture, so why not my heart, too? Wasn’t that what God wanted of me, anyway?

My mother-in-law wiped the corner of her eye and sat down.

I bit my lip. Usually there’s no stopping the Queen’s dramatic exits. My husband came by that honestly. “Thank you for your support, Doctor. And don’t worry about protecting me.” I took Liz’s hand. “You know how mothers and daughters are. She just wants what’s best for me. Ryan and I are determined to continue nursing through this first year. Don’t worry.”

My doctor bowed low toward the Queen before giving Lily back to me. “It’s not Ryan that I’m worried about, Tracey. It’s you. So many strong women come through this practice changed by motherhood into insecure little girls. I never thought that you’d be one of them. Your mother-in-law may be a queen, but so are you. You’ve just got to learn how to rule your own roost.” With those wise words, a big hug and a menu plan for nursing mothers, Dr. Thomson left Queen Liz, Lily and I alone in the room.

As we left, I realized that my mother-in-law was still holding my hand. Tight.

I closed my eyes for a quick prayer. We weren’t alone at all.

Chapter Three

W e had a fight in the car on the way over. A pretty bad one. Almost as bad as the blowup with Ryan’s software business earlier in the week. He assured me that everything was okay, while he tried to retrieve files one of his key employees had deleted. He whispered words like “solvent” and “litigation” when he thought I wasn’t listening.

“Look, we’re here now, okay? Let’s just try and get through this. Dre wants me to step up and do some things in the church, but it seems like the harder I try to serve God, the more whack things get. I don’t even know what we’re fighting about.”

I blinked back tears. “Me either. Not really. I think we’re both just tired. All this stuff with your business has had you on edge. Some lawyer keeps leaving messages, by the way. Something about the articles of incorporation.”

Ryan gripped both sides of his head as if trying to hold it on his neck. “Yeah, whatever. Look, I don’t want to think about any of that right now, much less talk about it. Let’s just go in here and see what the Lord has to say to us.”

Sounded like a plan to me.

For once, Ryan didn’t pop up out of the car and move inside the church at lightning speed. Whatever was going on with him, helping the pastor seemed to have him dreading going inside as much as I usually did. Today, though, I was trying to get a move on. A few minutes more and someone might take my back-corner seat. And that would be totally unacceptable.

I gave Ryan a little nudge as I grabbed the last of Lily’s things. “Come on or somebody might get our seats. And you know I won’t know how to function then. You might look up and see me in the balcony.”

Ryan laughed, but I wasn’t kidding. It just might come to that.

“We can’t sit in the back today, Tracey. I forgot to tell you. We need to sit in the front, at least until after the announcements.”

A rapid succession of blinks from me followed this insane information. “When you say front, just exactly how far front do you mean? Ninth row? Eighth?” All of a sudden I wished I had a paper bag in my purse. This was enough to make me hyperventilate.

“Third row, babe. With Mom and the other ladies. Don’t look at me like that. It’s one Sunday, okay? I know that my mother gives you fits, but she’s my mother. Help me out. Just for today.”

Famous last words. I knew better than to believe them. For one thing, whatever this front-row business was about, it wasn’t just for today. Ryan dealt with things on a need-to-know basis, especially when it came to the Queen and I. I had a feeling that I’d be needing to know this same information next week as well. Still, she was his mother and he was my husband. “Okay. Just promise me that you won’t let her clown on me in front of all those people. You know I hate that.”

He kissed my hand and took a bow. “No problem, Your Majesty. Your wish is my command,” he said as we passed one of the older deacons, who readjusted his glasses after we went by.

So, he’d been in my bathroom after all. He was so dead when we got home. For now, though, it was time to face the Queen. Wearing a prepregnancy skirt for the first time since the baby, I was feeling pretty good, too. It had elastic in the waist, but the Queen wouldn’t be able to tell that. Okay, so she would, but I didn’t care.

Ten minutes later, we were on the third row and far enough from Liz to keep things civil without having a fight.

Or so I thought.

Even with a hat more than a foot in diameter, three-inch heels and two-inch nails, Queen Liz managed to squeeze through twenty people to get to us before I could escape. And she had the nerve to drag a friend along for the ride.

I waved goodbye to the confused people who’d just been reassigned farther down the row without their permission. If only I could get off as easily.

“That skirt is cute, but frumpy. Did you get my e-mail?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You know. Jenny Craig. No one has to know. I promise.”

My eyes could have worn a hole in Ryan’s shirt from the way I stared at him, but he was so caught up in his own distress (over what, I wasn’t sure) that he left me defenseless. “Hey, Mom. You look good this morning. Nice shoes.”

Obligatory or not, that was more than any compliment I’d been given in a long time. I took a deep breath, reminding myself not to be jealous. That was just what she wanted, to set us against each other.

“Thanks, son. You look good, too.” She paused. “So does my sweet little grandbaby.” She moved in for the baby kidnapping, always her ultimate goal. “Here, I’ll take her.”

My mother-in-law’s hands came toward me in a flash of pink and green. My eyes focused on the pearl insets on the designs on her nails. She was in rare form today.

Instead of clutching Lily to my chest as I usually would have and trying to explain that in a few minutes she’d need to eat and I didn’t want to disturb the service with Lily’s crying, I let go. I let God. If the baby cried, she cried. Nobody would die. For whatever reason, Liz needed to make her friends think that she had me under control. (I knew enough from the dynamics between my friends and me to know when a woman, even an older woman, is showing off for her girls.)

My husband looked relieved. It had been a long week for him at work and at home. Though this seemed more serious than any problems Ryan had dealt with before, I still wanted to help. The difference now was that he didn’t confide in me or ask my counsel the way he did when we were dating and first married. It was as if he thought I’d break since I’d had Lily, like he had to protect me from everything.

That, and the orchid climbing out of the lady’s hat two rows in front of me was really starting to get on my nerves. Okay, so I had a baby. Women have been doing it since time began. I admit that it’s more challenging than I thought it would be. Okay, a lot more challenging than I thought it would be, but God is helping me do it. Sure, there are days when I’m so tired that I fall asleep while I’m typing, wakened only by the blare of my nursing alarm, but hey, life goes on. I appreciated the way people looked out for me when I was pregnant, now I’m wondering if I’ll ever be Tracey again. Not that I don’t like the sound of Lily’s mom….

I was doing it again, letting my mind wander in church of all places. Ryan took my hand and gave me a smile. Very nice. Now if I could just concentrate and stop making menus and to-do lists in the margin of my bulletin, I’d be making progress. I didn’t know why, but ever since I’d had Lily, some of my most creative moments had happened in church. Usually, though, I was holding Lily, so I didn’t get to write any of it down until I got home. Right there, as the choir was finishing, I thought of a concept for the logo for CurlyDivas.com, a site for black women with natural hair. I was enjoying that project a lot, even picking up a few tips for my own tresses.

Today I was wearing my half-ro in twists, set off by a middle part and sporting the copper highlights that my former hairdresser was kind enough to come to my home and put in. I’d tried to make appointments with her several times, but something always came up with the baby. And as much as Queen Liz wanted everyone to think that she was the perfect grandmother, outside of church and other public events, she didn’t want to fool with Lily at all. When I asked her to babysit so that I could get my hair done, she suggested I call a friend or switch Lily to formula so that she could be sure that she’d sleep most of the time.

I got that my choice—our choice—to breast-feed made things a little unconventional for everyone. That was why I pumped my milk, too, so that the Queen didn’t have to worry. It didn’t matter, though. If I could just make it through the first year, things would get better. They had to. The good thing was, I was never, never doing this again. Ryan would have to play catch with someone else’s son, because another baby in this body just wasn’t happening. As soon as I was fertile again, I was going to—

“Here.” Lily dangled from my mother-in-law’s arms like a little golden dishrag. Her face was red from crying. Was I so into my thoughts that I hadn’t heard my own child? The music was loud, but still….

She felt warm against me, pushing her face into my shirt. For all the hard times, there were good ones, too. I loved my baby in a way I hadn’t known it was possible to love anyone. Tapping my foot to the music, I cradled Lily in the crook of my arm and pulled a blanket up over her. My nursing shirt was like some sort of James Bond contraption and with one flip of a button, all the goodies were flowing and totally out of view.

“’Lizbeth? Is that child pulling out her breast-asssissss? Lord have mercy. I do believe that I have seen it all.” One of my mother-in-law’s friends, Miss Bea, looked as though she was about to faint. She grabbed a mortuary fan from the back of the pew in front of her and started fanning so hard that I had to close my right eye.

I should have closed the left one, too.

Maybe then I wouldn’t have seen the Queen’s face coming at me like some sort of eighties 3–D movie. She wasn’t smiling. She didn’t even scream, which was what I expected from the look of her. What she did do was something new, something inexplicably terrifying.

She whispered.

And not to me.

“Son, get your wife up from here and take her to the nursing room. Now.”

Ryan, who’d obviously been doing some daydreaming of his own, looked confused for a moment himself. “What, Mom? Tracey nurses Lily in here every Sunday. What’s the big deal?”

Miss Bea started to wail. The organ faltered and someone missed the entrance to the chorus of the song. The Queen took the fan and tried to comfort her friend, still speaking with the vicious whisper that made me want to look behind me to see if there was a sniper in the church balcony, waiting to take me out at any moment.

There wasn’t. I peeked.

“Now, Bea, calm down. I told you. The girl has no mother, no home training. Don’t you get yourself all upset now. I’m going to take care of this, if I have to drag her out of here myself.” She turned and stared at me with the coldest look I’d ever gotten from her (and that’s quite a collection).

Lily burped while her grandmother pushed up the sleeves on her mint-green suit. She meant that thing, as Dana would say. She was going to try to drag me out of here. I had to pray then, because the first thing that came to my mind in that moment was the almost forty pounds separating myself and the good Queen. Every ounce would come in handy if she tried to put her hands on me. Every ounce.

You are in church. That is your mother-in-law. Get up and go—

I was thinking it. I was praying it. But I guess I took too long about it, because the next thing I knew, Lily and I were up on our feet and a diaper bag was shoved onto my shoulder. My husband took my hand and led me out of the pew, providing a clenched smile to the two hundred or so people in our vicinity. This was past embarrassing, it was humiliating. Despite my resolve, a tear tickled my nostril as I stepped onto the carpet covering the aisle.

Ryan walked close behind me as though he had a gun to my back. I thought to myself that it seemed as though his mother had a gun to his. A loud sniff escaped when the pastor’s wife waved and I tried to smile. Ryan’s phone vibrated in his pocket, but he didn’t stop for that, either. He pushed me along with purpose, even when I paused and tried to turn to him and speak, to say that this was insane and that we should just sit in the back of the church together and try to talk some sense into his mother later, there came a gentle pressure of his arm across my shoulders.

His words, hot on my neck, let me know that sitting in the back wasn’t going to happen. “Keep moving, Tracey. For goodness’ sake, just keep moving.”

For goodness’ sake, Ryan? Or for your sake?

Either way, I kept going. Smiling and crying like some sort of Miss Mom USA without her Prozac, I stumbled out of the only place I felt God in my life anymore and into the cold empty hall. Once the doors closed behind us, I turned to my husband and gave him a look worthy of the Queen herself.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ryan said in a voice too loud for a church hallway but much quieter than his usual tone in such situations. He pointed down the hall at the door I’d passed so many times, but never gone inside. “Come on. You’re going to have to go in there.”

More tugging and pushing. Him trying to take the baby, me taking her back. Him trying to take the diaper bag, me taking it back. Him throwing his head back as if he wanted to scream, me doing the same. Like a bad zit on prom night, things were coming to a head and this wasn’t the place for the mess.

Though we’d both dug in our heels, mine were a little too cute to endure for the long haul. Just as my wedges started to wobble, Ryan took my hand and kissed it before steadying me. “Baby, please. Can you just come on? I need to get back in the service. Pastor asked me to do something special today and I’m going to miss it. I know Mom is out of line. I do. It’s just not the time to deal with it.” He led me down the hall, toward the door I didn’t want to enter.

I followed, thankful that in the midst of the whole mess, Lily had somehow managed to fall asleep. Must be nice. “You always say that, Ryan. ‘I know Mom shouldn’t have said that. I know that hurt you. I’ll talk to her. It’s just not the right time.’ You know what I’m starting to think? It’ll never be the right time. I think you know that your mother will never accept me and you don’t really care. Well, I do—”

“Get over it.” Ryan folded his arms, rolled his eyes and pointed to the door. “You’ve got to go in there, so just do it and be done with it.”

I looked deeply into my husband’s eyes, wondering if he really saw me standing here, if he heard me breathing. It was me, wasn’t it? Tracey Blackman, business owner, graphic designer, new mother, his wife? I’d never had to wonder who I was before, but since marrying him, bearing his child, I found myself searching for identity more than ever. And my husband had just told me to get over it.

Mother Redding, the wife of the former pastor, who also happened to be the mother of the current one, stopped to smile at me on her way into the sanctuary. Liz (the only person people seemed to call Mrs. Blackman these days) said the former first lady was mean, but she’d never been anything but nice to me. I looked for her every week just to see what she was wearing. This morning she wore a bright orange suit with flames going down the back of her skirt. Fire climbed her shoes, too. As she reached the door, she gave me a wink, then straightened her shoulders and went inside the sanctuary. Her son’s booming voice burst through the door as she opened it.

My eyes looked back and forth from the door I’d come out of to the door it seemed I had no choice but to go into. Now I was going somewhere else, somewhere new, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I stared at the mahogany door once more and took a deep breath while reading the words engraved on the brass plate.

The Cry Room.

I remembered again why I’d never wanted to go inside previously. Who would want to spend a church service in a place with that name? Though I’d never been inside, I’d deduced that this was a place for mothers to take their crying babies. Did I mention that Lily wasn’t crying? I was the one about to burst into tears. At the beginning of my pregnancy, I’d enjoyed the way people had offered me a seat or given me special privileges, but even that had gotten old. Being escorted out of church and into a special room by my husband and mother-in-law was just too much.

This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten this kind of reaction to feeding my hungry baby, of course. I’d nursed Lily in hot cars, bathroom stalls and guest bedrooms. Church had been the only place in my life where all of the pieces of me—Christian, wife and mother—could exist at once. And now, even at church there was a special place for me to go, away from my husband, who seemed to be slipping from me by the second, from the pleading look in his tired eyes.

Maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing, this forbidding door in front of me. Maybe it was time for me to find my own place, both in our marriage and in our church. I attempted to square my shoulders like that flaming-hot church mother had done, but I was too weighed down by the diaper bag on my shoulder and the baby in my arms. Instead of standing straight, I almost fell over. Again.

My husband sighed, but reached out to support me again. “What are you doing, Tracey? You’re going to drop the baby on the floor. Look, I’ve got to get back in there before Mom comes back out here and makes a scene, okay? It’s not a big deal to go in the Cry Room. Almost every church in Illinois has one of these now. There’s a window in there where you can see everything. And who knows, maybe you’ll make some friends here. It might be good for you.”

I took a deep breath. “Maybe I should just take Lily to the nursery and stay in the service with you. Maybe she’ll make some friends in there.”

Ryan lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t try to be funny, okay? You know Lily hates it in there. After the diaper rash and the screaming last time, we agreed that she’d stay with you. Since Mom is acting so crazy about you feeding her in the church, I guess that means we’ll be apart until you stop nursing, but don’t turn this into a big fight. Not now.”

Until I stop nursing? What was that supposed to mean?

He pulled back from me as if he’d touched something not so nice and straightened his tie, a silk one Rochelle had hand-painted and sent as a gift for his birthday. Right now, I wanted to wring Ryan’s neck with it and get in my car and drive the two hours back home to Leverhill, where Rochelle, Dana and my other friends from the Sassy Sistahood e-mail group still lived. My heart went back there for me, back to my old church where they let mothers feed their babies under a blanket and people knew how to say hello. Where—

“Tracey!”

As my husband raised his voice to the tone he used with his insubordinate employees, a baby on the other side of the door let out a piercing scream. My husband folded his arms and made an I-told-you-so face.

“See? There’s a reason for this. If that child was in the service, no one could hear and then the mother would have to get up and try to get out from between all those people—”

The door to the Cry Room jerked open and a woman I’d seen many times before stormed out with her crying child. Tears were streaming down her face, too. “Excuse me,” she said as she pushed past us.

I watched in amazement, first at the dark room revealed when she opened the door, and second at her exit from the one place that was supposed to be for crying. She wobbled on her high heels across the foyer to the nursery. I gasped in disbelief.

The door opened again and a smiling face appeared, a deacon’s wife whose name I couldn’t remember. Sister Hawkins, maybe? That sounded right. She ran the Mother-to-Mother ministry and had very definite ideas about what being a mother meant. Running my graphic-design firm, In His Image, from home and putting Lily in part-time day care did not fit with her concept of motherhood. Probably the only reason Mrs. Hawkins (that was her name!) still spoke to me was because I nursed Lily instead of giving her formula. She’d never say that, but it was the only thing she’d discussed in our brief conversations.

Ryan formed a tight smile as the woman stepped forward with one hand behind her to buffer the sound as the door closed. He narrowed his eyes at me a little, just enough that only I would notice. “Sorry about the noise. It’s our first time. It’s a little bit of an adjustment.”

Sister Hawkins leaned forward, speaking only to my husband and barely above a whisper. “We really like to keep it quiet here so that everyone can hear and the other babies stay peaceful. That baby—” she pointed down the hall toward the path that the mother who’d left had taken “—he wouldn’t take his bottle. Not much we could do to help with that….” She paused to quiver at the idea.

“Anyway, Brother Ryan, your wife and daughter are more than welcome to join us. We’ve been wondering why she hasn’t come in before now. I know that I sent her an invitation.” She smiled wide, revealing the gold front tooth that had surprised me the first time I saw it. Now it just made me want to giggle. There were a lot of things we could do to hide our pasts, but some things just told the tale for us. The light hit the gold tooth from all angles. My husband blinked as if someone had just taken his picture. I was too mad to laugh.

I forced my mouth shut when Ryan squeezed my hand. I hadn’t realized it’d been hanging open. I don’t know which thing stunned me more: Sister Hawkins’s gold tooth or the fact that babies couldn’t cry in the cry room. What was the point of the place then? I decided to ask. “So it’s not really a cry room, is it? It’s a place for moms to nurse their babies?”

The woman turned to me. “Yes, that’s it exactly. They’re called Nursing Mothers’ Rooms at some churches, but the Cry Room was what the building committee chose. I know it seems different at first, but it’s church policy. With Brother Ryan advancing in favor with the pastor and the other men, you don’t want to be disobedient and hold him back, right?” She patted my arm, then held it tight.

Feeling like a homesick kid on the first day of school, I gently pulled away. “I do want to follow the policy, but the church I grew up in doesn’t make the mothers leave the sanctuary to feed their babies. Our pastor wanted all the families to stay together—”

Ryan frowned. “He’s not your pastor anymore. And that’s not your church. This is. Now go on in, hon. I’ve got to get back.” He brought down his tone for Sister Hawkins’s sake and gave her a polite nod as well, but not before whispering, “I’m sorry,” out of the corner of his mouth.

I dropped my head. I was sorry, too. Once again, I was proving his mother right. That look on my husband’s face had said it all. Though he loved me, his mother seemed convinced that I would never be quite right for the job of being his wife or running his house. I’d heard her whisper it to him more times than either he or I would admit. Queen’s doubts had always made me feel bad, but this morning I wondered if she wasn’t right. I couldn’t help thinking too that Dana had told me not to marry Ryan. At the time, I’d thought she was jealous, since they’d gone out a few times. But now…

The woman’s hand gripped my arm again, and before I knew it, the dim room enveloped me and the door shut behind me. Lily wiggled awake in my arms. I could imagine her blinking to adjust to the darkness the way she did in her crib at home. She knew she was somewhere different, somewhere that seemed far away. I smiled down at her, hoping that she could see me.

That’s right, honey. They’ve put us out of the church of all things.

Chapter Four

“T he changing table is over there. There’s a rocking chair and baby swing in the corner. There are footstools under most of the chairs to use when you’re nursing. There are some nursing pillows over there,” the deacon’s wife said, pointing to a stack of pillows and blankets in the corner. “If the baby falls asleep, you can walk her down to the nursery and put her in one of the cribs. They’ll call you if she wakes up and starts to cry. The number will flash right out there.”

Sister Hawkins pointed toward the panel of glass running across the front of the room. Beyond it was my new church family, milling about and shaking hands. High above their heads was a black square with blinking red numbers, each one assigned to a different child when they signed in to their classes. I saw a woman duck through the crowd and rush out the side door.

I pushed Lily upright and over my shoulder to keep from showing my disappointment. The woman who’d run out had a three- or four-year-old, so this separation thing wasn’t as temporary as Sister Hawkins made it seem. What if Lily felt the same way about the toddlers’ class as she did the nursery? Would I be stuck in here for the next five years? Maybe I had it all wrong. I hoped so. “It’s very nice. All of it. I was just wondering, though…How long do I have to stay in here?”

Sister Hawkins gave me her signature look of disapproval. Her children probably knew it well. “It’s not a prison sentence, dear. It’s an honor. Being a mother is a beautiful thing. It’s a pity more young women don’t realize that. Again, we ask that you use the Cry Room as long as you’re breast-feeding your baby or whenever your child is crying during the service and not in the nursery. You’ll like it so much, though, you won’t want to leave. I’ve been in here seven years myself, ever since they built the new church.”

“Yeah, this is her own personal pulpit,” someone whispered, followed by a few giggles.

“Hush,” the woman said in the sharpest, sweetest tone I’d ever heard. “Here, honey, sit down.” She offered me a seat between her and another woman, who was the head of the Planning to Homeschool group or the Mothers of Many ministry, one of those women that I found both amazing and intimidating. I considered taking the seat she suggested to try to get to know that woman better. Rainy Styles was her name. I was sure about that. Ryan and I had been reading up on home-schooling and all other aspects of child rearing and I had a ton of questions to ask.

Still, I wasn’t ready to spend my first Sunday that close to Sister Hawkins’s scrutiny. Instead, I smiled at both of them and took a seat on the end of the back row in case Lily started crying and I needed to make a quick exit like that other woman had done. “Thanks, but I’ll sit here for now.”

The deacon’s wife looked a little insulted before fixing her smile, so much like my husband’s a few minutes earlier, firmly in place. The church mask, my old roommate used to call it as we set out on Sunday mornings. She’d tug at her cheeks and forehead, determined to leave all fakeness behind. I had no name for the false Sunday smiles, but I hated them. Church for me was a place to be vulnerable, not a place to cover up and be perfect. There was the rest of the week for that.

Attending the church that Ryan had grown up in, the church where his mother still attended, gave me plenty of opportunities to need Jesus. My old friends had wondered how things would go with me coming to a church where Ryan had a past and I didn’t, but Rochelle had said it best: “Go where your husband goes. God will go with you.”

I had amened the sentiment then, but sometimes now I wondered if God had gotten lost in the move. My mother-in-law didn’t just attend this church. From the way she’d had me kicked out of the sanctuary this morning with my husband’s approval, it seemed as if Liz just about ran the place. Now she’d have a whole team of women trying to whip me into a suitable wife.

Sister Hawkins attempted to whisper to someone about me. She didn’t do very well with it. She needed to take hissing lessons the Queen. “They’re talking about making her husband a minister, but I don’t see how it’s going to work with her acting a fool like that. Talking about her old pastor and such. Doesn’t she know how things work around here?”

Evidently I didn’t know much of anything at all.

The only light in the room came through the glass in front of us, so it was hard to make out who she’d been speaking to, but I knew that the speaker was the woman who’d escorted me in. My jailer. The pastor wanted to make my husband a minister? Surely this lady was confused, or at least I thought so at first, but after recounting Ryan’s nervousness this morning, I quickly realized she might be right. Gossips like that might get the details confused, but they generally got the big things right. Ryan was being considered for something. Why hadn’t Ryan told me anything? Maybe he had….

I’ve got to get back inside….

Hmm…

Dana’s husband, Adrian, was a minister now, though at the Messianic fellowship they attended, it wasn’t necessarily called that. Rochelle’s husband, Shan, was a deacon at his church, too. Still, my friends were real. Honest. Did I have to become some kind of Christian robot in order for my husband to become a leader?

I hugged my baby closer and shut my eyes before they stung with tears. Maybe Sister Hawkins was right. Though I felt I had a point, the sanctuary wasn’t the place to prove it. I should have just come into the Cry Room like I’d been asked and talked to Ryan about it at home. The thing was, we didn’t talk at home. Ryan barely talked to me at all, and when he did, that stupid cell phone seemed attached to the side of his head, or his BlackBerry, laptop or some other piece of equipment was in front of his face.

Lily pushed forward with her feet, digging her heels and toes into the cup of pudding that had once been my abdominals. I’d almost laughed when the woman mentioned nursing pillows. I didn’t need any—I was one. Though I’d stood up at my wedding almost two years ago with a stomach flat enough to cook on, giving birth to a ten-pound baby had stretched me into some kind of rag doll. Body parts had left their original positions and shifted to new locations. Where my six-pack had once lived, there was now an empty Hefty bag, hanging over with just a little bit of trash in it. Or at least that’s the way my husband described it right after the birth. I laughed with him then, but it wasn’t funny anymore. Nothing was, especially not this room.

Lord, I love being a mother, but does this mean I have to stop being a woman? A person?

A pregnant woman on the other side of the glass paused in front of us, checking her hair. She smiled at herself in what she must have thought, as I once did, was a mirror. I bit my lip remembering how my own face had stared back at me from that glass when I was pregnant. I’d finger-combed my little Afro and kissed my lips together thinking how cute I was, just like this woman was doing now. I wondered if she knew what awaited her on the other side of the glass, a life of watching other people worship through a window, of running out of God’s presence when your number blinked red. I wondered if she had any idea what this new motherhood was all about. I certainly didn’t.

“She’s missing the corners,” the woman next to me whispered. “I love when they use it for a mirror, but I always want to turn up the lights real quick and wave so that she can see there’s, like, thirty women in here watching her check her lipstick. We used to have fun in here, but that was before…”

I choked back my brewing tears and smiled, squinting a little to see the woman beside me more clearly. From her voice and sense of humor, I knew she was the one who’d made the crack before about this room being the other woman’s own personal pulpit. I wasn’t quite sure what she’d meant by that, either, but if I got to know this lady better, I’d be sure to ask. With her blond curls clearly in view, I realized with a shock, this must be the model-thin mother all the men spoke about, the one who always wore her old jeans back to church after each baby. The one husbands compared their wives to. Perhaps I should have taken the seat next to the other woman after all.

A friend must show herself friendly.

I sighed. Over and over, I’d prayed for friends at the church and every time, this scripture came to my mind. Today, I needed to suck it up and obey. I’d made enough messes for one morning. “You used to do stuff like that before? Before what? It sounds like this used to be a fun place.”

The woman moved closer, extending both hands. Her baby must have been the little boy in the swing. “It was a fun place. But like I said, that was before…all the cliques, all the rules.”

“Shh! Please be quiet back there. The Word of God is about to go forth. Have some respect,” the deacon’s wife said in a much less friendly tone than she’d started with in the hall.

The woman next to me laughed quietly. “That means her service is about to begin. Listen up, you’ll get an earful. I have a feeling you’re going to be our object lesson for the morning. Don’t let it get you down, though. And don’t let this room get you down, either. It used to be called the Breathing Room. It’s only the Cry Room if you let it be.”

“Quiet, puleeeeeze!”

Lily started crying at the sound of Sister Hawkins’s loud voice, the same way she did at home lately when Ryan screamed into the phone while talking to his business partners. I tried to hush her quickly so I wouldn’t be sent out of yet another room. I’d thought myself so blessed when I got married. Ryan had what every good girl dreamed of, especially one who’d been fat all her life and never had a date.

He was a Christian, a genius and fine, to boot. No other guy loved computers the way I did, and talking with him about open-source software and graphics programs had taken many of our dates long into the night. What had never come up was his workaholic tendencies. Oh, and his freaky relationship with his mother. That one was most definitely left out of the equation.

As Dana pointed out, though, I should have had a clue when his mother took over all the wedding planning and ordered those ugly pink bridesmaids’ dresses. Straight out of Gone with the Wind those things were. I think back now and know how good my friends were to even wear them. I wasn’t thinking about my friends at the time, though; I had only one thing on my mind, becoming Ryan’s wife.

Lily tugged at my shirt and I gladly obliged her hunger. At least I could meet someone’s expectations today. Slightly louder than the music had been, the pastor’s voice filled the room. The baby grabbed my finger at the sound of the man’s rich timbre, one she’d heard often when I replayed sermons in the house.

If I was honest, Pastor Dre, the younger son of the Reverend Redding, the man who’d pastored during Ryan’s youth, was a much better orator than my pastor back in Leverhill. This young pastor’s sermons were lively and contemporary and he had a great sense of humor, but like many other up-and-coming pastors I’d met, he didn’t seem to know how to connect with people. Sometimes he seemed so focused on his programs that I wasn’t sure he even liked the members, let alone loved them.

The people seemed to regard him more as a prince than a servant, and the gold lacquer thrones that he and his wife sat on behind the pulpit had almost sent me running out of the sanctuary my first Sunday here. Still, this was my husband’s church, and somehow, I had to make it mine, too. Even if it meant losing me in the process.

“We see through a glass darkly,” the preacher said. “We look in the mirror and think we see who we are, but we’re not looking in God’s mirror, we’re seeing the reflections of other people and who they want us to be. You need to take a look in the mirror of God’s Word and see what things are really looking like. That nice suit might be looking good in the natural, but in the spiritual, well, you could be wearing rags. You might look in the mirror and see a mother with dark circles under her eyes, but when reflected in God’s Word, you are a beautiful woman, wise and valued far above rubies.”

The tears I’d been holding back broke free and streamed down my face. I’d been looking at myself, at this church, at my husband through the mirrors of everyone but God. Sure, Ryan was different from my friends’ husbands, but I was different from them, too. So breast-feeding had made me gain weight instead of lose it as everyone said it would. I was doing something good for my baby. Maybe this room, this place I’d fought tooth and nail to stay out of, would be a blessing, too.

My neighbor’s fingers reached out for mine. She held my hand tightly for a few seconds and then let it go. She didn’t turn to look at me or even say a word, but it meant so much just to have someone touch me, to have someone care.

The room blurred as I held my baby closer and let the pain of the morning run out of me with hot, wet tears. Unfortunately, Lily was used to my silent crying and she finished her feeding quietly. The morning had started off with me on the pew next to Ryan, praying he’d notice my new perfume and the prepregnancy skirt I’d worked out every day the week before to squeeze into. (Again, there was elastic in the waist, but still…it counted for something.)

I tried to remind myself that Ryan had fallen in love with me while I was heavier than this and he loved me now that my pregnancy pounds seemed stuck to my frame.

But today, he didn’t notice my skirt. He didn’t notice me at all. He’d spent most of the time before service explaining to his mother why I didn’t usually pass Lily down the row to her and the other older women.

“Lily will start to spend more time with you as she gets older. For now, though, Tracey’s trying to be a good mom and I think she’s doing a great job.” He’d actually sounded proud of me in that moment and I remember smiling and feeling beautiful. Feeling strong.

Those feelings were short-lived.

Ryan was the king of church etiquette now that we’d moved back to his home church, though he’d been a free spirit when we were both in the singles’ group back at Broken Bread Fellowship in Leverhill. No matter how much you think you know a person, you never really know every part of them. You’re lucky if you really get to know yourself. Dana tried to tell me that, too. Oh well.

Although the embarrassment of being ushered out of the sanctuary by my own husband weighed heavy on my mind, it was his words that pressed the hardest against my heart, not his actions.

Get over it.

It was the same thing he told the managers of his company all the time. Still, he’d never said it to me.

Until now.

“Church family, please welcome the newest member of the ministerial team here at Promised Land Worship Center, Ryan Blackman! Many of you will remember his father, Robert, who served here for many years. Ryan is an accomplished businessman, as well. Some of you are running his software on your computers at home. His wife is back there with the baby, but you can shake both their hands on the way out today. Ryan will be heading up the youth division of Christian Education. Give him a hand!”

My tears stopped and the Cry Room came into view again, this time allowing me to see my husband approach the pulpit. Say what? The minister of whom? My heart seemed to stop as Ryan took a seat behind the pulpit, next to the pastor. I could hear Sister Hawkins groaning from where I sat. My heart seemed to stop, but I knew it couldn’t have, because I was still breathing. (I was, wasn’t I?)

“All these years that my Reginald has been a deacon here and then Pastor goes and puts another young guy on the ministerial staff. Well, that’s how it goes, I guess.” Sister Hawkins looked over at me, no longer beating around the bush. “You’d better get your act together though if you’re going to deal with those ministers’ wives…they’ll eat you alive, honey.”

“Like she would know,” my new friend the next seat over whispered, barely moving her lips.

I could only watch in shock as my husband was congratulated. Youth? Was this some kind of joke? Ryan barely had time for his own daughter. How could this be happening?

The woman next to me extended her hand again. (Why couldn’t I remember her name? Probably because I’d been calling her Skinny Woman in my mind since coming here.) Brenna Ross. I’d seen her name and face on the screen as one of the ministers’ wives. Her husband was the minister of music, a dark-haired hunk who all the visiting college girls went crazy for. At least I didn’t have that to deal with. She pulled me toward her and hugged me.

“I hope you were listening to the sermon,” Brenna whispered. “Get the tape and hear it again. See yourself as God sees you. You don’t have to look good in anyone else’s mirror. Keep your eyes on Christ. He’s got his eyes on you. Call me. I’m in the directory.”

I nodded and swallowed hard as she let me go, thankful for what seemed to be my first real friend since coming here. Thankful too that the glass separating me from my husband, the glass that I’d once thought was a mirror, seemed to have a different purpose after all—to make me see a new me, a woman made into Christ’s image instead of her own.

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