Читать книгу Selling My Soul - Sherri L. Lewis - Страница 7

Three

I let out an ear-piercing African screech. “Monnie!” I grabbed her and hugged her. I pulled away, and then hugged her again. I held on to her crying for a few minutes. When we pulled apart, her face was covered with tears too.

“Oh my goodness, look at you. You’ve lost so much weight, Monica.” My eyes traveled downward from her thinned face, to her muscular shoulders, to her sculpted arms, down to her round, swollen belly. I screeched again. “Oh my God! Oh my . . .” I put my hands to my face, then touched her belly, then back to my face again. “You’re . . . you’re . . . oh my God . . .”

Monica and Tiffany laughed at me. I grabbed Monica again and hugged her. Gentler this time so as not to squash her belly. I finally got the words out. “You’re pregnant. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. I mean, this didn’t just happen yesterday.”

Monica laughed and rubbed her belly. I stepped back and gestured for her to come into the house. “No, girl, it wasn’t yesterday, but I wanted to surprise you. Me and Kevin went to the beach with some friends one weekend and next thing you know . . .” She beamed. “I’m six months along. I had to come see you now before Daddy Kevin refuses to let me travel anymore. He is so overprotective.”

“I can’t believe you came to see me. I’m so glad to see you.”

Tiffany sucked her teeth. “Oh no, you didn’t want no company, remember?”

I turned to give Tiffany a hug. “I’m sorry, baby girl. This is the best welcome home surprise I could have ever asked for.”

I led Monica into the living room and gestured for her to sit down on the couch. “You want anything? Water? Juice?” I offered like I knew what was in the house.

“Water’s fine.”

“I’ll get it.” Tiffany bounced into the kitchen.

“I don’t even know where to start.” I sat down in the leather armchair next to her. “I don’t even know what to ask. I guess I don’t have to ask how you and Kevin are. Last time I talked to you, you guys were about to close on a house.”

“Girl, Kevin bought us the most fabulous house out in the suburbs of Atlanta. It’s a six bedroom, four and a half bath with a pool, a gourmet kitchen, and a home theatre and music studio in the basement. It’s about 5,000 square feet and just wonderful . . . what’s wrong?”

I must have been frowning. “Nothing. Wow. Sounds really huge just for the two of you.” I looked down at her belly. “Well, three of you.” I reached over and lovingly smoothed my hand across her belly, but I was thinking about how many orphaned kids could live in such a mansion.

Tiffany brought me and Monica a bottle of water and a glass of ice each and quietly slipped up the steps. Monica twisted her bottle open and poured half a glass. “I can’t wait for you to come down and see it. I have the guest room all ready for your first visit.”

I opened my bottle of water and drank almost the whole thing all at once, without taking a breath. Another guilty pleasure.

Monica stared at me downing the water. “Thirsty?”

I nodded. “So finish telling me about you and Kevin and how everything came back together.”

“Where do I even start?” She twisted the cap back on her bottle of water and set it down on the coffee table. “When I moved to Atlanta after catching Kevin with Trey, my intent was to file for divorce, remember?”

“Yeah, girl. I remember from one of the last conversations we had before I left, you were psyching yourself up to contact a lawyer.”

“It still seems so crazy. You couldn’t have told me that I would have gone from consulting a divorce lawyer to six months pregnant before you got back. You know that had to be God.”

Monica stopped talking and reached down to rub her belly, and I saw her stomach make a rippling motion beneath her hand. My eyes widened. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to feel a baby kicking inside.

She continued, “I met this guy who let me borrow this book he had about people who had lived as homosexuals in their past. With prayer and therapy and classes, they got delivered and were able to live a heterosexual life, get married, and have children and everything. The man who wrote the book had a story similar to Kevin’s. He was molested in the church when he was a young boy. After a horrible life ‘in the life,’ so to speak, he finally cried out to God and got delivered.

“When I read the book, I realized how much I still loved Kevin. He came to visit Atlanta on his concert tour, and I told him about the book. Long story short, he moved to Atlanta, and we actually met the pastor who wrote the book. He’s a part of a nationwide group of ministries that helps people get delivered from a lifestyle of homosexuality. Kevin joined his class and also saw a psychotherapist. At that point, he was living with a friend of ours down there while we were figuring things out.”

Monica took a deep breath and a little sip of water and went right back to talking fast. “I know it sounds crazy, Trina, but he changed right before my eyes. I saw God deliver him. You should see him now. He’s not the man he used to be. Ten times better. Confident, strong, really walking in authority as a man of God.”

She slid her shoes off and propped her slightly swollen feet up on the coffee table. “So anyway, one weekend, me and a group of our friends went to the beach. Kevin and my best friend—well my other best friend—Alaysia, got baptized. Later that day, everybody left the house and me and Kevin . . . well you know . . . and wouldn’t you know, the first time we did it, I ended up pregnant. Goes to show that my birth control those first couple of years of marriage were a worthwhile investment.”

We both laughed.

“We had planned to take things slower, you know. Let Kevin finish therapy, do some couples therapy together, maybe even do some counseling with the ministers at the church, and then have a marriage rededication ceremony and all that.” Her belly rippled again, and she reached down to rub it. “Apparently God had other plans. For whatever reason, He decided to put a rush on things.”

I laughed and reached over to rub her belly.

“So tell me about Africa. Girl, even with all that’s happened, my life is boring compared to everything you’ve been through the last two years.”

I looked at Monica’s water bottle and wondered if she planned on finishing the other half. “I don’t even know where to start. Later we’ll have to get on my computer so I can show you all the pictures because you have to see it to really understand it.”

I barely breathed as I tried to describe my time in the village of Mieze. The difficulty of caring for sick and orphaned children, the lack of decent drinking water, the poverty. And yet the beauty of a community crying out to God for revival. Seeing people get healed and give their lives to the Lord.

“Girl, I don’t see how you lived like that. No running water?” She held up her Deer Springs bottle. “I can’t imagine walking three miles just to get water to drink or wash with. And having to go to the bathroom in a hole? I can’t imagine how it smelled over there.”

I laughed. Monica obviously missed everything I had said about people getting healed and saved. “You get used to it after awhile.”

“What was the food like? What did you eat?”

“Mostly beans and rice. Sometimes fruit and vegetables. Every once in awhile, someone would kill a pig or a chicken and everyone would share. Sometimes we would find fish in the lake. That was the best treat.”

Monica scrunched her face up. “Oh my Lord. You’re a better woman than me. I couldn’t have done it. Where did you sleep? What was the house like?”

“House?” I laughed. “Hut or tent is more like it. They did have a mud brick house that I rotated in sometimes.”

“Okay, I can’t take anymore. Get to the good part.” Monica’s eyes lit up. “Tell me about the guy.”

I laughed and shook my head. “The guy . . . yeah . . . what can I say?”

She leaned forward on the edge of her seat.

I shrugged. “He’s a nice guy. Real heart for missions. In love with God. He’s cool.”

“Don’t even try it. When you were e-mailing me and on those brief phone calls you made, it sounded like you were head over heels in love about to get married at any minute.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re tripping. I did not, Monnie.”

Her eyes widened. “I can’t believe you. You made him sound perfect, almost like Jesus Himself came back to earth.”

I shrugged and laughed. “He’s cool.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Are you doing it again? That fear of commitment, fear of giving your heart away, fear that it won’t end up right so you do whatever you can do to sabotage it before it can go anywhere thing again?”

I stood and walked into the kitchen to get another bottle of water out of the pantry. It seemed crazy to see rows and rows of bottled water lined up on the bottom shelf. I looked at the rows of food—junk food with absolutely no nutritional value that Tiffany insisted on eating.

I came back into the den and sat back on the chair, pouring my water over the ice this time. I couldn’t believe how good the ice cold water tasted. It wasn’t like we had ice in Mieze. I looked down at my watch. “How long are you staying in town? Much as I’m enjoying catching up with you, I gotta get up the road to see my mom. I think something might be really wrong and she and Tiffany won’t tell me.”

Monica pressed her lips together and looked down at the floor.

“You know something? What is it?”

She looked up at me and bit her lip.

I stood up, towering over her. “What is going on? Why won’t anybody tell me anything? I can’t believe you know and won’t tell me what’s going on.” Tears started flowing down my face. I knew I was overly emotional from being jet-lagged, but still, they were all wrong for keeping the truth from me.

Monica reached up for my hand and pulled me back into the chair. She reached over and took my other hand and squeezed them both tight. “When I called Tiffany a week ago to let her know I wanted to be here for your homecoming, she burst into tears and told me she was glad I was coming because she didn’t know how to handle this all by herself. Your mother wouldn’t let Tiffany tell you what was going on because she knew you were coming home soon anyway and didn’t want you to end your trip early.”

The sad, serious expression on Monica’s face and the somber tone in her voice had my stomach churning in knots. “What . . . what is it?”

“About three months ago . . .” Monica hesitated for a second and took a deep breath, “. . . your mother was diagnosed with cancer.”