By the time we hit our twenties, the world had not gotten any kinder about it.
I watched strangers point at the grocery store. I watched teenagers snicker behind their phones like he couldn’t see the screens angled his way. I watched grown adults — people who should have known better — whisper behind cupped hands whenever we walked into a restaurant together, like his four-foot-four frame and my five-foot-seven one standing side by side was some kind of spectacle set up for their entertainment.
To me, none of that mattered even a little. Noah was still the sharpest, funniest, most stubbornly loyal person I had ever known in my life. He ran his own small accounting practice out of a storefront on Wexler Street by the time he was twenty-six, was the deacon board’s youngest member at New Hope Baptist, and could argue circles around anybody at Sunday dinner about anything from tax law to whether pineapple belonged on a pizza.
When we turned twenty-nine and decided to finally honor our childhood promise, our families did not celebrate with us.
They were horrified.
My mother, Cheryl Whitfield, pulled me into her kitchen during our engagement dinner, tears of pure frustration standing in her eyes.
“You’re sacrificing your youth for a childhood joke, Jade!” she said, her voice a harsh whisper meant to stay contained in that kitchen and failing completely, carrying straight through the thin wall into the dining room, where Noah sat with my father and my little brother, close enough to hear every single word.
“Mama, it’s not a joke to me.”
“I watched you throw away a good man once already,” she said, and there it was — the thing underneath all of it, the wound she’d been circling for six years without ever saying it plainly. “I am not about to watch you throw yourself away a second time, out of guilt, because you feel sorry for a man who needs looking after.”
I want to explain, before I go any further, exactly what my mother was talking about, because it matters more than she ever understood the night she said it.
When I was twenty-two, I was engaged to Marcus Yancey.
Marcus was, by every measure my mother cared about, exactly right. He’d finished his degree at Draymoor State, worked steady at his father’s insurance agency, sang tenor in the New Hope choir, and treated me like something precious every single day we were together. My mother loved him the way she’d have loved a son of her own. Half our church congregation had already picked out their outfits for the wedding before we’d even set a date.
Eight months before that wedding, I called it off.
