This must be how it starts. The sudden loss of breath and the on and off again sound of your heart in your ears. Words caught in your throat and the sudden urge to lick your lips. Wanting to look away, but wanting more just to reach across the table and place your hand on some part of him.
Our smiles widen as she admits to herself with certainty that, Yes, this is how it begins. And thanks to this reissue, so it now can begin for you.
Terry McMillan is the best-selling author of many novels, including Waiting to Exhale, Disappearing Acts, and Who Asked You? She lives in Northern California.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although this is a work of fiction, the emotions are real: pain, longing, love.
I am grateful to God, family, and friends, who constantly lift me up. Their support has been tremendous, and their love overwhelming. Thank you . . . thank you . . . thank you.
To my daughter, R’yane Azsa, who knew the years would go by so quickly? You’ve grown into such a beautiful young lady . . . I regret not having a dozen more. I love you so very much.
To my family at Dutton and the Vines agency, I am indebted and grateful.
Terry McMillan, your words of wisdom and friendship have been a source of great comfort for me. Thank you.
Pat Houser, thank you for your friendship and immense support.
To my readers, thank you for your continued support. Please keep the e-mails and letters coming; they are a constant source of joy for me.
All we need is love . . .
des-ti-ny (des-ti-nee) n. (pl. –nies) 1. Fate considered as a power. 2. That which happens to a person or thing, thought of as determined in advance by fate.
—Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 1980
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
—W. Somerset Maugham, recalled on his death, December 16, 1965
PROLOGUE
JANUARY 2003
When she recalls that period in her life, she likens it to a piece of the hard candy she’d often enjoyed as a child. Round, colorful, tangy, sweet on the outside, and bitter at the center.
Three years had come and gone, and since then Campbell had married a wonderful man from Kentucky, given birth to a son, moved to another part of the state, taken up pottery and yoga, leased a Mercedes, and purchased a beach house in Anguilla; her daughter, Macon, had made her a grandmother, and even with all of those life changes, her heart remained the same. Her heart remained with him.
She wished she could say that she thought of Donovan only when she heard Etta James belt out “At Last,” or in the dead of night, midsummer, when it rained or snowed, or when the sun shone so brightly, it made the day too beautiful to behold.
He had been beautiful.
She wished she could say that her mind reached back to those times only when life was unbalanced and sad, but that would be an outright lie because she thought about that man even when she was happy and wrapped up tight in her husband’s arms.
She thought about him when she held her newborn son to her breast, pulled her fingers through her hair, when she sighed, sneezed, breathed.
She thought about him.
She found him on her mind when she was surrounded by silence, engulfed by noise, when she sat, walked, stood in line at the grocery store.
Nikki Giovanni must have known someone similar, because she wrote about him in “Cancers (not necessarily a love poem).”
Damn! She thought about him.
And she asked herself, would she leave? Would she leave everything she’d ever wanted and had finally gotten? Would she put all she had behind her if she opened her door one day and found him standing there, empty-handed but with a full heart?
Would she leave everything and everyone she had if he opened his mouth and simply said, “Hello. I’m sorry. I love you.”
Would she go?
Shit, she believed she would.
Her
1973–1980
AGE EIGHT
She can hear her mama in the kitchen talking loud to the walls, beating the pots, slapping her forehead with the palm of her hand, and wailing, Lord, why this man do the things he do to me!
Millie cries a little, small tears that cling to her cheeks like the tiny diamond earrings she swoons over in the JCPenney catalog. The same diamond earrings her husband Fred always promises to buy her, but never does.
When Campbell sees those tears, those wet diamonds, she thinks that they are pieces of her mama’s fragile heart her daddy went and broke again.
Millie don’t know why he act the way he do, say the things he say, and he don’t seem to know either, ’cause when she ask him, he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Baby, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I spent the rent money, stayed out till dawn, had my hand on Viola Sampson’s knee . . . Millie, baby, I just don’t know.”
He don’t ever know, and he’s always sorry.
Sorry is what he says all the time, and whenever Millie hears those words, she behaves as if it’s the first time Fred’s been ignorant and sorry, and she spit and cuss, slap at his head and punch at his chest, holler out how much she hates him, screams she wishes he was dead, and still climbs into bed with him at night.
Luscious says Millie married Fred because Millie felt she was getting old and was afraid she would end up a spinster, sitting out on the porch ’longside Luscious, shooing flies and cuddling cats in her lap instead of babies.
“That’s why your mama married your daddy. I don’t think it was love, not the real kind that makes you walk with your back straight and your head high,” she tells Campbell.
I think I walk with my back straight, and I ain’t in love, Campbell thinks to herself.
“Your mother ain’t never been known to step in any dogshit or get the sole of her shoe messed up with gum. You know why?” Luscious asks, and cocks her head to one side.
Campbell shakes her head and waits.
“’Cause your mama always walks slumped over with her head down.”
Campbell rolls her eyes up and to the left and thinks about what Luscious says, and in her mind’s eye she sees her mama walking to the supermarket, the laundromat, and the butcher shop, head down, her eyes searching the sidewalk for something she won’t talk about.
“Uh-huh,” Campbell says, agreeing with Luscious.
Campbell asks Millie about what Luscious says; she asks, Is it true?
Millie tries to straighten the hump loving Fred done put on her back, and she twists her mouth up like she do on the day before the rent is due and it’s long past seven and Fred still ain’t home with his paycheck, and then she says, “Campbell,” and her daughter’s name is a long wind—and Millie takes another moment to fold her hands across her stomach before she continues.
“Campbell, your aunt Rita is old and feeble-minded and speak on things she don’t know nothing about.”
Millie