Page 2 of Buy Back My Love

Our son was stillborn, and I went into the hospital pregnant and came home without my baby. All his little clothes were still there. The crib JB had fought with was still put together, blankets were folded and waiting for somebody who was never coming home, and bottles were sitting in the cabinet even though there wasn’t gonna be anybody to use them. There really wasn’t a way to make sense of something like that.

Everybody kept telling me they were sorry, and I got so tired of hearing it that eventually I stopped answering the phone. I didn’t want to go anywhere or see anybody. Some days I barely wanted to get out of bed. JB handled his grief differently. He stayed gone more, hustled harder, and came home later. I knew he was hurting because I was hurting too, but neither one of us knew what the hell to do with the other person’s grief. We were young as hell trying to deal with something grown people probably didn’t know how to deal with either.

One day, I was lying around watching videos on YouTube and ended up on some girl doing an acrylic set. I watched the whole thing, then another one, then another one after that. A few days later, I ordered one of them cheap little nail kits online, and my first set looked like shit.

My little sister, Anika, still let me practice on her. Nina, my best friend since high school, did too, even though she talked shit the whole time. Anybody else I could convince to sit down and give me both their hands became practice. At first, it just gave me something to do, something that got me out of bed and made a couple hours pass without me thinking about the baby stuff sitting in the other room.

Eventually, I started getting good at it. Not overnight either. I fucked up plenty of nails before I figured out what I was doing. Acrylic too thick, shapes crooked, designs looking nothing like the picture somebody showed me. After a while, though, people stopped letting me practice for free and started asking how much I charged. That’s when I decided to go to school and do it right.

By the time I got my license, I already had people hitting me up for appointments. I did nails anywhere I could set my stuff up, took pictures of every set that came out good, posted them online, passed my name around, and saved what money I could. I wanted my own shop, and JB knew because I talked about it all the damn time. I knew what kind of chairs I wanted, how I wanted the lighting, how many stations I needed so I could bring other techs in. Hell, I even had the name picked out before I had enough money to rent a building. I always knew I was gonna call it Love-Lee.

One day, JB pulled up and told me to get in the car. I climbed in and looked over at him while I buckled my seat belt.

“Where we going?”

“Just come on.” He pulled off before I could ask anything else.

I frowned and settled back in my seat. “I hate when you do that.”

JB glanced over at me. “Lee, just ride.”

I fussed anyway, and he ignored me the whole drive. A few blocks from the neighborhood, he pulled up in front of an empty storefront and parked.

I looked through the windshield at the building, then over at him. “What we doing here?”

Instead of answering me, JB got out and started walking toward the door. I called his name, but he kept going, so I climbed out after him.

“Why you always got to make everything a damn surprise?”

By the time I caught up with him, he already had the door unlocked. The place was empty, nothing but bare walls, concrete floors, dust, and a couple old boxes somebody had left behind. I followed him inside and looked around, trying to figure out what the hell he had dragged me over there for.

“What is this?”

JB reached into his pocket and held a set of keys out to me. “Your shop.”

I laughed because I thought he was playing, but he didn’t laugh with me. He just stood there with his hand stretched out.

“JB, what you talking about?”

“You said you wanted your own spot.”

I looked at the keys again before finally taking them from his hand. “You bought this?”

“Yeah.”

My eyes went from the keys to the empty space around us. “Why?”

He looked at me like I had asked something stupid. “Cause you wanted it.”

That was JB. People could say whatever they wanted about him, but when it came to me, he had always been like that. If I wanted something and he could get it, nine times out of ten he was gonna find a way to make it happen. I cried right there in that empty building, then got to work turning it into the shop I’d been talking his ear off about.

JB bought the storefront, but everything that came after that was me. I picked out what I wanted the place to look like, found my techs, bought products, built the page, promoted the shop, took clients, handled complaints, stayed late, came in early, and did whatever else needed to be done. There were plenty of nights everybody else went home and I was still there cleaning up or figuring out appointments for the next day.

By my second year, Love-Lee was making enough money that I could’ve paid JB back for what he spent on the building. I tried more than once, but he wouldn’t take it.

“I’m serious, JB. Take the money.” I held the envelope out to him.

He looked at it but didn’t reach for it. “For what?”