The Quiet Damage by Jesselyn Cook

Author:Jesselyn Cook [Cook, Jesselyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2024-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

“The World’s an Evil Place”

It wasn’t until her midthirties, when Tayshia met Buck in 2015, that she truly knew how it felt to be taken care of. Her mother had done her best, but as a single parent with two jobs and four kids to support, she was rarely home. Tayshia, from a very early age, was less a daughter than a coparent. She didn’t mind. She had nothing to compare it to. Though the scenery changed, rotating through dilapidated apartment complexes and the occasional homeless shelters, her childhood memories were a lot of the same: feeding, nurturing, and watching over her little sister and cousins. Growing up so young was what had shaped her into such a fiercely independent, purpose-driven woman.

Transitioning from caregiver to care receiver wasn’t easy at first, especially with someone so fundamentally different from her. Although she and Buck had both grown up in hypersegregated Milwaukee, they had done so nearly two decades apart and had entirely different experiences there. Tayshia was a Black, millennial social justice activist, an animal lover, and a hotel clerk with bright blue hair and butterflies tattooed down her arm. Buck was a divorced, gray-bearded, cigar-smoking U.S. Army vet and hunter in his fifties. And he was white.

They knew how people saw them together. They could feel the stares, and the glares. But they just fit. When she couldn’t, he would. As she initially struggled to accept his love, he’d find excuses to dote on her with handmade cards or gifts, like their quarter-anniversary, or “National Squirrel Day”—or just because. He surprised her once with a stunning upholstered vanity stool that he’d made himself with floral purple fabric and strings of dangling beads around the edges. It made her cry. Her love language was food; she baked him his favorite pies and cakes and pastries, trying because of his heart disease to keep them in moderation, but often caving to his pleading sweet tooth. Whenever they parted ways, whether for a workday or a quick errand, it wasn’t “See you later” but “Kiss you in a bit.”

The sweetness of their love was its silliness. Tayshia had never been able to take life any way but seriously; she’d been in survival mode for much of it. She and Buck both had their own scars from their own battlefields. But when they were together, the mornings were slow and the laughter was endless. They bought a little white house just outside Detroit, near Kendra and the boys, and painted the walls inside bright teals, yellows, blues, and purples. Then they adopted a pair of “fur bastards,” a husky named Coco and a tabby named Sylvester, and taught both to play fetch in the grassy backyard. Each had its own pet-sized Detroit Lions jersey. Buck was a diehard fan, so Tayshia became one too. They even brought their big blue foam fingers to their wedding for a photoshoot.

Tayshia wasn’t a spiritual person, but she genuinely believed she’d found her soulmate in Buck. It was almost perfect, their life together.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.