Not a Day Goes By Read Online Free PDF Page B

like the most glamorous housewife on earth, particularly since she was wearing her Tiffany gift, dangling diamond earrings the size of hazelnuts.
    “How many children do I want?” she asked.
    “Yeah, how many children do you want?” I repeated.
    “Well, how many do you want?”
    “I asked first,” I teased.
    Yancey placed the bowl filled with lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes on the counter and walked over to where I was leaning against the refrigerator. She stood between my legs and placed her long, elegant arms on my shoulders and quizzed, “What brought this on?”
    “You
do
want to have children, don’t you?”
    “Of course I do,” she said, telling a little white lie. “But I also want my career and I have to be married first,” she said firmly.
    “But of course,” I replied.
    “I want a family one day also, but not one like mine,” Yancey said.
    “Me neither,” I assured Yancey.
    “I don’t think you can call what you and I had a family,” Yancey added.
    “We’ll create our own special family,” I said. I kissed her gently on the lips and then her forehead.
    She kissed me back and said, “And only when we’re both ready.”

    I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept thinking about children while stroking Yancey’s face as she slept. The children Yancey and I would have. I knew they would be beautiful. I mean with Yancey’s beautiful face, my gray eyes, our children would be the envy of any parents. When I think about having a family, I realize how I want it to be different from my childhood, and I know Yancey feels the same way. We both had f’d-up childhoods. I want my kids to wake up every morning knowing that both of their parents will be there to greet them. The same thing at night and at any activity they participate in. I could picture having a little boy who had mad football skills like his bad-assed dad.
    I hoped that one day I would be selected for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The other day I realized that I will be eligible in a couple of years. When I dream about being inducted, I always imagine a wife and a couple of kids right there in the front row. Maybe I could have my son introduce me, like Walter Payton’s son did. When I saw Walter’s young son, Jarrett, introduce his father, well, it almost brought me to tears. And for a man who never cries, that’s a hard thing to do.
    I know if I’m going to start a family then it means marriage. I’m pretty sure I’m ready. My finances are in order and I love Yancey more and more each day. I know her career is important, but I think she would give up just a little something to marry me and have my children—make that
our
children. The only question that lingers in my mind is can a diva and a dude like me ever settle down?

4
    I THINK IT would be a waste of time for you to read for this part,” the unsmiling casting agent said to a stunned Yancey.
    “Why do you say that? I’d be perfect for the part,” Yancey said. She was sitting on the edge of a leather swivel chair in a large and modern conference room in midtown Manhattan.
    The dark-skinned, small-boned, and wiry lady with full, plum-colored lips picked up Yancey’s head shot which was sitting on top of a stack of other pictures and said, “You’re much darker in person than in this picture. The role calls for a mixed-race black woman.”
    The part was the lead role in an upcoming miniseries on the life of Sally Hemings, the alleged slave lover of President Thomas Jefferson. Yancey had heard about the audition not from her agent Lois but while eavesdropping on a backstage conversation between a couple of light-skinned beauties during an audition for a Broadway workshop. Yancey thought even though it was television, this was a role she needed on her résumé, so she wasn’t going to let the casting agent get in her way. She was also thinking of the fifteen percent she could save with no greedy agent holding out her hands. So Yancey began to release a waterfall of charm,