One afternoon she said, "You keep describing your mother as two people — the woman who packed your lunches and the woman in the hallway. What happens if you allow her to be one person who did both?"
Jamal stared at the abstract painting behind her desk, blue shapes pretending to be water. "Then I have to love a whole person instead of a role. Roles are easier. Roles don't sleep with your friends."
"No," Dr. Okonkwo agreed. "They don't. People do. And people are what you actually have."
In March, Keisha ended things gently over Thai food. She said she liked him. She said she could feel a locked room in him that she was not being invited into. She said she did not need the key to every room, but she needed to know the house had a floor plan that included a future. Jamal respected her enough not to argue. He walked her to her car. He went home to the beige apartment and sat in the gray armchair and admitted to the empty room that she had been right.
Priya came later, in the heat of July, at a mutual friend's cookout that was not Rhea's and therefore carried less history. Priya taught eighth-grade English and quoted Baldwin without performing the quotation. She asked Jamal about his dreadlocks with genuine curiosity and laughed when he told her about the private who ran the wrong way. On their third date she said, "You get quiet like someone listening for footsteps in another room. You don't have to tell me whose. Just tell me if I should wait or walk."
He told her a shortened version of the hallway. She listened without the hungry fascination some people brought to other people's scandals. When he finished she said, "That's a lot to carry in a uniform. Thank you for setting it down here for a minute." They lasted four months. They ended because Jamal took a temporary assignment three states away and neither of them wanted to pretend distance was romantic. The goodbye was kind. Kindness, he was learning, was a skill that survived better than passion when the foundation was still under repair.
Angela called on a Wednesday in September with a voice that had been crying and then decided to stop.
"We're done," she said. "Daryl and me. For now. Maybe for good. I don't know."
Jamal sat on his balcony overlooking the parking lot. "Do you want me to come home?"