Sable Monroe

My mother came back to the room in Brooklyn and told me she wanted me to meet someone.

I asked who.

“My boyfriend,” she said.

That wasn’t unusual. By then, I understood that when my parents were having problems, my mother sometimes had other men in her life. In Jamaica, this hadn’t been hidden from me. I didn’t attach danger to the idea. If anything, I felt curious. This was the first man she wanted me to meet who wasn’t Jamaican, and the way she spoke about him made it sound like something good was coming.

She told me he was nice. That he wasn’t like my father. That she wanted us to get along.

So when she picked up my brother and me, I went along without resistance. I didn’t brace myself. I didn’t feel afraid. I was a child, and children tend to believe the version of the story they’re given, especially when it’s offered gently.

We got on a train. I remember watching the stops pass, the unfamiliar names, the way everything felt fast and quiet at the same time. Eventually, we ended up in Great Neck. From there, we went to a hotel.

I didn’t question why we were meeting him there. Adults moved us from place to place often enough that I had learned not to ask for explanations unless something was obviously wrong. This didn’t feel wrong yet. It just felt new.

When we met him, he smiled and shook our hands.

He was very thin. His hair was white in the front and black everywhere else. He looked calm. Polite. The kind of man who knew how to keep his voice even. There was nothing about him, at first glance, that signaled danger.

What I noticed more than his appearance was how he and my mother interacted.

He was very physically affectionate with her. Touching her, holding her, kissing her openly. This wasn’t something I was used to seeing. In Jamaica, affection like that mostly existed in movies. Adults didn’t behave that way in front of children. Watching it happen made something in my body tighten. I didn’t have language for the feeling. I only knew I hadn’t been prepared for it.

It was winter. Snow covered the ground outside. I remember that clearly. I had arrived in the United States in January of 1989, and everything about the season still felt sharp and foreign. The cold wasn’t just outside. It seemed to follow us indoors, settling into spaces I didn’t yet know how to warm.

That night, we all slept in the same hotel room.

There were two beds. My brother and I slept in one. My mother and her boyfriend slept in the other.

Nothing happened. He didn’t touch us. He didn’t raise his voice. He remained calm and pleasant the entire time. But I remember lying there awake, aware of his presence in the room, feeling strange sleeping near someone I didn’t know. It wasn’t fear exactly. It was vigilance. The sense that I needed to stay alert, even though I didn’t know why.

At some point, I noticed my mother trying to hide a bottle of alcohol.

I think it was Wild Irish Rose. Cheap liquor. She moved it out of sight quickly when she realized my brother and I had noticed it. We didn’t grow up around open drinking. That wasn’t normal to us. Her reaction stood out more than the bottle itself.

She was already concealing something.

At the time, I didn’t know what to make of that. I only registered the feeling it left behind — that something about him needed managing, even in the beginning. Even before anything had gone wrong.

That was the first time I met my mother’s boyfriend.

I had no idea then who he would become in our lives. I only knew that something had shifted, and that I would have to start paying attention in a new way.