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“People don’t know what kind of check I’m cashing, Nett. They just know I’m standing in line at the bank.”

“They can figure it out. They’ll assume you are just like the rest of the trash in line.”

Rhonda admitted she was a very young, very nervous wife and mother with a husband who was in jail. She refused to add “trash” to the list. To avoid being mistaken for such, Rhonda would wait a day or two after she got her check before she went to the bank.

Curtis came home nine months after he went to jail and went to live in his mother’s house in an upscale neighborhood. Rhonda and the children stayed with Nett. It took Rhonda five months to find an apartment that she could afford. Curtis still had a flaming addiction to heroin and couldn’t work. She and the children were only in their new home six weeks when Curtis burglarized his own mother’s house. He took her silverware, television, cameras, and her jewelry. He ransacked the house to make it look like a stranger had committed the burglary. Curtis was not a rocket scientist. He was arrested when he tried to pawn his mother’s diamond earrings.

Rhonda was devastated, but Curtis was her husband. She and a girlfriend pawned their engagement and wedding rings to bail him out of jail. On Tuesday, he was out. On Thursday, the day before he was scheduled to appear in court, Curtis disappeared.

Nothing and no one in Rhonda’s life seemed to work well for any length of time. She had wanted so much for her marriage—and her life—to work out. Ray had gotten married, had a son, separated from his wife, and was now drunk or high most of the time. Ray couldn’t work. The State of New York had legalized off-track betting, which had seriously infringed on Daddy’s street gambling operation. So Daddy wasn’t working. Grandma had gotten old. She was still mean as hell, but she could no longer work. Nett had a new boyfriend, and their relationship was working, but her relationship with Rhonda had gone downhill.

Rhonda was thin, she had hair, but nothing else in her life was working. She started going to dance classes at the community center to make herself feel better and met a new friend, Charlene. Charlene offered her a job teaching dance and told her about another job, working as a counselor for young women in a twenty-four hour rehabilitation center. That’s where Rhonda met John.

CHAPTER NINE

What’s the Lesson When You Engage in Self-Destructive Behavior?

You are free to believe what you choose, and what you do attests to what you believe. Let us be glad that you will see what you believe and that it has been given to you to change what you believe.

A Course in Miracles

I KNEELED DOWN AT THE EDGE of the pond and dipped my hands into the cool, swirling water, letting it flow through my fingers. Though the water was clear, my reflection was distorted. It was Rhonda’s shadow. There was still so much of Rhonda in me and around me. What she did and how she did it. What she felt and how I responded. The branches of the weeping willows that encircled the pond seemed to hang a little lower, to bend a bit more. Still, they were beautiful and very soothing. Nestled among the poplars, surrounded by the summer flowers that were dying to make room for the fall blossoms, they formed a type of symmetry that was not present in Rhonda’s life, but which Iyanla desperately needed to see.

I had remembered Gary and Curtis, a marriage gone bad, a husband in jail, and the birth of two children. I had refreshed my memory of the heaviness of Rhonda’s first nineteen years.

I could see how and why Rhonda thought she was a victim. I could see how she ran from one place to another, trying to get away from some place else where she had been victimized. I could see why she thought she was ugly, unlovable, destined to hurt and be hurt forever. I felt sad for her. I was not as sad about what had happened to her as I was about the fact that she could not see what was happening. I was sad that she could not see her pattern, and that there