I Ain't Me No More

by E. N. Joy

  Once again my mother burst out laughing as she headed back into the kitchen. Dino and I both heard her mumble as she shook her head at Dino’s ignorance. “He just doesn’t get it. He can’t beat Dub.”

  Dino looked at me after my mother’s comment. “Is that what you think too? That I can’t beat him?”

  I couldn’t even stand there and think about lying to Dino about how I felt. I knew he was no match for Dub, not while he was in this relentless state. Dub had been shot, stabbed, and dragged by an automobile, and still he stood. He was like a real-life boogeyman.

  “Answer me!” Dino exclaimed when I was taking too long to respond.

  “You can’t beat him, Dino. I mean, you’re bigger than him and everything, but Dub’s not going to fight, so I don’t mean you can’t beat him physically. What I mean is that he’s crazy. You can’t beat him at being crazy. The things he’d do to a person, you don’t have it in you to do,” I said, trying to reason with Dino without insulting his manhood.

  “Unbelievable!” Dino flopped down on the couch. “So that’s why you left me in the dark for so long. I mean, why should you tell me about this crazy fool when all along you felt in your heart that I couldn’t protect you, anyway. Now I’m looking like a buster. Got my peeps calling me, talking ’bout, ‘Y’all all right, man? Everything good with the family? You need some back up?’”

  “Please don’t try to make this about you,” I said, trying to contain my anger as I watched him whine.

  “Helen, it’s for you.” My mother peeked around the corner with the kitchen phone in her hand. I was so engaged in my conversation with Dino that I hadn’t even heard the phone ring. “It’s the news station.”

  I went and took the phone, wondering what the news station could possibly want. “This is Helen . . .Yes . . . Really? . . . Oh my God! Thank you! Thank you! Yes, I can be there. Thank you again so much,” I said before I hung up the phone with Andrea. “Thank you, God!” I shouted as I fell to my knees. No, I wasn’t a practicing Christian. No, I couldn’t even consider myself a babe in Christ. But this all had to have been orchestrated by God. That much I knew . . . I felt.

  “What it is?” Nana asked, coming out of her bedroom and into the kitchen.

  “That was Andrea, the lady from the news that interviewed me,” I answered. “She said the news station contacted the courts, asking them if there was anything more they could do to protect me from Dub. Come to find she got a call back from the prosecutor’s office, which says that Dub sending me threatening letters through the U.S. mail is a felony, and they can charge him one count for each letter he sent that I can present to the judge.”

  “So what does that mean?” my mom asked.

  “It means that if I can get down to the prosecutor’s office ASAP, they can start the paperwork and present it to the judge first thing in the morning.”

  I was shaking with anxiety. I was anxious to get down to that courthouse. I made a mental note to call Andrea up later and thank her again. She’d contacted the courts, putting a fire under them and pushing them to do something more. She’d aired my story, so if Dub got out and harmed me, there was no doubt my story would come back to haunt the legal system, which I’d reached out to for help. They did not want that type of embarrassment.

  I immediately headed to my bedroom and dug up every single threatening letter Dub had written me, along with the postdated, stamped envelopes, which showed he’d used the federal postal service to get them to me.

  “Dino, do you want to drive me?” I asked as I cleared the corner and entered the living room, only to find the spot where Dino had been sitting empty. I went to the window and looked outside.

  “He’s gone,” my mother said. “He left.”

  A small part of me could understand how Dino must have felt, but the bigger part of me was more concerned about protecting myself and my family, and Dino too, for that matter. So without harping on Dino’s absence, I headed out the door to meet the prosecutor.

  “What do you want me to do?” the judge asked me. “Keep him in jail forever?”

  I couldn’t believe the sarcasm of this man. After reading all those letters he’d been presented with by the prosecutor that morning, how could he not want to lock Dub up and throw away the key? Here this man was ready to just let Dub go on his merry way without so much as a fine. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. That was when it dawned on me that the judge had received my case only that morning, and now it was only early afternoon.

  “Have you read the letters?” I asked him. This man probably hadn’t even read the letters, and yet he was ready to rule.

  He paused. “No,” he said in an almost inaudible voice that didn’t hide his unease.

  By now my eyes were filled with tears of both anger and frustration. I was angry because this man had been all ready to decide the outcome of the case—my fate—without even having taken the time to review the crux of my complaint. The crux of my fear.

  I supposed the judge could read all these emotions circling in my mind like a tornado, as he decided to take a few seconds and read over some of the letters right then and there. Every now and then the expression on his face would change, as if he couldn’t believe the words he’d just read. Then he would look at Dub, who stood at the defendant’s table, with disdain.

  I, on the other hand, had not looked at Dub one time in the courtroom. I could feel his intimidating presence. I could feel him staring me down with his eyes, which he was using as daggers. Just that morning I could imagine him as happy as a lark, knowing this was the day he was to be released back into society. This was the day he would be set free. I pictured him all packed and ready to go. So when the guards came for him, I was sure he hadn’t had an inkling they would be bringing him to court for fresh charges. Unadulterated anger had to be writhing inside of him, like a worm trying to escape the hook of a fisherman.

  I had always feared Dub, no doubt, but what I feared more than Dub at that moment was fear itself. I didn’t want fear to force me to back down. I’d come too far. The light at the end of the tunnel was shining brightly on me. I couldn’t dim it with the darkness that Dub held within himself. So I just kept my eyes on the judge and did something I hadn’t done in a long time. I prayed.

  God, if you allow me to prevail in this matter, if you make this judge see my side of things and help me . . . God, if you save my life and the lives of my loved ones, I’ll give you my life. I promise that from this moment on I will live for you.

  After one minute of praying and only one minute of the judge getting the gist of the letters, my prayer was answered.

  “Mr. Dublen Richard Daniels, I find these letters to be repulsive and threatening. Not only that, but I find them to be a violation of the laws set in place by the state of Ohio and the federal government.” The judge sifted through some other papers. “Had you not committed prior criminal acts that involved violence, I might have almost chalked these letters up to simple jailhouse threats, but with your record, I can’t take the chance with Miss Lannden.”

  The judge looked at me as if he wanted to wink at me, letting me know that he was on my side, after all.

  I stifled the smile that was wrestling to make a courtroom appearance.

  “I know you were probably incensed at the time these letters were written,” the judge continued. “And there is a possibility that you didn’t mean everything you said and that you would never carry out these threats.” He looked down at the letters again and then looked at me. “But I’m not willing to take that chance.” Turning his attention back to Dub, he concluded, “So, with that being said, I’m sentencing you to twelve months jail time.” The judge slammed the file closed. “Plus the other four months from your last sentence that you didn’t serve. Since the last eight months didn’t give you time to cool off, maybe the next sixteen will do the trick.”

  “Hallelujah!” I shouted, with tears of joy now streaming down my face. At the time I didn’t even know that “Hallelujah�
� was the highest praise to God. All I knew was that God had answered my prayers and I had to communicate my gratefulness in His own language.

  In the midst of all the celebrating, as I watched the deputies handcuff Dub and take him right back to jail, I forgot one thing. I forgot about my promise to God. And it wouldn’t be long before I forgot about God altogether. How I saw it, when I was in trouble, when I wanted something from God, I knew exactly what to say in prayer. But once God had done what I’d asked Him to do, I didn’t know what to pray about. God realized this same thing about me too, so it would only be a matter of time before He gave me something else to pray about.

  Stone Number Thirty-three

  Things really started looking up for Dino and me after Dub was sent back to jail. I couldn’t say the same about myself and school. With all the drama going on in my life, my grades suffered tremendously. I ended up losing all my grants and scholarships. That really hurt, especially since I had only one semester to go in order to graduate. If I wanted to complete that final semester, I’d have to pay for it out of my own pocket. Considering that I was going to a private Lutheran college, I hardly had the money to do that. So I just put college on the back burner.

  As a matter of fact, I put lots of things on the back burner . . . or should I say in the back of my mind? It was like I had this new life. After years of emotional and physical abuse, I had managed to completely disconnect myself from that life. I pretended as though it had never even taken place, that it had all been one bad nightmare, and now I was living a dream.

  For the first time since I could remember, I felt free. There was no longer this imminent threat from Dub. Don’t get me wrong. I knew I was definitely still on Dub’s radar. If Dub had wanted to kill me before, I could only imagine how badly he wanted to see me dead now. I couldn’t imagine spending all that time in jail and then, the day I thought I was going to go free, being rerouted to court on charges filed by my ex, and then being sent straight back to jail . . . for another year!

  Hopefully, the judge was right and those sixteen months would be long enough for Dub to cool down . . . and maybe even forget about me altogether. But whatever twisted ways to kill me and my family that sprouted up in Dub’s head, I’d never know about them, as the judge had made it very clear in his orders that Dub was not to contact me via phone, mail, skywriting, or by any other means, at any location.

  “I still wish you hadn’t felt the need to go public and had just come to me first,” Dino kept saying the first couple of weeks after the Dub ordeal.

  “Baby, I am truly sorry if what I did made you feel like less than a man, but in my heart, I’m not sorry for the route I took,” I explained on one occasion.

  All that stress with Dub made me appreciate more and more Dino and his good qualities, all of which Dub lacked. Strangely enough, the ordeal with Dub sort of lit a fire up under Dino to step his game up as a man and become a provider.

  “Guess what?” Dino said before Baby D and I had barely made it through his apartment door one day.

  “What is it?” I asked. His contagious joy and excitement had me sporting a mile-wide grin.

  “I went out and got a job.”

  “Get out of here,” I replied.

  “Seriously. I start tomorrow. I realized that a settlement from my job is not realistic right now, so I went out and got a job.”

  “I’m so happy for you,” I said, wrapping my arms around his neck and planting a kiss on his cheek.

  “You and my landlord.” Dino smiled. “He was the first one I told. I worked something out where I’m going to get him all paid up.”

  Although I’d never met him personally, Dino’s landlord had to be a saint, his kind heart prohibiting him from putting Dino on the streets.

  “The only thing about this job is that my hours are funky. I go in at nine at night and don’t get off until three in the morning.”

  “It’s only part-time?” I tried to maintain my excitement after hearing he’d be putting in only six hours of work. Looking on the bright side, if the job paid well, then perhaps six hours was all he needed to put in in order to get a decent check.

  “Yeah, but it’s better than nothing. I had to get a job.” Dino’s last statement almost made it seem that someone had stuck a gun to his head and had told him to go out and get a job or else.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I agreed.

  “Do you have to wear a uniform?” Baby D interjected. “Like police and mailmen do?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Dino said before disappearing into his bedroom. He returned with his uniform over his arm. “See, here it is.” He held it up, showing it off to Baby D. It consisted of dark blue pants and a blue- and white-striped shirt. There was a picture of a little redheaded white girl with pigtails on the corner pocket of the shirt.

  “Cool,” Baby D replied, touching it. “Does this mean we can all get free Frosties? Because I like . . .”

  Baby D was talking, but I wasn’t listening. I was still stuck on the fast-food restaurant uniform Dino was so proudly showing off. I had to do a double take. Was this big, overgrown man really excited about the fact that he’d just landed a job at a fast-food joint? I mean, if he were a teenager looking for a job to support his tennis shoe addiction, that would be another story, but this man was only two years younger than me, which made him twenty-two . . . and not only was he a man, but he was my man! I couldn’t wrap my brain around it in order to get excited.

  “Burger King, huh?” was all I could say.

  “No, Mom. Wendy’s,” Baby D said, correcting me, rolling his eyes.

  I guess Dino saw the disappointment on my face. “Look, Helen, I know it’s not much. It’s not office work in corporate America, like you’re doing, but it’s a job. You never know. I could end up becoming a top manager.” He smiled and placed the paper hat on his head.

  Why was this sounding like that old McDonald’s commercial where the whole neighborhood was proud of Calvin for getting a job at the fast-food restaurant?

  “So, just hang in there with me, all right?” Dino rubbed my cheek and smiled.

  That darn smile of his made me smile, and the next thing I knew, I said a cheerful and meaningful “Okay.”

  For the moment, I was glad that Dino would have a little somethin’, somethin’ in his pockets. His working at Burger King—I mean Wendy’s—couldn’t be too bad, that is, as long as no one found out.

  “Did I see Dino working at Wendy’s?”

  It was almost shameful when a girl from work came over to my desk and asked me that question. Folks had seen Dino drop me off and pick me up from work a couple of times. I’d allowed him to use my car while I was at work so he could go look for work. Never had I imagined that he would find work at a fast-food joint and that my coworkers would spot him.

  I wanted to melt like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy threw water on her. Instead, I simply replied with the truth. “Yes, he works there now on the side.” Well, almost the truth. Wendy’s wasn’t his side job. It was his only job, but I’d led her to believe it was just a second part-time job he’d picked up for extra money.

  “I was just making sure, because my boyfriend and I stopped in there and I told him, ‘I think that’s the guy Helen’s seeing, the one she brought to the Christmas party.’”

  “Yep, that was him.” I hated saying it once again, forgetting all about the fact that Dino had accompanied me to the office Christmas party. He had put on such a show with his old-school dance moves, I imagined he was more than recognizable to my coworkers, even in his work getup.

  “Well, girl, at least you got a man that’s willing to work. I can’t get my boyfriend off the couch,” she joked.

  We each laughed, and I immediately felt more at ease. Here, I thought she was coming over to rub in my face the fact that I was dating someone who worked in a fast-food joint, and she’d ended up confessing that her man didn’t even work at all. I could tell she was real people. And that right
there was the start of a new friendship.

  Bianca, the girl from work, and I exchanged phone numbers and started hanging out. We had so much in common that it wasn’t funny. Although she had her friends that she’d hung out with since high school and I had Synthia and Konnie, she and I were more alike than anybody. We even shared the same birthday.

  She and I ended up doing stuff together almost every day, and that was easy since we worked together. But we even found reasons to hang out after work. I’d invite her to all my family’s events, and she’d invite me to hers. My family took to her immediately. And, of course, Dino liked her. Dino liked everybody. That was another quality he had that I admired: he saw the best in everybody. Even me, go figure. I had a hard time seeing anything good in myself. The way I saw it, anything good that might have been in me, Dub had beaten out.

  Hanging out with Bianca brought out another side of me. She was full of fun and full of life. She had this shine about her, a shine that made all those around her want to shine too. I had never laughed as much as I did when I was with Bianca. Since Bianca didn’t have any kids, she kicked it nonstop, and soon enough, so did I.

  “You going out again?” Dino asked as I began getting dressed after putting Baby D to bed.

  “Me and Bianca are just going out for a quick drink,” I replied, ignoring the tone in Dino’s voice, which sounded a little disappointed about the fact that I was about to leave. “You know I don’t drink all like that, so I won’t be long.”

  “But it’s the middle of the week. And it’s my night off.”

  “And?” I said, slipping my sheer, long-sleeved black bodysuit on over my Victoria’s Secret black lace bra.

  “Are you going out for a drink, or are you going out to get dudes to buy you a drink?” Dino looked my outfit up and down. “And why are you wearing that out with Bianca? You and I used to go out all the time together, and you never dressed like that when you were with me.”