Once Upon a Sunday

by Renee Allen McCoy

  Chapter Seven

  Tears streamed from my eyes as I stood in the doorway of Sean’s bedroom. My eyes drifted from the yellow dump truck on the bed that I told him to keep on the floor over to the new pair of sneakers he couldn’t wear until he grew into them.

  “Why?” I sniffled. “Why is all of this happening to me?” I smeared the tears away with the back of my hand and drew in several shallow breaths before breaking down again. It didn’t seem like my life. The emotions were real and raw, but this place … I’ve never been this low before.

  “Melinda!” I heard someone yell my name from the outside. “Melinda, are you in there?” This question came with several pounds on my front door and at that point I knew who it was. “Open the door,” she demanded.

  I stared through one of the windows of my living room and caught a glimpse of my mother’s car. I wondered if she was alone. Since everybody was still in my business, quick to tell her how much of a mess I was by having my child taken away from me, it wouldn’t have surprised me if one of those same people showed up with her to get a front row seat to see how it all fared out.

  My mother took the liberty of reminding me last night that we have at least a dozen relatives working down at the hospital and any one of them could have seen me there making a scene and ruining her good name. Again, it was all about her and how she looked.

  “All right. Have it your way,” she said before I saw her come into view.

  I watched as she walked back to her car. I snatched my head away from the window just as she looked in my direction. I’m not sure if she saw me or not, but shortly after her engine started the sound of her car drifted away.

  Despite Kevin’s threats and commands, I called his number anyway to see how my baby was doing. There’s no telling what sort of lies he’s filled my son’s head with. No matter what, I needed to tell Sean that I loved him. If he never hears a kind word uttered about me from anyone, that’s what I wanted him to remember.

  “Hello?” a woman answered the phone.

  I kept silent.

  “Hello?” she repeated, this time with a little funk in her voice.

  “This is Kevin’s wife,” I answered, trying to keep my composure while at the same time letting her know that I was legal and she was not, no matter how pregnant she was. “I was calling to speak to my son.”

  After she spouted off a few choice words, Kevin appeared on the line.

  “Melinda, why are you calling here?” he questioned. “Didn’t I tell you not to call here? Not to contact Sean at all?” He sounded even angrier than he did on the night before.

  “Have you forgotten that secret I swore I’d take to the grave?” I challenged him.

  He became silent.

  “You know that I would’ve never done anything to hurt our child. You know this! So why are you acting as if I’m a horrible mother?”

  “Because you are,” he snarled back at me. “I have to ask permission to see my son as if he’s not mine at all. What kind of mother would keep her child away from his father?”

  “I’ve never kept you away from him.”

  “Does Christmas and New Year’s Eve ring a bell for you?”

  “Are you serious? I’m his mother, he belonged with me in a house that he’s familiar with.”

  “Yeah, a house that I’m paying for.”

  “With stolen money,” I rebutted.

  We both became silent. I never thought that I would ever speak those words aloud after we decided to bury the bones from our past.

  “Look Melinda, if you call here again, you’ll really be sorry. And if you decide to open your big mouth about our past, you may as well pack your bags and get out of that house.” He hung up the phone.

  He had become quite comfortable with hanging up on me over the past twenty-four hours. There was no getting through his thick skull. The way he used Sean’s accident against me to further justify him shacking up with that woman was sickening.

  This man had pledged his life to me and promised to be there for better or worse. And now, he was talking to me like I was the one who had cheated on him. Like I was the one who had asked him to steal from his job, like I was the one who had orchestrated that whole mess. Truth be told, I never wanted money that way, but since he promised that he’d find a way to put the money back, I went along with it. It wasn’t until years later that I found out that he was lying about that too.

  “Do you really think that I can pay back that money on the salary I make?” he used to ask me. “It’s too late now anyway. I’m in a different office now managing different accounts. They’d never believe that it was a clerical error. Don’t be stupid.” He used to make me feel so small, but he was the father of my child.

  “Kevin?” I answered my phone again without looking at the caller ID.

  “Uh no, this is Farrah.”

  “Oh …” My voice drained all of the hope it held. “Hi, Farrah.”

  “Were you expecting a call from Kevin?” she asked.

  “Not really.” I sighed and turned the lights out to Sean’s room. As I gazed at the Spiderman poster attached to his door, a nervous smile crept across my face. Now that I didn’t have him, I didn’t have anything.

  “Melinda, are you okay? I mean, do you feel like some company?”

  Farrah’s heart was in the right place, I guess, but she’d never understand what I was going through. Besides losing my job and my son on the same day, I was beginning to lose myself. The constant reminders of how much of a failure I had become was overwhelming. I didn’t need her pep talk, although she had been the one compassionate fixture in my life over the past year. From the time I lost my close uncle to the time I lost my husband and almost lost my mind, Farrah was there. She never gave up on me, despite some of the nasty things I had said to her.

  “Thank you, Farrah, but no. I don’t feel like any company right now. I just need some time alone.”

  “Are you sure? I can bring lunch from that seafood place you like and we can watch a couple of movies,” she offered. “And I can braid your hair in that pretty style you wore over the Christmas holiday.”

  I chuckled as she almost had me. That sister can braid like nobody’s business and she always cut me a deal when it came to her whipping up a nice do. Despite the fact that my hair looked like a bird’s nest on top of my head right now, I still declined the offer. Even after she said that she’d do it for free.

  “Thank you, Farrah, really, but I just need to be by myself right now. Besides, I need to clean up this weekend so that social worker can see that I keep a clean house.”

  “But you do anyway.”

  “Yeah, but sometimes our clean may not be clean enough, you know. I don’t want to give her any indication that I neglect my son in anyway. I got home not too long ago from the store.” Thanks to Charlotte for the money she had given me yesterday, I was able to not only buy a few picture frames to fill the empty spots of where I used to have photos of the three of us that I had since smashed to pieces, but also buy some extra groceries and a new curtain that Sean had torn from his window playing superhero.

  “I can help you clean.” Farrah sounded sincere.

  “No, that’s okay. I appreciate it though.”

  “Okay,” she hesitantly relented. “Just call me if you need anything.”

  “Okay … and thank you for everything.” I paused, and then said, “Bye.”

  I slowly lowered the phone from my ear and walked over to the open photo album I had left on the coffee table from last night.

  It was nice looking at the pictures of my uncle when we used to go shrimping and crabbing while catching a few fish along the way. After my father died, it was like he picked right up where his brother had left off. We did things together that most fathers and daughters don’t.

  My pretentious sister never liked being outdoors, especially when it came to putting on rubber boots to hook live seafood. Oddly enough, she never missed a moment to eat whatever we caught. Since I
hadn’t been to a dock or shoreline in a while, I figured that tomorrow was as good a day as any. It didn’t matter that shrimping season was still a solid month away; just the nostalgic memories swept me in that direction. I needed closure and that was the place to do it.

  After rummaging through my garage for those blue rubber boots, I made a decision about my life. Hours of contemplating where to go from here only made things clearer in my mind. I had to stop the hurt. The pain would finally go away. No need dragging my son through this, seeing me this way. Despite our strained relationship, my mother would see to it that he would be taken care of. I’m sure of it. Things would be better this way. My mind was made up. I knew exactly what I had to do.