by Carl Weber
“Is the pussy that good that you’d violate an order of protection?” It took a moment for my alcohol-soaked brain to understand what he was telling me: He’d heard my conversation with Keisha. At least he’d heard part of it. Damn, I did not want him to know I was going over there. My lack of response opened the door for him to lecture me.
“She’s not worth your freedom, Darnel,” he continued. “Don’t let this woman ruin your life. You need to stay your behind home.”
“I have to talk to her.”
“You don’t have to do anything but stay black and die,” he said in a no-nonsense tone.
“Dad, you don’t understand,” I protested. Part of me knew how stupid I was being, but no matter how wrong she’d done me, I couldn’t control the way I felt. She had taken up residence in my heart a long time ago.
“You’re right; I don’t. But don’t be stupid. Anything you need to say to her can be said over the telephone.”
He was right and I knew it, but the image of me and Keisha making love had lit a fire in my soul, and I had to be near her, had to be able to touch her. A phone call just wouldn’t do it. Of course, I couldn’t admit this to my father, so I used Keisha’s suicide ploy to try getting him off my back.
“She told me she’s going to kill herself. I can’t have that on my conscience.”
He laughed. “If I had a hundred dollars for every woman who told me she was going to kill herself, I ’d be rich.” My father sat down next to me. “She said that because she wanted you to come over. You’re giving her what she wants. She knows you still love her.”
“She’s right. I do love her. I was going to marry her, remember?”
“I do, and I know you were deeply in love.”
“Oh yeah? What would you know about love?”
“Still won’t give me a break, huh?”
“Nope. I love you, but you could have married my mother. No woman has ever loved you like she does.”
Usually this topic caused a fight between me and my father, which would end with him telling me to mind my own business. But this time, maybe because he was feeling sorry for me, he took my criticism like a man.
“I can’t argue with you on that,” he told me. “She loved me more than I deserve. And I care about your mother, son. Your mother was, and is, a beautiful woman. But it takes a strong man to love a good woman.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You have to be a risk-taker to be in love. Love always opens you up to being hurt, and there are some hurts you never get over.” I could tell by my dad’s tone that he knew how I felt. I didn’t think he’d ever been hurt the way Keisha had done to me—he was more likely to be the one cheating, not the one cheated on. But even if he’d never felt it himself, he definitely had sympathy for me. This wasn’t his usual cool and calm spiel, when he was giving advice he’d never take.
For a while, we sat quietly, commiserating together, I guess.
I thought about it, flipping back and forth the pros and cons of taking this step. In the end, I knew that I still had to see Keisha. I just had to.
“I’m going over to Mark’s house.” I made up the lie to avoid any more lectures from Dad, but he was old school, and he’d already told the lies I was still dreaming up. I had to give him credit for staying out of it and letting me make my own decisions.
“Yeah, all right. Whatever. You can lie to me all you want, but you can’t lie to yourself.” My father waved his hand in dismissal, shook his head, and walked toward the kitchen. He obviously knew I was headed to Keisha’s, but at least he didn’t try to stop me.
Jamie
9
I slammed down the telephone, pissed off at Daddy for two reasons. Number one, he had one of his playthings over at the house, and number two, he hadn’t stopped Darnel from running over to Keisha’s house. He was so weak-minded, that brother of mine. Okay, maybe not exactly weak, but how about kindhearted? He was just too damn kindhearted and trusting.
Darnel wasn’t like me or Daddy; we were naturally suspicious, and it took a while for us to trust anyone outside of our family circle. You can ask my boo, Louis, about that. It took us almost five months of being together before I felt like I could trust him with my heart. But Darnel, he always took everyone at face value, trusting their word to be their bond. He just couldn’t believe shit stank. And everyone from his friends to his fiancée took his kindness for weakness.
“So, is everything okay?” Louis asked. He was sitting up in the bed, watching TV, probably waiting for me to finish my eleven o’clock call to Daddy. We hadn’t done anything in a couple of days, so I’m sure he was waiting up to get some. Shoot, I could use a little stress reduction myself, but only after I got this off my chest.“Daddy said Darnel’s gone over to Keisha’s.”
Louis rubbed his forehead. “What the hell’s he thinking about?”
“I don’t know. I think we’re going to have to find him a woman.”
“Oh no, you don’t. We’re not going to find him anything. That’s you. I’m not in the matchmaking business,” he said seriously.
“Oh, come on, baby.” I snuggled up next to him. “Don’t you want to see my brother happy?”
“Of course I do. That’s why I’m staying the hell out of his personal life.” Before I could find the right thing to say, he changed the subject. “So what’s your pops up to?”
“Would you believe he’s got some woman over at the house?”
Louis chuckled. “I’m not surprised. Your pops always got someone over at the house.”
I rolled my eyes at him something fierce. “That’s not funny, Louis.”
“I’m not laughing, Jamie. But you need to cut your pops some slack. You’re grown. The man’s gotta have a life too.”
“Yeah, well, he don’t need to waste his time on those gold diggers and whores. He’s too old for that. I got a good mind to go over there.”
“What, you expect him to play bingo with the senior citizens? The man just turned forty-eight years old, not ninety-eight. Damn, why can’t you give him a break?”
“He ain’t gotta play bingo. He just needs to slow down. You don’t understand, Louis. These women ain’t got nothing good for my daddy.”
This time, Louis rolled his eyes. “No woman has anything good for your father as far as you’re concerned.”
“You got that right.”
He shook his head. “You know, baby, your obsession with your father’s life is not healthy.”
I pulled away from him and sat up in the bed. “Obsession? What the hell do you mean by that? Are you trying to say me and my daddy are doing something?” I pointed my finger in his face, daring him to accuse me of something sick like that. I would knock his ass out if he did.
“No!” he said, sounding just as offended as I was. “Damn, baby. You’re touchy tonight. I’m just saying you’re a daddy’s girl, that’s all.”
I didn’t answer, because he was right. I was a daddy’s girl. But don’t pass judgment until you hear my story.
You see, I didn’t even find out that James Black was my daddy until I was ten. Apparently, my mother had been tipping around with him while she was married to Chester, the man who had raised me as his daughter. Chester was an ex-military man, and he raised me and my three older brothers—or rather the boys who turned out to be my half brothers—with plenty of rules and regulations. I always respected him, but I can’t say I was ever one of those little girls who worshipped her father.
Anyhow, when I was ten, my mother confided in me that James Black was my biological father, and she took me to see him on the sly. To this day, I wonder why she opened up that can of worms by introducing me to Daddy. Maybe she was feeling guilty about keeping the truth from me. I guess she figured that at ten, I was old enough to understand and smart enough to keep her secret. Or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she and Daddy had started screwing again behind Chester’s back. Now, I can’t prove that, but they sure went in his room for
a lot of so-called talks when I visited.
That withstanding, she couldn’t have predicted in a million years the bond that would form between me and Daddy. He was so nice to me, and I thought he was so handsome. We hit it off from the start. Even though I had just met him, it was obvious that we were cut from the same cloth. We shared the same sense of humor and loved the same foods. We even liked the same cartoons. Where Chester was strict and distant with us kids, Daddy would get right down on the floor and play with my dolls with me. Not to mention the fact that I was wearing his face. I loved my real daddy. I loved Chester, too, but there was no denying that Daddy was a much warmer man, and the connection between us was deep.
My mother saw how happy it made me to visit my father, so she brought me to see him as often as she could sneak away from Chester. Little did she know that this would eventually spell disaster for her.
One day, when I was about twelve, I was playing with my brothers when Chester came into the room and snatched the toy right out of my hand. My brothers and I had left the kitchen a mess after we fixed ourselves a snack, but apparently he thought I was the only one who should be responsible for cleaning up. Chester ordered me to wash the dishes but said nothing to the boys. He always treated me like I was Cinder-fuckin’-ella or something, and I was fed up.
“I don’t have to do what you tell me to do,” I said, standing in the middle of the living room as my brothers watched in confused silence. “You ain’t my real daddy. James Black’s my daddy,” I informed him.
From the look of shock on his face, I may as well have hit him with a baseball bat. His expression gradually transformed from shock to pain. When I think back on it, I realize that was the moment when he wrapped his head around the facts and knew that I was telling the truth. But someone like Chester was not about to show weakness in front of his boys, so he turned his pain into rage and took it out on me by trying to beat the black off of me.
Afterward, all hell broke loose between him and my moms. I thought for sure that because I ’d let this twelve-year-old secret out of the bag, they would get a divorce. As I lay in bed still aching from the beating I ’d received, that idea didn’t sound too bad to me anyway. However, my mom smoothed his feathers, probably in the bedroom, and the whole incident was put to rest with my mother’s words: “It’s nothing I can do about it. We have four kids. It happened.”
They stayed together, but there was still plenty of tension in the air. My brothers were mad at me for starting the whole thing, and my mother reminded me just about every day that I had broken my promise to keep her little secret. And Chester, he couldn’t even stand to see my face. In his eyes, I had become a living symbol of his wife’s infidelity.
It didn’t help matters that we went to the same church as Daddy, so Chester had to see Daddy every Sunday. He started complaining to my mother that every time he looked at me, he saw James Black’s face, and it was driving him crazy. Not to mention the fact that my mom had the audacity to name me Jamie, after James. It was one thing to know his wife cheated; it was clearly another to live with the proof of that affair.
My mother did what she thought she had to do to save her marriage. The next thing I knew, my ass was hauled off to stay with my daddy. As far as I was concerned,she had sacrificed me for the sake of her husband and her sons. I suffered the ultimate punishment for an affair that she’d had.
She tried for a while to visit me at Daddy’s house, but it wasn’t long before the frequency of the visits dropped to almost never. No doubt Chester was giving her hell every time he knew she was coming around James’s place, and I wasn’t making her time with me very pleasant either. As a preteen girl who felt abandoned by her, I didn’t have much love to show my mother.
She’d try to tell me funny stories about my brothers, but I didn’t want to hear it. Ever since the day I ’d told the secret, they made my life as uncomfortable as possible. They stopped calling me by my name and referred to me as “Mama’s little mistake.” Not long after I moved in with him, Daddy introduced me to Darnel, and although he didn’t live with us, Darnel and I were tight—tighter than I ’d ever been with my other brothers. So anything my mother had to say about the boys fell on deaf ears. By the time my mother told me that she and Chester and the boys were moving out of state, I think it was probably a relief for everyone involved. I hardly ever spoke to my mother after she moved.
I ended up living with Daddy from the age of twelve until just a few months ago, when I moved in with Louis. In all those years, Daddy never complained. He gave me all the love a young woman could ever want, including teaching me about hygiene and, believe it or not, shopping for my first bra. Women came and went—some of them, including Darnel’s mother, even seemed to think they had a shot at becoming Mrs. James Black—but Daddy remained devoted first and foremost to me, and that was just the way I liked it. To say I’m a daddy’s girl is an understatement. He was my best friend, and I would see to it that no one ever broke that bond.
“You know how I feel about my daddy. That’s not the issue,” I told Louis.
“Well, what is the issue? Your father’s an adult. You’re trying to hold him too tight.”
“He may be grown, but he’s got a family to worry about. He’s all Darnel and I really have.”
“So what is this here that me and you have?” Louis looked at me pointedly, waiting for my reply.
“You don’t understand because …” I fell silent before I said something that could hurt Louis.
Louis had told me about his childhood, so different from mine. He was raised in an orphanage in Iowa, and he had no family to speak of. He seemed to be like Adam—as if he just came into the world with no father or mother, and he didn’t need anyone except me. I loved him for his devotion to me, but it was also a point of contention between us, because he found it impossible to understand how I could love my father so much. We had already had several confrontations over Louis feeling that I was too into my family, which meant he took second place in my world. He would never understand, I decided, and it wasn’t worth the fight.
We sat there, staring at each other, trying to avoid an argument. Luckily for me, Louis’s cell rang before our tense silence escalated into angry words. But that didn’t stop me from catching an attitude when I glanced at the clock and realized how late it was.
“Who the hell is calling you at this time of night?”
Louis just gave me a blank look, like I was stupid to even be acting suspicious, but I didn’t care. I ’d learned many things from my father, including never assume that your mate isn’t cheating. As much as I loved my father, I knew he was a womanizer, and he had made fools of half the women in Queens, a good number of them married to husbands who had no clue. My motto had become “Ask the right questions now so you don’t have to pack your bags later.”
Louis knew that I had this jealous streak in me, so he answered my question to avoid another fight. “I don’t know. Probably work.”
His answer made me even more skeptical. Louis worked as a manager at a used-car dealership on Hillside Avenue, so he constantly got calls about problems, but never at this time of night. Something told me this wasn’t a work call. I watched him walk over to his dresser and pick up his cell phone, and I wondered if he would have the nerve to take the call in front of me.
“Hello.”
I was satisfied that it couldn’t be anything to worry about, because he didn’t make a move to leave the room when he answered. I leaned back against the pillows and relaxed for a moment, but my relief was short-lived. He listened intently for a few seconds, then said, “I understand. Friday’s fine,” then disappeared into the bathroom, where he finished his call.
He wasn’t in there long, but by the time he came out, I was ready to pounce. “So, who was that?” I asked before he could even get back into bed.
“Oh, that was work. They want me to go outta town on Friday.”
I felt my stomach clench. I was sure he was lying. His job never sent h
im out of town.
“To where?” I asked coldly.
“Somewhere in Pennsylvania. I’m supposed to go to a dealer auction and look for this BMW my boss promised a customer.”
Why was he trying to play me? He was about to make me flip on him.
“So, that was your boss?” I made no effort to hide the skepticism in my voice. I got out of bed and started to walk toward his dresser, where he’d placed his phone. “And he wants you to go to Pennsylvania Friday?”
“Yeah, why? You don’t believe me?”
I picked up his phone and hit the necessary keys to find the last call received. “Hell no, I don’t believe you.” I fully expected him to jump out of bed and try to stop me, but I was close enough to the bathroom to make a quick dash. Before he had a chance to pull the covers back, I ’d have the door locked, talking to whatever hooker had just called him.
“Boo, you don’t have to do this. I was gonna ask you if you wanted to go,” he said with a hint of amusement in his voice.
Oh, so he thinks this is funny, huh? I could feel my blood pressure rise at least five points. Damn, I really thought he was different than other men.
“Stop lying, Louis, and tell me who was on the phone,” I said as I hit the TALK button to redial the last number.
He sat up in bed and folded his arms. “Guess we’re going to find out.” He was trying to act cool and in control, but I knew he had to be scared.
“I guess we are,” I said with a smirk. I put the phone to my ear, fully expecting to hear a woman answer the phone. That’s why I nearly dropped the cell when I heard a familiar voice—a male voice.
“Hello?” Louis’s boss repeated for the third time.
I disconnected the call. Knowing that Louis’s boss had probably seen the number on his caller ID, I could only hope that he wouldn’t call back now. If Louis was mad enough, he might just embarrass me by telling his boss why I ’d called. But neither of those things hap-pened—his boss never called back, and Louis wasn’t mad.
