I sat down at my white tile kitchen table and began opening my bills. The first one on the top was my Verizon cell bill. It was a bill for seven hundred dollars and three cents. What the hell? It had to be a mistake. I thought we all shared minutes. I looked at all the phone lines and none of the minutes was over. I couldn’t understand why the bill was that much. I continued to scan the bill to see what could possibly make my bill so high. Then I spotted the reason and almost passed out.
“Alexis,” I screamed out.
She came down the steps in sky-blue running shorts and a pink tee.
“I’m right here. Why you screaming?” she asked, frowning and cradling her cell phone in her neck.
“You in the house. Get off the damn cell phone.” She shut her phone off and came down the steps.
“Mom, why you always trying to play somebody?”
“Alexis, why do I have a seven-hundred-dollar cell phone bill, and how the hell did you use six thousand text messages in one month?” I said, placing the bill in her hands. She looked at the bill, and said, “I don’t know what they talking about. I didn’t text six thousand times. It must have been a mistake.”
“This is not a mistake! It is your number right here. Listen, if you can’t be responsible with your phone, then you don’t need one. I can’t afford these high-ass bills. You going to have to get a job,” I yelled.
“I’ve been looking all summer. I filled out applications everywhere.”
“Alexis, this is your last warning. By the time school is back, you better have a job.”
“All right, Mom. I heard you,” she said as she walked back up the steps.
While Jamil was finishing up the dishes, I went to pick up Kierra from day care. I usually left Kierra at summer camp until two minutes before the summer camp ended. Kierra was a piece of work. She was nothing like Alexis or Jamil. She required so much more attention and time. Or maybe I didn’t remember them because I was so young. At almost five years old, this little girl just asked too many questions. She was really smart and had been reading since she was three and had an unbelievable memory. I’d be at the store, asking myself what was I supposed to get, and she would say, “You need to buy eggs to make a cake for Miss Alberta’s birthday tomorrow.”
Kierra was already waiting by the door when I walked in. I signed her out, and the first thing she asked was, “Mommy, where my daddy at?”
“He still at his new house,” I said.
“Why he got a new house, Mommy?” she asked, looking up at me with her father’s big eyes and fat cheeks. Her complexion was a blend of my mocha skin and her father’s honey complexion. Kierra’s hair was in a cluster of long braids decorated with barrettes at the tips.
“He needed to have his own space,” I said, grabbing her book bag and opening the car door for her.
“Why he need his own space, Mommy?” she asked as I fastened her in her booster chair.
“He just do, Kierra. I’m going to call him for you.”
I dialed his number and he picked up on the first ring. I passed her the telephone
“Daddy,” she screamed into the telephone.
I heard him say, “Hey, li’l mama. Daddy coming to see you tomorrow. Okay?”
She passed the phone to me.
“Yeah?” I answered.
“Is it okay if I come over tomorrow to see the kids?”
“I don’t care.”
“Okay, I’ll be there around six. How you doing? You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Here you go, Kierra,” I said as I gave the phone back to her. I wasn’t trying to have a conversation with him.
Chapter 2
Adrienne Sheppard
The treadmill was boring me. I read Essence from front to back, and I still had fifteen more minutes. I opened the cap on my Aquafina bottle and took a mouthful. I was trying to make the best of my gym membership that I was paying thirty dollars a month for. But it was not easy to stay focused. I had plateaued at 148 pounds, which was a tight size eight for me. All I wanted was to be back at my size six, maybe even a four. I wanted to get another fifteen pounds off so bad I hired a personal trainer. His name was Kyle. He had me squatting and flexing for the last hour and a half. He was treating me like I was at boot camp, and he just didn’t know I was about to go AWOL. Sweat was pouring down my face and I was so tired, but I saw him approaching, so I sped up a little to actually make him think I was enjoying this body torture.
“You’re doing good. How you feeling?” he asked, smiling as his muscles popped out of his red shirt and tight black pants.
I never had a man just smile and have my body just want him. But I didn’t care what he said, this session was over. I took my curly black hair off my neck and pulled it up in a bun.
“I feel good,” I lied.
“Okay, I’ll see you this time tomorrow,” he said as he stopped the treadmill.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said as I jumped off the treadmill.
“You guess? Hold up. You trying to get in shape, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
From the gym I went past my mother Debbie’s house. I’d always lived with my mother and grandparents. My mother was fifty-two with dark roots and blond ends. She had a streak of red blush going up the side of her eggshell-colored cheek and was wearing cherry-colored lipstick. We didn’t even look like we were mother and daughter. I look like my dad’s side, and he is black. My complexion was cocoa-butter yellow, and I had long, black, thick hair. My mother’s hair was brown, short, and thin. I had family on my dad’s side, but they never really accepted me. My dad broke up with my mom when she was pregnant with me.
Growing up, I was really lost. I didn’t really belong. People would put glue in my hair and hide my book bag. And I got it from black and white kids. I’d always had issues with my complexion and being biracial. I had a big nose and crazy untamed hair growing up. I was just an oddball. So I never made a lot of friends or brought anyone home. Kids at my school would say mean things to me like my mother was an albino elephant and ask me if I was adopted. I got into so many fights from first grade through high school. Somebody always wanted to fight me. I used to be so embarrassed when my mother came up to my school and tried to defend me, because she was white and very fat. Her legs used to be the size of boulders and squished together when she walked. She weighed about four hundred pounds and even needed a cane to get around. I loved my mom and I knew she was a good mom, but other kids didn’t see that. My mom and grandparents gave me a lot of love and attention, but that didn’t make me feel any better. So when my mom sat me down three years ago and said she was getting gastric bypass surgery, I was so excited. I knew it would be a new life for her and for me. I no longer would have to be ashamed of her. She lost two hundred pounds in two years, and got a new life and picked herself up a boyfriend. That’s why I knew I had to stay in the gym; it was in my genes to be fat.
“Hey, Mom,” I said as I came through the door.
She gave me a kiss on the cheek as she opened a can of Ensure for my grandfather. He was sitting in his recliner in the living room. My grandparents’ house was filled with decades-old furniture. Mostly wood and crazy burnt orange and green colors. She placed the drink in front of him and he pushed it to the side.
“I don’t like the way it taste. I want some coffee.”
“Pop, the doctor said you can’t have coffee. Drink this thing; you need to gain some weight.”
He looked over at me and took a sip. Henry Sheppard was a stubborn-ass man. Even at eighty-two he didn’t listen to anyone. He was so skinny that his small wife-beater was hanging off his tiny body. My grandmother passed away eight years ago. My mom took care of my grandfather because he was in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s.
I sat and talked to my mother for a little while and left. I wanted to get home and take a nap and shower before it was time for me to go to work. I was a nurse at the University of Alton Hospital. I’d been
there for two years. It wasn’t exactly what I’d expected. Sometimes I got tired of being around sick people; other times I felt more like a maid than a medical professional. I didn’t even really want to become a nurse, but I had to declare a major so I chose that. People were making good money, and I wanted to be assured of a job when I graduated. I worked my way through college and just stayed busy. I went to a community college; then I went to a nursing program at Jefferson University. I was working the four-to-twelve shift tonight. My schedule varied, and I did a lot of doubles. Sometimes it seemed like all I did was work. And when I wasn’t working, I was sleeping to get rested to go back to work. Sometimes I looked in the mirror and saw dark rings appearing under my eyes from lack of sleep. I thought it was a shame for a twenty-five-year-old to look like that.
I entered my apartment building and retrieved my mail out of the box. I had nothing but credit card offers and bills. I climbed up the steps to my third-floor apartment and entered. I had a tan carpet and white walls. I didn’t have anything on the walls, just a few pictures of me and my mom and my grandmom before she died. I said I would get the place together, but the only person looking at it was me. It was drab, and I had enough money to fix it up, but I just didn’t have the time.
Once I got to work my routine was the same. I went to the station and looked at the board to see how many patients I had. The head nurse, Liz, a vibrant Jamaican woman, usually made sure I had the least amount of patients. She looked out for me because she said I reminded her of her niece back home. “Hey, gal, what you got going on today?” she asked.
“Nothing, just a little tired.”
“No time to be tired, you’re a young person, you got plenty of time before you grow old, ya know,” she said as she handed me my charts and I yawned. Then I went into each patient’s room, introduced myself, and let them know I was going to be their nurse, and if they needed anything to call me.
“Hey, girlie,” I said as I saw Stacey. She was a tall brunette with green eyes. She was very nice and the only nurse I could relate to when I started. We were about the same age and on the same page with life. We swapped dating horror stories. Now she was engaged, and I didn’t see her that often.
“You here again? You work so much,” she said as she looked up from entering notes in the computer.
“Us single gals have to work if we want to pay our bills,” I said as I pulled out a chart.
“Whatever. You work because you don’t want a life. Anyway, I have to tell you, do not walk out of the room while 812 takes her medication. Because every shift she’s been saying the pill dropped on the floor and she couldn’t find it.”
“Another junkie,” I said as I peeped into the room. The woman looked like an addict. She was real thin with dark red spots embedded into her brown skin. It was so sad that she was in the hospital for heart and respiratory problems, and still trying to find a way to get high.
“Yeah.”
“Why do they keep admitting them? Let them go get high,” I said as I began to get my medicine list together. It was going to be a long night.
The next day, I went in for my personal training session with Kyle. He was in this fat girl’s face. He was helping her bring her arms down with weights. I don’t know why I was jealous, but I was. He was showing her the same attention that should have been reserved for me. I walked in his direction and he smiled with his one-dimpled-cheek smile. His curly hair was chaotic, being held together with some kind of mousse.
He saw me and his face turned from smiling to a militant glare, and he said, “Get started on the treadmill twenty minutes. At four point oh.”
I just nodded and jumped on the treadmill. I didn’t bring anything to read, so my twenty minutes was going to feel like an hour. I tried to concentrate, but I was distracted by weights clinking together and men doing arm curls behind me, and I was pissed that I could see Kyle through the mirror. He had moved from the fat girl to an anorexic-thin blonde. She was all in his face, laughing flirtatiously. She needed to go drink a protein shake and get out of his face. I walked slowly until he came over and stopped the machine.
“You ready?” he asked as he let his hand caress my waist.
“Yes.”
He instructed me to get off the treadmill so he could take my measurements. He placed the white measuring tape around my waist and told me I lost two inches.
“Two inches. That’s it?”
“That’s good. What are you trying to do?”
“I really just want to tone more. My stomach is flat, I just want some definition.”
“Definition,” he said as he laughed and asked me what part of the city I lived in.
I told him, and he said he was going to put me on a restricted diet and get me cut in no time. I gave him my address and was ready to begin my real personal training.
Kyle knocked on my door at seven in the morning. I looked at him stretching with a black shirt and knee-length shorts. He was jogging in place, asking me if I was ready. Hell no, but I was obligated because he was at my door. I threw on my sweats and he made me run like thirty blocks nonstop. By the time I was done I was out-of-breath tired and ready to pass out. But I pretended like nothing was wrong.
“What do you have to do now?” he asked as we stood in front of my door.
“Take a shower and get ready for work.”
“I want to check out your refrigerator.”
He went into my refrigerator and cabinets and threw everything away that he thought had too much sugar in it. He emptied my bag of Cool Ranch Doritos in the trash. Then he threw my honey wheat bread and Thai noodles in the trash. He even said I couldn’t have orange juice. I told him I had to get ready for work, but he insisted that we go food shopping. We then drove to Whole Foods, an organic market. He had me buy wheat pasta, egg whites, and soy milk—all this food that I had never heard of and that didn’t look appetizing. We got to the register and my bill was over a hundred dollars and I had only three bags. Eating right was too expensive. I pulled out my wallet, and a very attractive woman of about fifty approached us. I thought she was trying to reach for a magazine or something, so I moved out of her way. She cut her eyes at me, and said, “I need to speak with you, Kyle.”
Kyle told me he would be right back and went and had a lengthy conversation with the woman.
He met me in the parking lot and said that was one of his other clients. She was trying to set up some more dates. We arrived back at my apartment and he helped me bring my groceries in. I thanked him. He asked me for a pen and paper and wrote down a diet program for me while I put my groceries away. When I was done I went and sat down to look over his list of “can’t eats.”
“You are crazy,” I exclaimed as I looked at the list. As soon as I attempted to stand back up, my muscles in my legs locked and tightened. I began to scream.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” I said as I grabbed my calf.
He instructed me to sit and pulled my leg out slowly and massaged it. “You need to do more stretches,” he said as he pressed his fingertips into my sore muscles and rubbed the pain away.
Within minutes of my trainer touching my leg, our clothes came off and he was on top of me. Kyle was flexing his long muscle up against the flesh between my legs, giving me unbelievable pleasure. I was almost speechless, my mouth was stuck open as I gasped for air. After it was over, my body hurt more than when we began. Kyle sensed my discomfort and began rolling my shoulders back. My body was entranced by his touch. He interrupted that by turning my half-naked body over and assuring me that he would still be my trainer and nothing had changed.
Chapter 3
Dionne Matthews
The dean called my name: “Dionne Matthews.” I walked across the stage in my blue and gold with a big smile. I was so excited and relieved. It was finally over. The last few years had built me up for this. My clerkships, internships, and studying nonstop were finally over. At twenty-six I was now Dionne Matthews, Esquire. I
n the sea of people sitting in white metal chairs on the green lawn, I saw my parents, Pamela and William, standing up. They were so proud of me. Next to them was my older sister, Camille, and my boyfriend, Terrance. I posed and smiled, shook the dean’s hand, and walked offstage.
After the ceremony was over, I took a few pictures with my classmates and hugged, said good-bye, and collected e-mail addresses. I saw my girl Claudia. She was my study partner since my second year.
She yelled, “We did it! Let me get a picture.” We stood cheek-to-cheek and made silly faces as her father tried to operate her digital camera and took our picture.
“Proud of you, girl. I’m going to call you,” Claudia shouted.
“E-mail me when you get settled. Enjoy your summer,” I said as I walked through the crowd of graduates and parents and tried to locate my family.
My dad tapped my shoulder; I turned around and he gave me a kiss and pushed a bouquet of red roses into my hands.
“Thanks, Daddy,” I said as I smiled and gave his robust body a hug. My dad was losing all his hair, but was still a very handsome man.
My mother and sister came up and congratulated me too. As soon as they let me go, Terrance whispered how he was proud of me and grabbed my hand. We walked toward the cars; we were all meeting at a steak house to celebrate my graduation. Once in the car, Terrance gave me a kiss and hug, and told me how proud he was again. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be graduating. He put up with a lot of studying and crying and bitching. I thanked him for standing by my side. I was truly blessed with a good man. Terrance was a business consultant for Artec, a business consulting firm in Wilmington, Delaware. His job required two weeks out of the month traveling. My Terrance was handsome, not that tall but handsome. He was five eight with cardboard-brown clear skin and jet-black low-cut hair. His mustache and beard were trimmed down, and his round glasses rested perfectly on his face.
A Rich Man's Baby Page 2
