Ring, ring, ring, please leave a message after the beep. “Hey, Daddy, this is Jamie again. Hey, man, please pick up the phone or at least call me back so I know you’re okay. You know I worry ’bout you, old man, so call me back.” I tried to make a joke of it and to not give off how scared I was over the phone.
About 7:30 p.m. I finally got a phone call from my father. “Daddy, where have you been? Everyone has been calling you all day.”
“Hey, baby,” my father said in a very weak voice. “Sorry, I was very tired. My head is killing me, and I ended up sleeping all day.”
“Wait, if you slept all day, then you didn’t even go to work today?”
“No, baby, I’ve been in the house all day,” my father said as his voice got weaker and weaker.
In the house all day, I thought to myself. I had never heard or seen my father take off work to just lie in the house before. He went to work in the worst snowstorms, floods, holidays, he even went out to work after 9-11. This didn’t sound right.
“Daddy, did you go see a doctor?”
“No, but if I still feel like this in the morning, I’ll go then.”
“Daddy, you need to take better care of yourself. If not for me, then for your future grandkids, and lord knows, I ain’t having any kids, so you have to be around for Jenifer and Jayla to have kids.”
There I was, trying to make light out of every dark situation, I really hated that about myself. “Daddy, please promise me that you’ll go to the doctor first thing in the morning to get yourself checked out.”
“I guess that promise was a little too late, because that night my cousin came home from work and went down to her basement to check on my dad and found him passed out on the floor. We think he fell down the stairs. That was the scariest day of my life. I felt so helpless not being able to be at my dad’s side. My dad spent months in the hospital, and the doctor really couldn’t help him. We all pretty much were watching my dad die by the minute. He lost so much weight and couldn’t even feed himself; they even had his hands and legs in restraints because he would fight the nurses because he wanted to leave the hospital. It was so hard to watch.”
Jonathan and I spoke for hours on our drive. I told him all about my father, his condition and about my life inside and out. For the first time in almost seven years, I opened up to someone. I had so much emotion and anger built up from both my father, my mother, my past failed relationships, and just spoke the truth about the real Jamie Reynolds.
My father and mother split up about ten years ago, I think. My mother had a lot of pride as they pretended to stay together for “the kids,” off and on, which was the worst, because they really weren’t fooling anyone, and my siblings and I always had questions as my parents split up and came back together. My mother first split from my dad when I was ten years old and my oldest sister was twelve. I didn’t understand why, but my mother packed up my sister and me, and we moved out of our home on Bergen Street and moved into an apartment on East Eighteenth Street in Flatbush. We even went to a new school.
Actually, going to another school wasn’t anything new to us. You would think I was a military kid; I went to a new school seems like every year since the third grade. Never understood why we went to so many new schools, but you get used to it after a while. This was the story of my life. Never knowing what to expect or why, but I just dealt with it. Now that I’m an adult, I wished when I was younger I had tried harder to understand things instead of accepting them.
After my mother got back with my father after being separated for like a year, we again moved back in with my dad and went to another new school. Not to mention my mother was pregnant with my younger sister, Jayla. She was born when I was twelve years old. Less than a year after she was born, my mother and my two siblings moved out of New York to Florida without my father. Once again, not understanding what was going on because I was a kid, I just went with the flow. I wasn’t happy moving out of New York, but my parents promised us a better life.
I did find it kind of weird that my father didn’t live with us, but my parents often spoke on the phone and he visited often. We continued to do family vacations, celebrations, and were together as one big happy family on almost every holiday. It wasn’t like they were divorced like some of my other friends’ parents, so I just figured Florida was a safer place to live than New York, and since my grandmother lived in Florida, it was cool. Even though my grandmother hated me. Hate was a strong word, but that was the only word I could think of when it came to my grandmother. Even my mother knew she treated me differently than the rest and never knew why, so I never cared to understand after a while.
I often heard people say they stayed together for the kids, and I was proof it does more harm than good. I watched my parents argue and fight and slowly grow apart, yet try to stay together for the kids without just telling us they were unhappy and not staying married anymore.
Finally when I was about fifteen years old, my father came down for Christmas. He left to go back to New York abruptly. I walked into my mother’s room after my father left and she was crying.
I asked, “Ma, is everything okay?” For the first time, my mother opened up to me and told me everything. I soon became an adult at the age of fifteen as I listened to my mother expose years of my family’s secrets, and everything started to make sense, why we moved from school to school, why my dad was not around, and even why we moved into the East Eighteenth Street apartment.
“Do you know why your father left all of a sudden?” she added with tears in her eyes.
“No, Ma, why did he leave?” I asked this question not really ready to hear the answer, but I knew my mother needed to talk to someone.
“Your so-called sister has died in a fire,” my mother said.
“What? I don’t understand.”
My mother poured her heart out to me. She told me about my father’s secret life. How he had been cheating on her since they got married. How she could never trust my father around any of her friends. I thought I’d heard it all until my mother told me about my father’s affair with Samantha. Samantha lived upstairs and was our family’s babysitter ever since I was, like, four years old when my mother decided to go back to work. It happened right under my own roof when my sister and I would go outside to play.
After hearing my mother go on and on about the different affairs my father had throughout my childhood, with babysitters, neighbors, women we called auntie to be polite. I thought I would be sick to my stomach. I wanted to cry, because I loved and looked up to my father. In my eyes he was a perfect dad. But I had to hold it together; I was always known as the strong one in the family. I was the child with no emotion growing up and I allowed myself to believe that.
Then my mother told me about Kisha. Kisha was one of my so-called sisters, as my mother put it. Kisha was five years old when she died during a house fire. I guess this was why we moved into East Eighteenth Street when I was ten. My mother must have just found out about my so-called sister and she moved us out of Bergen Street to East Eighteenth Street.
This abuse towards my mother didn’t end with Kisha dying. My father continued to live a life of promiscuity for years. I guess when Kisha died, a piece of my dad and mom’s civil relationship went with it. I don’t really know the relationship my mother had with Kisha and her mother, but after that day I ended up seeing my dad less and less. My sister and I traveled to New York instead of my dad coming down to Florida to hang out with us. Knowing what I knew about my dad at first changed me, and my relationship with my dad was poor. It was hard to look at him and respect him. I never told him what my mother told me about his secret life.
“How do you react to something like that? Over the years, I learned to accept my father’s lifestyle and learned to move on.”
“Wow, that’s crazy JR,” was all Jonathan said and at this point I knew I said too much already.
“I just need to be with my family, that’s all,” I said really quickly then changed the subjec
t, as I started to feel uncomfortable about telling Jonathan so much. I wasn’t really an emotional person, and I was often seen as the strong one who had tough skin and gave advice to everyone else, not being the one who needed it. But I guess at that moment, I needed to tell someone something, or I might have erupted with my own hidden emotions.
“Enough about me, what’s your story?”
“My story?” Jonathan repeated. “There’s nothing to my story. You’ve known me for a minute now and pretty much seen and heard most of my story.”
He was right, not only did I work with Jonathan, but I also made it my business to know his business and the rest of my teams’ business. Could you blame me? I was a black female working in a white man’s production world. Most of my clients were white and I typically hired an all-black staff. I needed to know what kind of drama could come out of my crew before I hired. It was hard enough being a female in this business. Respect was not given, it was earned. I put too much of myself into this career, so leaving was kind of a big deal, because unlike most chicks in this business, I didn’t sleep my way up to the top, I actually worked. But all I did was work, making money was all I did and my social life suffered because of it. I not only did freelance work on the side, but I also worked the overnight shift at WSBTV Channel 2 News as an associated editor and hated every minute of it. Too many negative news stories, and it slowly killed me to go to work three times a week only to feel like crap after my three a.m. to noon shift. I was not sad at all to put in my two weeks’ notice in at Channel 2, but I felt better things were going to come to me in New York.
Home Sweet Home…
“Hey, Jonathan, thanks again for helping me drive to New York,” I said to him as I opened the front door of my mother’s house in Brooklyn.
“Anytime, my dear, anytime.”
“Hey, Prince.” I bent over to play with my little sister’s crazy dog. I hated that name Prince, but she had been calling that dog Prince ever since she got it, despite what anyone else called him.
“Jamie.” My little sister ran up to me and gave me a hug. “Ma said you wasn’t coming until Thursday.”
“I know, but we decided to leave early. What’s good?”
“Nothing,” she said, turning and smiling at Jonathan.
“Jayla, this is Jonathan. Jonathan, this is my little sister Jayla.” She was only thirteen and her ass and breasts were bigger than mine. My mother even told me she was wearing a C cup now. Which made me a little depressed, as I was only a B cup myself. I figured I should lose the little part because she wasn’t little anymore.
Jayla just kept on staring at Jonathan, so I quickly showed Jonathan the way to the bathroom and gave him a towel so he could freshen up. After driving for thirteen and a half hours, I figured he could use a nice hot shower.
“Stop looking at him like that,” I turned and snapped at Jayla.
“What are you talking ’bout? I wasn’t staring at anyone.”
I gave her this look: like I was once thirteen and I know.
“What?” she said. “It’s not like he’s your boyfriend or anything.”
“Sorry,” was all she could say after seeing my eyes get big from her smart-ass comment. I didn’t know if they got big from the embarrassment or the fact that my little sister just got smart with me. How did she know Jonathan and I weren’t dating; we could be dating. Was the thought of me having a boyfriend so farfetched? I guess not having a boyfriend in almost three years would cause even a five-year-old to make the same comment. Oh goodness, I hoped I didn’t end up like those crazy workaholic ladies that have a successful career with no man to share her success with. That would suck.
“Jayla, what time does your mother get home?” I quickly changed the subject. Ever since my older sister and I were young we spoke about our parents in the third person like we had two different sets of parents. Bad habits are hard to break, and it was too late anyway, we had already passed it on to my little sister.
“She gets home around six.”
“Did you eat?” I asked right as Jonathan came out of the bathroom, fully dressed. He was looking kind of good, but my sister was wrong, he had a girlfriend back in Georgia. Been there, done that; I would not mess around with another woman’s man again. Karma is a bitch.
“No, but I am kind of hungry,” Jonathan answered, poking my sister to agree with him.
“I wasn’t even talking to you and you call me greedy.”
My sister just started to giggle. “I just finished my homework and was about to make something to eat,” she said while walking into the kitchen.
“Okay, get dressed, and I’ll take you guys out to eat, my treat.”
She ran into the bedroom to get dressed. I turned to Jonathan and informed him that his Sidekick went off a couple of times while he was in the shower.
I picked up the Sidekick and began to give it to him, but I snatched it back and said, “I started to reply for you, but I didn’t want your tricks to get mad and cut you off if I replied.”
I said this because most of his and his longtime girlfriend’s drama stems from the fact he can’t keep his eyes, hands and penis to himself. He stepped out on his girl too many times, yet she gets mad and he promises never to do it again and then they’re back together. She was better than me; again, been there, done that. Now I had to shake my head at myself for dealing with my past life.
“Ha, ha, very funny.” He snatched the phone from my hands.
“There is only one trick… I-I mean, one woman for me, you know that.”
My feelings were actions speak louder than words, but how could I forget, remembering every chance he got, he spoke about Tawana on our thirteen-and-a-half-hour drive. It was kind of hard not to speak about her when she would call him like every thirty minutes on the drive up to New York. She even used to call when he was working. I would often get mad because she would call or text him like twenty times. I even spoke to the other managers, and they said she never called when he was working with them. At first I thought maybe she was jealous because I was one of the few women event managers in Atlanta and she didn’t like the fact that I was spending too much time with her man on a daily basis. But work was work, and I tried not to mix business with pleasure… been there, done that, not a good combination.
“Toni has nothing to do. He has been texting me since yesterday.”
“Does he work? He’s always texting you,” I said, pretending to try to read his Sidekick.
“He is at work, but he’s a little distracted,” Jonathan said with a crazy look on his face.
“Well, tell him I said hi.”
My sister finally came out of her room, wearing a tight-ass jean skirt and a T-shirt that was barely long enough to cover her ass. I didn’t even say anything.
“Alright, now everyone is looking cute and I am not going to go out looking like this.” I was still wearing my sweats, black T-shirt and flip-flops. “Give me about twenty minutes and I’ll get dressed. Jayla, call your mother while I get dressed and ask her where there is a good restaurant we can go get something.”
“Hey, before you go get dressed.” Jonathan walked over to me.
“What’s up?”
“I don’t know what you did to Toni, but he’s been asking me a lot of questions about you.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, man… he’s been texting me since he met you, asking about you. At first he was mad at me for not hooking you guys up.”
I just stood there, I was so shocked.
“Anyway.” Jonathan stopped himself from telling me what he and Toni had been talking ’bout. “He just wants to know if he can get your number and call you sometime.”
“Are you serious?” I said as I started laughing.
“Hey, he is serious. I don’t know what you did to him yesterday when I was getting dressed, but—”
I interrupted him, “I didn’t do anything. I was looking in the refrigerator and complaining to myself that you guys had no food,
and he offered to make me breakfast. That was it.” I really don’t know why I was so defensive about the day I met Toni, but I was.
“I can’t believe he actually made you breakfast. He normally don’t give a damn ’bout anyone, especially a chick. No offense, JR.”
“No, you good.”
“Anyway, I guess that is a NO to him calling you, right?”
“Naw,” I said without hesitating, “give it to him. I can use a new friend.” I looked over Jonathan’s shoulder and noticed Jayla looking over at us, laughing.
“Hey, lil girl, stay out of grown folks’ business… I’m getting dressed now,” I said as I ran off to go shower.
Within twenty minutes we were on the road.
“This is my jam… I love Mary J. Blige, you know, she’s my soul sister,” I said to Jonathan as I was bopping my head to the radio.
“You crazy, JR,” Jonathan said as Jayla just laughed. No one in my family called me JR. I was first called JR back in high school when I used to work at Footaction and hated to wear a name tag. I was told I had to wear one regardless of the name. That was how JR came to life, and since I worked at Footaction my junior and senior year in high school and all through college in Atlanta, it kind of just stuck with me.
“Okay, Jayla.” I began talking as I lowered the radio’s volume. “What restaurant your mother say we can check out?”
“Mommy said there’s a bunch of restaurants down Atlantic Avenue.”
“Cool, we can head down there, and whichever restaurant has the shortest waiting period, that’s where we’re going to eat.”
That plan didn’t work out; every restaurant was about a thirty- to forty-five-minute wait. We decided to wait at Olive Gardens. I just loved Italian food, even though Olive Garden wasn’t real Italian food, but it was close enough.
“Here.” Jonathan passed me his Sidekick while we waited for our names to be called. “You text him; he’s asking me too many questions and giving me a headache.”
Lust and Lies (The Jamie Reynolds Chronicles #1) Page 2
