by Mary Monroe
“But . . . but I thought you were taking those birth control pills!” I had just finished dinner and couldn’t wait to play one of my new video games. But now my stomach was churning, and the last thing I wanted to do was play a video game.
“I was!” she hollered. “But them things don’t always work.”
“Well, don’t worry,” I whispered. “We can skip school one day, and I’ll go with you to that clinic where they, uh, you know. . . .”
“The abortion clinic? You think I’m going to kill my baby?”
My mouth dropped open. With quivering lips, I hollered, “Do you mean to tell me you want to have it?”
“Why not?”
“What about school? What about your future? What about . . . my future?” I had big plans for my future, and they didn’t include a baby, especially one with a skank like Caroline for a mother. I had already disappointed my family one time too many with my antics. But me skipping school and pulling a few pranks was nothing compared to me getting a girl pregnant! The last thing I wanted to be at my age was a daddy!
“Fuck the future. You can do whatever else you want to do with yours, but you are going to take care of this baby.”
“Oh, shit,” I mouthed. “Uh, let me think about this.”
“What do you need to think about?”
“Everything! How do I even know it’s mine? I wasn’t the only boy. . . .”
“I ain’t been with nobody since I got with you.”
“Uh . . . uh . . . let me have some time to think about this. I . . . I hear my mother calling me, so I have to hang up. We’ll talk at school tomorrow.” I couldn’t get off that telephone fast enough.
I didn’t sleep at all that night. I was tempted to play sick so I could stay home from school the next morning, but I knew that I had to face the situation, and the sooner I did, the better. I got to school half an hour ahead of time that day. I cringed every time I saw a girl who looked like Caroline. By third period math class, the only class she and I had together, I still had not seen her.
Caroline was always in some kind of trouble for one reason or another. She had spent time in juvie for shoplifting and fighting, and she skipped a lot of school, anyway. She didn’t show up at all that day, and I didn’t think much about it. When I got home that evening, she was sitting on our living room couch with her mother. This woman had a face like a mule and the demeanor of a pit bull.
“Seth, I know what you done to my baby! You . . . you . . . you sex maniac, you! You horny bastard!” she roared. I couldn’t believe these words had come from an ex-stripper.
“Huh?” was all I could say.
My mother was pacing the floor, crying, waving her arms, and massaging her chest. I prayed she was not about to have another heart attack. My father stood in the middle of the floor, with his arms folded. He shot me a hot look.
“What the . . . What’s going on?” I asked as I dropped my backpack to the floor.
“Get over here, boy!” Father yelled.
I shuddered and remained standing in the same spot. I looked from Caroline to her mother and then to my mother. The moment my eyes met Mother’s, she flopped onto the love seat facing the couch, crying even harder. I had no idea what was going on, and before I could ask, Caroline looked at me and pointed.
“You raped me, and now I’m pregnant!” she yelled. “You better marry me, or I’m going to the cops!”
I felt like I’d just fallen into a bottomless pit. And I wished I had. “I didn’t rape nobody!” I yelled, looking from one face to another. By now Mother was wailing like a dying animal. “Mother, she’s lying!”
“Everybody at school knows how you followed me home all them times and threatened to hurt me if I didn’t have sex with you! You even said if I told on you, you’d beat my butt. Well, I’m tired of you controlling my life!” Caroline leaped up and shook her finger in my direction. “You even been bragging to all your friends about what you been doing to me!”
I looked to Caroline’s mother, hoping to see some sympathy on her face. I had no idea what made me think that. She was just as much of a skank as her daughter. She looked as angry as Caroline. “I ain’t going to let you get away with what you done to my baby!” Mrs. Mitchell screeched. Her voice was so shrill, it made me shudder some more. And even though I was several feet away from her, I could still smell the alcohol on her breath.
“Mother, I didn’t rape this girl! If anything, she raped me!” I insisted.
“Yes you did! My girl don’t lie! If I wasn’t such a lady, I’d beat the dog shit out of you with my bare hands!” Mrs. Mitchell hollered. “You can stand your uppity self on your head and deny what you done all you want. We can let a jury decide if we have to.” I could not believe the smug look on this woman’s face. They had me by the balls, and they knew it.
“Mother, Father, I’m so sorry. But you have to help me out of this mess, please,” I whimpered, still standing in the same spot like a lamppost.
My parents assured Caroline and her vicious mother that the baby would be well taken care of. As a gesture of good faith, and to prevent them from making a bigger fuss, Father whipped out his checkbook and wrote them a check for three thousand dollars. That sent them on their merry way, with big smiles on their conniving faces, but my parents looked like somebody had sucked some of the life out of them.
“Seth, I’m so disappointed in you,” Mother managed to say. She was still massaging her chest with one hand and fanning her face with the other.
“So am I,” I mumbled.
I would never forget that day and how hopeless I’d felt. Just thinking about it now almost made me sick.
Chapter 28
Seth
THE LAST THING I WANTED TO DO BEFORE I EVEN FINISHED HIGH school was get married, but I had offered to marry Caroline before and again after she gave birth to Darnell. When I told Mother I was willing to marry Caroline, she almost had a heart attack. She had had one several years ago, when I got hit by a car. That was how sensitive she was.
“You want to marry that low-life, ignorant jezebel? Bah! You will do no such thing until we get that DNA test done,” she informed me. There was a grimace on her face as she massaged her heaving chest and stomped back and forth in our living room. “I’d rather see you go to jail. My poor heart can’t take this! Are you trying to finish killing me?”
“I’m trying to do the right thing, Mother,” was all I said. And I meant it.
The year was 1985. DNA testing had not been around long, so my test proved only that there was an 85 percent chance that I was the father of Caroline’s baby boy. That and the fact that he looked just like me were good enough for me. That was why I’d offered to marry her again. But by that time, she had no interest in being my wife. However, she still wanted to get as much money from me as she could. Since my parents had made it clear that they were not going to support my son, I got a job working behind the counter at a deli after school and on weekends. That chump change they paid me didn’t go too far.
I loved my son and wanted to be in his life, but Caroline was determined to make that as difficult as possible. Almost every time I went to her place to see him and take her some money, she was either not home or on her way out the door to “go run some errands,” so my visits were brief. I was concerned about what she was spending the money on, because my son usually had on the same cheap outfits every time I visited. The only new things I noticed were things she had purchased for herself, such as new outfits, the latest CDs, and elaborate hair weaves. Raising a son by a ghetto princess was not going to be easy if I didn’t have much say in his upbringing. Caroline was even reluctant to let me take the boy around my family.
“I don’t want my child to grow up thinking he’s better than anybody else, the way your mama and daddy and them brothers of yours do! The only way I’ll let you take him around them is if I go, too,” Caroline told me.
Well, taking Caroline around my family was like pouring gasoline onto a bonfire. Sparks
flew every time I did.
“I love my grandson to death, but I don’t think I can stand to spend another hour around that mama of his,” Mother had said the last time I brought Caroline and Darnell to the house. “She’s raising him to be a thug already, like she is!”
Mother had almost fainted when she’d seen the cornrows on my two-year-old son’s head and his pierced ears that day. Father had shaken his head as he’d stood in front of the portable bar near the fireplace, with an exasperated look on his face. Caroline had had a smirk on her face, which had almost made me sick to my stomach. What she’d revealed later that afternoon had made me sick to my stomach.
“I think y’all should know that I’ve met somebody and we’re moving to L.A.,” she’d announced fifteen minutes after she had entered my parents’ house.
“That’s hundreds of miles away,” Mother had said, almost choking on her words.
“So what? Y’all got three cars and deep pockets. And don’t y’all fanny around in L.A. a few times a year, anyway, shopping and eating at them same fancy Beverly Hills restaurants that the stars go to? Well, now y’all will have something else to do when you come to L.A.” Caroline had not mentioned relocating to me before. “Seth, you just better make sure them support checks ain’t late, or I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget,” she’d hissed.
Caroline and Darnell left Berkeley two weeks later. As soon as she got settled in L.A., she started calling me, demanding more money. She was relentless. Some days she would call me in the morning and whine about an unexpected emergency that she needed money for, and I’d wire her the money immediately. Then she’d call me a few hours later on the same day to tell me she needed more money for another “unexpected emergency.” To keep up with Caroline’s demands, I had to drop out of school in the eleventh grade and take a full-time job doing backbreaking work on the loading dock of a cannery. Even though my parents had money and could have helped me support my son, they still refused to do so. This was their way of forcing me to “man up” and take care of my responsibilities. However, they usually purchased new clothes and other items for Darnell from the same high-end stores where they’d bought clothes for me and my brothers. When one of Caroline’s loose-lipped relatives told me that she was selling those expensive items that my parents sent, they stopped being so generous.
My money was so tight, I couldn’t even afford my own place or a car on my own. My brother Josh gave me a two-year-old Mustang to get around in. He also slipped me a few dollars for spending money every now and then. But I was still miserable. I was too gun-shy to get involved with another girl, so when I needed some female attention, I started picking up hookers. When I lost control of that, I had to start borrowing money to pay what I thought of as my “pussy cat” bill. With that and my other expenses, I had to rob Peter to pay Paul almost every month. I felt like I was trapped on a sinking ship.
I had created a no-win situation.
“Seth, you look so sad,” Sister Mays said, bringing me back into the conversation.
I shook my head to get that dark period in my life and the image of Caroline and her mother out of my mind and resumed eating my dinner. I didn’t want the pastor and the first lady to know how upset I was. “Um, things are really looking up for me, Sister Mays,” I mumbled.
“He’s attending some business classes after work,” Mother threw in, with a tentative look on her face.
“Which he wouldn’t have to do if he had stayed in school in the first place,” Damon reminded. “Nobody in this family has ever dropped out of high school!”
“I had to quit school and go to work so I could take care of Caroline and my son,” I yelled.
“And a fine job you’re doing, baby brother. You did the right thing by that girl, even though she was one of the biggest tramps in town,” Josh said, giving me a wink. “We all make bad choices when we’re young.”
“Too bad you were the one who got her pregnant, Seth,” Damon’s wife, Helene, said with a sniff. “You could have done a lot better, but I’m sure she couldn’t. The fact that she’s had four more babies by four different men since she trapped you proves that.”
“If that girl is so loose, how does she even know who gets her pregnant?” Sister Mays asked, looking puzzled.
“That’s a good question, dear. I’m glad you brought it up,” Reverend Mays said, looking at his wife like she had just solved the mysteries of the world. “This girl could be a trickster, for all we know.”
“I don’t know about the rest of Caroline’s babies, but Seth is the father of the first one. We had a DNA test done,” Father said with a hint of disgust in his voice.
“Hmmm. Well, tell me this, Seth. Does Rachel know you’re already a daddy?” Reverend Mays asked with a frown.
“It was one of the first things I told her.” I was proud of myself for not keeping that information from Rachel. I knew that if we stayed together, she’d eventually hear about Darnell. I’d wanted her to hear it from me, so I’d told her on our second date. “She doesn’t have a problem with it.”
Yes, I had told Rachel about Caroline and my son. I wanted this relationship to work, and the way things had been going, I had a feeling it would.
Rachel was going to change my life in ways I never imagined.
Chapter 29
Rachel
I HAD BEEN SO BUSY LATELY, I HAD NOT HAD A CHANCE TO TALK TO Uncle Albert. We had been playing phone tag since the day I met Seth.
“Baby girl, call me back so you can tell me about Seth,” one of Uncle Albert’s messages said. “You know I worry about you, so I just want to make sure everything is going all right.”
I felt bad about not being around when Uncle Albert called. He was one of the last people I wanted to worry. He was the only relative I had in California. He was just four years older than me, and we had always been very close. The rest of our family had pretty much written him off because he was gay, and as far as they were concerned, that condition was totally unacceptable.
When I was growing up, I had always suspected that Uncle Albert was gay. Even though he didn’t look it or act it, a lot of other people suspected the same thing, because he had no interest in dating females or in other things associated with boys, like sports, fishing, and fooling around with cars and other masculine things. Uncle Albert liked to do hair, shop, and cook. He was six feet tall by the time he was sixteen, and with his wavy black hair, smooth caramel-colored skin, and baby face, the girls were attracted to him like flies to honey. But when he partied, it was always with me and other boys. People whispered about him and prayed that he would “grow out of it” before it was too late.
When Uncle Albert escorted a male classmate to their senior prom, all hell broke loose. People were outraged. Other kids teased and picked on him, and Mama reminded him that “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” but it did no good.
Albert began to parade his male lovers all over town and even brought a few to the house. Mama was furious.
“What you do out there in the streets is your business. But you ain’t going to spread all that unnatural mess in my house!” she told him.
Shortly after that confrontation, Uncle Albert moved in with his new boyfriend, a plain-looking white man in his late thirties named Raymond Starks. Uncle Albert called his lover Sugar Dick. That made Mama cringe, and me, too, for that matter. I refused to call a grown man by such a ridiculous nickname. Even though Raymond was approaching middle age and was homely, his trust fund and a bad heart made up for that. Uncle Albert was an opportunist, so he took advantage of his sugar dick. Raymond treated my uncle like a prince and showered him with gifts. Uncle Albert was eighteen at the time and was working as a part-time nanny for a wealthy family that Raymond had introduced him to.
“A nanny! That’s a job only a woman should be doing,” Mama said.
A few months after they moved in together, Raymond took Uncle Albert on a lavish two-week vacation to San Francisco. Not only did they fly firs
t class, but they also stayed in a suite at the elegant Mark Hopkins Hotel.
When they returned to Alabama, Uncle Albert couldn’t stop talking about how much he had enjoyed that trip and about how open and free-spirited the gay people were in California.
“Girl, I never saw so many sweet-looking boys in my life. You can do just about anything you want out there, and nobody will bother you. I even saw people making love on the ground, in plain view, during the Gay Pride Parade,” Uncle Albert told me. He was so giddy, it was contagious.
“That sounds like the kind of place I’d like to live in someday,” I said.
“Rachel, California is the kind of place I’m going to live in someday.”
Not long after that conversation, Uncle Albert packed up and boarded a plane to California. He fled while Raymond was visiting relatives in Birmingham. As much as I loved my uncle and wanted him to be happy, I thought it was a shitty thing for him to do to the man who had taken him in and had treated him so well. As if his leaving wasn’t bad enough, he paid for some new clothes and his one-way, first-class plane ticket using his ex’s credit card.
Raymond told anybody who would listen that he was thinking about suing my uncle to make him pay back some of the money he had spent on him. He even came to the house and demanded Uncle Albert’s new address. He ranted and raved so much, Janet and Ernest scurried out of the living room like scared rabbits. I couldn’t decide what upset Mama more: the disgruntled, bald-headed, fat white man in her house, cussing up a storm, or the way his outburst upset Ernest and Janet.
“I don’t have Albert’s new address to give to you, Raymond. And to tell you the truth, I don’t want to get involved in y’all’s mess,” Mama said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I need to finish cooking dinner so I can feed my kids.” Mama left the room immediately.
Raymond turned to me. I stood in the doorway, trying to look concerned. I was, but not for Raymond. I was not about to tell him how to locate my uncle.
“Rachel, you and Albert were thick as thieves. I know you must know how to get in touch with him. You seem like a sensible girl. Don’t you think he needs to pay for what he did to me?”
