by RM Johnson
It had been another boring hour and a half of nonsense about essay writing that he didn’t understand, but it was over for the day, and that was all that Lewis cared about.
He shouldered his book bag and headed for the door, the last student to leave.
“Good-bye, Professor Jennings,” Lewis said to the bearded, middle-aged teacher sitting behind the desk.
“Oh, Lewis. Can I have a moment with you, please,” Professor Jennings said.
Lewis stopped, looked back. “Uh, yeah.”
“You know that you aren’t doing very well in this class, don’t you.”
“I got a D on the midterm progress report. You said that was passing.”
“It is for the midterm report, but not for the class. If you don’t get at least a C you’ll have to take it all over again. You don’t want that, do you?”
Lewis hated Professor Jennings at that moment. Here he was, twenty-seven years old, being talked to like a child. “No,” Lewis answered. “I don’t want that.”
“Have you been going to the learning assistance center?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have a job, and I can learn this on my own.”
“Your work says different,” Professor Jennings said. “Maybe you should look into letting go of the job, or maybe scaling back on some of the hours.”
Lewis couldn’t help but chuckle.
“Was that suggestion funny, Lewis?”
“I’m a grown man just like you are, need money just like you do, Professor Jennings. I won’t be cutting back on my work hours,” Lewis said, turning and walking toward the door. “But I’ll bring that grade up for you. I promise.”
Outside the door, Lewis stopped and leaned against the wall.
Kids almost ten years younger than he was walked past wearing iPod earphones, swatting one another, running around as if they were on a playground. He didn’t belong here. The only reason he was taking these stupid courses was because Monica had forced him to.
He didn’t want to do it. But Lewis knew it was one of the unspoken requirements for being with her. He figured she was used to being with men with all sorts of degrees. If he wanted to keep her, the least he could do was get his diploma.
But that was then, Lewis thought, walking toward the school’s exit. He had another class, General Science, but he knew he was failing that too, and he didn’t feel like going anyway. Besides, since Monica no longer wanted him, there was no reason to continue to go.
He stopped at the trash can at the corner, just before the door, and zipped down his book bag. Lewis pulled the two textbooks out, dropped them in the can, and walked out.
12
Freddy knelt on his hands and knees, trying to let the anger flow out of him as he scrubbed the grout between the bathroom tiles. The police had finally come four hours after he had called them. The two black officers, one male, the other a short female, stood over the bloodstain in the center of the worn living room carpet.
“At least you got him,” the woman, Officer Jackson, said.
Officer David moved over to the front door, examined the broken glass. “You did a lot of shooting. Your gun registered?”
“Yeah,” Freddy said.
“You sure?”
“We’re not the criminals here. We’re the victims. You going to find who broke in here, or you going to worry about me?”
Officer Jackson stepped in front of her partner. “We’re sorry, Mr. Ford. We’ll talk to some of your neighbors and see what we can do.”
Freddy knew that was a joke.
After the police left, he went to Home Depot to buy supplies to fix the windows and check on prices for security bars and a security door. If his family was to remain safe, it would only be because of him. Afterward, he had gone to work, where he was now. Doing work in the small bathroom, Freddy wore jeans, a light blue collared work shirt with his name stenciled on the breast pocket, and work boots.
Heavy-duty rubber gloves covered his hands as he scrubbed the tiles with a bucket of soapy water.
This was a house Freddy’s uncle Henry had bought cheap in an auction and had agreed to let Freddy rehab in exchange for a portion of the selling price.
This was Freddy’s plan for getting his moms and his girl out of that hellhole they lived in. If the neighborhood was better, Freddy would have asked his uncle if they could have moved into this house. Freddy and his best friend, Lewis, had done just about all the work that was needed, but the area was just as bad as, if not worse than where Freddy lived already. Freddy was grateful to his uncle for accepting the investment idea Freddy had brought to him.
He didn’t have to agree, nor, four years ago, did he have to give Freddy this job.
His uncle Henry did not like him. He thought Freddy wasn’t right in the head. Maybe he wasn’t, Freddy thought, as he scrubbed harder at the tiles, but that was Freddy’s father’s fault—Uncle Henry’s brother. Even at eight years old, how long was Freddy expected to suffer, hearing his mother getting beaten behind that locked bedroom door? How many mornings was he supposed to see her with blackened eyes and busted lips, saying she bumped into a wall or tripped over a chair?
Even then, Freddy knew that was bullshit.
He remembered asking her one night when she tucked him in, “Why you let Daddy beat you like that?”
His mother started crying all of a sudden. Just broke down and couldn’t stop. She threw herself onto Freddy, grabbed him tight. Freddy held her back, but she would not stop. No matter how much he begged her, how much he cried too, she would not stop.
She slept with him there in his twin bed that night, as she often did, while Freddy’s father worked the third shift over at the pipe factory. All that night, Freddy lay awake in bed. The next day, he left school at lunchtime and let himself into the house with his key.
“What we doing here?” Lewis said, stepping in behind Freddy. “Your father gonna kill us.”
“Shhh. He asleep. Just be quiet.”
Freddy tiptoed into his bedroom, grabbed the baseball bat from behind the door, then stood in the kitchen, just outside his father’s door.
“Just stay out here, okay?” Freddy whispered to Lewis.
“What you gonna do?”
“Just stay out here,” Freddy said, carefully opening the door and sneaking into his father’s bedroom.
The man lay sleeping on his back, still in his work pants and boots, his mouth open, snoring loudly. Freddy stood beside the bed, and with both hands, raised the bat high over his head.
He swung the bat down with all the might he had within his little body. When it connected, Freddy heard a loud crack. Later, he admitted to knowing that it was the first blow that killed him.
But Freddy continued swinging till blood covered his face, his shirt. He swung till he was out of breath, could barely stand, could not raise the bat again.
When he walked out of the bedroom, covered with his father’s blood, Lewis screamed.
Freddy stood up from the bathroom floor now and grabbed the bucket. His father’s death was the reason his mother could no longer sleep in that first floor bedroom and had to move upstairs. It was the reason Freddy and his mother had lived in damn near poverty ever since.
It was the reason she felt the need to go to some interview this morning, after being on disability for the past two years. Freddy’s mother would never blame him for their hard times, but sometimes, in the things she’d say or the way she’d look at him, Freddy could sense the resentment she held about his father’s death.
Freddy had been sent to a special school for the remainder of his grammar school years and was visited by social workers until he was fourteen years old. High school was rough for him, but he made it through. Jobs he could never seem to hang on to, but somehow, his mother had convinced her brother-in-law, Uncle Henry, into giving Freddy the job he had now. Since Freddy had been hired, he had come into work fifteen minutes to a half hour early every day. He paid clos
e attention to every word his uncle said to him, trying to learn this trade as best he could. No one knew it, but Freddy even had been taking classes to qualify for his real-estate license. He had taken the test and was waiting for the results to come in the mail.
He vowed this would be the job that would turn him into a responsible man. He had no choice. Kia was pregnant, and his mother was in need. Despite how badly Freddy’s father had beaten his mother, the man had been her husband, and it was wrong for Freddy to have taken him away from her. But Freddy would make everything better.
13
Nate had been preoccupied with all the time and effort it took to track Tori down, but now, sitting in the leather executive chair in his home office, he would be able to handle the task at hand.
“Thank you, Abbey,” Nate said before hanging up on the private investigator he had hired to watch Monica over the last two weeks. She was the same dogged investigator who’d done the work on Tori Thomas.
The information that Abbey had given to Nate so far proved there was nothing going on in his ex-wife’s life that Nate hadn’t already known about.
Monica was living with that clown, Lewis Waters. She had used part of the money she had stolen from Nate to buy Aero, the three-store chain where she used to work. She had also bought a million-dollar home in the South Loop and was throwing away money caring for the baby of the fool she was allowing to live there with her.
The bastard child’s name was Layla, Abbey told him. Nate sifted through the file he had on Monica and pulled out a snapshot. Despite how much he did not want to admit it, the child was cute. She had long black hair and big brown eyes.
Nate assumed Monica was treating the child as though she were her own, considering she could not give birth herself.
It was probably the reason she had not yet grown tired of that worthless man.
Nate thought about the child he and his wife could have had together. Not biologically, but the child Monica wanted so desperately to adopt.
She had found him when they were having trouble, when their marriage seemed beyond salvation.
Monica had presented Nate with the boy’s picture and the information she had gotten about him from the adoption agency.
“His name is Nathaniel, and he looks just like you, Nate. This could be our chance to have the family that you always wanted,” Monica had said.
Nate was trying not to hear her. He wanted a child who was his own. He would not sacrifice that just because it was too late for Monica to have a child herself.
But after the divorce, after Nate realized he had made the biggest mistake of his life, he’d taken time off from work and sat at home for weeks by himself, brooding.
Many times, he would look to the front door, hoping his ex-wife would walk through it. Whenever the phone rang, he prayed it would be Monica on the other end. It never was.
After a while, he realized that in pursuit of what he believed was most important to him—a child—he had lost what was truly the best thing in his life—his wife. One day as Nate mourned the fact that he could not get her back, he found himself frantically rummaging through the drawers and cabinets of his house. He was searching for the packet of literature on the boy Monica had wanted to adopt. Finding it, Nate tore through the papers, searching out the number, punching it into his phone.
Nate was told by a woman at the agency that he could come in that day. He raced over, hoping the boy had not yet been adopted.
Nate didn’t know why he was suddenly obsessed with the idea of having that child, this little Nathaniel, and no one else. Maybe because he felt it was the one thing that could bring him closer to his ex-wife, possibly even bring her back to him. Or maybe Nate was already thinking of how he could get revenge on Monica.
When Nate walked into the agency, a smiling woman wearing a flowered print dress greeted him.
“I don’t know if you’re the same lady, but some time ago my wife came here wanting to adopt a little boy named Nathaniel,” Nate said, hopeful. He pulled the photo out of his briefcase. “This is him.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Wolcott said. “Mrs. Kenny, right? I do remember her. I wondered what happened.”
“We were having some problems,” Nate sadly admitted. “We ended up getting divorced. But if the boy is still available, I would very much like to inquire about adopting him myself.”
“Well, let’s punch Nathaniel’s information into the old computer and see what we come up with,” Mrs. Wolcott said, winking.
Nate’s office door swung open, interrupting his thoughts. Little feet ran across the floor. Nate pushed back from his desk, opened his arms, and said, “Come over here, little fellow.” Nate picked up his son, took him in a hug, and squeezed him tight.
“I missed you, Daddy,” the three-year-old said.
“Well, I missed you too, Nathaniel.”
“He couldn’t wait to get back here so he could see his daddy. Daddy, daddy, daddy,” Mrs. Weatherly said, walking into the room behind the child. “Good to have you back, Mr. Kenny. Was your trip to California productive?”
“Yes, very productive. Thank you, Mrs. Weatherly.”
Mrs. Weatherly, who was thin, fair skinned, and always wore her salt and pepper hair in a bun, walked over to Nate’s desk and grabbed his son’s hand. “Come on, little one. Your father is busy working. You’ll see him when he comes downstairs. It’s peanut butter and jelly time for you.”
“Peanut butter and jelly,” the boy said, clapping. “Yay!”
Nate smiled, watching as Mrs. Weatherly carried his son out of the room and closed the door.
It could have worked for the three of them, him, Nathaniel, and Monica, but she didn’t want to try. She turned Nate down and would not make the effort, would not even give it a chance. She preferred to leave Nate and start a life with another man. There were times when Nate tried to forget about Monica, raise his son, and go on with his life. But he simply could not. Something seemed to tell him that until she paid in some way for what she had put him through, he would never be able to move forward.
Nate reached out across his desk and grabbed the framed picture of the woman in his life now. The brown, dark-haired woman with the big soft eyes smiled back at Nate. This was wrong of him, Nate thought, devoting so much attention to Monica when there was a woman who loved him, truly wanted to be with him.
Daphanie was the third and last woman who Nate had tried to find something with after his divorce. He later realized he had intentionally sabotaged those first two attempts, but Daphanie would not allow any of that.
She fought to make them work, and they had.
Daphanie loved Nathaniel, and Nate’s son was very fond of Daphanie. She was thirty-seven years old. There was still the possibility for children, which she said she definitely wanted to give Nate, but she realized if that were to happen, they would have to move quickly. Recently, they had even allowed themselves to go without protection. Nate always pulled out, but not with the urgency of a man decidedly against getting his woman pregnant. To him it felt that they silently agreed that if she wound up pregnant, then they’d have the baby.
Until now, nothing had happened, and Nate felt it was probably for the best. Because even though he was excited about the prospect of marriage and children with this woman, Nate knew none of that could happen until this business with Monica was settled.
14
After school, when Lewis went to pick his daughter up from day care, he noticed someone at the curb, staring at him from a car. The woman sitting in the big old Ford did not look away. Lewis squinted against the sun to get a better look at her and realized that he recognized her.
The car door opened and the woman stepped out and stood on the street side of the car, still staring at him from over the hood of her automobile. The woman was older, in her later fifties. Her graying brown hair looked like wire, held back with a rubber band. She was thin, almost gaunt, and wore a sweater despite the already warm afternoon weather.
“You
promised us,” the woman called out. “You can’t say we can have her then just take her away.”
Lewis looked over his shoulder, then quickly walked across the lawn, closing the distance between himself and the woman.
“It’s over,” Lewis said, his voice hushed, as if someone were listening in. “Do you hear me? I’m not going to tell you again. I’ve changed my mind.”
“But you promised!”
Again, Lewis looked back toward the day care building, wary of anyone stepping out of the front door. He then started around the car toward the woman. She quickly pulled open the door, tried to sink back into the car, but Lewis caught the handle first.
“I told you, forget about that,” he said, dipping his head into the cabin.
The woman sat, wide eyed, cowering behind the wheel.
“I’ve changed my mind, and it’s over. Don’t come around me no more. You hear me?”
The woman continued staring defiantly, saying nothing.
“You hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now get out of here.”
Lewis stepped back, watched the car drive off, and then walked back to the building to pick up his daughter.
Next, Lewis headed to his best friend Freddy’s house. Since Lewis wasn’t working that day, he wanted to ask how the rehabbing was going, see if there was anyone interested in buying the house.
Lewis hadn’t expected to hear that Freddy’s house had been broken into this morning and that Freddy had to damn near kill somebody.
As Layla sat playing in the next room, Freddy filled Lewis in on everything that had happened.
“And that’s it? You ain’t heard nothing back from the police yet?”
Freddy looked at Lewis like he was crazy, then flipped the grilled cheese sandwich he was frying. “And ain’t gonna hear nothing back. You know how it goes around here. I’m going to put those bars up, buy some more bullets, and dare somebody else to come back up in here. That is until we sell that house, buy another, and do it again and again, until we’re millionaires.”