She glanced at her mother before nodding and looking down at the dark green carpet.
“Well, ain’t nothing wrong with a little discipline,” the sheriff said with an impatient sigh. “Just keep the noise down. We don’t wanna have to come back here.”
Everything in Jake’s gut told him that it wasn’t that kid who’d thrown a fit. He didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone with her mother. He’d said as much as soon they made it to the patrol car.
“I don’t know, Sheriff. Maybe we should take the kid to protective services?”
“Seriously?” was all the sheriff said before climbing in behind the wheel. “It ain’t the first time that woman’s had problems with that girl. She goes to school with my son, always mouthing off at the teachers. Maybe if she gets enough whippings, it’ll straighten out that bad attitude of hers.”
Jake understood the notion that some kids were just bad, but something about the way she looked, or tried not to look at him, unsettled him. He was new at this job though, and if the sheriff didn’t think this call warranted more attention then who was he to question the man’s experience?
Diana Rigby, or Dirty Diana, as she was called, had been a regret haunting him since that day.
Jake had gone on with his life and career, telling himself that he couldn’t save everybody, and convincing himself that things probably weren’t as bad for that kid as he’d believed. She managed to fly underneath the radar growing up. Her name floated around town like a dirty secret, but not one that he gave much credence. She didn’t break any laws or draw enough attention to herself for someone like him to intervene.
Every now and then he’d see her in the drug store where she ended up working, but the two of them never exchanged more than casual pleasantries. Over time, he convinced himself that her life was what it was, and that she’d come to terms with that. Thinking back on it now, he realized that justifying her existence that way was only to ease his guilty conscience.
Chapter 3
Lorraine answered the door, a little heavier than Diana had remembered, appearing more tired than she’d looked when Diana last saw her nearly fifteen years ago. Still, those expressive, kind eyes, forever young, lit up at the sight of Diana.
“Look what the wind blew in.” Lorraine smiled, pushing past the screen door and embracing Diana in her fleshy arms.
Reluctantly, Diana held her too. As sweet as Lorraine was, she still had always sided with the enemy, regardless of how she tried to appear neutral. When Diana was a child, the last thing she needed was neutrality. She needed a bodyguard, someone with the courage to buffer space between her and a mother. Someone who knew the difference between discipline and abuse. Lorraine was never that person.
Her aunt leaned back and studied Diana from head to toe. “Don’t you look beautiful.”
Lorraine’s sincerity was appreciated. “Thank you, Auntie.”
The smile faded from her aunt’s face. “I didn’t tell her you was coming because I didn’t think you would.”
Diana paused. “I didn’t, either.”
Sadness shadowed Lorraine’s expression. “They wanted me to put her in hospice.” She teared up and shook her head. “Couldn’t do it. I won’t.”
She looked at Diana as if she expected sympathy or empathy, but it wasn’t long before she had no choice but to accept that neither was coming.
Diana followed her into the bungalow where she’d grown up. She marveled at how small it looked now with its dingy walls, dated furnishings, and stained carpet. Truly, this place wasn’t much bigger than her master suite back in Seattle.
“Ain’t much changed,” Lorraine offered as if reading Diana’s mind as they maneuvered past the worn sofa and cheap coffee table. “She got some furniture bout ten years back, but … We seen you on television a few times,” Lorraine continued. “Tray showed us on that YouTube. Girl,” she chuckled. “You sho’ can fight.”
“I had a good teacher,” Diana let slip.
Wounded, Lorraine stared back at her.
“Now, that’s not fair,” she said softly. “Especially not now.”
“There was nothing fair about living in this house.”
Diana might have lost her last fight in the ring, but she was not about to lose another one in this house.
Lorraine was just about to jump to her sister’s defense again when a voice came from the back room.
“Who there? Lorraine? Who you talking to?”
Louise Rigby. The bane of Diana’s existence.
Fifty-seven fights. That’s how many professional bouts “Dirty” Diana Rigby had fought during her MMA career. She’d only lost three, two by a couple of points. She had never been afraid of a single one of her opponents, but unexpected terror, that same terror she’d felt in this house her whole life, gripped her as she made her way down the narrow hallway to her mother’s room.
Death has a smell; musty and decaying. No air circulated through this house. Maybe it never had, but Diana felt like she was drowning in the thick and muddy memories saturating these walls.
Her mother lay propped up in bed, surrounded by what looked like a dozen pillows, with a fan blowing warm air from one corner of the room. Jesus! The woman looked dead already! She was thin, frail, and as white as a ghost. Her dark hair was gone except for a few stringy patches here and there. Her mother’s favorite picture of herself, of when she was young and beautiful, still sat on the dresser where it had always been.
“Who are you?”
Diana courageously stared back into her mother’s colorless eyes, something she’d never have done when she was a child. She held the woman’s unwavering gaze with a defiance she thought she’d never have.
“Have I changed that much?” she eventually asked.
Recognition, a spark at first, but soon, more discernible shown in her mother’s eyes. And for a moment, a wall of heavy and oppressive silence filled the space between them.
“What happened to your hair?”
“I shaved it off,” Diana responded, not regretting her decision to shave her lustrous waves in an effort to erase that insignificant and wounded girl she’d once been.
Once upon a time, Louise Rigby had been Diana’s own personal demon, haunting her dreams at night, fueling her rage in the ring. Her mother had been larger than life, in her life, for so many years that Diana had no idea how to live without her influence, consciously or sub-consciously. It didn’t matter. Her mother had always been there, whether Diana thought she was or not.
All of the anger she’d expected to feel at seeing her mother again, anger that had compelled her to stay away from this town, was gone.
“You had such pretty hair,” her mother said, sorrowfully.
“You want some sweet tea, sweetheart?” Lorraine came up behind Diana, so quickly it was almost as if she’d been hovering nearby to usher in her normal brand of neutral interference once again.
“No,” Diana responded. “I won’t be here long.”
“Oh, stay for supper, Diana,” Lorraine begged. “Please. It’ll be nice to catch up on everythin’ you been doin’.”
“I seen you fightin’ on the TV,” her mother said, her tone was as sour as her expression. “Don’t particularly care for watching women fight.”
She didn’t mean to, but Diana abruptly laughed.
Her mother didn’t look amused.
“Wow,” Diana responded, not bothering to hide the sarcasm.
“Watch your sass, Diana,” her mother snapped.
Oh! There she was. Louise Rigby, this frail and fragile-looking creature, lying on her death bed, still had that bite in her. And for a moment, her tone struck Diana like a slap across the face.
“Lemme get some tea,” Lorraine said, trying to diffuse the situation.
The three of them, in this painful dance, were all so well-trained, each quick to pull out the script and find her spot on the stage to fill her role so dutifully and with conviction.
“I don’t want tea,”
Diana reminded her, still locked in a steely gaze with her mother, just like she’d stared into the eyes of one of her opponents in the center of the ring. Years ago, Diana would have blinked first. But not now. And her mother was as ornery as ever, determined to minimize Diana with a look.
“You too good to eat with us now?” her mother taunted, a challenge in that tone and in her commitment to diminish her daughter, even now.
So, Diana told her the truth. “Yes.”
Louise, for the first time in all of Diana’s life, blinked first.
“Don’t you talk to her like that,” Lorraine snapped in her sister’s defense. “Ain’t no cause for you to come here and be nasty, Diana. None at all.”
“I got it honest,” Diana countered, glaring at the woman who’d hated her every moment of her life.
Were those tears glistening in Louise Rigby’s eyes?
After several moments of silence hanging heavy in the air, her mother finally responded. “Why’d you come here?” she challenged. “So eager to see me die, I suppose.”
Diana’s reason for being here escaped her. A few days ago, she lay sobbing like a baby on her kitchen floor, broken, because in that moment, it felt as if she was losing everything—her title, career, and her mother. She had lost her title and career, but she had never, ever had a mother. This woman’s only contribution to her life had been giving birth. And that’s all.
“Yes,” Diana softly admitted. “I suppose that is it. I used to think that I was free of you when I left home, but I wasn’t. I haven’t been until this moment, and I choose to let you go.”
“Why you talkin’ to her like that?” Lorraine interjected, rushing over to her sister’s bedside. “If you were gonna be cruel then you shoulda stayed gone.”
Diana breathed a deep and cleansing sigh of relief. “I forgive you, Louise. Finally, I’m setting us both free.”
She expected to feel the weight of a burden she’d been carrying all of her life miraculously lift and float away. Her mother wouldn’t be alive much longer, but Diana understood now that she needed to come here to say those three words: “I forgive you.”
Diana turned slowly to leave.
“Diana,” Lorraine called, chasing after her.
“Let her go, Lorraine,” her mother said in that bitter tone that cut as deep as any blade. “We ain’t missing nothing.”
Diana swept from the house and attempted to exhale her past and the hold it had had on her all these years, leaving it on the doorstep of a house with a woman she’d never see again.
Driving back to her hotel, unexpected tears pooled in her eyes. The last thing her mother said replayed over in her mind, and in her heart.
“Let her go. We ain’t missing nothing.”
Her mother’s most offensive and hurtful weapon was never her fists or extension cords. Never the screaming and calling Diana bitch or whore at the top of her lungs. It was always the more subtle attacks that hurt the most. Those, slippery, quiet insults that rooted the deepest.
We ain’t missing nothing was code for “Diana doesn’t mean shit to me. I never wanted her. I never loved her.”
We ain’t missing nothing.
Deep down, maybe she’d expected her mother to apologize for all the hurt she’d caused Diana. Some part of her had hoped that Louise might finally say the one thing Diana had longed to hear from her mother her entire life: “I love you.” But Louise Rigby would rather go to her grave choking on those words before saying them to her daughter, and that was a bitter truth that Diana would just have to accept.
Chapter 4
Diana had planned on leaving Rhino the next morning before the sun kissed the sky, but the call came in the middle of the night.
“She passed, Diana,” Lorraine said wearily. “Yo’ momma passed quietly in her sleep.”
Three long days later, Diana found herself sitting in the funeral parlor next to Lorraine, with others who had nothing better to do than to attend random memorial services. She stared at a wine-colored jar filled with all that was left of her mother.
Dust.
Lorraine dabbed at her eyes and sighed every now and then. But for the most part, the two of them sat there quietly, contemplating the unremarkable existence of Louise Rigby.
“She cried when you left the other day,” Lorraine eventually said.
She was good at that, at finding a way to make Louise the victim and guilting Diana into feeling as if she deserved every horrible moment dealt to her by her mother.
“I know you think she went out of her way to be hurtful, but—”
“She’s dead, Lorraine,” Diana said, patting the woman’s weathered hand. “You don’t need to be her champion anymore.”
Lorraine glanced at Diana with sorrow-filled eyes. “Of course, I do. Who else did she have, but me?”
Diana unexpectedly laughed out loud.
“Don’t you dare,” Lorraine retorted, nostrils flaring as she shook with indignation.
“No, don’t you dare,” Diana shot back. “I’m sick and tired of you coming to that woman’s defense. I’m tired of hearing you make a martyr out of her and excusing every terrible thing she did.”
She pointed at her mother’s urn, resisting the urge to knock it over and spill the contents onto the floor, exposing the nasty mess that was Louise.
Lorraine slapped her across the face. Hard.
Diana slapped her back.
“Ladies,” the stocky mortician shouted, rushing forward to stand between them amidst the gasps and shock of everyone around them. “If you can’t control yourselves, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
The two women locked angry gazes.
“Not a problem,” Diana said, making fast headway up the aisle leading toward the nearest exit.
Lorraine hurried after her. “It wasn’t her fault, Diana!”
Diana willed her body to come to a halt on the front steps.
“It wasn’t her fault how she treated you.”
“Let me guess,” she said over her shoulder. “The devil made her do it?”
“Yes.” Lorraine’s eyes glazed over with angry tears. “Yo’ father.”
“It was her, Lorraine.” She shook her head in disbelief that her aunt’s misplaced loyalty could extend even beyond the grave. “The woman’s gone. Whatever hold she had over you all these years is over. You don’t have to justify who she was and what she did, to me or even to yourself. Just—” She threw her hands up in disgust and moved forward. “let it be.”
“They raped her!” Lorraine blurted out, stopping Diana in her tracks and causing passersby to suddenly take even more of an interest in this heated discussion.
Lorraine’s lips trembled. “Half a dozen of ‘em, all led by him.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks as she inched closer. “Said he loved her. Told her he was gonna marry her.”
She swallowed, then closed her eyes as if warding off the memory like it personally happened to her. “Tricked her. Took her to the lake after the school dance and made love to her.”
Diana held her breath without realizing it.
“Five more boys came out of the wood, his friends.” She shrugged. “She begged him to stop them. He didn’t. She tried to get away, but—”
Lorraine averted her gaze, finding a pointed interest in the flowers surrounding the entrance. “They took turns.”
A small crowd had come from inside and gathered around Diana and Lorraine, listening to every word.
“She knew you were his ‘cause he was the only one who was black,” she confessed. “The others were all white.”
Well, that truth had been mercifully hidden from Diana her whole life, and she could’ve gone the rest of her life never knowing.
“I don’t remember my mother ever telling me that she loved me,” Diana painfully admitted. “She never put her arms around me. My mother didn’t love me because of that?”
Lorraine tried to reach out and place a hand on Diana’s arm, but she cringed
and yanked out of her way.
“And so, what?” Diana hissed. “Is that supposed to somehow make how she treated me better? That’s supposed to excuse the fact that every time she reached for me, I cringed because I knew she was about to hurt me because of what he did to her? What he did was not my fault!”
“No,” Lorraine sobbed. “But it was your burden.”
And that really was the truest statement ever made for her life.
“Growing up, they called me Dirty Diana,” she reluctantly admitted. Diana stared angrily out at the crowd gathered around the two of them and hurried down the stairs. Her life was none of their business. Lorraine followed her over to a small pond across the street from Diana’s rental car.
Lorraine’s pained expression said it all. “I know what they called you.”
“Dirty white girl. Dirty black girl.” She splayed a hand against her stomach. “Not good enough for either side.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Diana dismissed that with a flourish of her hand. “If my momma wasn’t kicking my ass, somebody else was in it.”
“Diana—”
“I kept it,” Diana admitted with a smile that didn’t reach her heart. “It’s the name I fight under. Dirty Diana Rigby. My moniker.”
“I don’t wanna hear this,” Lorraine held up a hand to ward off anything else Diana had to say.
“That’s how I fight, you see. Dirty.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, relaxing into telling the ugly parts of herself. “I don’t fight fair, Lorraine. Is there even such a thing? What the hell is fighting fair when you’re punching each other in the face?”
“What’s that got to do with your mother?”
“Who do you think I learned it from?” Diana snapped, noticing a family of ducks wade into the pond.
Lorraine stood there, wide-eyed and speechless.
“I’m sorry that those men did that to her,” Diana whispered. “No woman should have to suffer something like that, but no child should be forced to pay for a crime that had nothing to do with them.”
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