“That’s good.”
“What are you doing? Are you busy?”
“No. Just lying down watching TV. What’s up?”
As I lay across my bed, I felt such sadness in my heart. Like I said, no matter Tim’s addictions, he was such a figure in our childhood. “Lyric’s father died last night.”
I initially expected a bit of shock, but the phone fell so silent that I thought I dropped the call. “Vic, are you there?”
I heard tears in her voice as she answered, “Yes.” Then, she made a terrible attempt to mask her tears as she asked, “How did he pass? What happened?”
“Cirrhosis.”
Her sadness shocked me. I was sad too, but Vic seemed to be overwhelmed with grief as she cursed in whispers.
“Vic, are you okay?”
“I’ll call you back,” was all she said before hanging up.
I lay there puzzled for a few seconds until I heard Blood entering the house with the kids. He’d taken them out to eat, without even inviting me, so I knew that he was pretty much not fucking with me for a while.
I couldn’t care less though. It was funny how he treated me like a stepchild when he assumed the worse of me, but when his shit was in black and white, he acted like I was a complete bitch for not forgiving him.
I just continued to lay there. I didn’t even want to go greet him or the kids. He was just going to give me that same damn dramatic disappointed look anyway. No matter how much I insisted that I had a miscarriage, Blood acted like he knew that it wasn’t naturally. But he also knew that he had no room to blame me.
I lay there listening to the kids running back and forth. Just the pitter-patter of more than one pair of feet gave me a gnawing feeling on top of my already present cramps.
This household was fucked! Forget turned upside down; it was inside out!
Victoria
I couldn’t stop the tears.
No matter how bad I wanted the cries and sobs to stop, I couldn’t stop them.
I cried so hard that it hurt.
I couldn’t believe that he was gone. I couldn’t believe that I had waited so long to find him that I now would never have the chance to know the truth.
I was so mad at myself. I sat in the bed literally pulling at my hair and hollering at the walls because I was so angry that my bitterness had gotten in the way again.
When pulling my hair didn’t work, I frantically flung the coke on the floor that was once before me in lines on the mirror waiting for me to take them.
My phone began to ring, and I groaned in irritation. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone. Then I saw that it was Taij and answered immediately.
“Hello?”
He was at his rehearsal dinner, so I knew that this would only fuck up his night. But I had to talk to him. Since he was the only other person that knew, he was the only person that could make it better.
“Hey Vic. I just wanted to tell you that DeSire looked so pretty tonight. Thanks for getting her all dolled up.”
He sounded so happy. I hated to rain on his parade, but he was the only person that I could talk to about this.
“Hello? Vic?”
In cries, I replied, “He died, Taij.”
“Who?!”
“Tim. Lyric’s father. He’s dead.”
As Taij fell silent with shock, I filled the silence with my tears. This had to be a sick joke. Yet, I couldn’t even play that game or fault anyone but myself. Like always, I’d opted to ignore the issue until it was too late.
“I’m on my way,” Taij told me.
“No, Taij. You’re at your rehearsal dinner!”
“But you need somebody there with you.”
“I’m okay. I’m tired of crying anyway. I don’t want to spoil your night. Seriously, I’ll be okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I’ll talk to you later. Have a good night.”
For an hour, I attempted to get myself together, to calm down, and not give myself an anxiety attack. I lay in bed and took deep breaths. I attempted to convince myself not to get high. I attempted to convince myself that everything would be okay. I attempted to convince myself to hold on to the happiness that I’d found, with or without knowing who my father was, for the past year.
However, I couldn’t help but mourn for my stupidity. I had been so childish and irate for ignoring the possibilities of knowing if I had any living family besides DeSire. All of my life I had been so guarded and defensive. I was tired of letting good excuses allow me to continue to act that way. I had given myself a life sentence of loneliness, but I didn’t have to accept that anymore.
I forced myself to get it together. Lyric was right; I had been acting like a victim all of my life. I had been letting my past affect my future. I refused to let Tim’s death lead me down the same destructive path that I had gotten off of.
An hour later, as the tears stopped and determination set in, my doorbell rang. At first I wouldn’t even answer. I assumed that it was Tricey coming over because she heard my tears on the phone. I couldn’t take telling her the truth about why I was so sad about Tim’s death.
But then, I heard my daughter’s voice, so I ran to the door and opened it. The waterfall of tears started all over again as I laid eyes on Taij and DeSire, dressed in the most elegant after five attire.
This was my family. No matter who he was marrying, Taij was my unconditional, and so were DeSire, Tricey, Sugar, Lynn, and Crystal. Whether by blood relation or not, they were my family, and they were enough.
“I cannot believe you left your rehearsal dinner.”
Thirty minutes later, Taij had taken off his suit jacket, shirt, and tie. My tears had dried, and we were at the dining room table demolishing a pint of Remy Martin.
“Hey, it was an emergency. Code ten. Man down,” Taij replied with a chuckle.
I laughed. “Man all the way down.”
I felt so much better. There was still a bit of sadness and dread in the air. But, for the most part, I had been able to pull myself back together thanks to Taij. While I cried and subconsciously talked myself off of the ledge, he held me and verbally did the same.
“You’re going to be all right, Vic,” he promised as he sipped from his glass.
I sighed, saying, “I know.”
“I know you don’t have a lot of family, but you got a lot of people in your corner, including me.”
I think my will to better myself spoke before I knew what I was saying. “That’s why I was so angry when I found out that you cheated on me. When you and I started dating, I felt like God had given me the opportunity to start my own family. I thought that you were a Godsend. You were the first man to love me unconditionally without hurting or abusing me. When you did what you did, it felt like I was tricked, or like what I saw as a blessing was a curse in disguise. It’s a fucked up feeling to feel like God tricked you.”
It felt so good to not pretend to be this strong ass woman that wasn’t hurt by him. It felt good to take off the mask and the fake persona and be me; the woman that loved him with all of my heart. Even if those feelings were long gone, I needed the closure.
I was shocked when Taij replied so confidently, “I know that. That’s why I wanted so bad to fix it.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Honestly, you never gave me the chance.”
“You’re right. I can’t even argue with that. But you could have tried anyway.”
Taij sighed and confessed, “I wanted to try, Vic. For a long time, I waited for you to not be so angry that you would at least hear me out, but we argued for two years straight. And when we finally got to a point that we could be parents without being enemies, I felt like your life was better without me. I felt like after all that I had done to you, after all the anger that I had put in your heart, I didn’t deserve you.”
“How could you not deserve me when I thought that I didn’t deserve you?”
Taij seemed so taken aback at my sudden admittance of admiration for
and esteem of him. I ignored the look of astonishment and his breathlessness and allowed this five year old confession to flow out of me. I didn’t care if I looked weak or feeble. The closure was more important than the embarrassment.
“You were everything to me.” I could barely fight back the tears. They weren’t tears of anger. They were tears of relief that this weight was finally off of my chest. “For years, I loved you and wanted us back. It’s all my fault that I was too stubborn to tell you that. It’s all my fault that I let that one mistake put value on what could have been happiness for the rest of my life. But please don’t think that you weren’t good enough because, to me, you were too good to be true.”
After five years, that big elephant that still remained in the room with me and Taij galloped away as Taij stood, came closer to me, and embraced me with so much love and empathy.
I embraced him back and was so grateful to have him there for me. Even if he was getting married, even if Tricey wasn’t related to me, even if my other friend’s weren’t as close to me anymore, instead of mourning what I didn’t have, I vowed to start embracing them for being who I did have.
Nineteen
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Victoria
Tim’s funeral was a week later.
After a lot of soul searching, I felt it necessary to go. I just wanted to be able to lay my eyes on him. I wanted to be able to have the conversation with him before he was put into the ground, even if he couldn’t talk back to me.
In order to avoid Lyric at all costs, I went to the William’s funeral home an hour before the wake began. Slyly, I convinced one of the staff members that I was a family member that wanted to view his body before having to catch a flight.
Entering the room was so eerie. I looked in that coffin and saw a man that I didn’t know or recognize. Because of his addictions, Tim’s skin and features had begun to deteriorate when we were teenagers. Yet, it’s as if death had cleansed his body of all toxins, and the man in the casket looked better dead than he did alive.
I wanted to cry, but was pleasantly surprised when no tears came. I thought it normal for some tears to fall, but I was able to hold myself together as I asked him over and over again, “Are you my father?”
I looked at the formation of his eyes, the sculpture of his cheekbones, and the curl of his hair and tried to see some image of me. Yet, since I am a splitting image of my mother, I saw nothing indicating if this man played a part in bringing me into this world.
“What the hell are you doing here?!”
I was so startled that I jumped frantically, nearly bumping into Tim’s casket. I spun around to face Lyric, dressed in a long black short sleeve maxi dress with a face full of tears. Since she was already obviously upset, I knew that my presence only further disturbed her.
Tricey was standing next to her, with her hand on Lyric’s arm attempting to hold back Lyric’s anger, but even she looked at me in confusion.
I was stuck and couldn’t think of any logical reason to express why I was there. I stood there looking like a deer caught in headlights as Lyric continued to go off of me.
“We ain’t friends! I don’t need your condolences! Why the fuck are you here?!”
Before I could muster up the courage to say anything, a raspy and rugged voice came into the room and said, “Because that’s her daddy too. She can see him if she wants to.”
It was Lyric’s mother entering the room slowly. By the looks of her, alcohol and drugs were eating her away as well. She was so frail, and she lacked any of the features that I remembered.
“Mama, what the hell are you talking about?!”
It was funny how quickly Lyric dismissed her mother’s idea. Yet, when I didn’t deny it, when I seemed to cower in shame of the truth, Tricey’s mouth dropped.
With the same attitude that Lyric gave her mother, her mother gave it right back to her. “I said that’s her daddy too, so she can see him if she wants to.”
With every word she said, I seemed to shrink in embarrassment. While Tricey’s confusion grew, Lyric’s disgust deepened and was written all over her face.
But it was like her mother didn’t notice any of this, and kept rambling in her own toxic rant. “Your daddy was always down at Edith’s house ‘fixing some shit’. Don’t that much shit need fixin’ while your husband at work.” Then she chuckled evilly. “Humph. Knew this shit would come out one day. You tried to lie, Tim, but look at her. You can’t deny her. She don’t look shit like you, but she been walking just like you since she learned how to. Noticed that every time I looked out of my window and saw you, Vic. Shole did.”
To hear her speaking so personally of my mother, Jesse, and my history blew me away. The confirmation of this possibly being true took my breath away so much so that I couldn’t speak and couldn’t take it anymore. And what I also couldn’t take anymore was this look of disgust on Lyric’s face as she stared at me like this was all my fault. She seemed repulsed at the possibility of Tim being my father. That angered me so much so that I walked out without saying a word.
Other services were going on inside of the funeral home, so I fought to move quickly without knocking anyone over. I could hear Tricey calling my name, but I continued to move fast because I was mad that Lyric wasn’t the one coming after me.
Tricey
I had no words for this shit.
No words.
During the funeral, I sat completely motionless and speechless, as did Lyric. Her cries were the only noise that came out of her, but, since I knew that she had no connection with her father when he was living, I knew that these tears had a lot to do with what her mother said.
I tried to go after Vic. Once I got outside, she was nowhere to be seen until I saw her car speeding out the parking lot. I tried calling her between attempting to calm Lyric down, but she wouldn’t answer my calls and she hadn’t responded to any of my text messages.
I couldn’t believe that she had kept this from me and Lyric. I wondered how long she’d known that Tim was her father and if she had proof. I wondered why she hadn’t said anything.
Now I totally understood her anger in Puerto Vallarta.
Luckily, the funeral was short and Lyric spent very little time at the repast. She seemed so distant, speechless and in a daze, as was I.
After the repast, I had to meet Blood and his mother for lunch at Venice, an Italian restaurant in the south suburbs. I really wasn’t in the mood to entertain her. I needed to be with Lyric, Vic, or both, but his mother was insisting that I be there since she hadn’t seen me in months.
“Tricey, honey, what’s wrong?”
I knew that, as I sat there barely speaking, Blood and his mother would assume that my attitude had to do with Blood. I hadn’t had the opportunity to even tell Blood what happened at the funeral.
Luckily, his mother waited until Blood excused himself to the bathroom before she got in my business.
“Nothing,” I lied. “It’s just been a very tiring day. I had to go to my best friend’s father’s funeral earlier, so I am not in the best of moods.”
“Is that all that’s wrong? I see a lot of tension between you and Blood.”
“Well, considering all that we have been through, we’re lucky to still be together.”
His mother knew about Mauri, and I was sure that Blood informed her of the “miscarriage” that he still thought was suspect.
“You know Blood loves you, right?”
I couldn’t even respond. I didn’t doubt that he loved me, but I did doubt that love would fix all of the deception and lies that occurred in this relationship in the last couple of months.
Our household had turned so cold, emotionless, and lifeless. The only thing bringing any light or joy into it was the laughter of the kids.
“I know my son’s heart better than he does,” Betty told me with a smile.
She was such an adorable woman. She was sixty-five and fly. Blood kept her in the latest fashion. I assumed her to b
e the flyest lady at church with the biggest hats and the most blinged out dresses. Today, she was in a Donna Karen belted cap sleeve draped cowl dress that fit her mature full figure perfectly. Her grey hair was salon perfected; straightened beautifully and hanging on her shoulders.
I let go of my bitter disposition, because I didn’t want to break this old lady’s heart. “You’re right. I know that he loves me.”
“And I love you for taking in my grandson. You are so strong for doing that. Blood knows that, and he appreciates that.”
I was sure he did! That wasn’t a question. But, as Blood approached the table, I had to quiet my opinions.
It was sad the way we looked at each other. I looked at him with the same doubt in my eyes that was present in his when he looked at me. Our relationship had gone from sugar to shit so many times in its mere two years of existence that I doubted how it would last much longer.
STAR
For the second time in a week, I was at DeShawn’s house.
Obviously, he’d learned a thing or two after the robbery because this house was obviously a private home that very few people knew about.
We had just finished having sex. Our bodies were still sweaty, and we were still breathing hard. Yet, I wasn’t satisfied. I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t continue to hang out with DeShawn not knowing his intentions or with this robbery dangling over my head.
“DeShawn, why are you fucking with me after what I did to you?”
When it took him too long to respond, I sat up so that I could look him in the eyes; eyes that simply quietly stared back at me.
“We can’t keep ignoring what happened.”
“I’m not ignoring shit. It’s kind of hard to ignore.”
“Exactly! It’s hard to ignore the fact that it’s weird as fuck that you are fucking with me when I had something to do with that robbery.”
With a chuckle, DeShawn promised. “I’m not trying to set you up or no shit…”
“I’m past that! If you aren’t, great. But why?! It’s obvious that you feel some kind of way about me after what happened because you keep me away from people, you’re hiding me, and you have your times where you treat me funny…”
Good Girls Ain't No Fun Boxed Set (The SIX romance and urban fiction volumes of the LOVE, SEX, LIES series) Page 100