“That’s not true,” I told her. “Their fathers are there right next to the mothers in the stands. How do you think a lot of these girls started playing ball?”
“Because they were interested in it. Jimmy didn’t start playing basketball because of you.”
She had a point there. I wasn’t around Little Jay for most of the development in his game. In fact, he could teach me a few things.
I said, “Okay, you got me there. But I don’t know what I would have done if we had a daughter.”
“Mmm hmm,” she grunted.
“What made you ask me that?”
“I was just curious about it,” she said.
“Oh, there is a difference, if you want to know,” I told her.
“Why? A child is a child.”
“Yeah, well you tell that to China.” I had watched a program on television where they talked about the Chinese literally killing girl babies to make room for boys in the families because girls were traditionally given away in marriages. In other words, if you had two daughters and both daughters were married off, then you’d end up without any kids. But if you had two sons, you would be gaining numbers.
Denise said, “This is not China.”
I started to laugh. I said, “Well, you ask another man that question, and see what he says. Ask Brock. I met him at the game today,” I told her.
“Yeah, I heard,” she said, “and he feels the same way. But I guess it’s normal for a man to relate to a boy, as long as he doesn’t take things overboard.”
“Well, again, I just wanted to say thanks,” I told her. I didn’t want to wear out my welcome, and it was better for my ego if I ended the conversation. I didn’t expect to talk to her for that long anyway.
“How many times are you going to thank me?” she asked. “A son should be able to spend time with his father. I never stopped you from seeing him, you stopped yourself.”
I nodded with the phone in hand. “Yeah, you’re right,” I told her.
“So stop making it seem like I did you a favor, because I didn’t. I’m not that kind of mother. If I was, I would have taken your behind to court.”
I chuckled, but the shit wasn’t funny. “I guess that’s what I’m thanking you for then.”
“Well, if that’s the case, then you need to thank me, because I can’t sit here and say that I’ve never thought about it. I just knew you didn’t have any money. But still, that was no excuse for you not to at least try to provide for your child, if we’re going to talk about it. That’s why single mothers are the lowest-income families today, not only because some of them are on welfare, but because it takes two incomes to survive in America.”
“Not in your case,” I told her.
“That’s because I only have two children, and one has been taken care of since birth. Economically speaking, I only had to worry about one child.”
Damn! I felt like crawling under a rock somewhere. But what was I supposed to do? “So how do we solve this problem, you know, of fathers who are broke?”
“Well, first of all, they’re gonna have to stop getting in trouble with the law, because you can’t get a job with a jail record.”
“I know that’s right,” I agreed. “It took me years to find a stable one.”
“They have to stop sleeping, unprotected, with women who they don’t love and can’t see themselves having children with,” she added. “And then, they have to get motivated to be the so-called man of the house, and that does not mean just with attitude. If they want to complain so much about women doing what they have to do, then they need to start doing more so that they can still hold their heads up high without acting like assholes about who is doing what and making what.”
I couldn’t agree with her more. I had been thinking all of those same thoughts for the last five or six months. I had stepped up to the plate, and was no longer running away, complaining about my strikes like so many other brothers were doing. You just keep swinging until you start getting some good hits, but too many brothers were quitting altogether.
“I agree with you,” I told Denise. What else could I say? It was the truth.
I don’t know if she was expecting my agreement, because we suddenly had a long pause on the phone.
“I hear you’ve been raising another son,” she finally said to me.
I smiled. I’m sure she knew that for a while. I never told Little Jay not to tell her, but after Brock popped up at the game, spotted me with Jamal, and posed the father question, I knew it would get right back to her.
I said, “Yeah, after getting back involved with raising Jimmy and liking it, I guess I got over my fear of raising kids.”
“Is this Kim’s son? His name is Jamal, right?”
I took a deep breath. Denise knew about Kim for a long time. She used to think that Kim’s son was mine, but he wasn’t.
“I remember you used to swear up and down that he was my kid,” I reminded her.
“She wanted to have your kid,” Denise reminded me.
“Yeah, she did, didn’t she?”
“I always wondered how you were able to avoid that.”
“It just wasn’t meant to happen, I guess,” I told her. “I mean, when things are meant to be, they’re meant to be. And when they’re not, they’re not.”
Denise sighed and said, “Yeah, that’s just a bunch a B-S. I’m getting sick of people talking that stuff. That’s why we have so many broken families now. ‘It wasn’t meant to be.’ That’s plain bullshit.”
I chuckled. She was giving it to me straighter than an arrow. She was right again. I could have had a family with her. We could have made it happen, but I punked out, not because it wasn’t meant to be, but because I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain.
“It seems like a long, long time ago since we were together,” I said to her. “The time just flew by.”
“It didn’t fly by fast enough for me.”
I thought about Kim and Jamal before I moved in to live with them. Things were a lot smoother with me there. “Yeah, I guess not,” I told Denise.
“So, how are you liking this newfound father thing? Is it something you think you would promote?” she asked me.
She was reading my mind. I responded, “Definitely. I tell people about my two boys as much as I can now. My boss and I are having bragging competitions at work,” I joked.
“What about before you came back into Jimmy’s life?”
I grinned and shook my head. All I used to say beforehand was that I had a son. I really couldn’t say too much about him then, because I didn’t know much about him.
“I guess there wasn’t much I could say back then,” I answered.
“Well, I didn’t give Jimmy enough attention myself when he was younger. That’s why I was so fortunate that he liked playing basketball, because if he needed more personal attention like Walter did, I don’t know what I would have done. Walter was a handful, and he still is. But he’s starting to come around.”
“How do he and his father get along?” I asked.
“They’re doing much better than they used to, but it seems as if I have a harder time having a normal conversation with his father. I keep wanting to size him up when I talk to him. And I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help it.”
I smiled. I thought that I was the only one she lambasted. I said, “I know exactly what he’s feeling. Trust me.”
“Well, do either one of you know how I feel, or how I felt? No, nor do you think about it. That’s what makes my attitude about this entire thing worse, you two can’t even see my point of view.”
“What about our point of view?”
“What about it?”
“We have a story to tell in this thing, too. Nobody wants to listen to our story.”
“Because the shit is weak, J.D.! Now don’t get me started on that, okay? Because if you really want to let your story be told, then you come out to our next single mothers’ meeting and tell them.”
I could imagin
e the horror of that scene. It would have been a lynch mob. I started to laugh.
“Oh, don’t laugh, because I don’t see a damn thing funny about it! The only thing funny about this is that you would even attempt to think that your story held any kind of weight. You men just up and walk away from things. If it was a case where I had tried to trap you into something and take you to court for a bundle of money, that would be different, but that is far from the case here. So I don’t want to hear nothing that you have to say. All I care about is that you are back in your son’s life now, and on that note, I think it’s time for me to go before my temperature gets too high.”
I said, “Okay. Well, thanks for listening as long as you did.”
“Don’t mention it,” she snapped at me.
I had worn out my welcome anyway, but right before I hung up the phone with her, I said, “One more question, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to, but what do you think about your relationship with Brock?” I was still curious about that.
“That’s none of your business,” she told me.
“You asked me about Kim.”
“No I did not. I only asked if you were involved with raising her son.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, backing off. “Well, that must mean that your relationship with him is not perfect, because if it was, you would probably want to brag about it.” I just couldn’t leave it alone.
Denise said, “Try that reverse psychology stuff somewhere else, okay. I get enough of that from Walter’s father.”
“I’m not like him,” I told her.
“No, but you are a man, a black man, who had a son with a supportive black woman, and you didn’t try to marry her and make a family.”
Shit! I thought to myself. I don’t know why I kept trying to get to her. I guess only my mother could do it. Denise ripped me to pieces every time. All of a sudden, the name “Neecy” didn’t even fit her anymore.
“Well, it’s been nice talking to you, but I have things to do. Okay? I’ll tell your son that you called.”
When she hung up, I just held the phone in my hand and shook my head. I remember when Denise would worship the ground that I walked on. I was her first and only love for nearly five years, then it all just faded away. From an outside point of view, someone would wonder how I was able to get with her in the first place. She seemed light-years ahead of me. Nevertheless, she was dating a truck driver and couldn’t stand Walter Perry, Mr. Money Banks. I guess it really didn’t matter what a brother had, but more so how he treated her. Then again, with some sisters it was the exact opposite.
Little Jay said that Brock treated his mother “real good.” I guess he was telling the truth, because Brock had the keys to her castle.
I walked around the apartment and looked at all of Kim’s photos. She was a good-looking sister. She could look even better if she applied herself. Maybe I could buy her a few things and freshen up her wardrobe and appearance. She was a beginner that I could easily take to winner status, and she had been in my face for a straight half a year, bad breath in the morning and all. I sat there and laughed about it. But before I could work on her, I wanted to save up to buy a car.
I walked into Jamal’s room and gave him another look. He was balled up like a snail. He wasn’t my biological son, but I sure felt close to him. I realized that he could make me really proud one day.
I walked back out into the living room and took a seat on the couch. It was just after nine, and the University of Illinois was playing Cincinnati on ESPN. I sat there and watched the game while thinking about myself, Kim, and Jamal.
What if I did marry Kim? I thought. Then I shook it off. “Naw, she’d probably get too happy, and then shit would start changing too much around here,” I told myself. Women get married and start expecting the world. I liked things just the way they were. But what about having another kid? A daughter. We didn’t necessarily have to get married, as long as we were a family.
I called Kim at work just to ask her about it. What can I say, I felt hyper that night.
“What’s wrong?” she picked up the phone and asked me.
“Why you always think something’s wrong?”
“Well, it’s almost time for me to get off, so if you couldn’t wait, then it must be an emergency.”
“Well, you’re wrong.”
She said, “You just called to tell me you love me then?”
I grinned and decided to humor her. “Yeah, that’s it,” I told her.
“You do?”
She was taking it seriously. I grunted, “Hunh?” as if I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“You really love me, or do you just love my son?”
“Why can’t I love both of y’all? It shouldn’t be a competition thing. I don’t see it that way.”
“So you really love me then?” she asked again.
She was, as they say, fixated on the word. I asked her, “How many times are you gonna say that? You never told me that you loved me.”
“Of course I do,” she told me. She said it as if she had been waiting to tell me for ages.
“I didn’t ask you, I was just stating the fact.”
“Well, I do love you. And I know you haven’t asked me to marry you or anything, but I love what you’ve done with my son, and I love how you’ve given purpose to his life, and to my life.” Because of me, Kim’s New Year’s resolution was to stop smoking weed. She said that I could help her out with it by keeping her stress level down. That was going to be a real challenge. Kim got stressed about everything.
I said, “Wait a minute, slow down with all that. You’re supposed to give purpose to your own life.”
“Why don’t you take off from work tonight?” she asked, ignoring me.
She had asked me that before, and I had turned her down. I actually liked going to work, and hadn’t missed one night in seven months.
“Why?” I asked her.
“Well, I’m at work right now, and we really need to talk about things. You know we didn’t do much for Valentine’s Day.”
I smiled. “Yeah, what about it?” You can send a woman hearts and flowers any day. Valentine’s Day was a pain in the ass if you asked me. It was three times worse than Christmas. All that buildup and red shit for one day. At least Christmas was an entire season. But some women went as far as to break off entire relationships for Valentine’s Day expectations and disappointments. That didn’t make much sense at all.
“I just wanted to come home and hold you and my son tonight. Is that too much to ask?”
“And what about if you start wanting to do this every night?”
“Come on now, I know better than that. Besides, you haven’t taken off any days from work. Don’t you get vacation time or something?”
I hadn’t been on one job long enough to even think about a vacation. My vacations had been getting laid off and fired. I said, “Yeah, you got a point there. Other guys are taking vacations. The boss even took one with his family in January.”
“Yeah, so he shouldn’t be mad at you for taking off one night.”
“But I still have to let him know in advance,” I told her.
“Do you get any sick days or anything?”
I thought about my father. “Sick days to me are like a curse. I ain’t sick, and I never want to be sick.”
“A lot of other people aren’t either, but if you’re going to get paid for it, then take advantage of it.”
Kim was talking about starting a lot of bad habits.
She said, “Well, I gotta get back to work. Just think about it, okay?”
I hadn’t even gotten a chance to ask her what I had called for. “Damn, do you even want to know what I called for?” I snapped at her.
“Oh, what, besides to say that you love me?”
“I called to ask you what you thought about having a little girl or something.”
“You mean like a baby?” Her voice elevated into a squeal. I was nervous to repeat it but I di
d it anyway.
“Yeah, like a baby girl,” I told her.
“Oh my God! You’re gonna make me get hollered at.”
“Well, tell them this is an emergency like you said.”
She whispered and said, “You know my tubes are tied.”
“You can get them untied, right?” I asked her.
She said, “I don’t believe that you’re asking me this. And why a girl?”
“I just figured it would be something different from raising boys, you know.”
“Now see, we definitely have to talk tonight! Call your job right now!”
“We can talk about this in the morning.”
“No we can’t either. If you wanted to talk about this in the morning, then you should have waited until the morning to ask me. But no, you called me on the job, so it must have been on your mind.”
I had gotten myself in trouble. I said, “You know what, you get back to work and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Don’t be lying to me, because I’m gonna be real disappointed if you do. Don’t get me all worked up for nothing. You told me you don’t want me to smoke anymore, right?”
“All right, well, let me make this call then,” I told her.
“You promise?”
I shook my head and smiled. I really pushed Kim’s excitement button that night. She was showing how much she felt for me. I guess single mothers can open up when they feel like it. I wondered how it was with Denise and Brock. Did she get that excited for him? I had to get her off my damn mind!
I said, “Kim, I promise. Okay? Now let me call the man.”
“Okay, well, I’ll see you in another hour then.”
I hung up the phone and wondered what I had just gotten myself into. It was nearly ten o’clock. How was I going to call off just two hours before work? I didn’t want to start any bad habits, but I had promised Kim that I would see, so I called Roger at his home anyway. Hopefully, he hadn’t left yet.
“Hello,” he answered. His voice was direct and distinctive.
“Hey, Roger, it’s Jimmie Daniels. I may need a favor from you.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
I figured I’d take the honest route. I said, “You know I haven’t asked for a night off in seven months, and I know this is short notice and all, but I have some pressing family issues that came up tonight that I may need to straighten out right away.”