Chapter 9
Nine
K ept
My family flew in for Dakota’s fourth birthday—Trinity, my dad, Yahirah, Ayden, Nehemiah, his wife, and even my Aunt Sherise.
I went to the office that day. I received word the day before that the village trustees of Atterson, South Carolina had approved my subdivision within their city limits.
I was able to complete a lot of the paperwork, but I had to leave early because I promised to pick my dad up from the airport.
Gannon Boudreaux wasn’t alone when I pulled up to the curb to gather him outside of the airport, and I was shocked to see who was standing beside him. It was Vivienne Russell. I hadn’t seen her since my great-grandmother’s funeral back in undergrad, but I would recognize my mother anywhere.
I threw the truck into park and jumped out. I rounded the front of the car and embraced my father in a hug.
“Sorry I didn’t give you a heads up. Your mother really wanted it to be a surprise,” he said before we separated.
A surprise was the understatement of the frigging millennium.
I was shocked as shit. That lady had never laid eyes on either of my girls.
I couldn’t understand why she would want to surprise me by showing up for Dakota’s fourth birthday.
The moment my father released me, Vivienne was in my space.
She threw her arms around me and pulled me into her body.
“Kept!” Her voice cracked as she buried her face in my shirt.
As both a child, and a young adult, I had dealt with a measure of social anxiety. I was never sure about the expectations of certain interactions. In those situations, I tended to retreat inside myself and shut down.
As an adult, I’d gone to therapy and had received suggestions and strategies about how to deal with the feelings of overwhelming stress.
Now, I was able to walk onto a job site, walk into a board meeting, walk into any number of unknown situations and manage to present myself as a talented, capable, and experienced professional.
But being held in my biological mother’s arms with her face pressed against my chest was causing me to feel like the little boy I used to be, like the little boy who just wanted his mother to want him, who wanted to be enough, who wanted to matter more than the pull of her social life.
My father must’ve read the panic in my expression as our eyes met over the top of my mother’s head.
“Come on, Vivi. Let the boy breathe. We’re here all weekend. You’ll have plenty of time to talk with him.”
I didn’t know why my father was lying to my mother like that.
My focus and attention was going on my girls and on being a better parent to them—than the one she was to me.
It would probably take decades to unpack the impact of her absenteeism in my life.
And if she wasn’t in therapy or willing to get into it, there was no way we could even begin to scratch the surface.
The most I could offer was for her to try to build some type of relationship with Dakota and Destin.
But even then, I wouldn’t let her do that if she was still self-involved and pulling disappearing acts.
“Uh, let’s put the bags in the truck and head out. I see the airport cops looking over this way,” I told them.
“I know you were probably surprised to see me standing with your daddy at the airport,” Vivienne said from the passenger’s seat as I maneuvered my way out of the airport.
“Well, he said that was your goal—to surprise me,” I told her.
“It was. We haven’t seen each other since . . .” She seemed to think about when we’d last seen each other.
“Since Granny Bernie’s funeral. You and Patricia were both at the funeral.” Patricia was my grandmother, Vivienne’s mother.
“That’s right. Wow. That was ten years ago.”
“How’s Patricia?”
She sucked her teeth. “That lady is over seventy years old and still hanging in the streets.”
“What did the doctor tell you?” my father asked her from the back seat.
She gave a weary sigh. “That I can’t control Patricia’s actions. I can only control my reactions. If she’s her big age and still hasn’t learned that the streets don’t love nobody, then that’s on her.”
My father laughed. “You added that last part yourself.”
She joined him in the laughter. “You’re right, G. I did.”
“What doctor told you that?” I probed.
“Well, first the cardiologist. When I had the heart attack last year?—”
“You had a heart attack? Dad didn’t tell me.”
“I asked him not to.” She sighed again. “It was a wake-up call, Kept. I was in Vegas with some friends and a few of my co-workers from the bar.”
For as long as I could remember, Vivienne had worked as a bartender.
“We were at the pool drinking, dancing, and basically clowning around. A feeling of the worse heartburn on earth took me down to one of the beach chairs. Next thing I knew, I blacked out.”
“Damn. Sorry to hear that. Glad you’re okay.”
“Me too,” Gannon mumbled from the back.
“Gannon was the first person I thought to call when I woke up from the surgery. A few hours later, he was walking his fine ass into my hospital room. Had all the nurses swooning.”
My dad chuckled very I’m that nigga like.
I shook my head.
“You on AARP and still arrogant, huh?” I joked.
Vivienne hooted with laughter.
“Fuck you, Son. If you keep living, you’re gonna be on AARP one day too.”
“I’m looking forward to it. They give y’all old asses all kinds of discounts.”
We all laughed.
“So, you crack jokes now, Kept?” Vivienne questioned. “I remember you always being quiet and soft spoken. Your Granny used to say I gave you the right name because you were ‘as quiet as Kept.’ Or is this just you and Gannon’s relationship?”
“You know I’ve always had a good relationship with my boy. Thank you for giving him to me, baby.” He reached forward and gave her shoulders a little massage.
The fuck?
And even though I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to know, I had to ask, “Yo, are you two?—”
Vivienne cut me off. “We’re getting married.”
She flashed her sizable diamond in front of my face as I glanced from it to the road in front of me.
“Yeah, she finally agreed to make an honest man out of me,” my father added.
The fuck?
My head was messed up. There were so many things I wanted to say and so many questions that I wanted to ask that I could barely think straight.
For years, as a rich and popular professional athlete, Gannon Boudreaux had chased Vivienne Russell. And she refused to be caught. She refused to carry any of the pregnancies they’d created to term and only had me to spite Priscilla.
She was his mistress for years, who never seemed to even want a more permanent position in his life. And now that they were both in their fifties, they were getting married? This kind of shit was why my monthly therapy bill was so high. There was too damn much to unpack in just my immediate family.
“Are you guys hungry? Did you want to stop and have lunch?” I asked as I left the interstate at the Jackson Island exit.
“I’m too excited to meet my grand girls to be willing to stop anywhere but a red light,” Vivienne insisted. “And besides that, since the heart attack, Gannon and I eat clean—no fried foods, no red meat, no flour, no bread, no dairy, no rice, no noodles, no corn.”
“And I told you,” my dad said to her, “this boy has similar eating habits. You got groceries at the house, June?”
My father liked to refer to me as June, which was short for Junior.
It used to drive Priscilla crazy, but he refused to stop doing it.
I didn’t mind being called June by him. I didn’t mind that he considered me his junior.
After all, I was literally named Kept Gannon Boudreaux.
It was the fighting that it caused between him and Priscilla that always put knots in my stomach when he said it.
Even as a kid, I always felt that my mom caused enough trouble in their relationship for two people.
I didn’t want to be the cause of any additional drama.
Once he and Priscilla divorced and he moved out, I was able to settle more comfortably into acceptance of his nickname for me.
“Your mother likes to prepare our food herself. She likes to know exactly what’s in everything she eats. Do you mind if she cooks in your kitchen?”
Vivienne cooked? That was a new fucking development. I didn’t remember her even boiling water for tea. That was crazy.
“Nah, I don’t mind.” Honestly, I wasn’t sure if I minded or not. My thoughts were floating somewhere over Jupiter.
As my father and I stood alone at the back of my truck lifting their luggage from the trunk, I spoke.
“Yo, Dad, I didn’t know you were bringing .
. .” I hesitated, wondering if he expected me to call her mom.
I hadn’t called her that since I started talking.
I decided not to make things weird and addressed her in the way I always addressed her.
“Vivienne. I was going to put you in the guest room near the loft, but it’s kinda small.
You and,” I chuckled, “your fiancée should take my room.”
He chuckled too. “Fuck you, June.”
“I can’t believe your ass spun the block on Vivienne. She’s had your nuts in her fist since the beginning of time,” I whispered.
He shrugged. Both palms faced the sky. “What can I say? When you love somebody, you love ’em. What would you do if the girls’ mother was in the hospital and needed you?”
“Tell her to call the motherfucker she skipped off to London with.” I paused. “Or maybe try to figure out if there was a way to just toss some money at the situation. I would help her out financially, but I don’t want her back. And I damn sure wouldn’t put no ring on her finger.”
He shrugged again. “Guess that means that you don’t really love her.”
I could’ve told him that.