CHAPTER 16 #3
Her words reached out and grabbed me. Gentle. Firm. An older woman with a gaze that mapped out my entire struggle. I nodded. Kept my mouth shut, certain my words would crumble if I tried to speak.
I claimed a spot in the back row. Planted on the edge of my seat, ready for a quick departure. My eyes stayed glued to the floor, avoiding every face in the room. I needed to remain invisible.
The stories started one by one. No distractions to fill the silence, just voices finally speaking on the truth of their situations.
“I lost my job…”
“I ain’t seen my kids in two years…”
“I woke up in a hospital and didn’t know how I got there…”
I absorbed every syllable. The words landing softly, like dust in a room I ain’t opened in years.
I stayed motionless in my seat, certain that moving even an inch would force me to touch the truth.
My thoughts was racing, desperate to create distance where none existed.
I started building walls. I needed a buffer between myself and the weight of their words.
‘That ain’t me. I’m not that far gone.’ I tried to convince myself. The denial well-rehearsed. The silence after those thoughts was patient, didn’t argue back. It waited for me to make the next move. And that pressure was unbearable.
A woman began to speak. Her delivery was gentle. No shouting. No dramatics. She understood that a whisper carries more power than a scream when you standing on solid ground.
“I ain’t think I had a problem either,” she started. A small breath slipped between her words.
“I thought I was jus’ survivin’.”
That sentence reached inside and found a memory I didn't realize I was still holding onto. She examined her open hands, flipping them over, absorbing the truth of her past. She lifted her head.
“’Til I realized everythang I was tryin’ to survive…” Her tone grew sharp and honest, cutting through the air. She went quiet. That stillness acted as a magnet, drawing the attention of the whole basement until we was all hanging on what came next.
“…was really everythang I was runnin’ from.”
Not a soul moved. No coughing. No metal chairs dragging across the tile.
Like the stillness itself seemed to be paying attention.
Her words landed in the center of the circle, and the burden shifted from her shoulders onto the group.
My wall started to crumble. A crack forming in chamber I had been holding shut for too long.
I squirmed in my seat, the metal groaning under my weight.
The sound echoed through the silence, amplified and intrusive.
I was suddenly aware of every eye on me.
I couldn't hide anymore. The liquor was a distraction.
But that was only the top layer. My chest was packed tight with things I couldn't name.
My mind took off, chasing ghosts I been trying to outrun for years.
Death took my father before I had the words to explain the hole it left.
I was only two or three. I have no connection to his voice or his spirit.
All I ever possessed was the stories. Fragmented pieces.
Hand-me-down legacies that never matched the person I needed him to be.
He was gone before I could even grasp what was being taken from me.
And that brand of grief don't leave you with a single memory to lean on. Nothing but a head full of questions.
What would he sound like calling my name? Would I look like him? Walk like him? Would he have been hard on me or the one I ran to when things fell apart?
I have no answers. But at least he knew my face. He held me. He knew I existed in his world. And truthfully, that knowledge carries a sharper pain. It means I had value in his eyes. But still… he’s gone.
I spent my childhood watching how other kids moved with their fathers. I became an expert at pretending it didn't matter, that I didn't require that kind of love. But that gap in my life never closed. I’m still grieving a man whose face I can't even picture.
So, yeah, that pain? Is eating at me in ways I don’t even notice until I am here and the pain I been carrying finally makes its presence know.
My mind went rogue. The floodgates was wide open. Like a switch flipped and I lost the ability to keep my own secrets.
When Mama passed, she took more than her physical self.
It tore chunks out of my spirit and left the wounds exposed.
My ache for her is constant. I would give both arms to hear her voice again.
I reach for the phone before I can stop myself, thumb dancing over the buttons.
And the weight of her absence drops on me all over again. She ain’t picking up.
And I miss Dee something terrible. My baby sister.
My heart. One second she was here, the next she was gone.
Now her life is confined to a cell. I had zero notice.
They snatched her right when I needed her most.
I was struggling with the resentment. How she could be so reckless playing getaway driver for a bank job.
It felt like a betrayal, like she chose that life over the people who actually needed her.
The rest of my family, we ain’t break all at once.
That would’ve been too easy. We came apart slow.
Piece by piece. Like bad fruit rotting from the inside out.
Ten kids under one roof, always in each other’s space.
Now we all scattered. Like we was never meant to belong to each other in the first place.
People assume poverty only empty your pockets.
They wrong. It empties your house first turning full rooms into echoes.
Empties your table, not just of food, but of laughter.
Chairs sit there waiting on people who ain’t coming back.
Phone calls get shorter, then stop. Names that used to light up your caller ID turn into memories you’ve seen but don’t touch.
Until one day you look around and realize the family you knew is a ghost.
Everyone took their own path, and none of them lead back here.
Daniel was the oldest, the anchor. Folks always claimed he was the spitting image of Daddy.
I used to study his expression, hunting for fragments of my father.
Hoping that if I looked long enough, I would see my daddy staring back at me.
He wasn't just my sibling; he represented the best version of a man I had never seen.
Losing him was like someone reached inside and snatched a piece of me I hadn't even finished growing. It was like my father’s funeral on a loop, only the childhood blur was gone. This time, I was standing center stage in the grief, and the heat was unforgiving.
He was twenty-five, I was fifteen when they came to the door.
I remember that knock. And the whole house held its breath, like the air in the room already knew the truth.
I can still hear those boots dragging across the linoleum, the floorboards groaning under a weight they wasn't meant to hold.
Then the door creaked open. Two voices, hushed and jagged, cutting through the dark.
My body was already bracing for the impact.
“He’s not coming back.” Just like that. A handful of words, plain and cold. That’s all it takes to dismantle a family.
“A drunk driver.” Three more words. That’s what they gave us to explain a whole life gone. No goodbye stretched out long enough to even hold onto. A knock…a sentence…and life as I knew it was altered forever.
That moment right there is a permanent tenant in my spirit. And now, I haul it around in my silence, in the rhythm of my steps, in every single thing I’m too afraid to reach for.
Folks always ask me, Why you don’t drive? Why you always on the bus? Standing out there in the cold, waiting? I keep it light, try to make it sound simple.
“It ain’t my thing.”
Lie. The truth was I can’t do it. Can’t bring myself to get behind a wheel.
Hands wrapped around it, having that control in my grip.
I knew what lived on the other side of that.
I knew how quick it could turn. How one decision, one drink, could become a knock on a door.
How it could become another family standing in a calm house waiting to hear a sentence that splits their life in two.
I know what alcohol does. I know what it takes.
I know how fast it steals. How it don’t ask permission.
Don’t give no warning. Don’t care who it leaves behind. And still, I can’t stop drinking.
The room fell into itself. A girl sniffled, like she was trying to hide it.
The old man in the front row moved his head, slow, he understood without needing words.
I fidgeted in my seat, hands still gripping my purse tightly.
All the facts I been outrunning finally catching up and standing in front of me. Waiting for me to see it.
I had nowhere left to run and nowhere to hide. The conversation in the room continued, as I stayed lost in my head.
Tony crossed my mind. The only man I ever loved.
He wasn’t perfect. Neither was I. When you spend your whole life watching people leave, watching things fall apart, watching love come with conditions, and then a man shows up telling you all the good things, it does something to you.
Tony is out there somewhere. Still choosing the streets.
Still choosing everything but us. And I was still waiting.
Holding onto some broken idea that one day he would walk through that door and be the man I needed him to be.
I realized, I wasn’t only addicted to the bottle. I was addicted to hope that never showed up.
When the meeting ended, nobody rushed out. They talked, hugged, laughed a little. Broken people who found a way to breathe again. I got up. Still unsure. Still embarrassed. Still feeling I didn’t belong there. That same older woman caught my eye again.
“Come back tomorrow suga’,”
she said. Not pushy. Not demanding like the block. And I did. I came back the next day. And the next.
Somewhere between them folding chairs, the stories, the quiet moments where nobody judged me, I started to feel something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Possibility. Like maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t too far gone to come back. I couldn’t save Shay. But maybe I can still save Summer.