Chapter 2 #2
“No. What’s going on? Where are you coming from?” I asked. Her hair was nicely styled, and she was dressed in a cute denim look.
“I’m about to head to the airport. I’m going to New York, but I’ll be back in the morning.
You not saying what’s wrong with you. What’s going on?
Me, and Free have been trying to get in contact with you all morning.
She’s at the shop right now with back-to-back appointments, so she couldn’t come.
That’s why she sent me. What happened?” she was on my ass, looking at me with her arms folded, waiting for me to spill the beans, and let her know what was bothering me.
You could look into her eyes and tell that she cared.
Tommie was my girl. She was my child that would push every button of mine with her mouth, but I loved her to death.
Our relationship hadn’t always been this perfect.
When my girls were younger, I used to get on them, telling them not to be like me by going out there, and having babies while they were teenagers.
I didn’t expect my kids to be perfect because I was once a kid, so I knew that kids would fuck up from time to time, but as heavy as I pushed them to not have kids during their teenage years, you would think that they would have heard me loud, and clear.
There was always that one that was going to try you though.
Tommie ended up being that one, getting pregnant at sixteen, following in the same footsteps that I didn’t want her following in.
I remember beating her ass for getting pregnant because that was honestly the last thing that I wanted for any of my children. I beat her ass the same way my mama beat mine when I got pregnant as a teen.
As if her getting pregnant with her first child at sixteen wasn’t enough, she turns around and does the same thing two years later.
Tommie didn’t fear me, and that’s where her and I would clash at.
The same way that my mama ended up raising my girls for me when I was a young mom, so that I could run the streets, and chase behind a fast life that I felt like I was missing out on, was the same way that I was forced to raise Tommie’s kids at a point in their life.
Tommie and I used to go at it hard. Like, there were times when I wanted to fight that girl like she was a stranger off the streets.
Our relationship didn’t get better until her girls got older.
It came with maturity on her end. These days, Tommie and I had the best kind of relationship.
She carried on like I was her homegirl, always wanting to sit on the phone with me, and invite me out to places with her.
I didn’t mind though because I would rather that, than to be beefing with any of my children.
“Have you talked to Dionne?” I asked her.
“Not since yesterday. She told me that she wasn’t feeling good, so I left her alone. What Dionne gotta do with you laying up in the dark and not answering the phone?” she continued to press the issue.
“Your sister told me something the other day, and it was very disturbing. It’s not my secret to tell though. Talk to Dionne when you get back from New York,” I responded, sitting up in bed, and I pressed my back against the headboard.
I pulled my knees up, and I just stared off into space. The whole time, I could feel Tommie’s eyes on me, and I’m sure the wheels in her head were turning, as she was trying to figure out what the hell I was talking about.
“So, you just going to give me broken pieces of information, and think that I’m not going to be confused on what you’re talking about?
What’s going on ma? Is it something with Dionte?
He’s not eligible for parole anymore?” she asked, shooting out what she thought it was.
I just nodded my head no, letting her know that that’s not what it was.
Tommie sighed heavy, and I watched her as she took her knee out of the bed, walked around the bed, and she came over to where I was. She took a seat on the side, and her leg was bouncing up and down, trying to figure out what was wrong with me.
She picked her hand up, put it on my knee, and those beautiful, big brown eyes of hers that I often wanted to pull out of her head because of the way that she would work my nerves, were staring back at me, holding onto so much confusion, and worry.
Tommie was my hard child. The child that rarely showed any emotion, and when she did, her ass tends to get violent.
Tommie wasn’t tapped into her sensitive side like my oldest child.
Tommie was hard, and a lot of that had to do with a lot of the daddy issues that she had, due to her father not being in the picture, and some of the men that she’s entertained over the years.
So, to see her sitting before me, showing signs of worry, and care, this was a lot because in serious moments, she tends to laugh stuff off, so that she didn’t have to deal with the root of the problem. She was genuinely concerned right now.
“What happened then, ma? Your scaring me a little bit, and if you’re not going to tell me, I’m not about to get on this flight to New York because this is all that I’m going to be worried about.
Is it Nivea? Your thinking about her? I know you tend to get sad and miss her the most when the holidays come up, or her birthday.
Is that it? How come you’re laying up in the room in the dark? ” she continued to press the issue.
As she was asking me these questions, I was biting my lip, fighting like hell to keep my tears to myself. My throat was burning because of the fight that I was putting up.
I eventually lost the fight because tears started pouring from my eyes, and I dropped the gaze that I had on my daughter, lifting my hands up, so that I could clasps them together, and I just sat there, twiddling with my fingers.
“Dionne… she went to church with me the other morning. She had a real tough… a real tough time in service. She was screaming and crying. It was to the point that a few of the church members had… had to come over and help me out with her. After… After service, she went up front and... and she asked for prayer,” I was crying, trying to get through this, and tell Tommie what was going on, and I couldn’t keep my gaze on her because I feared the kind of reaction that I was going to get from her.
I could feel her stare piercing through me though, so I knew that she was hanging onto my every word.
“When we got back to my house… she told me what was bothering her. She… she revealed to me that Torrence raped her when she was eleven years old,” I got it out, and when I did, Tommie instantly took her hand off my knee, she jumped up from the bed, and I watched as both her hands went over her mouth.
She didn’t make a sound though. She didn’t scream upon hearing the news. She didn’t cry, but her silence was worth a thousand words right now.
“Ma, what the fuck!” she eventually let out after about a minute of her being completely silent.
I could see the rage in her eyes. There was a box of tissue that was still in bed with me from all the crying that I had been doing, so I pulled a couple of sheets out, so that I could wipe my eyes, along with blow my nose.
Tommie never came back over to the bed with me. Instead, she went over to the wall, posted her back up against it, and she said nothing else.
For about five minutes, she stood there in silence, looking down at the floor, probably trying to process this entire thing.
“Why she just now saying something about this shit ma? Why the fuck wouldn’t she have told you this years ago when it happened? What? She thought that you weren’t going to believe her or something?” she asked.
I wasn’t mad at Tommie for asking me that because it was a question that I’d asked Dionne as well.
I had no understanding why she would decide to keep this away from me.
I knew that growing up, I could be a little tough with my girls, but they knew that they could come to me about anything.
My kids knew that I would beat anyone’s asses when it came to them.
I was supposed to be their protector. I thought that they knew that their mom would go to war with whoever when it came to them, but I guess not.
“I asked her that same thing. She knew that I would believe her, but she feared the whole world finding out about it, so she carried that secret along with her for all these years. She broke my heart with this shit, and I’ve been sitting in this bed, sulking since I found out.
She didn’t just keep this secret from me.
She kept it from ya’ll too. Eleven years old is practically still a baby.
My baby had to live with that. Do you know how heavy and hard that had to be?
How much punishment that was for her? That’s the part that’s making me sick to my stomach,” I shared, speaking on the part that was disturbing me the most.
“Damn ma. When did he do this? I believe I was like nine when you were messing around with Torrence. I don’t remember a time when you left us home alone with him. I think he only came to the house a couple of times, but those times, you were always there,” she said.
“It happened on New Years Eve. I was drunk that night. That moment right there is when I failed her. She said that he came in her room that night,” I shared, and upon hearing that, she just dragged her body down to the floor, sitting with her legs extended, and she kept her hands in her lap, just trying to process all of this.
“At this point, I’ll kill this nigga myself because what the fuck!” Tommie said moments later.
“I’m ten steps ahead of you. He’s in jail right now.
Dionne told me that Tank told her that he was drinking, and driving, and hit a pedestrian.
The person that he hit is in critical condition, basically fighting for his life, and if he dies, Torrence is going to be charged with manslaughter,” I said, and when I finished, she looked at me with confused eyes.
“How does Tank know that?” she inquired.
“Oh. How the fuck could I leave that out? Torrence is Tank’s dad,” I shared.
“Ma, whatttt? What the fuck! You knew that?” she screamed, shocked by the news.
“I didn’t. When I met his trifling ass, he told me that he didn’t have any kids.
Dionne is two years older than Tank, which would mean that when I was dealing with Torrence, he had a whole nine-year-old son out there!
After we broke up, I didn’t keep up with him, never really saw him in passing, so I would never have known that he had a son.
When I heard about him over the years, people would just say how he was a drunk.
That’s it,” I said, and she nodded her head.
“Damn ma. I keep thinking about the other night when we were all over here. Remember when we were all talking about your exes, and Dionne got mad and stormed off? Here I am, thinking that she was just having another one of her dramatic episodes, when the whole time, my sister was fighting some shit internally that I never even knew about. I feel so fuckin bad,” Tommie’s voice cracked, and the tear that did fall, she quickly wiped it away.
Again, she was my child that rarely showed emotions, so the fact that this piece of news would make her crack like this, that’s how you knew the weight that it carried.
I could only imagine what this news was going to do to Free.
Free was the sister that truly adored Dionne, and even with my daughters being grown women, you could tell that Free still looked up to Dionne as a big sister.
Anything that Free would purchase for herself, any accomplishment that she would have, Dionne was the sister that she would always be excited to tell because to her, the praise just felt different when it came from your big sister.
“You didn’t know, Tommie,” I had to let her know, so that she didn’t go around trying to blame herself. I didn’t want her doing the same thing that I was currently doing.
“Whatever you do, don’t tell Dionte when he comes home. You know how he is about Dionne. If you tell him that, he’ll be right back in prison,” she said, and it’s crazy that she’d called that out because I had been thinking it.
Dionte would go into a full rage, and spiral if it ever got out to him what another man had done to his daughter.
I just remember when he was locked up, and I went on to have more kids, and how he would threaten me over the phone, telling me not to have those niggas around his daughter.
Even on a prison line, where the calls were being recorded, I remember the threats, where he would tell me that he would kill my ass if one of my other kids daddy did something to Dionne.
If he found out about it, all those plans of him coming home, and wanting to get back with me would go right out of the window.
He would forever hate me. I couldn’t stop Dionne though if she decided to tell her dad.
If she wanted to live in her truth by telling him, then that was on her, but me on the other hand?
I would be a fool to say it. He would kill me, and find a way to get to Torrence, so that he could kill him too.
He would proudly serve that lifetime prison sentence afterwards too, knowing that he got justice for his daughter.