Dysfunctional (The Root of Betrayal) Page 3

  Grandma went to cosmetology school when she arrived in Michigan, but has been doing her sisters' hair since she was ten. She became Alabama’s youngest beautician and that’s how I came to be. My grandmother had a customer, they called her Dee. She paid my grandma to do her hair, and that’s how Jeanette and Trent met, while grandma and Dee mixed up perm and shared recipes. Their children were under the stairs, or in the shed sharing and mixing body fluids. Trent’s family had money and so when they found out that Jeanette was pregnant, they didn’t want to have any part of that child whether if it was his or not. See my father was tied up with this other girl whose parents had money, so they wanted to associate only with their “kind.”

  Sure grandma was good enough to do her hair; that was a service she needed. Dee thought that she was better than us. After I was born, horns came through skulls, blood was shed and bones were fractured. It was something else grandma explained to me; a family war that would’ve made the Hatfield’s and McCoy’s seem like the Peace Corps. Eventually, someone was going to die. Grandma went to jail for breaking windows out of Dee’s house trying to lure her outside, but that was only after Dee told Jeanette not to send anymore letters or pictures of “that” baby to her house because she wasn’t her grandchild. “Are you serious grandma?” They ended up moving to Detroit after granddaddy got a job at Ford Motor Company, but not before people took trips to the hospital on both sides.

  Now that brings us to our current set of problems; Jeanette walks around looking pitiful and heavy-hearted because her man hasn’t called or came home. She’s so sad, all she does is eat and sleep.

  Juan and Alexis are an item and have been for quite some time now. Grandma doesn’t like him much, but she’s twenty-two, so she’s in that rebellious phase. This short, peanut headed boy thinks he’s God’s gift to women, and I don’t see why because he’s not attractive in the least bit. I watch them when they are around, and I think he’s a punk. You know how some men have a protective vibe about them? Like if you were in danger, you didn’t have any uncertainty that he would stand up and fight for you, or at least with you…Well, I’m sorry to report that Juan looks like the type of person that would throw you to the dogs to get bit to save his own ass. Scooby Doo and Shaggy would fight before he would and we all know about old Scooby.

  Jerry, Lynette’s boyfriend (who’s an overweight comedian), strives for attention and makes jokes about people, when he looks like he’s one burger shy of exploding. Where the hell did she find Jerry? Actually, where in the hell did they find these jerks? Excuse me miss? Can you point me in the direction where I can return these men? I wish that it was that simple,☺ because a lot of folks would’ve been returned starting with my parents.

  Diane’s previous love interests consisted of books, homework, and more books. Can you say revenge of the nerds? She’s the darkest one in the gang, and I think she’s dealing with issues since everyone else is light skinned or brown. As far as looks go, we all bear a resemblance of each other, and you can sure tell that we are family, even Darkie. She’s going through something because she has “gone” and completely changed her apparel. “Gone” are the unappealing overalls, replaced by denim jeans, and her bifocal glasses have been swapped out in favor of colored contacts. Perhaps it’s this new “mystery” guy she’s been seeing who’s responsible for this transformation—whatever the reason, it’s good to see her happy at least.

  Nia, my best-friend (well that’s what she calls herself), resides around the corner from my grandmother, and I’m kind of involved with her brother, Charles, I used to be in love with him, but he never looked at me twice because of Adrian Chattel, so once I came back to grandma’s house this past summer, he probably just realized my C cups and my fuller jeans. He’s interested, and now I’m not, but I talk to him just to conquer something that I always wished for. Okay, I’ve explained a lot about my family to you, so you shouldn’t be confused when I tell you a story. It’s eight o’ clock, and the Cosby’s are on…Good night.

  BACK DOWN MEMORY LANE

  “Let’s Get It On” played softly in the background on the kitchen’s small radio as Jeanette and her mother had one of those “Grown Folk” conferences going on at a moderate, peaceful, tone. Jeanette took a seat at the far end of the table sipping on some tea while her mother washed the dishes.

  Alexis moved like a zombie from her room to the bathroom, and back without noticing anyone was in the kitchen. Javon and Gavin had left the house around ten this morning to handle their regular drug dealings. Tamara searched for a secret place to hide her diary for when she visited on the weekends.

  “I can’t put it here,” she said, as she had attempted to put it behind the dresser. “This should be good,” she mumbled, but then changed her mind.

  Every place she thought of wasn’t good enough because it was accessible. In the back of Tamara’s closet, there was a small door that had a piece of wood that nailed it shut.

  “What do we have here?”

  With great force she removed the piece of wood from the wall with a hammer that she kept underneath her mattress and opened the secret door. She retrieved her flashlight from under her pillow and checked out the storage space. She’d tucked the book against the wall and used the wood to cover it up.

  “Look at all these damn spiders,” she said, as she held her hand over her mouth. “I hope I don’t come across one, or a dead corpse in here,” she nervously looked in. She thought that she heard voices in the kitchen, so she decided to go out there and be nosey.

  Barbara and Jeanette appear to be engaged in a serious conversation, so she tiptoed to the sofa and listened attentively.

  “She’s my child mama, and I know her,” Jeanette mumbled.

  “I’m not disputing that she’s your child, but I know her as well, I did raise her for the first twelve years of her life,” Barbara mentioned. “You’ve only had her for two years now.”

  She laughed softly. “Maybe so, but these are the worst years; her teenage years. She—”

  Barbara interrupted. “I’ll take her back, she can’t be any worse than you and your sisters during y’all terrible teenage years.”

  “Hmm,” Jeanette chuckled. “I wasn’t that bad and you know it mama,” she giggled.

  “You got mad at me and left home because I told you not to write or try to contact Trent. You blamed me because Dee didn’t want you and Trent to be together. I went to jail over the situation an—”

  “Mama, you only made matters worse,” she retorted. “We were going to work things out, Trent and I. And I asked you not to keep the confusion brewing, but you didn’t listen to me.”

  Jeanette and Barbara could be together laughing and hugging, but when this topic surfaced, cursing and door slamming soon followed, and today it most likely would end on the same note.

  “Are you stuck on stupid Jeanette? Or are you just plain retarded?” She shook her head out of pure disgust. “If you didn’t see that I was doing what was best for you and the baby, then I really don’t know what to tell you,” she said, slamming her cup down on the table. (And the slamming begins.)

  “No matter what you said that boy wasn’t going to go against ‘his mother’ for you or anyone else. They had money, so she turned her nose up and frowned down on us. She only had money from her inheritance. Other than that she would have been like the rest of us!”

  “But—”

  “But, my ass,” Barbara screamed. (There’s the cursing.)

  “Once you ‘become’ a mother you will understand that you don’t allow people to mistreat your children and still let them interact with them. She said the baby wasn’t his, and so you got mad when you had to get an abortion. They weren’t going to help take care of the baby, and they made that very clear. We were barely making ends meet living paycheck to paycheck. So I didn’t know where to turn. And then a month later you turned around and got pregnant again by him and hid it from me,” she said shaking her head. “But you got mad at me! He used you be
cause he had no business sleeping with you! He had a fiancée, so Dee had to cover his shit up. She wasn’t going to let your, what did she call you, let me think,” she looked up at the ceiling. “Your low-life, slutty ass ruin his life.”

  “She w—”

  Barbara swung her hand up to intercept. “I went to jail, and my brother was put in the hospital from her brothers beating him up. Your father and uncle lost their jobs because of this. All of them were put in jail from fighting at that bar and ended up with many cuts and broken bones. Your so-called friends turned their backs on you, but the final straw was when they tossed a cocktail bomb in our stables. It was just a matter of time before someone died.”

  “I didn’t ask any of you to fight over that! Y’all like to fight!”

  Barbara ignored Jeanette and massaged her temples to relieve her migraine. “One, two, three,” she exhaled and counted. “Four, five, six,” she continued.

  “I didn’t come here to talk about that Mama, that’s water under the bridge,” she said. “I came to see if Tamara wanted to come home early, or if she wanted to stay a few more days. You were the one who told me to get out of the car. I wasn’t even going to come in.”

  Barbara marched over to the counter, and poured herself a second cup of coffee. “Speaking about Tamara, I need to talk to you about her?”

  She exhaled. “What about her? What did she do now?” Jeanette wondered aloud.

  “You want some more tea?” Barbara rose from the table, but Jeanette declined on the tea. She cleared her throat pondering on how to come out and tell her. “Friday, Tamara called me crying saying that Damarcus had tried to rape her, so we had to go to the house and get her—”

  “What? Mama, I’m so tired of Tamara’s fabricated stories. We’ve went over this before, and I’m sick to death of it!” Jeanette struck the table with her hand and scooted away from the table.

  “What makes you so sure that she’s lying?” Barbara asked. “Or are you just hoping that she is? Besides, I believe her because she has no reason to lie on him,” she coughed. “I don’t see why you allowed an ex-convict to move in with you and your daughter.”

  She chuckled. “You always tried to regulate everything that your children did, and I despised that. I know him, and he didn’t lay a hand on her, she doesn’t like him, and none of y’all do either!”

  Barbara experienced the stiffness in her shoulders so she decided to step away from Jeanette before she struck her for talking senseless. She rinsed her cup out and wiped down the counter for the THIRD consecutive time.

  “You work all day and you got her there with him and his friends. I guess you didn’t take heed when Calvin tried to touch her, or she was lying about that too?”

  Jeanette rose up from the table. “If you believed he raped her, why didn’t anyone take her to the hospital, or call the police?”

  “How do you know that we didn’t take her, or never made a report to the police?”

  “Did you?”

  Barbara chuckled. “You mean to tell me that you didn’t expect for something like this to happen with all those strange men around? No one said you should not have been with him, but living with y’all should have been a no-no. What about him pounding on you? Love isn’t supposed to hurt baby.”

  “No one is perfect; you remained with daddy after you found out about him and Aunt Max,” she retorted.

  Within a blink of an eye, Barbara had whacked her across the face before she could finish the sentence. “How dare you try and throw that up in my face like that, and how dare you speak about your father like that? He’s been nothing but good to you girls!”

  “And he was good to Aunt Max too, I heard!” she replied sarcastically, holding her left cheek. “You forgave daddy, but never spoke to your sister again.”

  “Don’t you worry about me and my sister’s relationship,” she screamed.

  Barbara temporarily lost control once she stood in front of Jeanette’s disrespectful mouth. She reached for the collar of her shirt to choke the life out of her, but Jeanette quickly moved to the other side of the table. “I don’t have to stand here and take this, I’m grown,” she said.

  Tamara walked in laughing. “What in the world is going on in here, World War III?” She wanted nothing more than to see them fight, but decided against it.

  Barbara told Jeanette that she wouldn’t know how to be grown if it jumped in her ass and took over her body.

  “Good one grandma.”

  “You mind your business Tamara,” Jeanette yelled.

  “Okay, whenever you get some business, or even a business, let me know.”

  “Tamara!” Barbara bellowed. “You know Jeanette, just because you work, it doesn’t make you grown. Tamara does all the work around the house so you can shut up using the word GROWN. An adult would have raised their own child, not been in the streets with every Tom, Dick, and Harry! A grown person would not willingly put their child in harm’s way for a piece of sorry dick! You had that child and five days later abandoned her and didn’t look back. ”

  “I went to school! Why did you tell me it was okay to go on with my life and go back to school if you didn’t mean it?” she replied with tears running down her cheeks.

  “Don’t you dare try and blame me girl! I told you to go on with your life here, not move out of town and forget about your daughter! You made the decision to run off!”

  Alexis walked into the kitchen.

  “Okay, okay...Look, Jeanette, I think you should leave,” Alexis grabbed her arm. “Mama’s eyebrows are starting to connect, so you know after that I won’t be able to save you, so come on.”

  “Get your hands off of me!” Jeanette yelled, as she snatched away from Alexis.

  “I’ll leave when I get ready to leave! This isn’t your house—”

  “But you’re upsetting my damn mama, so you should leave. You manage to do this shit every time you come round here. Just leave Nette!”

  Jeanette looked at Tamara. “So…uh—are you going home or what?”

  “You don’t have to go if you don’t want! Let her ass stay in that house with that crazy man! She talks about you being disrespectful to her ass, where does she think you get it from? Look at how she talks to me? What goes around comes right back around!”

  “Mama, that’s not right to say.” Alexis gently pushed her mother into the living room on the couch before she had raised her pressure too high. The veins in her forehead became visible. “Mama calm down. That IS her daughter, remember?”

  “I don’t give a shit,” she stated. “She doesn’t treat her like a daughter.”

  “I’m not ready to go to your house. You and Damarcus don’t want me there anyway,” came from the kitchen.

  Oh they about to start, Alexis thought. “I don’t feel like being a mediator today, damn.”

  THE CONFRONTATION

  Juan cruised down Alexis’s street to see if her room light was on; it wasn’t. He parked at the end of the block and walked down to the house. He watched over his shoulders, making sure that no one trailed him. A reoccurrence of last’s month robbery was not in his plans. “A few more houses,” he told himself.

  It was 3:50 in the morning and Lexis would most likely be dead to the world, but it was imperative that he talked to her. Their phone conversation earlier didn’t end on a good note and he wanted to straighten some problems out.

  He pondered. Please let Alexis be in her room alone, and up, he’d crossed his fingers and prayed to himself, as he lightly tapped on her bedroom window. He paused a few seconds before he sought for something to stand on. He discovered a brick lying nearby the bushes; he positioned it by the window, so he could look through her window. He decided that if she didn’t soon approach, he was going to run off. Alexis had become aware of a shadow and figured that it was Juan.

  She eased out of her bed tiptoeing out of the house and around the back to the side. “Boo,” she nudged him in the back causing him to stumble off the brick.

&nbs
p; His eyes were bulged and frightened. “Girl, are you crazy?” he asked, as he held his rapidly pulsating heart. “Why did you do that?”

  She giggled. “You are such a scaredy-cat, Juan,” she held her stomach. “You thought that I was my mama?”

  “I didn’t know who you were. Don’t do that again,” he retorted.

  She questioned his reasons for visiting her home so late, knowing that would add fuel for her mother to act out.

  “You hung up on me, so I decided to come by,” he explained to her. “All you had to do was answer the phone.”

  She tilted her body toward the streetlight and looked at her watch. “That was what,” she paused, and checked her watch, “three hours ago so you weren’t that concerned about me being mad at you.”

  He stood there all childlike fumbling with his fingers. Something he had a tendency of doing when he was lying to you. “I had some important runs to make, but after I took care of that I came straight over here to see you,” he tried to lure her close to him.

  “You should have kept on past here because I don’t believe you,” she said, as she snatched away from him.

  “Why did you hang up on me?” he whispered in her ear.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t have time to argue with you about keeping my baby, and I’m not about to argue with you about it,” she folded her arms.

  “That’s why you are here now–to talk about that? It’s my baby, my body, and I haven’t decided what I want to do yet, and you will not convince me, one way or the other.”

  She started towards the front of the house, and he followed. She continued fussing at him, almost like his mother had done now and again, but his mind was someplace else, somewhere far away.