Single Mom (20 page)

This tall Hispanic babe was her secretary. I said, “I’m Jimmie Daniels. I had an appointment to see, ah, Denise Stewart, at one o’clock. Is she still in, or is she busy?” I was dying to call her Neecy, but I was willing to bet that if I said it, her secretary wouldn’t know who the hell I was talking about.

“Ah, yeah, she’s still in. Hold on one minute.” She buzzed Neecy on an office phone. “A Jimmie Daniels is out here to see you. He says he had a one o’clock appointment … Mmm hmm. Okay.” She hung up the line and said, “She’ll be with you in five minutes.”

Shit! The last thing I wanted to do was sit out there and think about what I wanted to say to her. I just wanted to be raw and spontaneous. Sometimes, when you think too much, you end up ruling out a lot of things. Then again, sometimes you get a chance to think of some better things to say, and that’s exactly what I did. So by the time Neecy and I were sitting face-to-face in her office, I was totally at ease.

“How long have you had this night job?” she asked me.

“Not even a week,” I told her.

Neecy was wearing a navy blue business suit, an off-white blouse, and a colorful scarf around her neck. I had on the same pair of blue jeans, blue shirt, and brown shoes that I had gone to work in the night before. But so what?

“First of all, you’re late.”

“And I still made it here,” I told her.

“Is that all you have to do, just make it there, not on time or anything?”

“Am I checking in at a clock down here? I make it to my job on time.”

“Is it stable?” she asked me.

“I hope it is.”

“And what if it’s not?”

“Then it’s back to the drawing board.”

She nodded her head. “I see. Well, your mother seems pretty excited about it,” she said to me.

I got slick on her and said, “Look at it this way, if Little Jay got an A
on his first math test, that wouldn’t mean that he’s gonna get an A in the class, but he would be off to a good start, right? Now wouldn’t
you
be happy with that?”

Neecy was trying her hardest not to smile. I was glad that I got a chance to wait before I talked to her. I was going to show her ass that I was still intelligent, and that I could sit there and beat her at her own damn psychological games.

She started to shake her head and said, “You know, I just don’t know what to think about you. I just keep thinking that I’m gonna get burned again. Or, rather, that your
son
is gonna get burned,” she said, correcting herself.

“I know you want to see me do well, Denise. I want to do well, too,” I told her. “You think I liked being a fuck-up for so long? You think any man likes that shit? Hell no! But you can only play the cards that you’re given until you get a better hand. So that’s what I’m trying to do now. I’m trying to establish some type of longevity, and something to look forward to in the future.”

I could tell that Neecy wanted to care about me. It may not have been a romantic thing anymore, but she still cared about me as her son’s father and as a black man struggling to survive. I could see it in her eyes, no matter how tough she tried to be with me.

“And you think that your son’s playing basketball is gonna be that future for you? What if he gets his feelings hurt like you did, and he finds out that he’s not as good as we all
think
he is? Then what?”

It was a good question. I was stuck for a second. Then I said, “What if after you got your degree in business, nobody wanted to hire you? What would you have done?”

She shook her head in denial. “There was no way it was gonna happen. I knew what I was capable of before I even went after the degree. The degree was just icing on the cake.”

“So, you were that confident, and here you are,” I said, looking around at her office.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t going up against one-in-a-million odds either,” she argued.

“You wasn’t? A single mom with
two
sons, going to college and becoming a successful businesswoman with her own office and payroll? Oh, yeah, I read about that every day,” I told her sarcastically.

Neecy finally broke a smile, but she still wouldn’t soften her toughness. “You may not read about it every day, but us single mothers are out
here getting the job done however we have to, and
that
’s a fact. But young black boys playing professional basketball is still a long shot, no matter
how
you try and slice the cake. I just don’t want my son to go through the same things that his father has.”

“He won’t,” I told her.

“And what makes you so sure?”

“Because you’re his mother. And I’m damn sure that you’re gonna tell him how I went downhill, if you haven’t already told him. I’ll make sure that I tell him too, but only when the time is right.”

“And when is that?”

“When he needs some inspiration, some moral support, or just plain old empathy,” I told her. I was poised and logical. I said, “Don’t take the boy’s dream away, just because
you’re
afraid of it not happening. You should never do that to a kid. That’s what’s wrong with so many black kids out here now, they have scared parents snatching their dreams away.”

“It sounds more like it’s
your
dream to me,” she responded.

“Yeah, well, maybe it is. Maybe
I
need some inspiration. Is anything wrong with that?”

“It is when you use people.”

“Oh, so is that what you think I’m doing,
using
my son?”

“You tell me.”

By that point, I was just plain disgusted. I didn’t even feel like talking anymore.

Neecy said, “Let’s say that he couldn’t play basketball, and he was just an average kid with average height. Would you still be this interested in him? You weren’t when he was younger.”

“Aw, now, see, that’s a bunch of bullshit!” I cursed at her. “You know damn well I’ve been a part of his life! Money ain’t every-fucking-thing, Denise! Okay? Now you go home and ask Jay if he loves his father. And he’ll
tell
you! Okay? So don’t run that shit on me!”

I got so excited that I didn’t realize how loud I was getting,
or
that I was standing, until I finished my statements.

Neecy looked embarrassed. “I didn’t say that you were
never
there—”

I cut her off and snapped, “Yeah, whatever. You just save that shit.” I headed for the door and left it open when I walked out, because if I would have closed it, she wouldn’t have had a damn door!

Neecy had lost all of her love for me. I couldn’t see how she could get so cold. She was an Ice Lady! I felt sorry for her in a way. It was like she
had floated off to her own island somewhere. And as far as the whole thing with me “using” my son, I wasn’t going to pay that shit no mind. I planned to keep supporting him and going to all the games that I could.
Neecy
had the problem, not me. I was doing the right thing. Just because she was angry about how I had been in the past, it didn’t make her right to
predict
how things were going to be with my son and me in the future.

I walked out of her office building and onto Halsted Street and looked at the piece of paper that Kim wrote the address of her job on. I was hungry as hell, and I wondered what they had on their menu. I wanted to get Neecy off my mind as quickly as I could. I figured if I could fill up my aching stomach and my sore eyes with the sight of Kim in her work uniform again, it would do the trick for me. One thing was for sure, I would take Kim’s down-to-earth sexiness over Neecy’s high society beef any day of the week.

didn’t want to call Denise back until I had a chance to go over things in my head. Once I did have a chance to think, I invited her out to a Friday night dinner at an Indian restaurant called the Eastern Spice. I had another three-day trip coming up and I wouldn’t see her for a while. If we didn’t talk before then, I had no idea when we’d be able to sit down and discuss things. I wanted to get it out of the way beforehand, to have a clear head while out on the road.

“So, what movies did your boys get from the video store?” I asked her. I was just making small talk. We were so hesitant with each other that it was like starting over again on a first date. I knew that our conversation would get serious sooner or later. There was no sense in rushing into it.

“They, ah, had the Tupac Shakur fever. So they got
Gridlock’d
and
Poetic Justice
.”

I nodded. “Yeah, this rapper stuff is getting to be a sad situation.”

Denise sighed and responded, “If you live by the sword, you die by the sword.”

“I hear his estate is worth millions of dollars now.”

“I bet it would be. The young man had a lot going for him. He just took a fast turn in the wrong direction. I hope that my boys will be able to learn something from it. That’s the only reason why I let them watch it. I don’t believe that shielding kids away from all of the things that are going on will necessarily be successful. Sometimes they need to be able
to see these things so that they can be strong enough to make their own decisions about what’s right.”

I nodded, while wondering in what direction
we
had turned, and what decisions
we
had made about what seemed right for us. “What do you think about our direction?” I couldn’t help asking.

“What about it?”

I don’t know what Denise was thinking about, but her mind didn’t seem to be into things that night. Maybe she was thinking about an issue concerning her sons, her younger sister, her job, her mother … There were so many things that she juggled around in her life that I didn’t know where to begin with her sometimes.

I said, “Are we headed up the road, down the road, or do we have a flat tire that needs fixin’?”

She smiled at that one. “I’d say we were on cruise control, just trying to figure out where we’d like to go. Unless you know already.”

She raised a brow at me, throwing the ball back on my side of the court.
Did
I know where I wanted to go with things? I don’t think I did. I knew that I loved Denise’s company, and I felt comfortable being around her and her sons, but there were many obstacles in the way of us becoming a committed couple. Denise had only recently told her sons’ fathers about me. Then again, maybe that meant that she was ready to be serious about us.

Our food began to arrive before I could comment. We had various small dishes to share from with some very different tastes.

“Mmm, have you eaten here before?” Denise asked me after trying an appetizer she seemed pleased with.

I smiled. I was always trying different things with her. “No. I just figured we’d do something different,” I told her. She had taken me to a few different places as well.

“You know, I’ll be honest with you, Dennis, I just don’t know what to think about relationships anymore,” Denise told me out of the blue. “It just seems that the more you expect, the less you get. Then when you don’t expect anything, everything just falls into your lap. And I don’t know how to respond anymore.

“Sometimes I feel like a bumper car,” she explained. “You turn on your engine and start moving ahead, and then you get knocked sideways. So then you say, ‘What the hell?’ and you start bumping right back. But frankly, the shit hurts, so you tell yourself, ‘Let me see if I can make it around this track without getting hit anymore.’ And you get to
rolling around, feeling good about it, then all of a sudden,
boom!
Somebody hits you out of nowhere. And as soon as you get rolling again, that’s when your damn car cuts the hell off.”

I broke out laughing. You couldn’t get any more clarity with any other analogy, unless you’ve never been on bumper cars before. Denise didn’t find it humorous though.

“I’m serious,” she said with a straight face. “You know why I’ve never been married?” she asked me. We had never spoken about it before. We had only talked about
my
previous marriage.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Well, number one; I didn’t want to force anything, and number two; I didn’t need anybody’s pity. And a lot of brothers would run that same game, acting as if my life was ruined because I had kids out of wedlock. ‘Aw, baby, you got two kids? What happened to their fathers?’ At the same time, they’re busy trying to screw you, right? Then if you say anything even
halfway
serious, they get to acting like assholes—‘Oh, I just don’t know if I’m ready to handle them two kids you got.’

“It was just pitiful. It was the worst kind of dating you could ever imagine.”

“Is that why you have this hot and cold approach with me?” I asked her.

“How else am I supposed to feel? I mean, it’s hard enough to deal with a man nowadays, when you
don’t
have kids. We could have everything clicking between us, and then at the end of the day, the question pops up, ‘What do we do about your kids?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, you know, they’re not going anywhere, at least not until it’s time for college.’ Because, see, I’m not some crazy white girl who’s gonna drown her kids in a car, and blame it on a carjacking, just to keep some damn man. Hell no! I’m not that kind of crazy!”