Promise followed my eyes, turning her head, so that she could see what had my attention. She looked over at the couch, and then back at me. She must have saw it in my eyes that I was bothered by that shit because her look suddenly softened.
Promise knew that I had a lot of shit going on right now, but mainly with football. She didn’t know anything about what happened this morning with the detectives. Since it’s gotten out about what’s been going on with my football career, she’s been calling, and texting me, just checking up on me, so she knew that I was at a low point right now, which would be the only reason her look softened.
“I’ll just come back later, then,” I said, already feeling like I’d come down here and had done too much.
“Rico, wait. You can just go get Romy from the back,” she said, knowing that those times when I would feel bad, my daughter is who I would turn to for happiness.
“It’s cool. Let her take a nap. Ay, do me a favor though. If some detectives pull up on you, and they question you, asking you if I was with you December 10th, tell them that I was, aight? Tell that I was over here with Romy,” I let her know, andshe stepped closer to me. We were so close that I could smell whatever fruity shit that she’d used to take a shower.
“What did you do?” she wanted to know.
“Nothing. Just tell that to them,” I told her.
“Okay. What else because our stories have to match?” she questioned.
Even though my baby mama and I bicker like a motha fucka, and I got on her nerves just as much as she got on mine, I knew she was solid, and she would lie to the feds for me. I knew she would. I didn’t have to question her loyalty. That’s why when my pops was talking all that shit in the car, telling me how he didn’t think that Promise would make a good alibi, I allowed that shit to go in one ear, and out the other because if anybody knew my baby mama, it was me. She wasn’t going to let me catch this charge if she could help it.
I told her what all I needed her to say, and then I eventually left. I had to call Uber to come pick me up, since I didn’t come in my whip.
The whole time that I stood outside by the staircase, I had my head down with my hands in my pockets. Something good had to come out of this shit. I prayed that I didn’t just fuck my entire life up by killing Toby. If I did, I just knew that nigga was in hell somewhere, laughing at this shit, having the time of his life.
Chapter 2
Antoinette Floyd
The Things I Missed
Ihaven’t experienced depression like this since I lost my youngest daughter, Nivea. Nivea’s death took a toll on me something terrible, and I just remember lying in bed for days at a time, and there wasn’t anything that anyone could do to help get me out of that funk. My body truly couldn’t function the way that it needed to back then because I was heartbroken. I was heartbroken because Nivea’s death was one of those things that could have been avoided.
My baby was in perfect health. She was a skinny thing, that loved to run, and work out, just like Dionne. Her weight was something that she battled with, since a kid. Nivea was always the smallest one in her age group. As a kid, she was always underweight whenever I took her to doctor’s appointments because she was a stubborn, and picky eater. I couldn’t get her to eat full meals like the rest of my daughters. For dinner, she would want something like a dinner roll, or she would eat pieces of whatever meat that I would make.
With her weight, it caused her to be very insecure. Mainly because my side of the family, a lot of the women were thick, and very curvaceous. Freedom, and Tommi took after me with theirweight. Both had the same hourglass frame as me, and once they had children, their hips spread, and their asses grew.
Dionne didn’t take after me in weight, either, but Dionne had curves that Nivea didn’t have, and seeing the women around her, constantly made her insecure, no matter how much we would all tell her ow beautiful she was, and how perfect her shape was for her. That girl did everything in her power to put added weight on her body. Nivea was still living with me, so I watched her drink those high- calorie shakes. It was the kind of shakes that doctors would recommend for kids when they were underweight. The kind I tried to give her as a kid, but her stubborn ass wouldn’t take it. She would go through protein bars, and then she got on birth control, thinking that it would fatten her up, but that didn’t work either.
During this, she would go to me, and her sisters, asking if we would pay for her cosmetic surgery. Nivea wanted to get a BBL. None of us would give her the money because we didn’t support the decision. It’s never been a hard task for either of my daughters to pull a nigga, so it wasn’t long before Nivea started messing around with someone, who funded the BBL.
I was pissed with that girl, and I was scared. Scared because I knew how dangerous that specific surgery was. We all tried to talk her out of it, but again, with that stubbornness that she had in her, she went and did it anyways. My baby died from complications of the surgery. Literally died the same day, and I haven’t been right in the head since. I was never fully whole again after that happened. Nivea was the child that was still living under my roof when she passed away, so we were very close. We would come down and have breakfast every morning if she had slept here the night before. I would still cook dinner for her, and we liked to watch those ghetto reality shows together on VH1 or BET. I lost a child, and it completely tore me apart.
I asked God to not allow me to ever experience a pain like that again, yet here I was, years later, lying in my bed, in complete darkness, as I’m mourning a secret that my oldest daughter put on me a couple of days ago. I couldn’t explain this hurt. I couldn’t explain this feeling. I felt like I’d failed as a mother.
I’ll admit that when my kids were younger, I wasn’t the perfect mom. I started having my children when I was a teenager. I was a young mom, and by the time I was in my middle twenties, I’d already had four daughters. Having children so young, it’ll force you to feel like you missed out on something in life. Back then, I felt like I was missing out on all the parties, hanging out with my girls, and just enjoying life. With that, my girls spent a lot of their childhood with my mama.
My mom raised them for me. Free would go with her dad on the weekends, Dionne would go with her dad’s family, since Dionte was in prison, and Nivea would go with her father as well. Tommie’s dad was the one that wasn’t shit, so Tommie was often with my mama. I didn’t get my shit together until the girls got a little older, and that came from Nivea’s dad trying to take me to court, wanting custody of our daughter.
I got my shit together, and I became the mother for my daughters that they needed. I worked, kept a roof over my children’s head, food on the table, and clothes on their backs. If I entertained niggas, my kids wouldn’t be around. I did my dirt with niggas while my kids were with their daddies or with my mom. The one man that I brought around my kids, simply because I thought that I had fallen in love, he came around, and he did some nasty shit like this.
This was hurting me. I remember pretty much every phase of my kids life, so for the two days that I’ve been lying in this room, I kept thinking about the phase that Dionne went through when she was eleven years old.
Dionne has always been my child that was very moody, and very sensitive. Since she was a little girl, we would all get on her about how moody her ass was. She could literally be happy one minute, and then flip, and have the biggest attitude in the world with everyone the next minute.
I remember around the time when she was eleven years old, the mood changes had gotten worse. I summed it up to knowing that she was getting ready to reach that age, puberty was getting ready to start, she was going to get a cycle, so I believed that’s what was happening. To know now that I’d ignored the signs and didn’t catch up on what was going on with my own daughter is what was causing me so much pain.
I couldn’t get her screams out of my head from the other morning in church. Again, Dionne was my very sensitive child, so when she initially started crying, I didn’t think much of it because Dionne cries in church just about every Sunday. When the cries got louder, and they turned into screams, and some of the women at church had to come over, and help me with her, I knew then that it was something deeper. I knew then that our pastor screaming, and preaching about releasing pain, and trauma is what was troubling her.
This past year, my daughter has allowed herself to live with so much punishment that she’s put on herself because of the part that she played with Garrus, so I thought that those may have been the reason for her cries as well, but again, when I could no longer handle her in church on my own, and people had to come over, and help me with her, I knew it was more.
I’ve been drowning in tears, and regret since. No matter how many times Dionne has told me that she wasn’t angry at me, and that she didn’t blame me for what happened to her, I felt like she should have. She had every right to be angry at me, and to blame me because I let that man into my home... into the sacred placed where my daughters laid their heads, and I ultimately failed her.I don’t see how I would ever get past this, let alone forgive my own self for it happening.
