“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 thinkhe 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 dramaticepisodes, 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 Dionnethough 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.
Chapter 3
Dionne Henry
Boss Lady
The first day at House of Henry was a success. Today was the first day that I’d come into the warehouse, where I had a full team of employees, and we actually got to work. I was a little nervous coming in this morning because all of this was new for me. I was afraid that the employees that I’d hired would think that I was incapable of running a business, probably felt like I didn’t know what I was talking about, let alone what I was doing, so I thought that they would walk out on me. With my emotions all over the damn place, especially since what happened between my mom and I after church the other day, I just haven’t been myself these days. Luckily, I knew how to turn the outside noise off, so I came in first thing this morning, and my team and I got to work.
