“I hope you don’t mean that literally.”
She waves a dismissive hand and picks up her cigarettes, lighting up before speaking through a mouthful of smoke. “Nah, he made his way around the girls his age, though.”
“His age?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.
“Yeah, he must’ve been about… Twenty-five, thirty. Just had a falling out with his family. His daddy came down sometimes, trying to patch things up, I guess. That man… He had money. Drove a Mercedes and everything. He was a looker, too, and liked to stop by and flirt if I was outside. We got to talking one day, and he offered me a job the summer I turned sixteen. I wasn’t about to pass that up. Made a hell of a lot more than I could babysitting, and no more drunk ass creeps coming home and making a pass at me while their wives were checking that I’d put the kids down right.”
“Just one creep, from what I hear.”
“Oh, well, I wasn’t babysitting for John. I was working at his law firm, but after hours is when the fun happened.”
She gives me a wink and trades her cigarette for a tube of mascara.
“So that’s the rich guy you had an affair with,” I say. “That’s what you were telling me to leverage.”
“Hell, yeah,” she says. “If I could have gotten in with his friends, I’d have been set. But I had to go and get stupid and fall in love. He didn’t want some clingy teenager coming around, tipping off his wife. So he dumped my ass. That’s when I met your daddy.”
I sit up straight on the bed. “Who was he?”
“Some other asshole,” she says with a wave of her hand, batting cigarette smoke out of her face. “He was playing poker with Daddy one night, and I was feeling rejected, and he paid me the good kind of attention, if you know what I mean. We snuck around a few months, but I was still hung up on John Darling. Ain’t nobody as good at sweet talking a woman as a Darling, that’s for damn sure. And he’d buy me shit, just like yours does. Your daddy couldn’t compare to that.”
“So you dumped him?”
“We had our fun, but it wasn’t anything that’d last.”
“But you know who he is. What’s his name? How old is he? Where is he now?”
“Course I know who he is,” she snaps. “What do you take me for, some kind of slut?”
“It never crossed your mind that I might want to meet him?” I ask, measuring my tone because I want her to keep talking, but I can’t help being irritated. She always avoided questions when I asked, and eventually, I got the picture. It didn’t matter who he was. He wasn’t here, and we were.
“It’s too late for that,” she says. “Got hauled off to jail about ten years ago. I heard he got stabbed his first night there. Serves him right, if you ask me. Worthless son of a bitch never lifted a finger to help me out, not even when I came up pregnant and Daddy kicked me out. Straight up denied you were his when I told him, probably just so he didn’t get booted from Daddy’s poker game. Guess that shows how important you were to him. At least I kept you.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I say, because what else can I say? She’s right. She could have given me up for adoption. Who knows, maybe I would have been better off. But there’s no way to know that now. Even if she hasn’t been the best mom, she gave up a lot for me.
“Yeah,” she says grudgingly. “So don’t go talking shit like I should have taken you to meet him. He didn’t want nothing to do with your ass.”
“Okay,” I say. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. I just wanted to know who he was.”
“I always told you he was a worthless piece of shit,” she says. “Guess that ain’t enough.”
“It’s enough.”
She smooths on her lipstick and drops it back onto her dresser, picking up her cigarette, which burned out while she was talking. She relights it and looks over herself in the mirror. “You know, I did try to give us a better life. I wasn’t looking for a baby, but I thought maybe I could still make something good for us. I tried talking to John, but he wouldn’t have nothing to do with me. So I tried with JT, since I wasn’t showing yet. He took me in after my daddy kicked me out. But I think we were both just trying to get a rise out of John. And then you came along, and everybody could tell you weren’t JT’s, what with your coloring.”
“He kicked you out?”
“Yeah,” she says, crushing out her cigarette. “He thought I’d cheated on him, couldn’t be convinced otherwise. And a man’s got his pride, especially a rich man. Even when he’s lost his money and ain’t rich no more. You weren’t his problem, and he wasn’t going to support some other asshole’s kid, especially if it came from his girlfriend cheating on him.”
I’m horrified by this story that I never knew, in part because I can see so much of my own self in it, so many mistakes that any girl could make. One forgotten condom and you’re a homeless teen mom begging for places to stay. If Royal didn’t have money, or hadn’t taken me to the clinic that day, this could be my life. No wonder she hates me.
“Mom… I’m sorry.”
She shrugs. “I lived with the Gunn family for a while, a couple years at least.”
I think of all the times Officer Gunn picked me up back in the graffiti days, how he always asked after my mom and went easy on me. For some reason, it makes me feel weird as hell.
Mom keeps talking as she adds more blush to her cheeks. “Then your papa got his arm caught up in a propeller while he was out on a friend’s fishing boat, and he didn’t make it. Your nana married some asshole from Beebe and moved up there. I got the trailer, and you know the rest of that story.”