I whooped. He whooped. Then, the next thing I knew, Mark’s balled-up fist was coming straight for my face. I fell onto the bed crying and holding my mouth; blood seeped off my lips and across my teeth, washing a nasty, bitter, metallic taste over my tongue. Droplets splashed across my shoes, the dark red slowly creeping into the fibers of my suede boots. Marcell’s screams rose into the air, thick and piercing. It was just like the scene from Baby Boy in which Yvette finds the condoms in the backseat pocket of her car and confronts Jody about his cheating ways, only to get socked dead in her eye for her troubles. Life imitating art.
I pulled my hand from my mouth and looked at the blood on my trembling fingers. Tears formed in my throat, traveled up to my nose, and finally pooled into my eyes. My words crackled like thunder. “This is over! Get your shit and get out!” I growled as I rushed toward the phone. Mark already was headed to the closet to get his things when I began dialing my father’s house; he was crying and snatching the drawers of the bureau open and stuffing his clothes into a bag when my little sister, April, answered the phone. All she heard was her big sister, seventeen years her senior, screaming and crying into the receiver; without my having to articulate a word, she started screaming, too, calling for my father.
“What’s wrong, baby?” my father said, terror ringing his words.
“Daddy, I need you!” I yelled.
I didn’t have to say anything else. I don’t know if he took a jet plane over or if he had a police escort to clear traffic, but I do know this: he was at my door within five minutes of that phone call. April, little squirt with plaits and barrettes and baubles in her hair, burst through the door and made a beeline for her nephew, scooping him up into her arms as she tried to soothe him. She was frantic. By contrast, my father, eerily, was the picture of calm. He walked slowly toward the closet where Mark was packing with his hands in his pockets, and when Mark was in his line of sight, Daddy planted himself on the hardwood floor, towering over my soon-to-be ex, and stared him down.
“You didn’t have to put your hands on her,” he said, finally, slowly, which surprised me. All my life, after all, Daddy was the one you called only when you were ready to launch the nuclear bomb. You didn’t ask for his help with inconsequential things, because when he arrived on the scene, his guns were already blazing and he was taking out everything in sight. Survivors weren’t an option. I expected my father to rip Mark from limb to limb. Daddy later told me that despite his newly Christian ways, he’d had a sixth sense that Mark had hit me and had actually plotted a way to kill Mark in the moments it took him to get to my place. “I literally was going to walk in, snap his neck, throw him over the balcony, and call the cops,” he said, a sinister look darkening his eyes. “I’d planned on telling the police, ‘It was self-defense. Look at my daughter’s mouth.’ But I prayed to God all the way over here; my grandson was in this room and I couldn’t take his father.”
Instead, Daddy faced off against the man who’d bloodied his daughter by talking rationally. “I understand it’s hard out here for a man,” Daddy told Mark. “But you’re better than that. This is my daughter you hit. She’s a woman. Real men don’t do that.”
Mark stood there and cried while my father gave him a heart-to-heart speech about how he’d done the same thing to my mother, and how it had ruined his relationship with her and had obliterated his chances of being a full-time father to the love of his life, me. I knew firsthand that this was something my father had long regretted, and over the years, after he cleaned himself up and got himself together and found God, he made a point of apologizing to both my mother and even her husband for laying hands on her.
I didn’t want an apology from Mark. Though our relationship had long been rocky, it hadn’t been physically abusive until that evening. Still, I knew that if it happened once, it would happen again and again. His punch knocked me into reality; like a dog who tastes bloody meat and never, ever wants to go back to dry kibble, a man who hits his lover once will never go back to keeping his hands to himself in the middle of an argument. I knew that well, especially because I was the product of an abusive relationship. “That’s a seed I sowed,” my father would say days later, after Mark was gone. “I knew I would pay for what I did to your mother, that it would come back through one of my babies. This is my fault.”
It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and I was no one’s victim. We simply couldn’t work it out. Like my mother before me, I made the difficult decision to cut off the romantic relationship with the father of my child, not just for my sake, but also for that of my baby boy. With that separation, my forever man, my first love, was no more, and my dream of building a family with him was over. In so many judgmental eyes, I’d become another statistic: a baby mama. But if one tucks that judgment in a back pocket for even a second and surveys the situation with clear-eyed focus, my becoming a single mother wasn’t about being an irresponsible woman with a child; for me, it was about making a sound parenting decision that would ultimately save our lives.