“Thirteen.”
She put her hand to her mouth and gasped: “That dirty dog.”
For a minute the two of us stood there, staring at each other in shock. I tried to make sense of what Evaleen was telling me. I played back all the months I’d been with Derrick and thought about the times we’d had sex in his car, at the park, or in Catfish’s old apartment on the dirty floor. I wondered if Evaleen was the reason Derrick never took me to his house or to meet his mama. Maybe him having a wife is why his sister always gave me the stink eye every time he brought me over to her place.
My mind flashed back to this one time when Derrick and I were sitting in his car and a girl ran past, banging on the front window. “That nigga married!” she yelled. “He married!”
Evaleen must have been putting the pieces together, too, because standing on my doorway she closed her eyes and began to pray. “Lord,” she said, “please give me the strength not to kick his sorry ass for this unholy alliance and transgression.”
When she was done, she opened her eyes and looked at me. “Girl,” she said, “I know you pregnant. We need to talk.”
I couldn’t imagine what she wanted to talk about. But just as I was opening my mouth to ask her, from up the block came the familiar sound of the ice cream truck. It made its way toward us, and parked right at the curb in front of Mama’s stoop. Evaleen glanced at the truck, her hand on her belly.
“You want one?” she asked, reading my mind. I was pregnant. Hell, yeah, I wanted ice cream!
I nodded yes and followed her to the truck. Evaleen bought herself a Creamsicle and handed me a Bomb Pop. Then she got right back to business.
“How far along are you?” she asked.
“Almost four months.”
“Good, there’s still time.”
“Time for what?”
“Time for you to get an abortion. You’re not even showing yet.”
“Why would I get an abortion?”
“Because if you have this baby it’s really gonna mess up my marriage,” she explained. “I have a family. He’s my husband so you need to get an abortion.”
I couldn’t believe I’d only met this lady three minutes ago and now she was asking me to kill my baby. In fact, I couldn’t believe any of this was happening. The day before I’d been a regular pregnant seventh grader. Now, suddenly, I had the kind of problems I’d only ever seen on The Young and the Restless.
I started to tell Evaleen that she wasn’t the boss of me—I was having my baby no matter what she wanted—when, from out of nowhere, Derrick drove up in his Chevy, like a bat out of hell, screeching to a stop in front of us.
“Bitch!” he hollered out his car window. At first I thought he was talking to me. But it was his wife he wanted. “Evaleen!” he yelled. “What the hell you doing? Get your ass in the damn car!” I stood on the curb with my Bomb Pop melting down my hand and watched Evaleen slide into the passenger seat. As soon as she closed the car door, Derrick punched her in the face.
I walked back into the house. I wasn’t ready for all this. These were grown-folk problems and way too much for me to handle. Especially since, with Derrick gone, I had no one to talk to. He had been my only friend. I wanted things back to how they used to be, when all I had to worry about was what to wear when Derrick took me roller-skating.
I lay down on the sofa and curled into a ball. With Smurfette giggling on the TV in the background, I tried to face the facts: my baby daddy was a low-down lying cheat. Still, all I wanted was for him to come back.
Chapter 11
It’s Time
I was eight months pregnant and ready to pop when Mama told us to pack up all our shit because we were moving again. I don’t know how she could predict the exact number of months and weeks she could go without paying rent before she got evicted, but she always knew when it was time to leave.
Other folks weren’t so organized. They’d fall behind on their rent and then a red eviction notice would get nailed to their front door and the marshals would show up and haul all their furniture and clothes and dishes and personal items out onto the curb. Getting put out was bad for other people, but good for us because that’s how we got new furniture. Mama would send us kids out to pick through the stuff the marshals had left by the side of the road, before the tenants came home to find out they’d just become homeless.
The new place Mama moved us to was in a run-down neighborhood called Vine City, and it was the worst place we’d ever lived. The apartment was called an “efficiency,” which I guess is short for “one step before hell.” It was a single, cramped, roach-infested room with a kitchen along the back wall and a small bathroom with a stand-up shower. It was only supposed to be for one person, but we all stayed there: me, Mama, Sweetie, Sweetie’s three-month-old daughter LaDontay—named for her baby daddy, Dontay, who happened to be Derrick’s younger brother—and my brothers Dre, Andre, and Jeffro when they weren’t locked up. It was such a shit-hole that when Dre got out of juvie and saw how we were living, he flagged down the popo and asked them to take him back to jail.
For home furnishings we had two beat-up sofas we picked up on the street. Mama slept on the brown corduroy one. Mine was dark yellow with a pattern that looked like flowers from far away, but on closer inspection seemed to be cooking grease and body fluids. Sweetie and her baby slept on a piece of foam we laid on the floor between the sofas. During the day we stored her foam in the shower stall, which meant we had to wash up in the sink. But first we had to heat the water on the hot plate because Mama hadn’t caught up on paying the gas bill, so there was no hot water.
We’d been living in Vine City for a month when I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like a thick rope was tightening around my belly. The pain came and went like waves coming in. I lay there for a while, trying to wish it away. But when it got so bad I was sure I was dying, I called out to Mama.
“Ohhhhhh . . .” I moaned. “My belly hurts.”
“Okay,” she said, flicking on her lamp. “Maybe you just got some gas. What it feel like?”
“I dunno.”
“Like you need to doo-doo?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do it feel like a regular upset stomach or more like your cycle coming on?”
“I don’t know what it feel like,” I said, turning my face to the wall. “It just hurts.”
Mama didn’t trust a doctor, so whenever something was wrong with one of her kids, she liked to do the diagnosing herself by asking a million questions and then taking a wild guess. Over the years she’d told me I had infantigo, trench mouth, chicken pox, sour stomach, a case of the nerves, and fleas. No matter what the ailment, the remedy was always “rub some Vicks on it.”
“Do it hurt in the front or the back?” she asked.
“All around.”
“Like you getting squeezed real tight?”
“Yeah, like that.”