“Vegas Duncan, I’d like you to meet my wife, Connie.”
It took a lot of effort to conceal the shock of hearing that my boy was married to this little old lady. Back in the day, Daryl could get pretty much any chick he wanted, and he usually went for the hottest ones around. This woman was a far cry from that.
“Nice to meet you Vegas, I’ve heard so much—” The woman started a coughing fit that I watched Daryl coax her through with more love than I’d given him credit for. I was honestly impressed and more than a little surprised.
“It’s nice to meet you too, Connie,” I said, taking her frail hand when she stopped coughing.
“Well, I’m going to leave you boys to talk.” She kissed Daryl’s forehead. “Love you. Don’t stay up too late.”
“Love you too,” Daryl said. “And please make sure you turn the oxygen on, babe.”
Even after she closed the bedroom door, I could still hear the sickly woman coughing. My uneasiness must have been written on my face, because Daryl came to her defense in a hurry.
“Don’t judge her. I love her.”
“Enough to marry her?”
“Yeah, can you believe it?”
“Honestly,” I said, “I can’t.”
A deep sadness passed over him. “She’s got cancer, Vegas. She only has a short time to live, and I’m going to be here for her, no matter what. Which is why I was about to tell you that I can’t come back.”
I pressed a little harder, not wanting to accept his decision as final. It may sound cold, considering how sick his wife was, but my family was in dire circumstances. “Dee, please. The family needs you. I need you, bro.”
“I’m sorry. She’s been too good to me. She’s been there for me when I needed her most. You know you and the family mean the world to me. I owe you all more than I could ever repay you in a lifetime, but I won’t abandon her, man. She’s my family too.”
I have to say I was a little disappointed in Daryl. As tight as we had been, and as much as my father had done for him over the years, I never would have expected him to say no when I came looking for him. But I saw that he wasn’t going to change his mind. Daryl had family of his own now, and he needed to tend to her. I decided to let things rest—at least for now.
Sonya
10
You know, I never used to understand people who talked about committing suicide. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that anything could be so bad you’d want to take your own life. Well, that had changed, because in the past few days I’d come to the conclusion that without Junior, life just wasn’t worth living anymore. There is something so brutal about having that kind of love and losing it; it’s almost better to never have had it at all. What made it even worse was that I knew he still loved me as much as I loved him. If he’d abandoned me or left me for another woman, I could have wallowed in my anger. Instead, I had left him. Not that I’d been given a choice, with Xavier threatening to kill him and his entire family. So, I’d been seriously considering taking my life to get this intense pain over with.