Page 38 of Buy Back My Love

“You was pregnant with his baby, so obviously you thought you was grown!” Mama yelled back. “I couldn’t have you in that house being a bad influence on Anika.”

“I needed you, Mama.”

My voice cracked, and I hated that it did. I was twenty-nine years old standing in my own house, but for a second I felt seventeen again, pregnant and scared with nowhere to go because my mama had put me out.

Mama opened her mouth like she was about to argue some more, but nothing came out right away. When she finally spoke, her voice wasn’t as hard. “Everything back then and everything now always come back to JB. It’s like that nigga got some kind of spell on you.”

That made the tears fall harder because as much as I wanted to tell her she was wrong, I couldn’t. My mama had been preaching to me since I was fourteen. Go to school. Get good grades. Don’t get pregnant. Stay away from boys bringing trouble to your door. I knew every rule she had ever given me, and I had broken the one she cared about the most.

Mama had me when she was sixteen, so she had always been hard on me and Anika about not repeating her mistakes. She had talked to us about birth control and condoms before either one of us was even old enough to want to hear that shit. To her, me getting pregnant senior year probably felt like everything she’d tried to keep me from doing had happened anyway.

She let out a breath and looked away from me for a second. “I’m gonna tell you the truth, Leona. I kicked you out because I was mad as hell. I figured you’d go stay with Big Mama or one of your aunties for a little while, I’d calm down, and then we’d figure the baby stuff out.”

I wiped at my face, but Mama wasn’t done. “I ain’t expect Jabari to turn around and get y’all a place of your own. By the time I got over being mad, you was already over there playing house with him.” Mama shook her head. “I regret putting you out. I do. Because after that, it felt like I had handed you straight over to that monster.”

“He’s not a monster, Mama.”

“Anybody who would hide drugs in your business and let you sit in prison behind that shit is a monster to me.” She looked me dead in my face. “Don’t let all this money and everything he buying you make you forget why he doing it. That man know what he did to you.”

“Why you gotta come over here with all this?” I asked, wiping my cheeks again. “I ain’t even been home a week.”

Mama stared at me for a few seconds, and whatever else she had been getting ready to say seemed to leave her.

“I just wanted to see my baby,” she said. “I ain’t come over here trying to argue with you.”

That was all it took. I started crying harder, and this time Mama didn’t say anything. She just came over and wrapped her arms around me. I held onto her and let myself cry because no matter how mad I had been at her, no matter how many unanswered calls and barely written letters I had kept count of, she was still my mama and I had missed her.

For a minute, I just let her hold me. I felt like a little girl again, and maybe part of me needed that. Me and my mama had damn near grown up together. She figured life out while raising me, then turned around and tried to make sure me and Anika didn’t make the same mistakes she did. She wasn’t perfect, and she damn sure wasn’t one of those soft, sweet mamas who always knew the right thing to say. Mama had picked up welding as a trade, was rough around the edges, and being from the hood didn’t exactly help with that either. But she was mine, and as fucked up as things had been between us, I loved her.

After a while, she pulled back and wiped under my eyes. “Girl, you gone have to stop all this damn crying. Your house so empty, the shit echoing.”

I stared at her for half a second before I started laughing. “There you go,” Mama said, smiling like she hadn’t just had me boohooing in my own living room.

I shook my head and wiped the rest of my face. “You wanna come furniture shopping with me?”

Her smile got a little bigger. “I’d like that.”

We probably needed therapy to fix everything between us, but shit, this was a start. Neither one of us was good at all that sitting down and talking about our feelings anyway, so for right now, retail therapy was good enough for me.

Evander "Van" Coleman

Walking through the house on Dog River was fucking with me more than I expected. Everywhere I looked, somebody had one of those little neon estate-sale stickers stuck to something I remembered from when I was a kid.

We had already packed away the things that actually mattered. Memaw Abigail’s recipe cards, Poppa Earl’s tackle boxes, the photo albums, and all the little keepsakes nobody else would understand the value of. Still, watching strangers walk through the house picking over everything else felt weird as hell.

Memaw died from COVID four years ago. Poppa held on without her longer than any of us expected, but he was never really the same after she was gone. Then last month, we lost him to a brain tumor.

I spent half my childhood in this house. Most days, if I wasn’t inside getting into something, I was out back on the dock with Poppa and a fishing pole.

“You alright?”

I looked over and saw my cousin Skye coming toward me, stepping out of the way of a man carrying an old bookshelf toward the front door. Skye was Aunt Sloane’s daughter, and since both of us were only children, we had always been more like brother and sister than cousins.

“Yeah.” I looked around the room again. “It’s just weird watching people buy up shit we grew up around.”

“I know.” Skye leaned against the doorframe beside me for a second before looking over. “You keeping the house or selling it?”

“I don’t know yet.” I glanced at her stomach. “Why? You want it? You and Landon could raise Tobias here.”