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I think they all knew that I wasn’t going to be the one to come to this nigga’s aide. I’ve never supported the cheating. I have always been the son to get in his chest and fall out with him because of the grimy shit that he would do to our mother. I’ve always been the one to tell him that I couldn’t wait for the day where my mom found her backbone, and she left his ass. With that, I wasn’t moving my feet to get that nigga up and take him to the hospital. Nigga had me so hot, that he could sit there, and bleed out for all that I cared.

Kingston, and Kendrix were the two to walk over to him. Both grabbed one of his arms and sat him up a little bit.

“Ya’ll tend to Emaye. We going to take his ass to the hospital,” Kingston let us know.

My pops was a big dude, so both my brothers had to lift him up, and carry him out of the room. He was dripping blood throughout the house, as they carried him away.

It got to a point that I had to eventually stop looking at him. If I continued to look at his pathetic ass, I was going to want to lay hands on him, so I took my eyes off him, and focused them on our mother.

“I need a minute. Give… give me a minute,” she said to Demarco, who was sitting next to her on the couch, rubbing her back, trying to get her to calm down.

“Emaye, I don’t trust you right now. If we take our eyes off you for a second, I don’t know what the fuck you going to do. Chill your ass out. Just sit down and catch your breath. Relax, yo!” Demarco snapped.

That’s when I walked over, so that I could stand next to them. She couldn’t even look us in the eyes. Her head dropped, looking into her lap. The tears continued to fall, and the cries continued to get louder by the second. Demarco told her to calm down, but there wasn’t a calm bone in her body.

“You went through that nigga phone? How you found out that he has a son, and a daughter on the way?” Demarco asked her. Through her cries and with her head still down, she only nodded her head.

I ended up sitting on the other side of her, placing my hand on her back too, rubbing it in a circular motion, just like my brother was doing to calm her down.

She didn’t fully calm down until about ten minutes later. When she did, she threw her body back into the couch and just sat there.

“Who’s the woman? You know her?” Demarco wanted to know.

“I’ve never seen that woman before a day in my life. I can tell that she’s younger than me though. Probably in her late thirties,” she responded, and then took a few seconds to gather her thoughts because you could tell that there was more that she wanted to say.

“I never go through your father’s phone. To me, it’s always been one thing to think that he was being unfaithful, but I never wanted to see it. I never wanted to catch him in the action. You, and your brothers have watched me be quiet for years. I was quiet, but I’ve never been some foolish woman, that’s ever believed I’ve been the only woman. I knew there were other women. I just didn’t have names. I didn’t have faces. Well, back then, I had both, but your father has become so calculated over the years, that it’s been a long time that someone has come to me as a woman,” she continued, and as she said these things, a couple of tears fell from her eyes.

“Thinking that your partner is cheating on you, and seeing it are two completely different things. Tonight, he came home later than usual. He was mean to me tonight, and short in his responses. Because I know how this works with him, I knew that he’d just gone out and cheated. Whenever my presence alone irritates him, or he snaps at me about the smallest things, I know it’s his guilty conscious that’s eating him alive. Something about tonight was a little different though. Even with him being mean to me, and snapping on me, he could barely look me in my eyes. That was different because your father has always been a confidant liar. He’s always been able to lie to me, but still give good eye contact,” she said.

“He went ahead and did his routine that he typically does after a long night of cheating, which is going into the bathroom, so he could shower, and handle everything else that he needs to. In all the years that I’ve been married to your father, he’s never left his phone around me. That man will get up and take his phone with him just to go downstairs and grab something to drink. Tonight, I’m not sure if his mind was elsewhere, or for the first time, he just got sloppy because while he showered, he put his phone on the charger, right there on his nightstand,” she took a pause, and then continued.

“For a long time, I sat there at the edge of the bed, just staring at the phone. I felt like if I looked into that phone, our 35-year marriage would go down the drain. To further explain to you that I’ve never had access to his phone, I couldn’t even guess his passcode in the beginning. It took a while, but I eventually guessed correctly. The passcode was your birthday,” she said, looking at Demarco, and then she took another long pause.

She fiddled with her fingers and then dropped her head down again. It’s as if she was embarrassed. As if she didn’t want to look my brother and I in the eyes, out of fear that we might have been judging her.

“So many women in that phone. I’m crying about the fourteen-year-old son that he has, and the little girl that’s due next month, but that’s just a portion of it. Conversations with other women, dating back months, and years. I knew that he would eventually come out of the shower, so I left the room, locking myself up into one of the guest rooms. The woman that he has the children with, her name is Lydia. Dominican woman. I can tell by the way he communicates with her that he loves her. Reading their messages, it reminded me of the way that he communicates with me. I just can’t believe that I let fourteen years go by, and it just came out tonight that he has a son. I don’t think you two understand how broken I am. This has broken me,” she finished, and started crying again.

That’s when I reached my arm out and pulled her to me. She buried her head under my arm and broke down. Her entire body was shaking, while I sat here with this mug on my face, using my hand to rub up and down her arm.

I’m telling you, seeing my mom cry like this did something to me. I was developing feelings of hate. I was beginning to hate my pops. A nigga make my mama cry like this? On God, that fuck nigga gotta feel me. Daddy or not, I had to lay hands on that nigga. Yeah, she might have shot his ass up, put him in a great amount of pain, but I wanted him to feel me too.

“I… I just snapped… He was looking around the house… for me. He knew I had his phone… He was downstairs… screaming for me. I.. I.. eventually got up… found one of his gun safes, and I went downstairs, looking for him. That’s… when I shot him in the family room,” she was able to get that out to us through her tears.

Hearing how distraught she sounded, I know for a fact that she had every intention of killing his ass tonight. For whatever reason, I guess it just wasn’t his time yet because that head shot that she sent his way, missed his ass. If Demarco hadn’t got that gun out of her hand in a reasonable amount of time, I know she would have tried again, and something tells me that the second shot wouldn’t have missed.

“Give me a minute,” she eventually said, removing her head from me.

She attempted to stand, but just like the last time, Demarco wouldn’t let her. I never really saw a look of fear in my brother’s eyes until now. You could see it all over his face that he feared the state that our mom was in, and that’s why he didn’t want her to walk away.

“Demarco, I’m okay. I just need a second,” she said, pushing his hand from holding onto her arm.

He sucked his teeth, but he did allow her to stand up. She walked out of the room, leaving my brother and I in here. While we sat, we heard her walking up the stairs.

For a while, neither one of us said anything to each other. He had his thoughts, and I had mine.

“You really think she going to leave him?” my brother wanted to know.

“Yeah man. I truly believe that’s it between them. You know that we’ve never seen this version of Emaye. When we ever heard her curse? When we ever seen her get out of her body like that? She was ready to kill that nigga. He hid a kid from her for fourteen years! Man, if that shit ain’t hurtful enough, now his ass got another baby on the way with the same fuckin woman. I will personally stop whatever I’m doing to help her pack her shit up and get the fuck out of here. Ain’t no coming back from that man,” I shared, and he nodded his head.