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“Hey,” I answered the phone for him.
“I know you not crying because that little nigga is dead? Where the fuck you at, shorty?” his deep voice boomed through the phone.
I sucked my teeth, hating myself for even getting involved with a man like him. Of course, he knew who Vonte was. Who didn’t know Vonte? He was well known in Miami and pretty much all over due to his basketball skills. This idiot that I was on the phone with was just as much of a Vonte fan as anyone else but was just too jealous to ever admit it.
“Yes, I’m crying because he passed. You are so fuckin’ insensitive,” I cried.
“Fuck do you want me to say, shorty? I didn’t know the nigga, so I don’t have any sympathy for his ass. All of a sudden you care about that nigga when you was just fuckin’ me last night! Look, come over. I want to show you these new shoes I got for you and our baby. I got a few other things for you as well,” he said.
This is what I meant by saying that I hated myself for putting myself in a situation like this. The baby that I was carrying in my stomach didn’t belong to Vonte, but at this moment, I was hoping it did because with him gone, at least I would still have a piece of him.
The person who I was on the phone talking was named Reggie, short for Reginald. I loved Reggie, but I loved Vonte more. I’ve known Reggie for the past two years or so, but it wasn’t a title on what he and I had. He was older than me, twenty-three to be exact, and he wasn’t looking to settle down just yet. I didn’t mind because I had Vonte. The moment I went to the doctor for the first time and saw how many weeks pregnant I was, I knew that the baby didn’t belong to Vonte because the weeks just didn’t add up, but because Vonte always had something going on from basketball practice, games, and school, I knew he wouldn’t question the weeks. He wasn’t like me, where he would remember the days that he and I had sex.
Reggie didn’t know that I was telling Vonte that this was his baby. If he did, he would have probably killed me. I didn’t have a plan on what I was going to do once the baby got here, and I was leading two men to believe that they were the father of my child. As hateful as this sounds and Lord knows that I didn’t even want to have to say it, but Vonte died for a reason. It would have been a dirty situation if he were to have lived through this situation.
“What do you mean I all of a sudden care about him? I do care about him! I love him! That was my boyfriend,” I cried.
“Yo, you sound stupid as fuck right now! How that’s your boyfriend and you carrying my baby? You coming over or what?” he asked, followed by him releasing a loud, horrendous cough.
That right there let me know that his stupid ass was over there smoking. That’s all he ever did these days. Reggie was a good man; he just had some fucked-up ways about him. He gave me money, he had his own place, he was so fuckin’ handsome but other than that, he was an asshole maybe 99.8% of the time. I didn’t leave him because we had an understanding.
“No, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I let him know.
“Fuck you too then. I’ll be glad when you have this baby with your emotional ass. Don’t call me tomorrow when you want to talk, it’ll be too late then because I’ll be with my other bitch,” he spat and then he hung up the phone.
I couldn’t care less about him dealing with another woman. I had just lost someone who meant the world to me, and it was all my fault. I couldn’t get Vonte’s mother’s cries out of my head. Even with me back in my car and far away from her, I could hear her crying, and it was tugging at my heart so much that it hurt. She would never get over that.
I knew how much she loved Vonte, and I also knew how much he loved her. In fact, for the longest, I was so jealous of their relationship because I felt like he was always putting her before me. I took someone away from her that she will never be able to get back, and I was sick to my stomach about it. I couldn’t tell her what I’d done because she would more than likely kill my ass. For the rest of my life, I would have to live with this secret. This would forever be a monkey hanging on my back. My life wouldn’t be the same going forward.
Reggie was always busy doing God knows what, so when I had doctor’s appointments, I would usually go to them alone. My mother worked during the day at the hospital, so she wasn’t available to go to the appointments with me. Plus, she was pretty upset with me for getting pregnant, so she really wasn’t being as supportive as I would have hoped her to be. With neither of them going with me, I was depending on Vonte and putting pressure on him to come with me. After all, I was telling him that this was his baby.
The only thing that Reggie did was buy things. As far as just being there and supporting me with this pregnancy, I felt like he couldn’t care less. All he cared about was buying the baby name brand things that it would probably grow out of within a month.
With Vonte gone, I really felt like I had no one. Yes, he was giving me the cold shoulder, but he had a good heart, so I knew that it was only a matter of time before he came around. With Reggie, there was absolutely no changing him. He would be an asshole ’till the day he died.
Giovonni “Trip” Young
You know this bitch ass warden denied my request to attend my son’s funeral. I couldn’t even be there to lay my own fuckin’ baby boy to rest. As if being in prison while he died wasn’t enough, then these fuck ass crackas going to deny me the chance to attend his funeral. The only reason I haven’t spazzed the fuck out in this bitch was that I needed to be there for Jashae. My baby mama wasn’t doing good at all. Granted, I wasn’t doing good my damn self, but I was the man in this shit, so I had to be strong where she was weak.
Jashae didn’t know how I cried myself to sleep every fuckin’ night since I found out about Vonte’s passing. When Jashae called me that night hysterically crying on the phone, immediately I knew something bad had happened, but I didn’t think that it had shit to do with my baby boy. I couldn’t get Jashae’s screams and cries out of my head, and it had been a damn week. I felt so guilty in this entire situation because when I learned from my son a couple of weeks ago that he had a baby on the way, I was overly strict on him. I wonder if he died thinking that I didn’t love him or he was a disappointment to me because that’s how I made it seem. That’s why we had to work on the power of the tongue because that shit held so much, man.
Here it was, almost two in the morning, and I couldn’t sleep. I was holding onto a picture in my hands of Vonte and me when he was six years old. We took this picture a year before I was incarcerated. Jashae was the one to actually take the picture. We were lying in bed together, shirts off, on our back, literally holding our head the same way, mouth hung wide open and everything. I would sell my soul to be able to go back to that day. I wouldn’t have been out there in the streets running wild, doing stupid ass drivebys, none of that shit. Instead, I would have been looking for something to do legit, so that I could provide for my family.
I was smart enough to know not to dwell on the past so I wouldn’t start doing it now. Lying there, I swear I could feel what Jashae felt although she was four hours away from me. I was so in sync with that woman that I knew she was hurting right now and needed me, so I jumped out of my bunk just to make sure that none of the correctional officers were working the floor because I couldn’t get caught with the phone since Raynell wasn’t there. She wouldn’t be back until first thing tomorrow morning.
After making sure that everything was clear outside, I walked back over to my bed and dug through the cushion that we slept on, which is where I hid the phone. Once I found it, I quickly turned it on, and I proceeded to video call Jashae. It took her a few rings, but eventually, the screen came up, and it was pitch black. She didn
’t say anything, but I knew she was there because I could hear her breathing.
“You alright baby?” was the first thing that I asked.
Granted, I knew she wasn’t alright, but I still chose to ask. If Jashae loved anybody in this fuckin’ world, she loved our son. That shit didn’t even have to be questioned because she proved it in everything she did. She showed the love that she had for Vonte when she was only thirteen and a baby her damn self. I was picturing her now at fourteen when Vonte was almost one. She would be standing up with him in her arms as she tried to calm him down to get him to go to sleep, all the while, a textbook would be on the table as she did homework.
If Jashae could have brought Vonte to school with her, I’m sure she would because she didn’t like to ask anyone to watch him for her. She jumped into that motherhood shit head first with no life vest and had been holding shit down from the moment she pushed him out of her. Never complained about shit either. She made sure that our son didn’t want for a fuckin’ thing, and she raised the fuck out of him in my absence.
“Nooo. Trip, I miss him. I miss him so much,” she cried.
Her cries had my eyes getting watery too. I sniffed and wiped my eyes before a tear could even fall.
