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I tugged on her hands as I released a sigh. Finally, I let her hands go and sat back in my seat.
“Do you know that your husband paid someone twenty thousand dollars to kill Billionaire? Well, technically, he paid them ten thousand dollars as a deposit, and they were supposed to have gotten the rest of the money once the job was done. Ma, my husband could have been dead last night. What is getting into him? He is getting sicker by the day. He really has some nerve to not like Billionaire, and he keeps referring to him as a thug, but look at the things he’s doing. He’s such an evil person, but he just dresses his evil up in expensive, designer suits, so people will never even know what this man is capable of. Did you know this?” I asked my mom.
A lone tear fell from her eyes as she looked at me from across the table, shaking her head no. She took a while to answer my question. It was as if she was trying to process everything that I’d just said.
“That money was withdrawn from the account about three weeks ago. I remember asking him why ten thousand dollars had been removed from the account, and he told me that he was getting ready to have some men come and do some work at the church. I actually believed him and never even questioned him about it. For months, he had been telling me that he wanted to get the church fellowship hall renovated. I thought that money was to cover the renovations. I’m sitting here now and thinking about last week Wednesday when I went into his office after bible study. You remember Saint, right?” my mom asked me.
“Yeah. The young deacon with all the tattoos, right?” I asked my mom.
She nodded, letting me know that was the one she was talking about.
“As I was walking out, Saint was walking in. Bible study was already over for the night, and everyone had gone home, including the rest of the deacons. The whole drive home, I kept questioning myself on what my husband had to talk to Saint about. I could have stood outside the door and ear hustled, but you know the way your father watches those cameras, so he would have seen me. I stayed up all night, just trying to figure out what they could have been talking about. Now that you’re telling me your father paid someone to kill Billionaire, Normani, I can bet you every dollar I have to my name that your father paid Saint to do that. Normani, baby, I am so sorry. I knew nothing about this until now,” she said, using the back of her hands to wipe away the tears falling from her eyes.
I believed her; I wasn’t even sure why I thought for a second that she could have possibly known anything about this. My mother wasn’t even A hateful person. Since my mother’s birthday, she had been around Billionaire on a few occasions and had often expressed that she loved him for me. This just left her in an awkward situation, and I wondered what she would do.
“I met with a lawyer yesterday. I’m getting the paperwork started. Your father and I are about to start the process of getting a divorce. Normani, I have hidden the way I felt for years, and it’s finally time to walk away,” she said, shocking me with her words.
“Years, Ma? I thought this mess just started once Billionaire came into the picture.”
She quickly shook her head, letting me know that I had it all wrong.
“No. That’s just when he stopped directing all his negative energy toward someone else and not me. The side of your father that you have seen for the past few months, Normani, I have seen that side of him for years. I hid it from you, your sister, and the church because I never wanted to ruin his image. So many people look up to your father. Young boys come up to him all the time and tell him that he’s the father they wish they had. I think about the way he was a parent to you and Naomi, and although I didn’t agree with a lot of his parenting methods, I followed right along, letting him be the dictator for a lot of thin
gs.
“I wanted us to be a family that gave people something to look up to, and because of that, I stayed, and I took things that I knew wasn’t right for me to put up with. To be honest with you, Normani, I lost your father the moment his father died. I never really got him back after that,” my mom said, exposing things I didn’t even know.
My grandfather had been dead since I was a kid. You mean to tell me that my mother did all this suffering for years, and she just took it? Wow. I wished I could have heard her cry. I wished I could have heard the things she was nonverbally saying, so I could have helped out. My mind traveled back to a couple of years ago when my mother preached on Ephesians 5:25, where it talked about husbands loving their wives in the same way that Christ loved the church. I remember that sermon verbatim because it’s like her soul was crying as she preached in front of everyone. She seemed to be talking directly to my father.
My other was crying out in a room filled with so many people, letting us know that all she wanted was for her husband to love her, and I didn’t even catch it. It had gone right over my head. Now that I think about it, that was the last time I had seen my mother preach. I wondered if he had anything to do about that. Something else she said had me raising an eyebrow too.
“Ma, has he ever put his hands on you?” I asked. I just really wanted to know.
“Which time?” she responded.
I heard the hurt that came out when she said that. It felt as if my heart had dropped right in the pit of my stomach. I put my hands over my mouth, unable to believe any of this.
“I don’t want to sit here, Normani, and taint the image that you have of your father, and—”
“Ma, the image that I have of him has been tainted for months! He is no saint in my eyes. This man is terrible! Is he the reason you stopped ministering and singing? Ma, you are the best preacher I know! Better than him, and you know it!” I said.
“He knows it too, which is why he made me stop. It’s a pride thing that men have. Whenever word would get out that I was preaching on a Sunday, the number of people that would fill that sanctuary was ridiculous! You know it would be standing room only, and that’s on both the first level and the second level of the church. The money that the church would bring in during offering would almost double when I preached versus when it was him.
“I never told you or your sister this, but years ago, when I sang one Sunday, somebody recorded me, and they uploaded the video on YouTube. A few big gospel producers reached out and wanted to sign me. The second I told your father, of course, he shut it down. I know you probably think that I’m crazy, and you may even view me as weak, but for so long, I just wanted to make our marriage work, you know? We’d been through so much together, and I didn’t want to leave after all these years. Your father has always had a soft place in my heart, and I think he abused that because he knew the way my heart worked when it came to him.
“When his parents died, he would always refer to it as them leaving him. If I divorced him, I didn’t want to be another person who left him, but I’ve allowed this man to beat me down too many times, both physically, emotionally, and even mentally. This is why when I found out about you dating Billionaire, I’ve always supported it, even if he was so much different from you. I had that mindset because I’m married to one of the biggest pastors in Miami, and I get treated like crap by him on a daily. A title doesn’t mean anything because it’s all about how you are being treated. Your father labels Billionaire as a thug, but I can see that thug treats you ten times better than your father has ever treated me,” my mom said.
I couldn’t help but feel bad. My mother was spilling out her soul to me, and all I could do was listen.
“What do you plan to do, Ma? I can change the locks at my house, and you can move in there. I’m hardly there anymore,” I told her, and she shook her head.
“I’ve already begun to look at potential places for me to stay. Honestly, baby, I just want something small and peaceful. I don’t need a whole bunch of extra room because it’ll just be me. I got in contact with a couple of prisons and even some group homes, so I could start ministering there. That was always my plan from the very beginning, but the second I got with your father, I let his controlling ways pretty much talk me out of all my dreams.
“Believe it or not, I’ve always lived vicariously through both you and your sister. I admire the two of you for standing on your own two feet and doing the things in your life that make you happy. You told me how you wanted to write your books, and you went ahead and did just that. I have dreams too, Normani. Dreams that were stripped away from me because I let a man convince me that his dreams were more important and more realistic,” she spoke.
We were doing so much talking that we had forgotten to order. Once the waitress came over, we ran down what we wanted, and then she quickly walked away.
“Are you going to bible study tonight?” I asked.
