Aftermath (3 page)

Her father, Nate, stood against the kitchen counter holding her dog in his arms. He had picked her locks and waited for her to get home. Toya would have shot him on sight, but he had an advantage. Ginger was her weakness and there was no way she would ever put her dog in danger. Nate knew this, after having watched her from a distance for weeks, and was using it to his advantage.

“I just want to talk to you, Latoya. Now I've tried to call you, tried to come by here and you keep refusing. I didn't want to go this route, but you forced me.”

She had wanted to spit in his face. “Talk, bitch! And it better be good or I swear to God, I'll kill your ass tonight.”

Nate had known that his daughter wouldn't be happy to see him. After all, he'd been a brutal and often cruel parent and Toya had certainly suffered the worst of it. Knowing she wouldn't need much of an excuse to shoot him, he wasted no time getting right to the point.

“I'm about to die, Latoya,” he had said solemnly. “And before I die, I wanted to come and tell you that I'm sorry.”

Toya had slowly lowered the gun then. She wasn't sure why, since part of her wanted to pull the trigger and speed up his death. But there was something in his tone that made her pause. Toya could hear defeat in his voice, something she'd never sensed from him before. Nate had always been ready for a fight, but tonight he looked as if life had kicked his ass. Sizing him up, she noticed for the first time that he appeared to have lost a lot of weight. She had always recalled her father being a menacing presence in her life. Now, he looked frail, thin, and drawn.

Nate cleared his throat.

“I need a bone marrow transplant and so far they can't find a match for me.”

Toya smirked and held her gun tighter. “Mmm-hmm. So you thought you could come here to convince me to be a donor?” She shook her head. “Let me save you the trouble. You can drop dead as far as I'm concerned.”

Nate cringed a little. “Latoya, I'm not here to ask you for nothing.”

“Good.”

“I came here to talk to you. And all I want is a chance for you to hear me out. Hear what I have to say to you. Then you can cuss me out and kick me out if that's what you want.”

“What could you possibly have to say to me?” she asked, shaking her head.

“I do want to tell you that I'm sorry, Latoya, but there's a lot of things you don't know, a lot that I need to explain to you before it's too late.”

Toya thought about it. It seemed to her that this tyrant wanted to clear his conscience before he went to meet his maker. Again, she considered squeezing the trigger and ending it all. He didn't deserve a chance to be heard.

Sensing her hesitation, Nate said, “Please, baby girl. Just hear me out.” He held Ginger close to his chest, and the dog squirmed and looked pleadingly at Toya.

Toya hesitantly put the gun's safety on and led the way to her dining room. She sat at her dining room table across from her father, and he finally set Ginger free. The dog ran over and jumped into her lap.

“Hurry up and say what you gotta say,” she demanded.

“I watched my daddy kill a man when I was twelve years old,” Nate said, matter-of-factly. “And by the time I was seventeen I had killed a man myself while defending my mama. I came home from work one night and found Mama arguing with our landlord. The nigga called my mother a bitch and when she protested, he slapped her.” Nate shook his head. “He ain't never slap nobody else after that.” He sighed. “By the time I met your mother I had seen a lot of things. I had grown up long before I moved out of my mama's house. Seeing the shit that I saw made me tough. I guess it made me a bully sometimes. But when I met your mother … she brought out the best in me.”

Toya sucked her teeth. “That ain't how I remember it.”

Toya's mother had been a teacher. And although her salary had been paltry, she had a degree and a career—two things Nate had never had in all his life. Nate had quit school at the age of fourteen and worked at a steel mill, long hard hours for such little pay that it frustrated and angered him. That anger reared its head whenever he drank, which eventually became a daily occurrence. And Nate was a mean drunk.

“I have a thousand memories of you telling her that she was a dumb bitch, that she was lucky to have a nigga like you for a husband.” Toya shook her head, recalling those painful words.

She had never understood why her mother—a woman who came from a family of college graduates, old money, and prestige—had fallen for and married a man as good for nothing as Nate. Hailing from Georgia, Toya's mother, Jeanie, had moved to New York City in search of some fun and excitement and found both in Nate. He lived in her Brooklyn neighborhood and was a fixture there. He worked at a steel mill in New Jersey but his main source of income was his gambling. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Nate. Jeanie was a lovely new face on the scene. The unlikely pair had an unmistakable chemistry in the beginning. Nate was proud to be the object of Jeanie's desire and had considered himself lucky to have found such a good woman. His lack of education didn't bother her. She was too impressed by his Brooklyn swagger, good looks, and sense of humor to care. Plus, Nate was making a decent wage at his job, and in the beginning things had been perfect. As their family grew, Nate worked longer hours to make ends meet. By the time Latoya, their fourth child, was born, the family was barely getting by. Nate's drinking had increased and Jeanie was dismayed when he was finally fired from his job. She had to shoulder the financial burden all by herself and it seemed that no matter what she did, it was never good enough.

“I was cruel to your mother,” Nate admitted, his eyes downcast. “I used to cuss at her, call her names.”

“You used to kick her ass.” Latoya didn't want Nate to forget that little detail. “Brutally! You used to kick all our asses.”

Nate looked at his only daughter and was ashamed. He nodded. “Yes, I did.”

Latoya was relentless. “You felt like a man when you did that? Beating up on females and little boys made you feel powerful? Is that what it was?”

Nate didn't know how to answer that, so he sat in silence and looked at Toya.

“Wanna go down memory lane?” she asked facetiously. “Let's talk about the time I came home from school and found you fucking that bitch Miss Crystal right there in my mother's bed!” Toya shook her head as if her father should be absolutely ashamed of himself. “Your wife's best friend. You couldn't keep your dick out of anything!” She felt her blood boil, felt her hand instinctively inch toward her gun lying on the table. “Remember that night when you came in my room when my friend Stephanie had spent the night?”

“Now, Latoya, I told you—”

“She was only thirteen years old, you fuckin'—”

“I was high…”

“You tried to pull her pants down and fuck my friend … She was just a little girl, you sick bitch!”

“Latoya, I told you I was out of my mind that night.” Nate lowered his eyes, ashamed of the ugly truth. He had spent years getting high and drunk as a way to forget the events of that night. He had come home and found that Jeanie wasn't there. For some reason—a reason he was never able to fully come to terms with—he stumbled into Toya's room and found her friend sleeping there in the spare bed. Nate had snapped out of a twisted trance only when Toya clawed at his face and Stephanie kicked him in his nuts.

“I didn't know what I was doing.”

Toya's fingers brushed against the cold steel of her nine as she glared at her father, remembering the terror she felt that night when the father she already hated had the nerve to cross a very sick line. “I should have killed you then,” she said. “I should have plunged a knife into your chest and watched you die.”

Nate stared at her, knowing that she was contemplating it now.

Toya thought back on that hot summer evening when her sweaty and belligerent father had entered her room, clawing at her friend in ways they both knew weren't right. Toya had fought him off savagely, crying and kicking at her father until he retreated in pain when she hit her mark. She was embarrassed, ashamed of what had happened to her friend. Stephanie had been scared and so had Toya, and Nate only made them more afraid, as they watched him go from apologetic to menacing in minutes. Nate had apologized to Stephanie, begging her to keep her mouth shut about what happened and swearing that it was all a misunderstanding. Then he threatened to kill Toya if she ever told her mother. Toya had kept that dirty little secret among many others over the years, never wanting to bring more pain to her mother than what she was already enduring.

“I was never a good father or husband,” he said.

Toya laughed as if this were the biggest understatement. Nate tried not to notice and continued.

“When you guys were little I used to drink a lot. And when I would get drunk, I would turn into somebody else.”

Toya recalled how her father barked orders at her and her brothers, even when they were little. Whenever he came home, the drama erupted.

“I mean, you come in here and make it sound like you were just unkind. You were a muthafuckin' monster! You would go out there in the street and get so drunk and so high that you would pass out on the fuckin' porch and sleep out there all night in a heap on the doorstep. We would have to step over you on our way to school. All of our friends used to see you out there like that. And then when you woke up, you would terrorize everybody. You cheated on your wife
openly
. You used to beat the boys until they cried like girls. You would make my life hell and beat your beloved wife bloody all the time. Don't you think that's why God is snatching your miserable life away from you?”

Nate shrugged, unsure how to answer that. “It was the liquor, Latoya. I was—”

“You were a fuckin' embarrassment, out in the streets every day, stumbling around and falling down drunk. You would yell our names from down the block and we would
die
from embarrassment. I was so ashamed that people knew you were my father.”

Nate hated to hear her say that. But he had to admit that he deserved it.

Toya got lost in thought for a moment, recalling the terror she'd suffered at her father's hands. As she'd gotten older and blossomed into an adolescent, Toya, like most girls her age, began to like boys. Toya recalled how her drunken father would see her on the block talking to a boy and bellow her name. When she went over to him, he'd ask her what the boy was saying to her. It never mattered. Before she could even answer him, he'd slap her in the face and tell her not to be a dumb bitch.

“Niggas only want one thing from you,” he'd say. “You keep being a dumb bitch standing around here listening to these fools and you ain't gonna be shit. All you'll be is another dumb bitch with a whole bunch of kids. All these muthafuckas want is some pussy. Take your black ass home!”

Toya snapped out of her reverie and heard her father apologizing for the umpteenth time. She had hated Nate for as long as she could remember. Cutting him off midsentence, her words left him momentarily speechless. “And then, as if being a drunk bum in the street wasn't enough, you started using crack.”

Nate closed his eyes and nodded. That had been the worst mistake of his life.

Toya knew she had hit him where it hurt. “You're a fuckin' crackhead.”

Nate opened his eyes and looked at his daughter for several long, silent moments. “I
was
a crackhead.”

“Once a crackhead, always a crackhead.”

He put up his hands as if he didn't want to fight. “Okay,” he allowed. “I got caught up with that shit and couldn't get off.” As she listened to him talking about his alcoholism and how he got hooked on drugs, she kept flashing back to incidents in her childhood that were forever etched in her memory.

“I realized I had a problem. But I couldn't stop using crack,” Nate was saying. “Whenever I wasn't high, I would think about all the shit I had did to y'all and I—”

“Remember when you would wake me up in the middle of the night, even when you knew that I had school the next day, so that I could walk with you to get drugs?” Toya interrupted. “Remember that shit? How you would take me with you to go get that shit because you were too twisted to walk and get it by yourself?”

Nate didn't respond. Of course he remembered it. He knew that she was trying to hurt him, and it was working.

“How about the time when I was sixteen and on my way out to a party and you tried to stop me from going—said I was going out to be a fuckin' tramp. When I tried to walk past you, you pushed me down the stairs and broke my arm. Remember that?”

“Latoya—”

“Or the time when you knocked my tooth out.” Toya popped her false tooth out to reveal a hole where her front tooth had once been. Few people knew that she had a missing tooth, but for her it was a painful daily reminder of the abuse she'd suffered at her father's hands. “Punched me in my mouth like a fuckin' man 'cuz I had the nerve to try and defend my mother when you were putting a foot in her ass.” She sighed. “You would beat her until she cried and curled up in a ball. Then you would take her money, her jewelry,
our
shit … whatever you could find. And you would go and get high. Didn't care how we survived, what we ate, or if the bills got paid. Didn't care that all the neighbors were calling
your
wife a dumb bitch, and that all the kids in school were laughing at us and the shame you brought on all of us. All you ever cared about was yourself. No wonder Derrick started selling drugs at sixteen. Somebody had to take care of the family. And your no-good ass was too fucked up to help.”

“I'm so sorry, Latoya.”

“Fuck you.”

“I deserve that.”

“You deserve to die, bitch!” Her voice reverberated off the dining room walls and she saw her father wince ever so slightly.