Lust and Lies (The Jamie Reynolds Chronicles #1) (2 page)

“You don’t have to yell, man… you guys have a safe trip, and it was nice meeting you, Jamie, I mean JR,” Toni said as he began putting his shoes on.

“Thanks again for breakfast,” I said with a big smile on my face as Jonathan and I made our way outside.

“Damn, Jamie, your car is packed,” Jonathan said as he tried to find a place in the car to stuff his garment bag.

“I’m sorry”, I said as Jonathan began to walk to the trunk. “The trunk is also full. See if you can find a place in the backseat.”

“Okay,” Jonathan said as he tried to stuff the bag into the backseat.

“Can it fit?”

“Yeah, I got it. You ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be. Good-bye, Atlanta, and hello…”

I was just about to say good-bye to the city I lived in for over seven years—four years at Clark Atlanta University and the last three years trying to make a professional name for myself—when Toni walked out of the house.

“You guys drive safe and have a fun ride,” he said as he opened his car door.

“Thanks, man,” Jonathan said as he was closing the back door. “Where you heading?” Jonathan asked Toni before he began to pull out of the driveway.

“To the grocery store, you know we don’t have any food in the house,” Toni said while reversing his 2001 black Honda Civic with a big smirk on his face.

I just busted out laughing.

“What, what is so funny?” Jonathan asked as he began fastening his seat belt.

“Oh, nothing.”

Only Ten Hours to Go

“Hey, Jonathan, thanks, man, for helping me drive my car back to New York.”

“You good, don’t worry ’bout it. I can’t believe you’re leaving Atlanta; how long—”

“Seven long, hot years,” I said to him as I cut him off in the middle of his sentence.

“Damn, seven years.”

“Yup, I’ve been here since ’98, and I’ve done a lot within those seven years and I’ve grown and changed a lot. I am more mature,” I said jokingly.

“Well, for the record, I’m going to miss you,” Jonathan said, pretending to wipe away a tear from his face.

“Funny, very funny… but all jokes aside, I’m going to miss you too. Thanks for everything.”

“No, man, thank you, you don’t know it, but you’ve helped me out a lot. My best freelance work came from you, not to mention my best paying work,” he said with a smile. “You never told me why you’re moving?”

I took a deep breath and began telling him the reason. I figured we had about twelve hours to go and this could take a long time.

“I figured it’s easy to leave Atlanta with no major responsibilities—no kids, no man—it’s a lot easier to pack up and go and start over when you have nothing holding you back. You feel me, right?”

“I got you, that makes a lot of sense, but you’re moving with such short notice. Are you sure you’re not just running away from anything?”

“No, I’m not running away from anything. I know it was short notice, but it had to be done. Remember when I asked you to ask your mother if she could find me a few buddy passes to fly home?”

“Yeah, I remember, your father was sick, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry my mother didn’t come through on the tickets.”

“Oh, it’s cool, I thought I would try.”
After all, your mother has worked for Delta Airlines for over twenty years, why not?
I thought to myself.

“Man, I was flying home like every other week. My father has been in the hospital for, like, three months.”

“Dammmmmn, I’m sorry to hear that. How’s he doing?”

“He’s never going to be a hundred percent, but he is doing better.” That was always my answer to everyone when they asked about my father and his condition. I guess you could say I was a little bit embarrassed; besides, I had to uphold my so-called perfect image.

“You never told me what happened to him; you just briefly mentioned that he had some kind of seizure, when you called asking about the tickets.”

I took another deep breath and said, “Well, it’s kind of complicated. The last time I saw my father well was during Christmas at my older sister’s home in Austell, and he really wasn’t even that well. Three days after my parents left Jenifer’s home to go back to Brooklyn, I called my mother because I was trying to get a hold of my dad.”

“Good afternoon, Ma, hope all is well?” I said politely to my mother on the phone. Have you spoken to Daddy? I’ve been calling him all morning with no answer.”

“I tried to call him myself, but he didn’t answer his phone. I’ve been trying to call him since yesterday,” my mother said, sounding worried. My parents have been divorced for some time now, and tried to be civil and co-parents to my younger sister Jayla, so my mother often called my dad.

“You don’t understand, Jonathan. My father and I have a very close relationship, he may not always pick up the phone for my mom, but he always picks up the phone for me. I was devastated; I called him about ten times that day and still no answer.”

Ring, ring, ring
, please leave a message after the beep. “Hey, Daddy, this is Jamie again. Hey, man, please pick up the phone or at least call me back so I know you’re okay. You know I worry ’bout you, old man, so call me back.” I tried to make a joke of it and to not give off how scared I was over the phone.

About 7:30 p.m. I finally got a phone call from my father. “Daddy, where have you been? Everyone has been calling you all day.”

“Hey, baby,” my father said in a very weak voice. “Sorry, I was very tired. My head is killing me, and I ended up sleeping all day.”

“Wait, if you slept all day, then you didn’t even go to work today?”

“No, baby, I’ve been in the house all day,” my father said as his voice got weaker and weaker.

In the house all day
, I thought to myself. I had never heard or seen my father take off work to just lie in the house before. He went to work in the worst snowstorms, floods, holidays, he even went out to work after 9-11. This didn’t sound right.

“Daddy, did you go see a doctor?”

“No, but if I still feel like this in the morning, I’ll go then.”

“Daddy, you need to take better care of yourself. If not for me, then for your future grandkids, and lord knows, I ain’t having any kids, so you have to be around for Jenifer and Jayla to have kids.”

There I was, trying to make light out of every dark situation, I really hated that about myself. “Daddy, please promise me that you’ll go to the doctor first thing in the morning to get yourself checked out.”

“I guess that promise was a little too late, because that night my cousin came home from work and went down to her basement to check on my dad and found him passed out on the floor. We think he fell down the stairs. That was the scariest day of my life. I felt so helpless not being able to be at my dad’s side. My dad spent months in the hospital, and the doctor really couldn’t help him. We all pretty much were watching my dad die by the minute. He lost so much weight and couldn’t even feed himself; they even had his hands and legs in restraints because he would fight the nurses because he wanted to leave the hospital. It was so hard to watch.”

Jonathan and I spoke for hours on our drive. I told him all about my father, his condition and about my life inside and out. For the first time in almost seven years, I opened up to someone. I had so much emotion and anger built up from both my father, my mother, my past failed relationships, and just spoke the truth about the real Jamie Reynolds.

My father and mother split up about ten years ago, I think. My mother had a lot of pride as they pretended to stay together for “the kids,” off and on, which was the worst, because they really weren’t fooling anyone, and my siblings and I always had questions as my parents split up and came back together. My mother first split from my dad when I was ten years old and my oldest sister was twelve. I didn’t understand why, but my mother packed up my sister and me, and we moved out of our home on Bergen Street and moved into an apartment on East Eighteenth Street in Flatbush. We even went to a new school.

Actually, going to another school wasn’t anything new to us. You would think I was a military kid; I went to a new school seems like every year since the third grade. Never understood why we went to so many new schools, but you get used to it after a while. This was the story of my life. Never knowing what to expect or why, but I just dealt with it. Now that I’m an adult, I wished when I was younger I had tried harder to understand things instead of accepting them.

After my mother got back with my father after being separated for like a year, we again moved back in with my dad and went to another new school. Not to mention my mother was pregnant with my younger sister, Jayla. She was born when I was twelve years old. Less than a year after she was born, my mother and my two siblings moved out of New York to Florida without my father. Once again, not understanding what was going on because I was a kid, I just went with the flow. I wasn’t happy moving out of New York, but my parents promised us a better life.

I did find it kind of weird that my father didn’t live with us, but my parents often spoke on the phone and he visited often. We continued to do family vacations, celebrations, and were together as one big happy family on almost every holiday. It wasn’t like they were divorced like some of my other friends’ parents, so I just figured Florida was a safer place to live than New York, and since my grandmother lived in Florida, it was cool. Even though my grandmother hated me. Hate was a strong word, but that was the only word I could think of when it came to my grandmother. Even my mother knew she treated me differently than the rest and never knew why, so I never cared to understand after a while.

I often heard people say they stayed together for the kids, and I was proof it does more harm than good. I watched my parents argue and fight and slowly grow apart, yet try to stay together for the kids without just telling us they were unhappy and not staying married anymore.

Finally when I was about fifteen years old, my father came down for Christmas. He left to go back to New York abruptly. I walked into my mother’s room after my father left and she was crying.

I asked, “Ma, is everything okay?” For the first time, my mother opened up to me and told me everything. I soon became an adult at the age of fifteen as I listened to my mother expose years of my family’s secrets, and everything started to make sense, why we moved from school to school, why my dad was not around, and even why we moved into the East Eighteenth Street apartment.

“Do you know why your father left all of a sudden?” she added with tears in her eyes.

“No, Ma, why did he leave?” I asked this question not really ready to hear the answer, but I knew my mother needed to talk to someone.

“Your so-called sister has died in a fire,” my mother said.

“What? I don’t understand.”

My mother poured her heart out to me. She told me about my father’s secret life. How he had been cheating on her since they got married. How she could never trust my father around any of her friends. I thought I’d heard it all until my mother told me about my father’s affair with Samantha. Samantha lived upstairs and was our family’s babysitter ever since I was, like, four years old when my mother decided to go back to work. It happened right under my own roof when my sister and I would go outside to play.

After hearing my mother go on and on about the different affairs my father had throughout my childhood, with babysitters, neighbors, women we called auntie to be polite. I thought I would be sick to my stomach. I wanted to cry, because I loved and looked up to my father. In my eyes he was a perfect dad. But I had to hold it together; I was always known as the strong one in the family. I was the child with no emotion growing up and I allowed myself to believe that.

Then my mother told me about Kisha. Kisha was one of my so-called sisters, as my mother put it. Kisha was five years old when she died during a house fire. I guess this was why we moved into East Eighteenth Street when I was ten. My mother must have just found out about my so-called sister and she moved us out of Bergen Street to East Eighteenth Street.

This abuse towards my mother didn’t end with Kisha dying. My father continued to live a life of promiscuity for years. I guess when Kisha died, a piece of my dad and mom’s civil relationship went with it. I don’t really know the relationship my mother had with Kisha and her mother, but after that day I ended up seeing my dad less and less. My sister and I traveled to New York instead of my dad coming down to Florida to hang out with us. Knowing what I knew about my dad at first changed me, and my relationship with my dad was poor. It was hard to look at him and respect him. I never told him what my mother told me about his secret life.

“How do you react to something like that? Over the years, I learned to accept my father’s lifestyle and learned to move on.”

“Wow, that’s crazy JR,” was all Jonathan said and at this point I knew I said too much already.

“I just need to be with my family, that’s all,” I said really quickly then changed the subject, as I started to feel uncomfortable about telling Jonathan so much. I wasn’t really an emotional person, and I was often seen as the strong one who had tough skin and gave advice to everyone else, not being the one who needed it. But I guess at that moment, I needed to tell someone something, or I might have erupted with my own hidden emotions.

“Enough about me, what’s your story?”

“My story?” Jonathan repeated. “There’s nothing to my story. You’ve known me for a minute now and pretty much seen and heard most of my story.”

He was right, not only did I work with Jonathan, but I also made it my business to know his business and the rest of my teams’ business. Could you blame me? I was a black female working in a white man’s production world. Most of my clients were white and I typically hired an all-black staff. I needed to know what kind of drama could come out of my crew before I hired. It was hard enough being a female in this business. Respect was not given, it was earned. I put too much of myself into this career, so leaving was kind of a big deal, because unlike most chicks in this business, I didn’t sleep my way up to the top, I actually worked. But all I did was work, making money was all I did and my social life suffered because of it. I not only did freelance work on the side, but I also worked the overnight shift at WSBTV Channel 2 News as an associated editor and hated every minute of it. Too many negative news stories, and it slowly killed me to go to work three times a week only to feel like crap after my three a.m. to noon shift. I was not sad at all to put in my two weeks’ notice in at Channel 2, but I felt better things were going to come to me in New York.