Single Mom (43 page)

Anyway, when I got back to the apartment, Kim was out taking Jamal to school. I looked around at the place and asked myself what might be a good house present to buy her. Or better yet, knowing Kim, she’d probably want a more personal item like a piece of jewelry or something. She didn’t seem to wear much of it, and that was a good thing because I wouldn’t have to think too hard about what to get her. So I planned on taking a trip to a jewelry store and pricing a few things. I didn’t know what I would buy for Jamal. Maybe I’d ask him what he wanted first and pick the things that made the most sense. I planned to spend the most on my son. He deserved it. I hadn’t been taking care of him in years. Maybe I’d buy him a nice sweatsuit and a pair of basketball shoes. The only thing was, with his school colors being green and gold, there weren’t that many pairs of basketball shoes that would coordinate. I wanted him to use my shoes in his games without his colors clashing.

A pair of black-on-white Jordans would work, but those things cost a hundred and thirty dollars,
on sale!
But what the hell, I hadn’t bought my son anything worthwhile for years. If I included a nice sweatsuit, we were talking well over two hundred dollars. Then I had to think about getting my mother something. She had put up with my irresponsibility for a long time and had never stopped supporting me. I guess that’s what mothers are for. I
had
to buy my mother something. Then I thought about Little Jay’s brother, Walter. Could I grab him a book bag or something, just so he won’t feel left out? Then again,
his
father had plenty of money. Would he buy
my
son anything? So I changed my mind. And what about Neecy’s truck-driver friend, would he be buying anything for her sons?

I got so wired up about the Christmas present thing that I could hardly sleep. It was weird, too, because I hadn’t been into the spirit of Christmas since I was still a kid! Besides having a job to be able to
afford
Christmas, I guess you really have to care about other people in your life to give a shit. Christmas was about sharing. The way the Bible tells it, God shared his only son, and then Jesus laid down his life on the cross for all of humanity. However, for many years, I had only shared bad times and bad news. So I forced myself to write a Christmas list to work from when I woke up that afternoon.

• • •

When I woke up after three, Kim was getting ready for work, and smiling at me.

“What’s so funny?” I asked her.

“Nothin’.” She was still smiling when she said it.

I looked over at my Christmas list on the nightstand and figured it out. I said, “Kim, have you ever heard of the rules of Santa Claus?”

“The what?” she asked me.

“The rules of Santa Claus.”

“No. What are they?” She started to grin.

“Rule number one says that you should never look at Santa Claus’s list, otherwise, you don’t get shit.”

Kim started to laugh. She knew she had been busted. “So what’s rule number two?”

“Rule number two says that you never open your present before Christmas.”

She was tickled by the idea. I was just making the shit up as I went along. It all made sense though.

“And what’s rule number three?”

“Rule number three says that you should never break your presents, lose them, or give them away. Because if you do, you don’t get any for next Christmas.”

“So you get a one-Christmas suspension?”

“That’s right. And another rule is that you don’t tell people what Santa’s gonna get for them. So don’t say anything to Jamal about it.” I looked over at the clock. Jamal would be getting home soon. A neighbor’s kid sometimes walked him in from school when Kim and I couldn’t pick him up. Before I came into the picture, Kim’s mother often arranged his pickup to her house. No wonder the woman didn’t have a problem with me, I was lightening her load. She still watched Jamal on occasions, so it wasn’t as if I was taking her grandchild away from her completely.

“I know what he wants already,” Kim told me.

As soon as she finished her sentence, there was a knock on the door.

“That’s him right now,” I assumed. “Don’t tell me what he wants. Let me ask him,” I told his mother.

She went out and let him in. I climbed out of bed and made a trip to the bathroom. The Christmas idea was getting me excited. Imagine that. To buy all of the things that I planned on, it would take nearly a full paycheck. Somebody must have smacked me over the head with a baseball bat.

When I returned from the bathroom, Kim was still grinning away.

“You didn’t do what I told you
not
to do, did you?” I was referring to Jamal and the Christmas list.

“No I didn’t,” Kim snapped at me.

“Good,” I told her.

“Well, I’ll see you two later on,” she said, walking out the door.

It was just me and Jamal again. It had been that way for a couple of months. I was actually a full-time guardian. A father every day.

I said, “Jamal, I’m about to take a shower, and I want you to do your homework while I’m in there, because we have some runs to make today.” I planned on visiting my mother, who was off work for the day, and then buying all the presents I needed, outside of Jamal’s and his mother’s. I would get those when Jamal wasn’t with me.

“Do you want something to eat or drink before I take my shower?” He nodded. “Yeah.”

“All right. Come on then.” I led him into the kitchen and made him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and poured him some juice. “Now eat your sandwich, drink your juice, and do your homework,” I told him.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“You’ll find out when we get there,” I told him. Then I got out a change of underwear and a towel.

When I finished getting ready, I went over Jamal’s homework to make sure he did everything. Once I got used to doing it, it got easier to remember. And at six years old, Jamal’s homework was a breeze.

I nodded my head and said, “Good job. You just got one thing wrong.” I pointed out his mistake to him.

He looked at it and said, “Oh,” before making the correction with his pencil.

“When you take your test, you take your time, okay? Don’t rush anything. That’s when you make mistakes. And the more you rush, the more mistakes you can make.”

I listened to myself talk and said, “Damn, that’s a lesson for life.”

Jamal looked at me and smiled. He knew what he wasn’t supposed to say. I apologized to him anyway. His mother wasn’t the only one who slipped with the language.

I called my mother and told her that Jamal and I were on our way. I had taken him over there a few times, so she was familiar with him. And she liked him.

“Are you two hungry?” she asked me.

I looked at Jamal and figured that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
wouldn’t hold him long. I already knew that
I
was hungry. “Yeah, we’re hungry,” I answered.

“Okay, I’ll have something ready when you get here.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I told her.

“And make sure you dress him properly.”

I smiled. Once a mother always a mother. “I will, Mom. I’ll make sure that I’m bundled up, too. See you soon.”

As soon as we walked out the door and were on our way to the bus stop, I asked Jamal what he wanted for Christmas.

“A Sony Playstation,” he answered excitedly.

I didn’t know exactly what that was, but anything with Sony in front of it sounded expensive. “Is that a video game or something?”

“Yeah, it’s a lot of them.” Then he started naming things that I couldn’t even repeat.

“Do they have basketball and football cartridges?”

“Um, I think so,” he answered. He didn’t seem too sure about it.

I remembered when my brothers and I had a video game called Intellivision. Intellivision had the best sports games ever! You could control nearly everything, and it had an infinite number of plays to choose from, not just a dozen or so like the new games that were out.

“Well, we’ll see what Santa Claus can do,” I told Jamal.

He smiled and said, “There’s no such thing as Santa Claus.”

People waiting at the bus stop with us began to laugh.

“Who told you that?” I asked him. “And if there’s no Santa Claus, then where do all the toys come from.” I was just asking to see how much he knew.

“Those toys come from the store.”

“So they make them at the store? Or do the elves make them at the North Pole, and then ship them to the stores at nighttime with Rudolf and the rest of the reindeer?”

“Unt unh. There’s no such thing as Rudolf. And reindeer don’t fly,” he told me.

“How do they get around then?”

“They run.”

I was having a good time with him as the bus pulled up.

He said, “If reindeer could fly, then I would want to get one. Then we wouldn’t have to ride buses.”

People were really amused at how sharp he was. I was too, but I was getting used to it. Most kids were bright until people stopped challenging them. Then they would fall into a dark stage of destruction. I knew
because I was one of those kids. My dark stage didn’t come until much later.

“He’s really smart, isn’t he?” an older woman asked me.

“All kids are,” I told her. I wanted to think positive.

An older man nodded and agreed with me. “Mmm hmm,” he mumbled. “They can use them smarts in the streets,
or
in the books. But most of them choose to use it out in the streets.”

“Yeah, well,
this one
won’t,” I told the older man. I noticed that most people were more negative than positive when talking about a kid’s future. It was almost as if we
expected
black kids to fuck up. That attitude was pissing me off! I wished someone would have told me that I could do anything when
I
was young. Even make the NBA if I wanted to. But most people thought of me as just a good high school player, and I fell right into their game.

By the time we made it over to my mother’s, Jamal had fallen asleep. He usually took naps in the late afternoon because of the crazy schedule he was used to with his mother. As long as he didn’t doze off in the classroom, I didn’t have a problem with it. Kids needed more rest than adults anyway. A nap was good for him.

Jamal yawned as soon as he spoke to my mother.

“Oh, so you’re tired, are you?” she said to him. “You can take a nap then. Take your shoes off and lay down on the couch. You can get something to eat when you’re good and ready. Okay?”

It seemed like Mom treated Jamal better than she treated me. He took her suggestion, and stretched out on the comfortable couch.

I smiled at her and whispered while we entered the kitchen. “I don’t know, Mom, it seems like you like him.”

“I
do
like him. He’s a nice, respectable boy. And I’m so glad that you’re looking after him like you are. Him
and
Jimmy.”

“Yeah, it just took me a long time to realize it, Mom. I can’t start all over, but I can pick up where I left off, and that was basically nowhere. So I guess I have a whole lot of catching up to do.”

“Well, at least you’re
trying
to catch up. Some of these fathers are not even trying. It’s just sad. Don’t they know that their kids need them in their lives? What is wrong with these young fathers today?”

I felt guilty. Just a year ago, I was one of those young fathers, but I always cared about my son. I said, “It just takes some deep thinking and a lot of courage, Mom. A good job helps too,” I added.

“Well, most of them don’t even want to
look
for a job. A good job is
not going to walk up and smack you in the face. You have to go out and
find
one.”

I sat down at the small kitchen table as my mother fixed me some chicken and dumplings. She was a chicken and dumplings expert. Trust me! My eyes lit up. Jamal didn’t know what he was missing.

When my mother sat down to join me, I noticed how everything had been scaled down. We used to have a big kitchen table when my brothers and father were still living. Suddenly, my meal didn’t taste as good as it should have to me. Nevertheless, I tried to think of brighter things.

“So, Mom, what do you want for Christmas?” I asked, trying to get my mother as excited about it as I was.

She seemed to be in a daze for a moment. “I don’t need anything for Christmas,” she told me. “Besides,” she added, “what
I
would want I can’t possibly have.”

Then it hit me that my mother was thinking about the absence of my brothers and father, too. Maybe that was why she was so happy to see me with Jimmy and Jamal. It served as a new beginning of bonding between a black man and his sons.

I looked into her eyes and decided to ask her the question I had been thinking about for months. “Hey, Mom … have you ever felt that we would all still be here if Dad was alive and healthy?”

My mother began to nod and rock back and forth in her chair. She said, “Every time things were going right, something would just go wrong. And every time your father would have the best job, he would get sick or injured. I always wondered what he had done to deserve so much bad luck. I ended up putting a lot of pressure on your older brother to help out, and we all just let
you
play basketball.”

I thought back and remembered the arguments that my mother used to have with Marcus. They always seemed to calm down when I was around, and I always wondered what was going on. Maybe I was Mr. Special Son all along, because of my basketball skills and my father’s enjoyment in watching me play.

“Boys need their fathers or somebody to look up to,” my mother told me. “You remember how hurt you were when your father died?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I remember. I still do hurt. For
all
of us.”

“But you had that extra eye from your father that your brothers never got. They didn’t feel as hurt when he died. But you, it just changed your whole attitude about life. I saw the changes happening, but I was too busy trying to hold on to
all
of you to do anything about it. I couldn’t
give that special attention that your father gave you. And poor Neecy couldn’t either.”