Mama's Girl Read online

  Mama’s Girl

  Daybreak Jones

  www.urbanbooks.net

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Urban Books, LLC

  300 Farmingdale Road, NY-Route 109

  Farmingdale, NY 11735

  Mama’s Girl Copyright © 2017 Daybreak Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior consent of the Publisher, except brief quotes used in reviews.

  ISBN: 978-1-62286-583-3

  This is a work of fiction. Any references or similarities to actual events, real people, living or dead, or to real locales are intended to give the novel a sense of reality. Any similarity in other names, characters, places, and incidents is entirely coincidental.

  Distributed by Kensington Publishing Corp.

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  Prologue

  My eyes are open, but the darkness makes them feel closed. I know they’re open because I am blinking, and I’m not asleep. I try to lift my hands to my face, but my arms are restricted. I can’t move them up or to the side. I can touch my thighs. My jeans are wet and torn. When I raise my hands, I feel this cold, slick material on the back of my hand. I am sort of wrapped in something. I can’t lift my legs any higher than my hands. I feel around with my hands and feet. I am inside of something. My hands and feet meet resistance.

  “Hey!” I scream.

  “What the hell?” is what I hear in response to my scream, and whoever said it is real close.

  I start frantically moving my arms and legs as much as I can. I feel and hear my feet banging on something. I bang them harder. “Hey, somebody get me out of here!”

  Suddenly a heavy hand is on my chest, holding me still. I hear a loud zip, and the light attacks my eyes. I force them closed, but I blink them open quickly.

  “No! You are DOA!” he screams at me and jumps away with his hands holding his head.

  “What?” I blink my eyes to seeing. “Oh, my God.” I am on a metal hospital table in a body bag.

  The man runs from me to a phone on a pole. “I need a physician in the morgue, stat!”

  I try to get off the table. But when I look down, I see my cut-up bloody jeans and blouse.

  “Jesus, help me.”

  I can’t stand because my feet are still in the bottom of the body bag. My shoulder hurts so much that I grab it. I feel a warm liquid. Turning my head, I see blood seeping through my fingers.

  “Don’t move!” the man yells at me, but I try to stand anyway pulling my feet from the bag. When I swing them to the floor, blood gushes from my leg. I pull my hand from my shoulder to my thigh trying to stop the squirting. Blood keeps coming through my fingers. The room flips and spins, and I fall to the floor.

  There is a doctor, maybe two, working on me. They have put an oxygen mask on me and stuck a couple IVs in my arms.

  I have been shot in the shoulder, and I remember who did it.

  My side and shoulder hurt. The oxygen smells like rubber. The body bag I was wrapped in is on the floor. I am hoping they will take me off this cold metal table.

  “We have to move her to surgery one. I can’t stop the bleeding.”

  I try to raise my head to see the bleeding, but a nurse holds me still.

  “Relax, May. You can’t move around, baby. You’ll make it worse, understand?”

  She sounds a lot like my mama. I nod my head. How does she know my name? Nobody asked me my name.

  “Have the anesthesiologist in surgery one,” one of the doctors says.

  I look over at the guy who unzipped the body bag. He’s standing by the phone pole with his eyes bucked wide open. He has a black water hose in his hand, and he is wearing a bloody white apron. I guess he is the cleanup guy. I feel like I am going to throw up, and I do.

  The nurse removes my mask and turns my head to the side, and I puke all over her blue uniform pants, the metal table, and down to the body bag. I am in too much pain to really care what I vomit on. My shoulder feels like it’s burning.

  “My shoulder is hot,” I tell them.

  “We’ve got to move her now,” the boss doctor says.

  I throw up again, and they start rolling me out of the morgue. I am peeing on myself as they push me into the elevator, and I don’t care. My side feels like something is trying to come out of me. There is pressure pushing from inside of me. I vomit again. The nurse wipes my lips and around my mouth. I want to tell her not to bother because I feel more coming.

  “Don’t worry, baby. You will be asleep soon, and the pain will stop,” she says.

  I doubt it. No way am I going to sleep hurting like this.

  “Your thighs have been severely cut, and one of the wounds damaged an artery. When you regained consciousness and moved your legs that allowed the blood to flow. We have to stop the bleeding.”

  “Cuts?”

  “Yes, baby, several.”

  “Who cut me?”

  They don’t have to worry about me bleeding to death because I am going to freeze to death. I am shivering to the bone, and my teeth are chattering. No way am I going to sleep now. They have pushed me into a room with brighter lights and more people.

  The nurse who sounds like my mama is still with me. She and another nurse are peeling off my clothes and sponge-bathing me. The warm water feels real good. There is a guy with a monitor behind me. He places another mask over my nose and mouth.

  He asks me, “Spell your last name?”

  I say, “J-o-y . . .”

  I must be dreaming because Grandma and Papa are sitting on the front porch with me, and it’s summer. We are watching Edith coming toward us, but it is little girl Edith not grown Edith, and she has a big bag of sunflower seeds and two sour pickles in the bags. I run down the steps toward her but, when I get to her, I am suddenly in the nightclub where I got shot. Little girl Edith is at the club with me. Dude hasn’t started to shoot yet. I reach for little girl Edith, but I hear the shot and feel myself getting hit in the shoulder. I reach again for little girl Edith, but she jumps away from me and starts screaming. I am on floor in front of the bar bleeding and calling for my mama.

  I wake up.

  I still have on an oxygen mask, but I am no longer in that big, bright room. It’s a small room with one other bed. The television is on. In its light, I see a cast and brace on my shoulder and arm. My legs are covered with the sheets, and I am too tired to try to move the sheets. I see the door opening, and a nurse walks in. I want to say something, but I can’t.

  It’s another dream. It has to be, because I am not shot or cut, but I am at the bar where I got shot. This is my first time in a bar or club or tavern, and I am not enjoying myself at all. The place stinks of cigarettes, body sweat, beer, liquor, and cheap lady’s perfume and men’s cologne. In the mirror, I see myself sitting on the barstool looking at Samuel.


  I’m telling him, “They are going to put my mama in jail.”

  “No. They will understand it was an accident.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know. Relax. Let’s get back to the hospital.” He places his little glass on the bar top.

  I see her in the mirror walking up behind us before she speaks: “And where are you taking this child?”

  I have seen her in his car and in pictures on his phone and in his wallet. This is Samuel’s wife standing behind us.

  “I asked you a question, Sam. What are you doing here with this child?”

  When I look at Samuel’s reflection in the mirror, I am confused. His face is smiling, and he looks happy.

  “Hey, baby!” he says standing and turning around. He pulls her into an embrace. “I didn’t think my text went through. So you are good with going out to eat tonight?”

  “What text? I saw your Porsche outside and couldn’t figure out why you would be in a dive like this.”

  Still hugging her, he says, “Oh, me and May stopped to go over her lines. She is an understudy in the Langston play, and she’s trying out for a role at Loyola. I was going to drop her off then meet you at Geno’s for steaks. That is, if you’re up for it.”

  He is still hugging her.

  “Of course, baby, I would love to stop for steaks.” She kisses him, breaks the embrace, and turns to me and says, “It’s nice meeting you, May. I hope you get the part.” She extends her hand for me to shake.

  I don’t know what to say, but I smile my biggest smile and shake her hand.

  Suddenly, little girl Edith appears on the bar and says, “She’s fucking you husband. Shoot her!”

  I force myself awake.

  My mouth and throat are so dry. The nurse was nice enough to put everything on my right side. He shot me in my left shoulder and moving that arm is not an option, not with the cast and the brace.

  I saw him shoot me. The gun was pointed right at me. I saw the fire come out of it. Maybe he was trying to shoot her, but he shot me.

  Chapter One

  Six Months Earlier . . .

  Cold weather is why I have to go to an alternative school. After being tardy forty-two days my junior year, the school administration kicked me out of Calumet High School. Cold, frosty mornings and I just don’t get along. Standing on a corner first thing in the morning and waiting for the bus in the freezing wind is just not my thing. I didn’t do it my first three years of high school, and I’m certainly not going to do it my senior year.

  In my freshman, sophomore, and junior years, Uncle Doug, one of Mama’s boyfriends, took me to school. He worked at the grocery store down the street from the school, so dropping me off wasn’t a problem. But then his drunk butt got fired, and that left me with the bus. My mama has a car, but she won’t get up to take me anywhere in the mornings. She tells me to make it the best way I can.

  Mama said she caught the bus to high school so why shouldn’t I. She caught the bus, all right, for one year, and then she got pregnant with me and never went back, not even to get her GED.

  My best friend, Carlos, his mama wakes him up in the mornings, fixes him breakfast, and helps him get out the door. The alarm on my smart phone wakes me up, and most times when I come home from school, my mama is getting up from one of her naps. And it’s not like she is tired from working. My mama doesn’t have a job. She gets a check once a month, bootlegs, and gets help from her boyfriends, who she calls my uncles. I have a couple of uncles, but I never met any of the aunties who go with them.

  We live in the house Grandma and Papa left Mama and me. They died five years ago, six months apart from each other, Papa first then Grandma. I miss them both every day. Our house was happier when they were alive. We were a real family with a mama and a daddy. My mama and I were more like sisters. Papa and Grandma were the grownups. After Papa and Grandma died, Mama had to be the grownup, and being an adult is hard for her.

  Mama likes to have parties, and she has them all the time, but they are not happy parties. They are not birthday parties or anniversary parties like Papa and Grandma used to have. They invited real uncles and cousins and aunties over. When Grandma cooked, people would bring more than brown paper bags with bottles in them to our house. For Grandma and Papa’s parties, people brought pies, cakes, bread pudding, and all kinds of stuff here. Those were happy parties.

  Mama’s parties are “just because” parties: just because somebody’s check came, just because somebody hit the number, just because somebody got divorced, or just because it’s Friday night. “Just because” parties are not real parties.

  Mama and her friends love to party and act happy, but their eyes are sad even when their faces are grinning. It’s a weird thing to see, a smiling face with sad eyes, but I see it all the time at Mama’s parties. Papa told me a person’s eyes tell their story. If that’s true, and I believe it is, then Mama and her loud partying friends are sad, despite the laughs that come out of their mouths.

  Well, because Mama spends her time with her partying friends and her boyfriends, I have to get myself up and out in the mornings. A person would think that a mother would take her only child to school but, nope, that’s not the case with Gloria Joyce. She brags about me making the A-B honor roll, but she won’t take me to school.

  My mama told me getting up in the mornings would add stress to her life, and stress would give her wrinkles, and wrinkles would make her look older, which cannot happen by any means because she has to stay looking young for the uncles, which I don’t understand, because all the uncles look old. My mama looks too good and too young to be bothered with any of her boyfriends.

  My mama is fine, beautiful really. She could be a supermodel—well, a short one. I have seen models who aren’t tall. She could be one. People say I look like her, but Mama is way prettier than me. We share the same light complexion, but Mama’s lips are narrow where mine are thick. Men say they like my thick lips, and I like my lips, but Mama’s thin ones seem to balance her face. Her nose is pointed, and mine is wide and kind of round. She says she wishes she had my nose but, again, hers matches her face. What makes her so pretty is that every part on her face is balanced. No part overshadows another. People are always mistaking us for sisters, and she doesn’t bother to correct them.

  Once, the truant officer from my old high school came by the house. He wouldn’t talk to Mama or come into the house because he thought she was my sister, and that we were trying to run a game on him. After she showed him her driver’s license, he gave her my attendance record still standing on the porch. He told her I would be transferred to the alternative school because of my tardiness. In his very next breath, he commented on her not having on a wedding ring and asked her out to dinner. My mama smiled and questioned him on his ability to stop the transfer. He had no power in that area, he told her. Still smiling, she closed the door in his face.

  The alternative school isn’t that bad. It doesn’t start until ten o’clock, and there is a bus that picks students up. And by going to the alternative school, I will be graduating this year. If I had stayed at Calumet, I wouldn’t graduate until next year because I failed my eight a.m. English class last year due to my tardiness. That got me really mad because I got mostly A’s on my assignments despite being late. School policy is statewide, the principal told my mama. There was nothing he could do.

  At the alternative school, I can retake English at an accelerated rate so I will graduate this year, which should make me happy but, honestly, I just want to stop going to school. Being finished with it will be a relief. I want high school to be over.

  We live on Eighty-ninth and Morgan, and the alternative school is all the way out on 115th Street, and it’s a locked campus, and all the extracurricular activities revolve around school stuff. I joined the computer club, but only because of the late bus driver. He’s an actor and model, and he drives the bus part time, and he is too fine, and the way he looked at me from the start told me he was intere
sted.

  His father owns the bus company, and my mama says his family has money. I have seen their buses all my life and never thought that it was a family name on the side of them: Talbert Transportation Service. His name is Samuel Talbert. He has curly hair, prefect white teeth, smooth bright skin, green eyes, and he’s tall. He showed me some pictures of himself in magazine ads. And since he models and acts, the whole world must think he is fine, not just Mama and me.

  Another good thing about the alternative school, besides Samuel, is Carlos going there too. He got kicked out of Calumet for making and selling fake state IDs. They kicked him out even with him being the starting forward and the highest scorer on the team. He could have gone to jail and gotten kicked out of the school system for good making those phony IDs, but his mama begged the school administration not to report him to the police. Mama says she did more than beg Mr. Anderson, the principal, but Mama never has anything nice to say about Ms. Carol.

  They grew up next door to each other just like Carlos and me, and they were best friends too. Now, they give each other phony smiles and halfhearted waves when they pass. Whatever happened between them happened years ago, and only they know what it was. Not even Grandma or Papa knew what stopped them from being best friends.

  Carlos and I were best friends before we knew the difference between boy and girl, and we are still best friends today, despite knowing. None of his girlfriends can stand me, and I don’t care. Our friendship is stronger than any boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. We listen to each other, and I tell him when a girl is a tramp. Sometimes a pretty face fools him. Like a lot of dark-skinned boys, he attracts girls with light complexions. I guess opposites do attract, and since he’s tall and plays basketball, the girls really sweat him. But I keep the tramps away, and he does the same for me, but he’s not sure about Samuel yet.

  Samuel is five years older than us, so Carlos can’t get any real info on him, but he told me to take my time with him and not to have sex with him. He said older dudes always want to sex up a high school girl and then move on to another one. That much he is certain of. I hope Samuel does want to sex me up because I sure want him to sex me up. If I waited on Carlos to decide who I should have sex with, I would still be a virgin. As far as he is concerned no guy is good enough for me to do it with.