Page 96 of Tangled Hearts
“You good?” Shakeisha asked gently, curling up on the other end of the couch.
He smirked without any humor. “I got too much shit in my head. Can’t turn it off.”
“Then put it somewhere.”
Her words hung there, and for once, he didn’t snap back or get offended. Instead, he stood up before disappearing intothe bedroom. He came back with a black, worn sketchbook. He tossed it onto the table between them, the cover bent and the edges curled.
Shakeisha’s brows lifted. “What’s this, baby daddy?”
“My head,” he muttered, sitting back down. “The shit I don’t know how to say out loud.”
She opened it carefully afraid of what she might see. Rock was a ticking time bomb like that. He was always in his head and firing off when he felt too vulnerable.
Dark pencil lines, heavy shading, faces and figures that screamed pain covered each page as she flipped. One caught her—an empty crib, drawn with such detail it looked like a photograph. A cracked heart sat in the middle of it.
Her throat tightened. “This you?”
Rock nodded, his temples jumped from him gnawing on his teeth. “When they took me. When Nick set me up. I missed all her baby years ‘cause of him. Five years. All I had was that crib in my head.”
Shakeisha ran her thumb across the page, not smudging it, just feeling the weight of the intricate details of Rock’s mind. “This is powerful, Rock. This is you telling your story without saying a word. People need to see this.”
He let out a bitter laugh. “People don’t care about no nigga drawing in a book.”
“I do,” she said softly. “And I think other people would too. You don’t know how many kids you could reach with this. Boys who feel like they ain’t got a way out. You could put this on skin, on walls, in books. This ain’t just sketches, Rock. This is therapy, and it’s talent.”
He stared at her, caught between brushing it off and letting the words sink in. “You’re a great mama… My mama ain’t never said no shit like that. She ain’t even want me half the time. Chose dick over me every chance she got.” He shook his head.“Sometimes I think she the reason I don’t know how to stay put. If my own mama ain’t want me, why would anybody else?”
Shakeisha closed the book and placed it on her lap. “You ever think about forgiving her?”
He snapped his head toward her. “Forgive? After what she did?”
“I didn’t say forget,” she answered. “But holding that anger don’t change nothing. It don’t give you them years back. It just eats at you every day. You think about her every time you look at yourself. That’s a prison too.”
Rock blinked, her words cutting in a way fists never could. He dropped his head into his hands, voice muffled. “I don’t know if I got forgiveness in me, baby. Not for her. Not for Nick.”
“You don’t gotta do it today.” She shook her head. “But you can’t raise Rodeisha with all that hate still in your chest. She gonna feel it, even if you never say it out loud. She deserves a daddy that shows up with a clean and pure heart. That’s the man you trying to be, right?”
Her words sat heavy, replaying in his mind. He reached for the book, flipped to another page—this one a drawing of a man with a little girl on his shoulders, her braids flying back as she laughed. It was lighter than the rest. Softer too.
“That’s what I want,” he admitted. “Her looking at me like I’m more than the fuck-ups. More than the time I lost. Like I’m a solid ass nigga.”
Shakeisha’s hand landed on his knee. “Then be that man. You’re already him, Rock. You just don’t believe it yet.”
He smirked, his small gap showing. “You believe it?”
Shakeisha sat back, inhaling deep before exhaling just as hard. “I do but it scares me. I know why you still running behind Knycole… you’re too scared to let go of your past life and walk into the one you deserve the most.”
“They teach you that in school? How to be a therapist and shit?”
Shakeisha rolled her eyes with a smile on her face. “No but I’m for real, Rodrick… what does ten years look like for you? You going back to the streets? What’s the plan?”
He dragged his hand down his face, exhaling heavily. “I don’t know. That’s the problem.” He looked around the living room filled with so much love. “Streets all I knew. It’s all I was good at. You take that away… I’m just a nigga with scars and a record. Nobody hiring me. Nobody betting on me. Except myself. And most days, I don’t even know how to do that.”
Shakeisha reached for the sketchbook again, flipping back to the drawing of the man with the little girl on his shoulders. “This is betting on yourself. This is you telling your story in a way that don’t gotta end with you dead or locked up again. You can tattoo. You can teach kids how to draw. You can open a shop. Don’t tell me you ain’t got a plan—you just scared to believe in it.”
Rock rubbed his chest, right where the ache sat. His mother’s face flashed through his mind—eyes glazed, fake laughing, sitting on the next man’s lap. He clenched his jaw, head starting to throb. “You know what ten years look like for me? It look like my mama never showing up. It look like Nick stealing five years from me. It look like the world laughing at me every time I try to stand tall.”
Shakeisha’s voice softened, but her words didn’t. “Or… it can look like you finally being the man you always needed. You can rewrite it, Rock. But you gotta want to.”
