Page 43 of If I Gave You My Heart
I wasn't like Adira. She yearned for a relationship with our biological mother, and personally, I couldn't give two fucks. Everybody knows that a boy's first love is their mother, and I feel like I didn't have one. That woman lost the title of mother when she allowed me and my sister to enter the system. Joy always saw that her reasoning for it was valid and that I should at least try to have some kind of relationship with the woman, but I wasn't going for that.
Joy's voice broke me from my thoughts as I looked into the eyes of the woman who had abandoned me.
"Baby, did you hear me?" Joy asked.
"Ny… let's go."
I heard Nyoka's sweet tone saying goodbye inside to the family I had just introduced her to. While Nyoka was giving one of my nieces a hug, I snatched her hand and pulled her past both Joy and Jolene and down the steps. As Nyoka and I walked toward the car, I could hear Adira and Javier coming outside.
"Mom?" I heard Adira say. She sounded shocked, but I could tell that there was a slight glimmer of happiness in her tone.
"Adonis…"
I kept walking as I ignored the stranger's voice calling after me. As a boy, my mother was my heart. She was so beautiful to me, and her voice was one that I could never forget. Her raspy tone used to be the sweetest thing to me, and now I was disgusted with the sound of the shit.
"Donny…" I paused with Nyoka's small hand filling mine. I stood in my tracks.
Memories of my mother calling me that as a little boy came right to me. We used to play hide-and-seek, and her raspy tone would lightly say my name throughout our small apartment.
"Donny…" she would say with a raspy giggle as she pulled back curtains and tablecloths just to find me.
"Can I talk to you, please?"
I felt a tap on my shoulder, quickly dropped it, and turned around with the mean mug plastered on my face.
"Bruh, leave me the fuck alone."
"Adonis!" I heard Joy yelling from the front porch. I never cursed around her. None of us did. "She is still your mother."
I looked deep into the eyes of the woman standing before me. Looking at eyes that mirrored mine in shape and in color pissed me off even more.
"Joy, fuck this lady. You're my mother."
"Actually… I'm your grandmother."
Memories of Joy for years defending the woman standing before me flashed in my mind, and now it was all starting to make sense. One day, Adira and I were with my mother, and then the next, this lady came along and said that she had adopted us. I remember other kids having nanas, and I never had one. I had a Joy. I broke the deep stare with my mother to give Joy my undivided attention.
"What?"
"Baby, come inside! We're doing all this fussing in the street!" Joy yelled from the porch.
As I shifted sights between Joy and my surrogate, I started to see the resemblance between the two. My sight became blurry as my eyes watered. I loved Joy the very first time I laid eyes on her because of how similar she looked to my mother.
"Bullshit!" At this point, I was hollering.
Two squeezes in the palm of my hand made me look down to see that Nyoka was still standing beside me.Calm downis what the two squeezes signaled, and I knew it, but I just couldn't. We stood on the curb hand in hand as my life, or what I knew to be my life, was turning upside down. Nyoka was witnessing a real nigga out on the curb crying like a little ass boy. The tears were flowing, and I didn't even give a damn to wipe them.
"Donny…"
"Stop muthafucking calling me that!" I yelled as I slapped my mother's hand away from me.
"Let's go…" I heard Nyoka say as she pulled me closer to her Jeep.
"Nah, stop muthafucking calling me that!"
I was pulling away from Nyoka because badly I wanted to kill the woman standing before me.
"Baby, just go."
