Telling a man you pregnant with his child is like taking a bite of a tender peach. The only way to know if it’s good is if you sink your teeth into it.
The first time I told Tooth I was pregnant, I didn’t even know I was having twins yet, hadn’t told no one else. I was scared shitless when I went to him, meeting where we always did in the back room of the bait shop where he worked, and before he unzipped his pants, I blurted it out. Dug my teeth in and waited for the taste.
I couldn’t’ve been more shocked when he picked me up and spun me around, waiting for me to wrap my legs around his torso so he could squeeze my ass, whispering in my ear, “We’re having a baby,” and he didn’t sound angry or disappointed or scared at all, so I laughed and said, “Yeah, we are,” and that was that.
I was hoping everyone else would react the same way Tooth did, and that was my first mistake. You’ve prob’ly thought about how pissed you’d be if your baby came home from high school telling you she’s pregnant, but imagine the other way around. A closed fist for a stomach, thinking about your momma looking you in your face and picturing all the dirty things you was doing. So I tried not to go in acting like I was making a death announcement.
Instead, when I told Momma and Pops, I had a big old grin on my face, trying to make my voice sound like all those women in the movies, high-pitched and exploding at the first syllable in PREGnant. Momma slapped me across the face before I got the rest of the word out. Pops just shook his head and got up to throw my clothes into a trash bag and hand them to me.
“You not gon’ embarrass me in my own house,” he said, even as I sobbed on the fake grass mat outside the trailer all night, even as I begged him to let me back in the next morning, Jayden staring out the window at me at age thirteen, tears welled up in his eyes, but never standing to open the door. Never even getting to say goodbye to my little sisters, both of them six at the time, ’cause Momma told them not to talk to me.
At least this time telling Tooth, I didn’t have so much to lose, but that didn’t make me feel any less like gagging all over the McDonald’s table as I waited for him, staring at my fries.
When he finally walked in, the urge to retch became even stronger, the way his cheekbones sloped and his eyes grazed over every other table even though I was the only one in the place. When he slid into the plastic booth across from me, all I could think about was how pretty he still was and then, as I looked closer at him, how age was starting to creep its way into his face.
Back when I was fifteen and he was twenty-one, I didn’t know how old he was. I swear, you really couldn’t tell. I just knew he was the pretty boy who worked at the bait shop and that every single girl in town would stop on by just to see if he was the marrying type. When we first met, I thought we looked like we was the same age, him and his baby face, but now I could see he was slowly wilting. Dusky patches growing beneath his eyes from staying up too late and forgetting to eat, skin dulling from that radiant buzz that made him look soft, suede. You had to look for it, but it was there. So I forced myself to look ’cause if I didn’t fight to see his age, I would forget not to love him, and Lord knows how that worked for me before.
“Hey babygirl, where my kids at?” He took my fries, pulling them toward him, eating them three at a time.
“They with the Girls,” I said. “Luck been askin’ when you gon’ teach her to surf like you said you would.”
“She not even five, can’t be surfing.”
“Then you shouldn’t’ve promised her,” I said. It irked me, watching him munch on those grease-soaked potatoes, not having to deal with Luck sobbing about how he promised her, flailing on the ground and puffing up her lungs with more fury and air than I knew a little body could fit.
“So if you ain’t brought the kids, why you make me come out here on my lunch break?” Tooth asked, still staring at those fries as he chowed down.
“I gotta tell you something.” I tried to steady my breathing, calm down my secret hoping that he’d be happy, that he’d say he was waiting to tell me, but he was buying us a house with all his savings, and he wanted to take me and the twins home to meet his grandmama and he wanted us to be a family.
I know you wondering why I was still betting on a grown man who clearly didn’t know better, but you gotta remember my hope wasn’t just for me. It was for my babies. Part of me was still wishing on a dying tree that I could give them the family I thought I’d had before it all fell apart.
“Good,” he said. “I got something to tell you too.”
“Really?” Maybe it would happen. Maybe he’d step up and we could give Luck and Lion what they deserved. Something intact. Something sacred.
Tooth nodded. “I actually just got a new place, moved in a couple weeks ago.”
My jaw felt like it might wiggle loose and separate into top and bottom. “You bought a house? Please tell me it’s got two bedrooms.”
“Renting, but yeah,” he said. “Two big bedrooms, up close to the shop, and we just got some mattresses from that flea market in Pensacola and we was thinkin’ maybe we’d go in on one of them big flat-screens that cover the whole wall.”
Like always, Tooth snapped my hope in two and I remembered who he was. My torment stirred.
“We?” I coughed. “You got a new girl?” I was ready to stand up and throw those fries all over him, slap him silly.
“Whatchu talkin’ ’bout? I don’t got no woman but you.”
“Then who’s we?”
“Me and my boys. All five of us workin’ at the shop rented out a whole goddamn house, and Derrick and Slim and I sharing one room and Ricky and Deshawn sharing the other, and I was thinking that I could have the kids one or two nights a week. Just not on no weekends, ’cause you know the boys and I like to go on out to the city. And not on Thursday or Monday neither, ’cause I can’t be missin’ no football games with the season just starting. Whatchu think?”
As I listened to Tooth, trying to make sense of what the fuck he was saying to me, the door to the McDonald’s opened up and Mrs. Woods walked in with some girl with natural hair trailing behind her. Prob’ly some stray relative come down for Labor Day. I smiled at Mrs. Woods and she smiled back, but I knew she wasn’t down for none of the Girls or me, since she was friendly with my momma and her bunch.
I watched over Tooth’s shoulder as they went up to the register and ordered, and I almost started laughing in Tooth’s face when I saw their food coming out and Mrs. Woods grabbed her burger and fries and the girl picked up a salad in the same little carton they usually put the fries in. Nothing but iceberg lettuce and three cherry tomatoes up in that salad, and the girl looked happy as hell, sitting down in the farthest booth from us.
“Whatchu think, Simone?” Tooth asked again.
I turned back to him. “What do I think? Here I am, thinkin’ you might actually do something to make us a family like I been askin’ you to since the day I pushed two babies out my coochie and now you tellin’ me you want me to let the most precious things I got sleep next to some strange men I don’t know?”
Tooth threw his fist down on the table. “Bullshit, Simone, you know my boys. It’s not no different than you leaving them with your Girls.”
“Just ’cause they try to fist-bump me once every couple months don’t mean I know shit about your boys. And it’s not nothing like the Girls. I won’t leave my daughter alone with some old men I don’t know nothin’ about.”
Tooth’s eyebrows knit. “What you mean, old? You know me, you know I’m not no kiddie-lover and my boys ain’t neither.”
That’s when I understood what I’d said. Not just what I’d said but what I’d meant. I couldn’t leave my daughter with some strange grown men like I’d been left with Tooth. I couldn’t let her grow up thinking it was normal to be alone with someone who had learned how to drive a car at the same time that she was still pissing her bed at night, someone who she would meet years later and who would claim to love her when really he wanted to own her. I couldn’t let my son learn how to slink into a room like his dad had, sit down among the boys and learn all he had to do to feel powerful was clench a girl in his fist and never let her go.
And if I couldn’t leave Luck or Lion in the house Tooth wanted, in the life Tooth wanted, learning the lessons of who he was and how he’d survived, how was I supposed to tell him there was another child that would tie us together, another child who would make it harder and harder for me to do what needed doing, to leave him. I couldn’t bite into that peach thinking it might taste sweet when I could already smell it was rotting inside.
“No, Tooth. They’re not coming to sleep in your frat house. You wanna see your kids, you can come see ’em anytime, but you gotta come to me.”
“The fuck you talkin’ ’bout, Simone?” Tooth stood and I thought he was gonna hit me or something, but instead he came over and slid into my side of the booth, grabbed one of my hands. “I put in six goddamn years witchu. I stayed even when most niggas would’ve left. C’mon, baby, just let me have my kids come over.” He moved his hand from mine down to my thigh and squeezed, and I pushed him away.
“No. I don’t wanna be doing that no more. Not with you.” I started to stand, but he was in my way. “Let me out.”
Tooth looked at me for a moment, his eyes the color of the bayou just like his babies’, staring at me like he wanted to rip into me. Then he slid out of the booth and let me out. I leaned over and scooped up my carton of fries, taking them with me, past Mrs. Woods and the salad girl, out of the McDonald’s and into the early-September air, leaving him there, standing, watching me go.
I didn’t know it then, but leaving Tooth in that McDonald’s with the salad girl and Mrs. Woods would change everything, sweep me into a mess that went beyond Tooth or me or this thing growing inside me. I’m telling you that so you can stop yourself from thinking this whole thing could’ve been prevented if I just hadn’t met him for those fries. Like all things, you can’t know until you know.
In that moment though, when I marched out into the parking lot and keeled over, vomiting my insides out till they spilled across the hot asphalt, I felt free. When I rose, I put a fry into my mouth and got to walking. This time, it was just me and this thing growing inside me. And I was determined to get it out.