Now July, with Lyulle’s sentence to be up sometime in November, I had to get my act together. I had seen very little of Dion. He’d still had my money. Lyulle was milking my guilt to the max. I felt awful all the time about what I had done. It was official; if he wanted to end the relationship, he’d be justified.
I’d officially cheated on him multiple times in multiple ways while he was locked up for eleven months. He was gonna fuck me up when he got out of jail. Oh, there was no way around these consequences. I began my mental exercises and some physical exercises too. I was scared. Everyone knew I was scared. Lyulle knew I was scared.
I worked out in the apartment complex weight room. With Brooklyn still in Akron, Lyulle was still begging me to go pick him up. I made excuse after excuse not to.
I was working two jobs, and I’d be really tired after work, too tired to care for him. He was better off with my family for now. I’d say anything to defend the lie-festyle that I was leading.
I began to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. The books became my study guides to deal with my now opponent Lyulle Peterson. I’d need to learn fast if I wanted to survive my test that was surely due to arrive.
October rolled around. I visited Lyulle from time to time. I began speaking to him regularly, but things were far from good with us.
I got a call from Gem.
“So are you coming home before he gets out of jail?”
“No. What makes you think that?”
“I think you should. You’re talking about how scared you are and all this. I think you should transfer your job and just move back here.”
Imagine me; I was furious. Excuse me. I asked you after Brooklyn was born if I could come stay with you, and you told me no. I’ve been dealing with this this long. Sorry, I do not want to live in a shelter.
“Well, if you don’t transfer your job and move up here, I am gonna file for custody of Brooklyn and make you come home.”
Did she just have the audacity to say to me that she would take me son from me if I didn’t do what she said? What kinda hoopla bullshit is this? And I’d liked to see her try it because I did not think her silly ass would follow through on a bogus manipulation such as that trash. I did not jump in my car that night to get Brooklyn.
She wouldn’t dare do some shit like that. I called my grandmother, Brooklyn’s Nana, who was keeping him and with whom I had spoken months prior about Lyulle’s knowing I had been dishonest, about him having cameras in our apartment, and about him saying I was a bad mother when that could have been further from the truth. Anyway, I called her to inform her about what Gem had said to me. Because Nana had been responsible for Brooklyn, she wouldn’t dare allow Gem to do such a thing. I was wrong again.
The truth had smacked me in the face when the sheriff showed up at my door to serve me on the custody status of my firstborn.
“Your child has been placed in the emergency custody of your mother Gem.”
Can you imagine my panic and my confusion and my pain when I tell you I almost did not believe what I was holding in my hands was real? I read the pages, and my hands began to tremble and shake uncontrollably. My mind began to race, and my heart beat out of my chest. I had failed, and Summit County and the rest of the family were gonna feel this, that I was feeling some type of way. They would all feel my pain.
I raced to Akron from Columbus to see what was going on. I went to Nana and Mimi’s house first. What was this? Look what she had done! I was met at the door by my grandmother, who said no, I could not see my son. My heart dropped to my feet. She called the police … on me? This was unreal, masterful even. How could this be playing out before my eyes in this way? My mother and my grandmother were taking my son from me.
I was made to leave. My heart was somewhere floating around in my body, outside of my chest cavity. I found myself on the highway back to Reynoldsburg with no one but my lonesome, broken self.
The next visit day, I went to see Lyulle. I had to tell him about the court order. I had to tell him what had happened to me and what Gem had done. He would be out of prison in a few weeks. I needed him to go to court to defend me, to defend himself, and to stand with me to get back Brooklyn. He would too. There was no question in my mind about it. Although we had our relationship problems and I’d have hell to pay, I knew it—he’d stand united with me for our son.
He never came downstairs. He never came down for the visit. I waited for a whole hour to see him, requesting he come down repeatedly. He never came.
I left. I was bawling and speeding from Pickaway County Correctional Institute. It couldn’t get any worse until a state highway patrolman pulled me over for speeding. I was going seventy-four in a fifty-five-miles-per-hour construction zone on the highway. I was hysterical.
The phone rang. It was a guy who was feeling me at the time … someone I had dodged for years since college. The only reason that I did was because I did not really think he was truly into me. He had managed to date all of the prettiest girls in our high school, of which I was not among. So I never took him seriously. Plus, he was a big military guy, deployed in Korea. He could not have been seriously into me. It was the perfect time for him to call me. I needed a friend.
I told him everything, from the court order to Lyulle’s deeds to discussing his cousin who was one of Lyulle’s team players. A small world, it had been. This guy was hot for me. We spoke on the phone a lot of the time after that—flirting, phone sex, pictures, things like that—but we never linked up. He was kind to me and called me almost daily to compliment me. We would not exchange physical information until nearly four years later.
Unbeknownst to me, Lyulle had fucked one of the dude’s cousins years ago and was now playing with that girl’s sister. How? I’m telling you, I’d known nothing of this type of life. The crazy part was that same girl, the sister, Lyulle and she and I … well, we had a helluva night with each of those sisters. Both nights, I’d had a yeast infection, and my pussy smelled like the inside of a garbage can sitting on a garbage truck parked at the landfill.
The next call was from Lyulle.
Once he got on the phone and I pulled away from the state trooper who gave me a ticket totaling $199, and having just hung up the phone from the last call, I was still bawling, blubbering like a baby about my trash bag of a life. He’d asked me to come back to the jail. I could still visit. I wanted to go back. I had to go to work. I’d be late or need to call off if I did not continue on home. I turned around to head back to the prison anyway.
Lyulle waited until I was near the exit to the prison to say to me, “Nah, you may need to go ahead and go to work. I will call you back after the count.” We hung up.
When he called me back, I told him how the setup went down with Gem and my grandmother and how things had turned out. He encouraged me to hold on until he got home, which gave me hope. I could not patch things up with him in a few weeks. However, I knew he would help me with this bag of shit I was thrown and I was now carefully carrying.