Jordan Belcher - Status

“Stop it,” she seethed.

“But over time you learned to love her,” I went on. “Please don’t push Landon away. We have the same flesh and blood. He is my brother. And he saved my life.”

“Get him out of my house right now!”

I let out a mean breath like a bull, then grabbed the back of Landon’s wheelchair. “Come on, Kylie.” I wheeled him outside, bumping down the concrete steps.

He hit the hand brake.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He blinked, and two tears trickled down his cheeks. “My mother is the same way. She didn’t want me trying to get in touch with you. But I always wanted to meet you and get to know my other family. I’m sorry for not going about it a different way.”

He lowered his head and started crying. I kissed him on the cheek and put my arms around him.

“I don’t care how you got in touch with me. I’m just glad you did. We can start our own tradition. Waffle House, every Sunday. How you like that?”

He smiled wistfully. “That sounds good.”

Kylie’s little arms wrapped around us, too.

“Oh,” he said suddenly. “Since we’re going somewhere else to eat, I have a question?”

“What is it?”

“Can I bring my daughters?”

I gasped. “You have children?”

“Yep. My oldest daughter is two, and her birthday is a day after Kylie’s. My youngest is nine months. Two different baby mommas. Yo little brother has a way with the ladies. That’s why they call me Ladykiller.”

I cracked up laughing. “Oh my God! I can’t wait to meet them.”

“Me too,” Kylie said.

Tyesha816listed Ladykilleras her brother.

The guards wouldn’t let inmates touch the money, so I had to place nine quarters into the vending machine myself. When the turtle cake fell, Rodrick hunkered down and grabbed it out of the slot.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked me nicely, as if he were paying.

“No. Do you want one?”

“Yeah. Get me a Pepsi.”

Thankfully, the State never brought back up the murder case against Rodrick. But he still had to do time for his parole violation for coming in contact with the police without notifying his parole officer. I couldn’t believe that was actually a parole rule, but it was. Rodrick said there were endless rules to keep felons in a “closed circuit of perpetual marginality”—whatever that meant. At the most, he’d have to do six more months. But for Kylie’s sake, hopefully the board would give him an early review.

We sat down in plastic chairs at our table. Kylie was behind us in the visiting room’s play area, building a Lego house with a girl close to her age. I unwrapped my burrito and took a bite.

“I have to ask you something, Rodrick.”

“Wussup?”

“Did I mess up your life?”

He looked confused. “How could you do that?”

“By getting pregnant. You had a good future ahead of you with the basketball scholarship and everything. I remember you started hustling after that to take care of Kylie. I know if I would have never gotten pregnant, you would probably be playing pro. I always wondered if that’s why you cheated on me so much… because you resented me.”

“You got it all wrong. I started hustling before I found out you was pregnant. And when I did find out, that just made me hustle that much harder. Then I got busted and they took the scholarship away when I got convicted. But that’s my fault. And you had a scholarship to Clark Atlanta. You turned that down to raise Kylie in Kansas City. I could be to blame for you only being able to get your associate’s from that online course. Who knows how far you would’ve went if you had gone to Atlanta. To be honest, I started trying to get you pregnant when I found out you got yo scholarship. I figured you was about to do big things and I wanted to keep you, get you pregnant before one of them niggas down there did. So I’m sorry for doing you wrong.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

“I didn’t cheat because I resented you. I cheated because I was stupid. When I got out of prison the first time, I felt like I owed every female that sent me a letter. Fuckin’ all of ‘em was my way of saying thank you. You know how appreciative I am, Tyesha. But that was a twisted, selfish way of thinking. I’ve since learned from my mistakes. That’s why I stopped that cheating shit.”

“You stopped? When?”

One of the guards walked up and told me to keep my hands visible on the table. He also made Rodrick tuck in his prison red shirt and hand over the rubberband holding up his dreads. Rubberbands weren’t allowed.

“I been done stopped,” Rodrick told me when the guard walked off. “And not just since I got locked up again.”

“You’ll never change, Rodrick. I’ve learned that some people never will. You can’t force people to change; the only person you can change is yourself. The only reason I came up here was so you could see your daughter. And to tell you that I’m moving on.”

“Hold up, Tyesha. I just told you that I stopped cheating.”

“That’s funny. Because the one bitch I just knew you would never talk to again, Dava Babcock, just posted a picture of a letter you sent her two days ago. And before you fix your face to tell a lie, let me ad lib what the letter said. ‘ Dear Dava, I can’t wait till I get out so I can suck on that juice box again. I promise you I’ll put it on you harder than before. No, you don’t have to worry about me getting out and getting with my baby momma. Me and her are just friends. She’s coming to see me Saturday just so I can see my daughter, but I got you on the list for Sunday. Thanks for the bread. A nigga been eatin’ good in here. If the board calls me for that review, I’ll be home before our baby is born. You just make sure you eat right and keep your Temple healthy and nutritious. ” Clearing my throat to stop myself from crying, I said, “I would be able to tell you what the rest of the letter said but the guards wouldn’t let me bring in my phone. But it sure did look like your handwriting and your scribbly-ass signature.”

He leaned back in his seat and sighed.

We really didn’t have much to talk about for the rest of the visit. He asked to take a picture with Kylie and I didn’t mind. I paid for three images and stood behind the photographer as they posed together.

“When’s the next time you coming up?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ll try to bring Kylie at least once a month.”

When I got back to my car, I buckled Kylie in her booster seat. I got in behind the wheel and checked the comments from The Site on my phone. Earlier I had uploaded pictures of me and Kylie and Landon—and his two little girls, Kendal and Kayla—posing in front of Kaleidoscope’s glass doors at Crown Center. Landon made a comment that he was glad he didn’t get arrested this time. I laughed and clicked Like.

The private message box in the corner of my display screen was lit.

I tapped it with my thumb and read the message that appeared.

Rick Myers:I’ll be waiting patiently until the next time I can see you again.

The message was sent to me thirty minutes ago from Cameron, Missouri. I knew Gideon Byers was locked up for 25 years in a maximum security prison in that town. “Rick Myers” was his fake Site name, which he’d been using all this time to stalk and spy on me. If he sent this message, it meant that he’d smuggled a cell phone into the institution somehow.

My first thought was to go to my settings and block him from viewing my page. But then I decided to let him keep watching. I knew one day I’d find a good man and start a family, and I wanted Gideon to see every step, to suffer every time I posted how happy I was, to get angry when I uploaded my wedding photos, to cry when he saw our child’s beautiful face.