Unforgettable Man by Tiye Love

Author:Tiye Love [Love, Tiye]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Garden Avenue Press

14

Devin

Sheltered in my arms on a blanket while we enjoyed the cool breeze of the water off the Gulf of Mexico, after a dinner of fried lobsters and Greek salads, I bared my soul to Royalty. I wanted her to understand me, my faults, my weaknesses, my strengths. Everything.

“After my marriage ended, I had to do some serious soul searching, self-reflection. I’d lost everything. My wife, my daughter, and temporarily, my father. He had lost the election to Tre and he blamed me for it. Because he’d been too afraid to admit that Tre had been the better candidate for mayor, he said that the scandal of my divorce made voters leery to vote for him. I stayed away from my family, even Nicholas, nursing my wounds, trying to get a handle on my life and where I went wrong. I even searched for you on the internet and found out that you were a lawyer at a firm in New Orleans. I started to reach out and then stopped myself because I was not in a good emotional space. You were the one woman I thought I didn’t hurt, and I wanted it to stay that way.

“The first clear memory of my parents had to be when I was five years old. My parents had gotten into a huge argument because I told my mother that my dad and I visited one of his lady friends. I didn’t know that this friend had been one of his lovers. My mother left our home angry and my father beat me and warned me to never open my mouth about him again. He rarely hit me, but when he did, it was pretty bad, and my mother would have to intervene for him to stop.”

“Was he abusive to your mother too?”

I hugged her tighter, thinking about the relationship I had with my father as a boy. “Until you asked me that question, I didn’t see his treatment of me as abuse. I was stubborn, always had a smart mouth, wanted things my way. I wasn’t an easy child to raise. His sometimes harsh treatment of me was deserved, or at least that’s what I told myself, because he wasn’t that way with my mother. He never hit her, or if he did, I never saw any evidence of it.”

“He made you feel that you deserved his punishments. I mean, what five-year-old child would lie to his mother about how he spent his day?”

“Yeah…well, for a long time I refused to go anywhere with him. Only wanted to be around my mother, and of course that further damaged our relationship since I was his only child, his only son.” I stared into the ocean, thinking about our turbulent relationship over the years. “The last time my father hit me, I was sixteen. We had words about how he was treating my mother, and he punched me hard in the chest when I got in his face. I’d grown taller than him, and I pushed him so hard he lost his balance and fell.

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