Veils

Sammie & Jovan

“Sorry. She’s just gonna keep calling til I pick up. Let me get this. Hey baby. Well… you know how it is. It’s a funeral. Everybody’s doin. I’m just drivin Jovan back to his place and then I’m headin over to the hotel. Oh okay… She wanna talk to you. Gimme a second. Okay baby. Yeah… I’ll call you when I get back to the hotel. You know I ain’t had time to take care of that today. I don’t know? Like forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour. Well if you fall asleep and I call you, I can’t do much about that now can I? Well if you want me to pay attention to my drivin then stop talkin to me and talk to Jovan like you asd to do! Okay Carla. Here he is.”
“Hey. Thank you. Thank you. Yes I got the sympathy card. It was beautiful the doves, and the… I don’t know what you call it, the lens flare kinda effect. Yes. Gialisa got her card too I think. She’ll call you. You know… she… she’s having a hard time but she’s gonna be alright. We all gon be alright. We got to I guess. What else can we do? Um, I think she just… it’s hard for her. You know? She, I guess she left early cause well, she the kinda person need her space sometimes. I don’t know when I can come out there to see y’all but I’ll be out there. I’ll be there. Yeah… well… I don’t know what to say. Thanks. Thank you. Okay. You too. I will. Okay. Okay. Alright. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Goodnight.”
“She only too much cos she care.”
“Naw, it’s okay. I know how she is.”
“She invite you to come over at least five times didn’t she?”
“Yeah. Yeah she did. Guess I haven’t been out there for a long time. What was the last time? Maybe…”
“It was three years ago.”
“Three years ago? Naw, we seen each otha out there since then.”
“No. I came here wit her for yo graduation, then you came out there and you… you stayed with your friends but we had some real nice times together. You rememba? You rememba we did the cosmic bowling and you rememba Carla’s mom? She made you enchiladas and cause you practically licked yo plate clean, then she sent you some to take wit you on the plane?”
“Yeah. Yeah. That was real nice. How she doin?”
“Oh she real good. She good. She so clear in her mind and still get around. She take the bus everywhere. We tell her to let one of us know if she need anythang, if she need us to take her to the sto or to the post office, to church… whateva she need but she don’t tell us nothin. She just do it all on her own, and act like we botherin her when we call just to check in wit her. She muss really like you cause she don’t be cookin for us. But sometimes on Friday nights we gets togetha and we plays dominos or spades or monopoly. She would be real happy if you came out to see us. She might even make you some mo of her enchiladas.”
“You think so? I would like that. It’s just… things are so busy round here and all the stuff with daddy.”
“Oh I know. I know. You… you just know… that if you come, we all gon be happy to see you. I… I’m gon be happy to see you but you know that. And I know you got yo own life. I know you busy. I know it musta been hard, school, yo job… I just…”
“You okay?”
“Yes… well… no not really. It’s complicated. You know how yo daddy was.”
“Yeah… I know…”
“But he raised you right. He took good care of you. You was safe here. You was, you and Gialisa y’all… I was so proud of y’all. Proud of my kids. Yo daddy wasn’t good to me. But he was good to y’all. That’s all I needed him to do and he did it.”
“Yeah it was tough. I’m just glad y’all never tried to put me and Gialisa in the middle. That woulda been too hard. It was already hard enough.”
“When all was said and done we said we wasn’t gonna do that. We said a lot other things to eachotha in that time but I’m proud of us because we broke a lot of promises to each otha, but we kept all the ones we made about you and Gialisa.”
“He told me he wanted to talk to you again before… before… you know… but.”
“Yeah. I had thought about callin him too, but we ain’t really seen each otha since yo graduation and we only spoke maybe bout a handful of times. I wanted to say… well sorry that he was in so much pain, or maybe I’m prayin for you, or somethin, but… everyday I told myself I would do it. I think I didn’t want to try to make it about hope. I didn’t know how he felt. If he was at peace wit it… if he was tryin to find another way to… I don’t know… to deal wit it, so I thought it was better to just, to just let you and Gialisa handle it. So that’s what I did.”
“I think he wanted to apologise and try to make things right,you know?”
“Things was as good as they was eva gone be. He didn’t need to apologise for nothin. That was a long time ago, but I think I understand… when you know it could all be over at any moment, when you don’t think that you’ve got plenty of time, you wanna make everything right. You know I believe what I believe and I believe that what he didn’t know then, he know now. He know that I’m sorry he suffered like that and he know that you and Gialisa is the best of us and that y’all and everything that come afta y’all gone be the best of us, on and on long afta people don’t even remember our names.”
“Sure. But I wish he had just called you. So y’all coulda talked about it before… you know? I… I feel like I want to tell you some things, some things I think I need to say while I can.”
“Like what?”
“Yeah… it was messed up. It was wrong what me and Gialisa did. How we left you.”
“Phewwwwww.”
“Me and her, we talk about it sometimes.”
“Now y’all know I don’t… I understand. And that was a long time ago. Maybe it was better for you to be wit you daddy. Like I said. Y’all turned out good. Y’all turned out great. You both such good people, you both did your schooling, you both ain’t had no trouble or no problems and yo daddy and Dana they did a good job.”
“Losin him. Seein him go. Watchin, trying to take care of him but also trying to be honest with him. He never told me we couldn’t talk about nothing, but I could see sometimes that he didn’t want to talk about everything. It wasn’t about where he was at, how much he felt up to it, like you know, with his health and stuff, but there was just stuff he didn’t want to talk about and you could see it when you tried to, to talk about it. You could see in his eyes he didn’t want to talk about it. We didn’t pretend to ourselves that things were gonna get better. We kind of prepared for it from the beginning. That’s what he wanted. He knew. You know? He knew he wasn’t prolly gonna make it. Couldn’t convince him otherwise so we just tried to do it like that. We just planned on him not making it. You and me tho, we here. We can talk, and I think, I think there’s things to talk about.”
“We gone be at your house in about two minutes.”
“It was messed up. Me and Gialisa doing what we did. Why we did it. It was messed up.”
“Y’all was just kids I…”
“When it happened… when we moved to daddy’s I was… I was relieved but sad at the same time. Then years later when I stopped and Gialisa stopped coming to see you and you let us stop coming to see you, I was angry then. It was like, like I told myself that what I did was the right thing. I convinced myself, and Gialisa, that you didn’t really care about us. That you just wanted to dress like a dude and be with Carla.”
“Ima have to pull over for this.”
“Muh… Sammie.”
“I been waitin on this. It didn’t matter what you said, I just wanted to see if we cold talk about it..”
“What?”
“I had a strategy. My strategy was to make sure that you and your sister were gonna be as good as you two could be. Listen we all gotta a bum deal. No one else shoulda been able to tell me nothin about myself or how to be. I didn’t choose to come into this, and you didn’t choose to be born into this but I couldn’t be a good parent to you without bein who I am. Me and your daddy had split. Ma and Pa died. I finally had the chance to do it. To say, okay you’re not really bein who you are but who’s stopping you now? So I did it. I don’t know what I expected and I think about this a lot. I don’t know if I thought you two would just accept me. I think, that is what I thought.”
“But we didn’t. Or maybe we didn’t accept us, but we didn’t know how. All we saw was that everything was changing and we didn’t understand that things always change. We had to blame somebody.”
“Well that’s, that… I knew you were angry. I knew you were scared. What I didn’t know was what to do wit it. But how to tell you that? What to do wit it, especially at that time. People didn’t wanna hire me. Your Uncles and Aunties stopped having anything to do wit me, and there were other things, dark things, painful things that a person can’t tell they children.”
“Tell me.”
“No. No, I won’t. But now you know in a different way cause you livin yo life out loud... “
“I was so scared about what other people said, what they thought, all the looks. Even Carla. I hated the way she tried to… just make it like it was normal. You know? Like how she even tried to do the right thing and just give us space, and that was what she… that was the best thing she coulda done in that situation but that… was too much cause it was like she was tryna say it was okay and it wasn’t okay. It was only okay cause you and her started hanging around with other people who had decided it was okay when everybody else around me said it wasn’t.”
“When you a kid, and sometimes when you an adult all of that matters. And I knew that. It was never that I didn’t want you. It was how can I do the best I can for you when I’m not doin for myself? I didn’t think my chilrin would… and I don’t say this to make you feel guilty, but if you had asked me if my own chilrin wouldn’t accept me, then I would say you crazy.”
“It musta been hard.”
“Well… I’m not gonna say it wasn’t, but it was what you wanted. I had hoped that we would talk about it, like we used to talk about everything. We used to talk a lot. I just let y’all do what you needed to do but I did think that we would… Oh now wait a minute.”
“Shit!”
“It’s okay. It’s alright. We ain’t doin nothin. It’s okay. Put your hands in your lap.”
“Evenin officer.”
“Sir, is there a reason you’re parked in front of this house?”
“We lost a loved one that we buried today. Just pulled over to talk about everything.”
“So you don’t live in this neighborhood?”
“No officer. No sir. My son live just about two blocks away.”
“I’m gonna need to see your license and registration.”
“It’s in the glovebox. Is it okay for me to open up the glove box and take it out officer

Written by Isaiah Lopaz, Anthology / Appendix 2021