The Pride – page 3
“You still’dare? Yeah, she pissed. You should’a seen her face when I told her to come back and get Marcus. I could tell she wanted to say something, but that little fass tack wanted to get outside more than she wanted to fight with me. I keep tellin’ that little heffa she cain’t win when it comes to fightin’ me. I’mo always come out on top when it’s me against her. I let her say her little stuff sometimes just so she can feel like she got a say, but I pay the cost to be the boss in this mugg. I wish she had said something. I would’a told her to go in the back and get Stacy, Tracy and Kelvin, too,” Angela said into the phone and chuckled.
“Anyway, tell me what happened with that dude from the club. He was fine! Did you let him hi…” Angela’s seven-year-old seemed to have materialized out of thin air and was standing in front of her with an empty sippy cup. “Hold on, girl. What?!?!”
“Can I have some juice?” Kelvin wouldn’t look at Angela. He stared down at the floor and waited for her answer.
“What time is it, Kelvin?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly.
“Oh, now you don’t know how to tell time? Um. OK. Well, since you cain’t tell time now, you sho’ cain’t have no juice.”
Kelvin’s head snapped up to look at the clock over his mother’s head. “Um, it’s, it’s…,” he paused and studied the hands on the clock. He dashed out of the room. Angela looked down at her wristwatch and laughed into the phone.
“He ran in my bedroom to look at the digital clock. He think he slick. His little feelin’s gone be hurt when he see what time it is. Huh? Oh. I don’t let him drink nuthin’ afta six, because he pee in the bed. Hold on. KELVIN, WHAT TIME IS IT?” Angela laughed to herself when her shout was answered with silence. She wiped the smile from her face when she heard her son coming back toward the livingroom. Kelvin walked slowly back into the room with his head hanging down and the sippy cup between both hands held up to his chest.
“It’s too late for me to drink something,” he said with tears welling up in his eyes. Angela almost felt sorry for him, but she thought about having to walk five blocks to the laundromat with smelly, urine-stained sheets if he wet the bed again.
“Momma, please,” Kelvin whinin, “I promise I’ll wake up if I have to go to the bathroom. Pleeeeeeaaaasseee, Momma. Please!” Tears spilled out of Kelvin’s eyes. Angela could see that Kelvin felt tortured about having his liquids restricted. She knew that look, because it was the same one she used to have on her face when her mother did the same thing to her. One thing she refused to do to Kelvin, however, was spank him when he wet the bed.
Everytime Angela wet the bed, her mother spanked her unmercifully, and it didn’t stop her from wetting the bed. It only terrified her out of going to sleep at night. She slept so soundly that her full bladder failed to rouse her out of her sleep so she could relieve herself in the toilet and not on the sheets and mattress. Angela bore a faint scar on her forehead, because she was so sleepy in class one day that she toppled out of her chair and slammed her forehead into the desk of the student next to her. Her mother’s response, when she’d had to come get Angela from the nurse’s office was simply, “That’s what you get. Maybe you’ll stop pissing yourself at night.” Angela didn’t stop wetting the bed until she was almost 12. She got her period, and she just stopped wetting the bed. She didn’t know what was going to make Kelvin stop wetting the bed, but she was sure he’d never have a menstrual cycle and she was sure spanking him wasn’t going to help either.