Gloria came out of her room. “If you don’t like the way we keep Marcus, then why don’t you go find his daddy and tell him to watch his own kid. But then again, you won’t even tell us who the daddy is.”

  “I’ll watch my baby myself, so Kee Kee can go to school. I can’t have her falling behind in school on my conscience.”

  Marquita put the diaper bag on her shoulder and walked out of the apartment with her baby on her hip. Her mother followed her and started screaming, “Go find that baby’s daddy!” for all the neighbors to hear as she made her way down the stairs.

  “Go back in the house,” Marquita shot back at her.

  “Why don’t you want Moochie to know who his daddy is? Maybe he can take care of that baby, because you sure can’t.”

  “I take care of Marcus better than you ever took care of us. That’s for sure.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Gloria went back into her apartment and slammed the door.

  Marquita opened the back car door and strapped Marcus into his car seat. She got in the car and sat behind the steering wheel. Taking several deep breaths didn’t help her calm down. She screamed. Marcus started crying. Then Marquita hit the steering wheel and screamed again, as if screams could change the world.

  The baby cried louder.

  “I’m sorry, Moochie. Stop crying.” She turned and rubbed his belly to soothe him. “And I’m sorry about your daddy. I’d like to take you to meet him, but I just don’t see what good it would do. Anyway, he’s got his own problems. Don’t see how telling him about you is going to change anything.”

  Chapter 2

  Pulling herself out of bed, Trish Robinson stretched to get the kink out of her neck and glanced over at her husband’s snoring form. He used to give good massages, good hugs, good everything, but that was before everything went left. Rolling her neck from side to side, she looped her fingers together to give her arms and back a stretch, then took a long, deep, do-I-have-to-start-this-day-already sigh.

  “I will sing a fruitful song in a barren land.” Every morning since the day her precious son was told he might never walk again, Trish sang those words to encourage herself to keep on fighting, keep getting out of bed every morning so she could see how God would turn her midnight into sweet, sunshiny days.

  “Mama!”

  “I’m coming, Jon-Jon.” They lived in a ranch-style home with nine-foot-high ceilings, so sound traveled. Even though their master bedroom was on the opposite side of the house from Jon-Jon’s room, she heard him holler her name.

  Jon-Jon rarely hollered for her first thing in the morning, but when he did, Trish knew what that meant. She rushed into the bathroom and grabbed a washcloth, towel, wet wipes, and a Depend for her precious twenty-year-old. Long, deep sigh. “I will sing a fruitful song . . .”

  Before stepping out of her bedroom, Trish made sure to plaster that same generic smile on her face that she hoped said to her son, “All is right with the world,” even though it wasn’t. Picking up her smartphone, she pulled up YouTube and put on some praise music. She danced to “You Deserve My Praise” by Tamela Mann as she entered Jon-Jon’s room.

  “Hey, handsome.” He was a younger version of his father, with skin the color of a russet potato. He and his father both sported goatees, but Jon-Jon hadn’t brushed his hair in a month. So, where his dad had a low-cut fade, Jon-Jon had a matted, coming-to-America-straight-out-of-Africa untamed afro sitting on top of his head.

  “Turn it off, Mama. I’m not in the mood for that this morning.”

  “Boy, you better give God some praise.” She continued dancing, trying to change his mood. The room smelled foul, like soiled diapers mixed with sweat, but she resisted the urge to cover her nose.

  “For what?” Jon-Jon flung the covers off his bed, revealing soiled sheets. “Who in their right mind would praise God for this?”

  Trish’s heart went out to her son. Her only son. A son she had expected to be in his second year of college and on his way to the NFL the following year. At least that’s what the scout had told them.

  She had expected to attend her son’s wedding and welcome grandchildren into her home one day. But life had dealt them such a low and sneaky blow that it was hard to get back up. Trish refused to give up, refused to stop believing that God could change their circumstances.

  Trish placed her phone on the dresser and let the music fill the room as she rolled her son to the left so she could unhook the sheets from his mattress. Then she rolled him to the right and unhooked the other side. “What happened to you isn’t fair, son. But you woke up this morning and every morning since that horrible accident. That’s something to thank the good Lord for, isn’t it?”

  “You’re changing the boy’s diaper, Trish. At least let him be angry at God while you’re cleaning his behind.” Dwayne wiped the sleep from his eyes as he stood in the doorway.

  “Tell her to turn the music off, Dad. I’m not in the mood.”

  Why couldn’t Dwayne have just stayed asleep? Why’d he have to come in here, getting Jon-Jon worked up with all his foolish talk about being mad at God? She waved him into the room. “Come help me lift Jon-Jon’s waist so I can pull this Depend off.”

  “It’s a diaper,” Dwayne snarled.

  That deep baritone voice of Dwayne’s used to give her that come hither feeling, with fluttering all up in her stomach. Now she just wanted to stuff a rag in his mouth so he would shut up. “Just help me, or get out of here and leave us alone. I’m not doing this with you this morning, Dwayne.”

  He came into the room, went straight to the dresser where her phone was, and stopped the music from playing. He then put his shirt over his nose as he lifted Jon-Jon’s waist.

  Snatching the shirt from his nose, Trish wanted to scream at her husband. How dare he treat his own son this way? She side-eyed him, daring him to put that shirt back over his nose as she cleaned Jon-Jon. She then pulled the new Depend up to cover her son.

  Dwayne helped her take the sheets off the bed, holding Jon-Jon to one side and then rolling Jon-Jon to the other side while she moved the sheets.

  She took a laundry bag out of Jon-Jon’s closet, put the soiled sheets in it, and tried to hand it to Dwayne. “Can you take this to the laundry room?”

  “Have you lost your mind?” Turning his nose up, Dwayne scurried out of the room like he smelled smoke and needed to put out the fire. Although he had no problem lifting Jon-Jon out of the bed or helping with his physical therapy, he rarely helped her clean Jon-Jon. He said he didn’t have the stomach for it. Trish just wished he wasn’t so mean about it.

  Turning back to Jon-Jon, she playfully nudged his shoulder. “All better. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  She took the dirty linens to the laundry, then came back to Jon-Jon’s room and vacuumed the floor. She wiped off his table and then held out a hand to Jon-Jon. “Now let me get you out of that bed.”

  He shook his head. “Not today, Mom. Just leave me alone. I just want to be left alone.”

  She started to object. The doctor said it wasn’t good for Jon-Jon to lie in bed all day. He didn’t want his muscles to atrophy. But as he turned his head away from her, she saw the tear roll down his cheek. “I’ll fix you some pancakes.”

  No response.

  Trish went to her master bathroom, brushed her teeth, took the headwrap off, and let her hair fall on her honey-toned shoulders. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror brought on a sigh. Trish’s eyes were so puffy that it looked as if she had gone five rounds with Floyd Mayweather and floated like a feather with every jab and uppercut to her face. Exhaustion hung on her shoulders like an old friend. If Jon-Jon didn’t need her, she would climb back in bed and sleep as if sleep was money and she was trying to get paid. But sleep was a luxury she couldn’t afford, so she made her way to the kitchen to take care of breakfast.

  Pancakes were her son’s favorite breakfast, guaranteed to put a smile on his face. When he was younger he’d told her that he didn’t want his dad’s pancakes because, as he put it, “Nobody fixes pancakes like you, Mama.” Ever since then, Trish made sure to sprinkle a little extra cinnamon in the pancake mix.

  As the cinnamon mixed into the pancake batter, the color change was just a shade darker than her walls. These days, a lot of interior walls were being painted gray, but Trish liked warmer colors. She had picked a color called golden rod, which was a mix between yellow and brown, for her interior color. Because of the high ceilings and the open floor plan, the color worked and didn’t darken the house much at all.

  Mixing her batter, she added vanilla extract and melted butter, but the cinnamon she had already added was the key to great pancakes. That, and the extra butter she slathered on the cakes while they cooked in her special pancake-making skillet, like every good Southern mother worth her cooking apron would.

  “Make me a few of them cakes.” Dwayne sat down at the kitchen counter.

  Lip curled, displaying her disgust, she responded, “I know you didn’t just ask me to fix you nothing after the way you treated my son this morning.”

  “He’s my son, too, Trish. And if he would put forth a little effort during physical therapy, he’d be able to get himself out of that bed and into his wheelchair. Then he could get to the bathroom on his own.”

  “He’s trying, Dwayne. You just don’t care what any of us are going through.” She was married to a man who didn’t open his eyes to see anybody’s needs but his own. He hadn’t always been like this though. Jon-Jon’s accident had changed him, turned him into someone she barely recognized.

  “I’m hungry, Trish. I don’t have time to argue with you this morning.”

  She turned to give him a preview of the cold shoulder he’d be receiving all day long, but that’s when she realized he had his work shirt on. He’d just gotten off work at eleven last night and was now going in for another shift.

  He’d been working extra shifts as a forklift driver ever since he found this job about three months ago, after being fired from a job he’d held for fifteen years. The company had a no-tolerance policy when it came to attendance and didn’t care if Dwayne was at the hospital as his son fought for his life.

  While Dwayne was losing one job and searching for another, Trish had taken family medical leave from her fourth grade teaching position. Dwayne had been fine with that, but when Jon-Jon didn’t get better and the pay checks stopped coming after two months, he told her to go back to work. But how could she go back to school and teach other kids when her son couldn’t even get out of bed without help? So she handed in her resignation.

  Dwayne had been smoking mad when he discovered that she quit her job without discussing it with him. Still, he had asked for extra hours on his job so they could catch up on some bills. So if he wanted to eat, she would feed him. “You want sausage links and eggs too?”

  “Naw, pancakes are good enough. I got to get going.”

  Trish put some butter in the skillet and turned her back to Dwayne as she prayed he wouldn’t ask . . . Don’t ask. Don’t ask.

  “Heard anything from that blood-sucking attorney?”

  She put the mix in the pan and turned up the fire a bit. The sooner she got him on his way, the easier her day would be. “Not since he told us that the court case has been postponed again.”

  “You still think them people aren’t trying to pull a fast one? They won’t even give us our day in court. Haven’t even given our boy an ‘I’m sorry,’ or a ‘Hey, let me pay those hospital bills.’”

  Flipping the pancakes and buttering the smooth side, she turned to him. Jon-Jon’s room was just off the kitchen, about fifteen feet from where she stood, so she whispered. “If you would let Jon-Jon accept the money from the insurance settlement, we could get some of these bills paid.”

  “Jon-Jon’s injuries and lifetime loss of income is worth way more than that insurance policy they got.”

  “Yeah, but at least we’d have something.”

  “Something that didn’t cost them nothing. You think rich people like that lose sleep over their insurance premiums going up? What about what my boy lost? They owe us, and all they’ve done is try to get out of paying for what they did.” He slammed his fist against the counter.

  She put his pancakes on a plate, handed it to him, and held out the syrup. “Not saying they don’t owe Jon-Jon more, but the bills are piling up. You’re working all this overtime, trying to cover hospital bills and household bills, like a hamster on a spinning wheel.”

  Snatching the syrup from her outstretched hand, he said, “That’s why you shouldn’t have quit your job. Who does that?”

  Hands on hips and neck rolling, she fired back, “A woman whose son has been paralyzed for six months, that’s who.”

  Stabbing his fork into his pancakes, Dwayne swirled them around the plate to soak in the syrup and then stuffed them in his mouth.

  She sighed, ready to throw in the towel. “Why can’t we stop fighting and being so angry? We can’t pay for the next surgery Jon-Jon needs. And if he doesn’t get it, he has even less of a chance of walking again. Maybe it’s time to just take the money and move on with our lives.”

  Dwayne’s lip drew into a snarl. His eyes held disdain for her words. “Forgiveness runs deep with you, don’t it? Too deep.”

  She wished that was true. Since she was a little girl sitting in the church sanctuary, listening to Pastor Greenwald talk about forgiveness like it was the answer to all the ills of the world, Trish had made up her mind to forgive. But, for the life of her, she couldn’t find a way to forgive her husband for becoming as mean and surly as a coiling rattlesnake.

  She wanted out of this marriage, but every time she decided enough was enough, she’d hear Pastor Greenwald’s message ringing in her head. Why had she attended church that day? Pastor Greenwald’s words had sounded so reasonable, so just and full of grace. But that was before her son lost the use of his legs and his football scholarship, before she had to give up hope of all the grandchildren she thought she’d have, and before her husband turned into Hannibal Lecter—without the cannibalism, just all the evil.

  Wiping his mouth, Dwayne stood and put his plate in the sink while leering at her. “Now you acting like you don’t hear nobody. You good at that silent game until you need my money for these bills. You talk real good then.”

  Why wouldn’t he just divorce her already? This misery that crept up on her every gut-wrenching day was becoming too much to bear. Whenever she thought things might be getting better, she’d go to sleep and wake up to the same misery, like that movie Groundhog Day.

  Slamming the spatula on the counter, nostrils flaring like a lioness who’d found her prey, she attacked. “I have put up with your mess for months now. You want to be hateful for the rest of your life, fine. But here’s what you ain’t gon’ do . . .” Yeah, she was a teacher by profession and was speaking all types of ebonics, but as she got in Dwayne’s face, she didn’t care about proper English. “You are not going to pull me into your darkness. I don’t want to have this conversation with you ever again. You want to know what the lawyers are doing about Jon-Jon’s case, then call them yourself.”

  Leaning back like he wanted to put space between him and Trish, Dwayne said, “You’re the one at home. I’m working extra hours, so I don’t have time to make those calls.”

  “I don’t care!” she shouted at him, hands flailing in the air.

  “Mom, stop yelling!” Jon-Jon called out from his bedroom.

  “Oh, so it’s like that now?” Dwayne whispered.

  Lowering her tone, while still rolling her neck from side to side, she said, “You better believe it’s like that. Either tell Jon-Jon to accept the insurance settlement or deal with the attorneys yourself.” She plated Jon-Jon’s pancakes as she gave Dwayne an I-wish-you-would-say-something-else-to-me staredown.

  “You done changed Trish.” He shook his head but didn’t say anything else.

  Trish picked up the syrup and left her husband in the kitchen to fix his own lunch and go on about his business.

  When she and Dwayne first married, Trish thought she’d found her little piece of heaven on earth. He’d been good to her, and she’d loved him for it. When the doctors told her she wouldn’t be able to have any more children after Jon-Jon was born, Dwayne didn’t trip. They were grateful that they had a son, and they made him their world.

  Maybe they were wrong for doing that because their world was now crumbling around them, and neither of them knew what to do about all the broken pieces. The only thing it seemed they knew to do was to keep waking up so Jon-Jon would have somebody to take care of him.

  She and Dwayne had once been lovers, friends, and confidantes. They were now only civil with each other in front of Jon-Jon, but this morning they couldn’t even manage that. She was sure Jon-Jon felt awful and blamed himself for her and Dwayne’s problems. She hated the thought of that more than anything.

  She heard Dwayne slam the garage door as he left the house. Trish came back into the kitchen, rested her hands on the counter, and shook her head as her eyes watered. Tears in the rain, too many reasons to name, just pain, pain, pain.

  Chapter 3

  Alexis Marshall could hardly believe that her twins, Ella and Ethan, had just turned eleven. The years were moving way too fast. Before she knew it they would be off to college and treating her like an afterthought.

  But today they were only eleven, and she was having the time of her life spoiling them. For their birthday party, she and Michael hired face painters, a juggler, a magician, and a Justin Bieber impersonator. With their forty-five-hundred-square-foot open floor plan, they could have just moved some furniture around and hosted the twenty-three kids in the space between the living room and kitchen.

  But Ella and Ethan wanted to show off the new pool their dad had installed in the backyard. The pool was a true work of art, so she could understand why the kids wanted to show it off. There were three components to the pool: a circular hot tub, connected to the oval twenty-eight foot pool, and—the third and most eye-catching of all—the mountainous wall that surrounded it.