Miss Opportunity - Ch. 4.3

E-Blade and Delia argued for the rest of the night. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes very loudly.

The loud arguing eventually awakened the kids from their slumber. The two Jackwood boys continued to lie in their bed, listening hard without moving or making a sound. Cami’s son, Little Man, got out of bed and went to make inquiry with his mother, unable to take the suspense about the nature of the arguments any longer.

“We gotta move again, Mama?” Little Man asked. For only five-years-old, he was extremely astute about grownup matters. Always had been.

“Yeah,” Cami replied, ignoring her smarting eye as she quietly packed their things into three suitcases. She had enough money for a hotel room for a few days, but not enough to last them beyond a week.

E-Blade is gonna have to help me get that apartment after all, Cami mused, throwing even more things into the suitcases.

She and E-Blade had talked about her moving often enough since their affair begin. He’d been against it before because with Cami having no job and no man, Delia would have surely figured out that he was her sugar daddy. She’d been suspicions enough when E-Blade unexpectedly bought her cousin a new car recently.

Now that our secret is out, there’s nothing stopping me from getting my own place, Cami mused.

“You made Mama Dee mad?” Little Man asked, interrupting his mother’s thoughts.

Slammed hard by his astuteness at knowing that she was somehow partly to blame for this late night move and by his now frequent use of his new nickname for Delia, Cami felt too many emotions to name right now. Jealousy was the dominant one though. It was what made her glad that her and E-Blade’s secret had finally come out.

In her own place, Cami could regain the right to be the only woman her son called Mama. She could also return to actually behaving like a real mother, which she hadn’t been doing lately.

Dee won’t be mad forever,” Cami finally replied, deliberately skirting past the heart of her son’s question. “In the meantime, we’re going to be moving into a place of our own soon. A place where you will have your own room again.”

Little Man’s eyes lit up. “My own room?”

“Yeah, your own everything.” Cami smiled. “We’re going to be so happy in our own place,” she promised, pulling her son into her arms. Something that she would be doing a lot more of from now on in order to break Little Man’s attachment to Delia.

Unfortunately for Cami, she would not be able to keep that promise to her son…at least not for very long. In fact, their happiness in that new apartment would only last a good week.

Sadly, before that week was out, three people in their crew would be shot, one killed, and two incarcerated. All because of Cami and E-Blade’s greed, jealousy, and unwillingness to respect boundaries.

© 2008 by Suprina Frazier


Comments

Suprina said…
Going to take a break now. Before I go, I want to say how messed up it is when a little child knows how messed up you are (i.e. Little Man knew that Cami had done something wrong to blow things for them AGAIN).

Suprina
Subrina said…
Yeah that's very messed up...We don't need to bring kids into this world until we can stand on our own two feet...Lil man is gonna be messed up for part of his life all because of his screwed up mother.
Suprina said…
Subrina: Yep. But since children are real resilient, I'm going to give Little Man a little more than the average child in this story. He's going to need it with a mother like Cami.

Hmmm...wonder if that's how God thinks about us at times. You know, gives us an extra dose of whatever to help us cope with the various situations and people in our lives.

Just a thought.

Suprina

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