Free Up to No Good by Carl Weber

knew that I was telling the truth. But someone like Chester was not about to show weakness in front of his boys, so he turned his pain into rage and took it out on me by trying to beat the black off of me.
    Afterward, all hell broke loose between him and my moms. I thought for sure that because I ’d let this twelve-year-old secret out of the bag, they would get a divorce. As I lay in bed still aching from the beating I ’d received, that idea didn’t sound too bad to me anyway. However, my mom smoothed his feathers, probably in the bedroom, and the whole incident was put to rest with my mother’s words: “It’s nothing I can do about it. We have four kids. It happened.”
    They stayed together, but there was still plenty of tension in the air. My brothers were mad at me for starting the whole thing, and my mother reminded me just about every day that I had broken my promise to keep her little secret. And Chester, he couldn’t even stand to see my face. In his eyes, I had become a living symbol of his wife’s infidelity.
    It didn’t help matters that we went to the same church as Daddy, so Chester had to see Daddy every Sunday. He started complaining to my mother that every time he looked at me, he saw James Black’s face, and it was driving him crazy. Not to mention the fact that my mom had the audacity to name me Jamie, after James. It was one thing to know his wife cheated; it was clearly another to live with the proof of that affair.
    My mother did what she thought she had to do to save her marriage. The next thing I knew, my ass was hauled off to stay with my daddy. As far as I was concerned,she had sacrificed me for the sake of her husband and her sons. I suffered the ultimate punishment for an affair that she’d had.
    She tried for a while to visit me at Daddy’s house, but it wasn’t long before the frequency of the visits dropped to almost never. No doubt Chester was giving her hell every time he knew she was coming around James’s place, and I wasn’t making her time with me very pleasant either. As a preteen girl who felt abandoned by her, I didn’t have much love to show my mother.
    She’d try to tell me funny stories about my brothers, but I didn’t want to hear it. Ever since the day I ’d told the secret, they made my life as uncomfortable as possible. They stopped calling me by my name and referred to me as “Mama’s little mistake.” Not long after I moved in with him, Daddy introduced me to Darnel, and although he didn’t live with us, Darnel and I were tight—tighter than I ’d ever been with my other brothers. So anything my mother had to say about the boys fell on deaf ears. By the time my mother told me that she and Chester and the boys were moving out of state, I think it was probably a relief for everyone involved. I hardly ever spoke to my mother after she moved.
    I ended up living with Daddy from the age of twelve until just a few months ago, when I moved in with Louis. In all those years, Daddy never complained. He gave me all the love a young woman could ever want, including teaching me about hygiene and, believe it or not, shopping for my first bra. Women came and went—some of them, including Darnel’s mother, even seemed to think they had a shot at becoming Mrs. James Black—but Daddy remained devoted first and foremost to me, and that was just the way I liked it. To say I’m a daddy’sgirl is an understatement. He was my best friend, and I would see to it that no one ever broke that bond.
    “You know how I feel about my daddy. That’s not the issue,” I told Louis.
    “Well, what is the issue? Your father’s an adult. You’re trying to hold him too tight.”
    “He may be grown, but he’s got a family to worry about. He’s all Darnel and I really have.”
    “So what is this here that me and you have?” Louis looked at me pointedly, waiting for my reply.
    “You don’t understand because …” I fell silent before I said something that could hurt