Friends: A Love Story Read Online Free Page A

and it was dark. I thought if I said something he would run off the road and kill us both. I told myself, ‘Just let me shut up until I can get to the hospital and away from him.’”
    When Mama got to the hospital, she got taken care of and then called us up to tell us the deal. She also filed charges against Teddy. Of course, D’nette was upset because she had always wanted a daddy.
    When we came back from North Carolina a few weeks later,we thought, “Where we gonna live now? Oh, God, I guess it’s back to the projects.” But the preacher at Stewart Memorial, where we had gone to church for all these years, had a parson-age he didn’t live in on the other side of town. He let us live there for a while. But even after we moved in, my mother just lay on the couch, crying. She just couldn’t do anything. You had to bring her water and everything. Now that I think back on it, I’m sure she was crushed, but, of course, being dramatic, Mama milked every moment out of it.
    Apparently Teddy tried to reconcile—or at least reason with my mother to drop the charges against him. I remember Aunt Viola, who owned the beer garden, coming over to talk to Mama while she was lying on the couch.
    â€œBetty, now, Hiram has hit me, too, you know,” Aunt Viola told Mom. “But we’re still together. It’s no big deal. Forgive and forget it.”
    â€œHeck, no, no, no, no, no,” my mother said to Viola. “If Hiram beat you, that’s on you. With all due respect to you, I’m not going through that. No, no, no, no!”
    Then Teddy wrote my mother a letter—“Please, Betty, forgive me. I’m sorry,” he wrote—blah, blah, blah, blah. He made the mistake of writing it in red ink. I saw it and thought, “Oh, no, here she goes.”
    â€œHe wrote the letter in red ink,” my mother shouted. “That’s my blood! His name is Teddy Slaughter and he tried to slaughter me. His last name isn’t Slaughter for nothing!”
    Being a teenager, after a while I thought, “Get up! Get up! I’m tired of being your slave. Just stop crying and being all sad. You don’t want to go back to him but you won’t get up.”
    Now, for some reason, around that same time my father came to St. Pete’s for the first time. He came for the weekend and spent time with us. My mother gave him her bedroom and she slept on the couch. He said, “Why don’t you sleep in here?”
    She said, “Hell, no! Them days are over. You are here to see your children.”
    Well, one evening while Daddy was visiting, Teddy came by the house. My mother told him, “I don’t know you. Just keep driving by.”
    I peeked out at him from the front picture window as he walked back to his car. I saw him reach in and start to pull out something long and dark.
    â€œOh, my God!” I said. “He’s got a shotgun.” I figured he was about to shoot the picture window.
    â€œGet away from there!” my mother shouted.
    D’nette ran and hid in the closet. I thought, “My daddy’s here and he’s going to kick his behind!” and kept on peeking out the window. But Daddy went and stood over by the closet next to D’nette. Teddy’s outside and Daddy’s inside, but there was no protection nowhere! Fortunately, it was just the long part of a car-jack that Teddy pulled out of the car. Did he throw it? It’s now been so long, I can’t remember.
    Â 
    That fall I was bussed to Boca Ciega High School. Race relations at Boca Ciega were a whole different story from Disston and Azalea. The black kids and white kids there had been having altercations so Mr. Kreiver, the former sergeant, was transferred to Boca Ciega. The school paired him with a black vice principal, Mr. Anders. They squashed the race problems from day one and won the respect of all students because they were fair. No one felt unjustly