Chapter 2

Wednesday 14^th July 2010

6:04 AM

“Kemereta, I’m getting married-”

“What! Are you out of your flipping mind?”

 Silence, the world with all its natural noises, the chirp of the birds, the trickle of the light morning rain when it tear-dropped off a leaves of Kemereta’s window garden, slowed, froze and went to absolute zero. She had that red light in her head and an alarm saying, ‘does not compute to what the heck this lady said’. She had just woke up, mother seemed to be in her room for some time because her two windows were open and she sat in front of one, looking out at the geographical green beauty of the Caribbean country-side. The slope of the hills, the majestic beauty of the sun as it rose, the bending of the overly long trees and stronghold of those that were tough, what a beauty indeed. The sun rays gave a glaze of magic and wonder that summer’s morning on her thin white curtain as a breeze lifted off the floor, into the air and died by collapsing to the floor again. Kemereta decided to surprise her mother a good morning with some morning breath but mother responded even with her back turned toward her, ‘ I’m getting married...’

“Young lady, your language is preposterous and you will not speak to me in that tone.” Mother’s sternness straighten Kemereta as her disgusted and almost-about-throttle-with-what-you-just-said expression changed instantaneously to oh-my-gosh-what-the-heck-did-i-just-said and I’m-so-sorry-please-don’t- take-away-my-cell-phone. Mother was now out of the beautifully carved golden chair and standing behind it.

“Look mom, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe I heard what you said properly or was that good morning in another language you just learnt?”

“Kemereta, I find that is quite humourless and immature. Not to mention disrespectful. I thought we came to a motherly, daughterly understanding when it came to Trevor” Mother scowled looked changed back to sophistication and girlish blush with the mention of Trevor from her own lips.

“Yes! We did!” Kemereta threw her hands up in the air with frustration. She got a headache oh so quickly. Her heart was racing, her eyes almost to bleed with tears. She continued, “The understanding that we would wait for dad! You don’t understand, he said he would come back”

“Kemereta, you were five when he said that!” mother’s sophisticated, mellow tone, darken and raged with a shout. She began to cry. She coughed up words with her head bent down, but Kemereta couldn’t understand them from under mother’s breath and tears. Her hand gripped hard to the chair, and she looked up at her daughter. “Kemereta, I can’t wait forever. It’s been eleven years. Eleven. Where is your father?”

“I don’t know”

“When is he coming” Mother’s questions brought a thicken tension in the room. The rain pattered louder on the roof, the rain drops grow longer, the sun became hidden and the electricity went.

“I don’t know” More tears. More screaming out the answers to the questions.

“How do you know if he still loves me? Huh?”

“I-I-I don’t know”

“How do you know that he still loves you? Huh? Kemereta?”

“Yes, yes I do. I know this, I believe this, and he wouldn’t tell me that he’ll come back if he didn’t.” That silence again filled the room. “Get out of my room”

“Kemereta, you need a fath-“

“JUST GET OUT!” she roared and covered her mouth, still astonish by her own tone.

Mother left with her voice trailing off “You have blasted no decorum” There was the Trinidadian in mother. She had been so uptight and all English lately when her new white ‘boyfriend’ from Great Britain came into her life.

But mother was right. She needed a dad. But she needed her dad. Her biological dad. She needed Hector Moses, not Trevor Richfield. Father left home when Kemereta was five. She could remember the Sunday afternoon breeze as father knelt on gave her a big hug. It was the best hug she ever got filled with such warmth and love. And as he recoiled from the stifling little kid’s affection he would miss, he clenched Kemereta’s dark brown chin and said, “I’ll be back; I’ll never leave my baby girl. When you need me most I will come” Ruffling her long woolly black hair, he vanished just as water evaporates.

“Dad where are you I need you now” her muffled voice mumbled into her pillow. Even though the exact image of his looks were fading into the dark abyss in the dark corner of her memories, the voice, his voice, the words, his words, that he said to her still rang clear over the years. It was hard for mum, Kemereta would admit but she needed to believe like she did. Mother claimed that father said he wasn’t ready to be a real dad yet. Kids, he wasn’t ready for kids. He needed to be free again. He needed to go America, the land of the free. A wife and kid slowed him down so he left. Five years of it was too much. Kemereta had nothing else to believe in, no real proof that he said that, but she still had that burning hope. Even though she gave up looking out the window in her old home back in Tobago waiting for daddy to drive back up the drive way, the hope still burn in her. She was determined. Her old family life would come back some day. With her mother being one of the Nation’s top business women in the country, no amount of money, clothes, shoes, nothing, could kill that spirit in her, that hope.  Not even her tight butt, gay-looking, greedy, overly cologne wearing, freak of a going-be step dad, Trevor Richfield.