tilted and brows crumpled, then picked up the stack of papers. She crinkled her forehead more and looked at her mother strangely.
“It’s college! I got accepted to college. I’m going to school for nursing,” her mother said excitedly.
Cheyenne’s eyebrows flew up into arches on her face. “Wow, Mommy! That’s great!” she said enthusiastically. In Cheyenne’s mind, she selfishly wondered what was going to happen to her and Lil Kev while their mother went to school.
“I have to make things better for us while your father is gone. I wasn’t on the system all this time, and I’m not going on it now,” her mother said that day. Then, as if she could read Cheyenne’s mind, she broke the news to her and Lil Kev that they would have to stay with fat Ms. Lula at night while she went to work and school.
Cheyenne groaned. She knew that Ms. Lula and her house stank like corn chips and ass. She hated every time they had to go there. But her mother was too determined to let Cheyenne and Lil Kev’s complaints deter her. As much as they cried, their mother held her head up high, left them, and pursued a nursing career.
When her mother had a break from school, she would pack them all up—Cheyenne, Kelsi, and Lil Kev—and they would take the same long van ride upstate to see her father. Her mother would sacrifice everything to make sure she visited her father. If it was visit day for her father, her mother didn’t care if she missed school, work, or they missed school. There was nothing more important to Desiree Turner than going to see her husband. She was as loyal as they came. When most women would’ve moved on with their lives as soon as they heard his sentence being read in court, her mother stood steady, stuck out her chest, and made a promise to hold her father down no matter how long it took.
Cheyenne couldn’t ever forget the first time they visited her father. He had only been gone for a month, and she’d been missing him like crazy. Her mother dressed them all in their best clothes. She herself wore a pretty yellow-and-orange sundress that brought out her complexion. She had accessorized the dress with gold bangles and a pair of tan espadrilles. Kelsi and Cheyenne were dressed alike in bright sundresses—Kelsi’s aqua green and Cheyenne’s fuchsia.
Her father was still on Riker’s Island at that time. Cheyenne remembered that the guards at the jail treated them like animals. They were searched like thieves. Lil Kev’s milk had to be poured out of his bottle, and her mother’s pocketbook was dumped out.
“This is just stupid! We not in jail here, you know!” Kelsi sassed to the guards.
That was the one thing Cheyenne loved about her best friend. She never backed down from a fight or confrontation, even with adults.
When the guards brought her father out to see them that day, he had chains on his hands and feet. He sat on the opposite side of a broken-down table, and after one hug for each of them, they weren’t able to touch him again. In one month, her father had changed drastically to Cheyenne. He just didn’t look healthy. His skin had gone dry, his hair had grown out into a small afro, and he looked way older than he had the day he was arrested.
Cheyenne thought to herself that her father was dying inside that place, that he would never make it out of there alive. She cried for almost the entire visit. She hated seeing her father in that stupid orange jumpsuit when she was used to seeing him in nice, crisp, name brand clothes.
Kelsi, on the other hand, was overjoyed to see him. She even tried to hog Cheyenne’s father’s conversation from her mother.
Lil Kev refused to even look at their father that day. If he tried to touch Lil Kev, he would scream at the top of his lungs. Finally, her father relented and never tried to touch her baby brother again.
“What’s up with my baby boy? He forgot his old man already?” her father asked, his voice cracking like he was about to cry.
As young as he was, Lil Kev sensed that it would just be best to cut his ties with their father right away. Not Cheyenne. She’d held onto the hopes that her father, Kevin “Big K” Turner, was going to win his appeals and be home with them in no time. At least, that was what her father had told her he was “working on” every time they visited him after that.
It wasn’t until 2003, when Cheyenne was sixteen years old, that she finally stopped believing in her father’s appeals story. Seven years of the same old story had turned her into a cynical, bitter teenager who didn’t believe in shit. Her father had been transferred from Rikers Island to Upstate New York, which signaled to Cheyenne that he was going away for longer than they’d all expected. She was old enough by then to figure out that her mother had no more money to pay lawyers and that her father’s street influence and connections had dried up, so none of his former employees came up off any money to foot his appeals bill.
When Cheyenne did her own silly form of research, she found out that her father had been sentenced under New York’s Rockefeller drug laws, and no amount of appeals could reverse the draconian sentencing guidelines that came with those laws. It was a lifetime behind bars unless a miracle happened and something changed about the system.
Kelsi was the only one who faithfully accompanied Cheyenne’s mother to visit her father. Her mother didn’t take Lil Kev anymore because he never spoke to his father, and it made the visits harder on everyone. Cheyenne stopped going as well. It had become too painful for her to see her father aging ten times faster than if he’d been home. Seeing him in shackles and handcuffs, helpless, useless, had also taken its toll on her emotionally. She suddenly found herself really angry with her father. Cheyenne guessed years of watching her mother bust her ass to become a nurse, all while keeping food on the table and clothes on their backs, made her resent him for leaving them.
Her mother would act like she didn’t get the memo that Cheyenne wasn’t visiting her father anymore. The night before each visit, her mother would still try to get Cheyenne to change her mind.
“Y’all need to go to bed so we can get up and get to the vans early. I like to find seats in the front so I can be first on that line when we get up there,” her mother said one evening as she stood in Cheyenne’s doorway, a warm smile spread on her beautiful but tired face.
Cheyenne hated seeing her mother so tired all the time. She worked twelve-hour shifts four days a week as a nurse at Brooklyn Hospital. Then, her mother would use her days off to either shop for things for her father or visit her father. Cheyenne didn’t know how her mother did it—stay loyal like that. To Cheyenne, there was loyalty, and then there was stupidity. In her eyes, after so many years of getting nothing in return, her mother was bordering on stupidity.
“I’m not going. But you already knew this, since I didn’t go the last three times y’all went,” Cheyenne told her mother flatly that evening.
Her mother let out a long sigh, and her face went dark. “Cheyenne, I know it hasn’t been easy, but he is still your father. You know that he would’ve never left if he had his choice. He is powerless right now, but it is not his fault. Kevin would’ve given his life to be here for us,” her mother replied, her tone stern but soft.
She had been telling Cheyenne and Lil Kev the same thing for years at that point. Cheyenne had grown tired of her mother making excuses for her father. Cheyenne could not understand the kind of love her mother had for her father, and she could only hope to have anything close to it when she grew up. Even though her mother had worked herself to the bone and had to live in the filthy projects, she never showed one ounce of resentment toward her father. Not even one ounce. That night, Cheyenne turned her back and pulled her blanket up to her neck. She was done discussing the issue with her mother. If she ever laid eyes on her father again, it surely wouldn’t be while he was behind prison walls.
