“No, he has a bunch of friends who like to influence him. You don’t even have friends.”

“Look, I’m not trying to make this an argument. I don’t like arguing.”

“Yeah, and you only called because Mom told you to. How selfish is that?”

She was getting slightly off track.

I said, “The point is, unless you’re going to be inside of a normal family setting, you’re gonna create an unnecessary strain on yourself and on the rest of us.”

“Well, we didn’t come from any normal family setting. So what are you talking about?”

“Does that mean that we have to stay outside of the norm?” I asked her.

She said, “Well, in case you haven’t noticed, single black women raising children is the norm now. He was raised by a single mother, too.”

What in the world had happened to Juanita’s mind? I couldn’t understand her logic. And she was a college graduate. I was ready to stop the phone conversation altogether. What the hell was the use? She was locked in her own world.

She added, “You could have had a single mother situation, too.”

I didn’t plan to respond to that. For what? She had her life and views, and I had mine. That’s exactly why I kept my distance from other people’s chaos.

But Juanita was on a roll.

She said, “That girl Andrea was ready to have your baby, but she knew that your ass would have acted a fool, so she decided not to.”

I stopped cold, but I figured my sister was pulling my leg to get a rise out of me. She had to be. At least I hoped she was.

I blew it off. “Yeah, whatever. That’s impossible. I was always protected with her.”

“Are you sure?”

I wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to let Juanita know that.

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Well, that’s not…”

She left me hanging.

I said, “That’s not what? She would have told me about something like that. And why would she tell you?”

“I was just in the right place at the right time. Sometimes people need to just get the load off, and it doesn’t matter who they do it with.”

“Yeah, whatever.” I didn’t believe her. She was saying that just to spite me.

“Are we still being honest here, big brother? Because I’m not making this up. And you can think what you wanna think, but I know what I know.”

I said, “Well, why are you telling me something like that now?”

“Because you think you can do whatever you want. But real life is not like that.”

Juanita was extremely poised with her information. So I started to believe it. I even had to stand up from my La-Z-Boy chair and feel my legs for a minute. My heart started racing and everything.

“And you’re telling me that you didn’t try to stop her.”

Not that I would have wanted a baby, but since Juanita was so adamant about having her own child, it didn’t make sense that she wouldn’t have fought for a child of mine that would have been her niece or nephew.