No Place To Go

By Tami J

No other words can describe the most challenging problem anyone can face.

For M'Shelle Boyd, a once- thriving, hard-working healthcare worker and single mother of three, she had everything going for her. despite experiencing a couple of setbacks, she's always been able to bounce back and maintain her dignity...or so it seems.

In the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tami J
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648713538

Book preview

Prologue

My leg bounced up and down in anticipation as I waited around to find out what our next move would be. I looked back and forth between the clock on the wall and the clock on my cellular device. The clock on the wall is three minutes faster than the time on my cell phone. In less than five minutes, the outcome of a phone call will determine my fate. Never in a million years would I have thought I’d be in this predicament. My life was in shambles and I could only blame myself.

How could a person with fifteen years job experience under their belt, not obtain a job in their field? I asked God this question more times than I can remember. Over two dozen online applications and several job interviews and still nothing. Had my resume been red flagged as a DO NOT HIRE? Have I been blackballed from the medical field? It’s been four years since my untimely departure from PSH. I guess, not only did God decide to close the door on that chapter of my life, he decided to nail that muthafuckah shut. So now what?

Yeah, I admit I may have said some things that I wish now that I could take back, but it was only pertaining to my job at PSH. I need to make some money, not any fast food restaurant or super-center money. Yet here I am now, without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.

My only regret now is not hopping my ass on that Greyhound bus going to Atlanta. What if I had turned down Joan’s offer to stay here in Michigan? What if Stephan had actually given me the money I needed to pay Joan for staying with her? What if I had never gotten terminated from my job? All these what-ifs, and not one damn solution to get us out of this situation.

So, where in life did things go so wrong? How could I have avoided some of these pitfalls and made wiser decisions? I had prayed and asked for God’s blessings long before I got to this point.

Jada and Caleb looked at me, worriedly. I guess under the circumstance, I’d look worried too. I tried to stay positive and hopeful for the sake of the kids, but deep down inside, I was a mess.

It was now two-minutes til eleven by my cell phone and 11:01 according to the clock on the wall. I went to my call log and scrolled down to the number I had called earlier. One-minute left before eleven o’clock. My nerves were getting the best of me. I was terrified of the way this phone call could go. I took a deep breath, hit send and waited for the phone to ring on the other end.

1

One

A​ MEANS TO AN END…I hate my freaking job. Every night as I come up off the expressway and see the building sitting off to the right of me, I get an instant headache. It’s been like this for the past couple of years now. Why I won’t quit and find another job is beyond me.

I work at the Pediatric Specialty Hospital of Detroit as a Patient Care Technician. I, like most working-class people, depend on my job to meet the means of my everyday living expenses. I make a decent amount of money working here at PSH. I’m not rich but I make enough money for my three kids and me to live comfortably.

I’ve been working here for seven years. The first couple years of me working here were cool. It was the new learning experience that excited me about the job, and I was in school in hopes of one day becoming a registered nurse. But all that changed after a few years.

I work the graveyard shift, which is perfect because as a single mother, my kids (Shay 16, Jada 8, and Caleb 4) are asleep while I’m at work and by the time I get off, I am shipping them off to school and daycare and would have the house to myself.

So, what is it that I don’t like about my job? THE PEOPLE, ALL OF THEM! Management, the lazy ass nurses who think the PCA’s are their slaves, the parents of the patients, and some the patients. Yeah, I said it, even some of them hollering ass kids and babies are starting to get on my nerves. I had started to despise everything involving patient care, especially in the hospital. However, I wouldn’t mind going back to clinical care.

I had become a professional ass kisser, taking orders from everybody and that didn’t sit well with me. I was sometimes a babysitter and floor walker to the crying, sick babies who couldn’t be pacified after being fed, diapers had been changed, swaddled in their blankets, and given a binkie. But the pay was good. I had the best benefits and a 401k plan that I wasn’t ready to give up.

After seven years of working here, I had mastered all the required skills to do my job efficiently, but my work ethics changed; I wasn’t as dedicated as I was when I first started. I had become bored, but the bills still needed to be paid and my kids still needed to be taken care of, so I stayed and dealt with the people I had grown to dislike. I had become stagnant and it’s sad to say, but I was okay with that at the time, as familiarity breeds complacency. I had become comfortable with the people, the location from my house to the job, I don’t like forced change, and my self- doubt. I wasn’t ready to meet new people, take orders from a new set of people, or learn to function in their setting, so I stayed.

I dreaded going to work, and the misery continued after I got off because I dreaded having to go back. I had to learn the hard way that if you stay in it for the money, you’ll eventually end up unhappy and less productive.

I had decided to go back to school this year, which meant I had to cut my hours at work, but I knew it would be worth it in long run. That would also mean that I would no longer be able to afford to spend frivolously on things we were once accustomed to.

All was well the first semester of school. I passed all three of my classes with two B’s and an A. I decided to take the summer off and resume classes in the fall. During my time out of school, I picked up hours at work. Since I was part-time, it wasn’t an issue.

Shay had gotten a job working with her dad and stepmom at a restaurant they owned. That was a huge burden taken off me. It allowed for her to help pay for some of her back to school necessities.

In August, my car started acting up. I had just paid the car paid off the end of last year and had been debating if I wanted to get another car note. I took my car in to get it looked at and was told that my head gasket was bad because of a leak in my radiator and to repair them both, I would have to come out of about $1200. I surely didn’t have that kind of money, even with me picking up the extra hours at work, it would take me over two months just to save that kind of money. Needless to say, I drove it until it finally had gotten enough of my foolishness and cut off on me right up the street from my house as I was coming home from work.

I locked the car up and marched home, showered, and went to bed. When I finally woke up, I called Durelle, the guy I am seeing and had him come push the car down to the house.

So, what now, Durelle asked.

I can’t afford to get it fixed, so I guess I’m going to see how much I’ll get for selling it and I’ll just have to catch a taxi back and forth to work.

That’s going to be expensive, he replied.

Yeah, well, I’m not catching two buses to get to work. Mind you, I work midnights, and I’d have to leave out at about nine o’clock just to make it there by eleven.

Well, I can pick you up in the morning when you get off work.

Durelle is, how do I put this, living with this chick? They're supposedly not together but he had an issue at the house he was staying at and had to temporarily move in with her until things got settled at his house.

After two weeks of my car sitting in the driveway with me having no intentions of getting it fixed, I listed the car on craigslist asking for $1500 OBO, letting possible buyers know that the car needed head gaskets. Within a few hours, a few people hit me up, and I eventually sold the car for $1200.

$1200 wasn’t enough money for me to buy another car plus get insurance, so I just used to money for cab fare back and forth to work. Durelle would take me to run any errands that I would need to run throughout the day.

The deadline for registration for school was approaching, but I knew without me having my own transportation that I wasn’t going to be able to take any classes this semester.

A couple weeks later, I decided to get in touch with my ex-husband Stephan, who is also the father of Jada and Caleb, to see if I could get some help from him. After all, he had been MIA for almost two years, so now was a good time for him to step up to the plate and offer his assistance.

2

Two

Stephan and I met ten years ago at Walmart of all places. He was standing in line behind me waiting to check out, and I could feel him staring at me. He finally had the courage to speak to me and I spoke back. At the time, I really didn’t feel like being bothered. I had just gotten off work and had to grab a few things before heading home and was ready to get out of that store, get home and relax. At the time, I was working regular hours at a Dr.'s office.

Stephan introduced himself and tried to make small talk with me, and I, not wanting to be rude, entertained his small talk. After all, he wasn’t a bad looking guy.

So, are you single, Stephan questioned.

Yes, I’m single. I still hadn’t told him my name.

Would you mind if I called you sometimes, get to know you a little better, perhaps?

I pondered his question for a moment. I wasn’t against being in a relationship, I just wasn’t expecting to find my next love connection while standing in line at Wally World, but hey, you never know where you’ll find love. I gave Stephan my number, and within a couple of days, he called me.

Stephan is six years older than I am and is the youngest child of four. He has a brother and two sisters. His family is from a town called Cheshire, located in Connecticut. Stephan and his brother Kurtis live together in Allen Park, while the rest of their family still resides in Connecticut. Kurtis works as a dealer at MGM Grand Casino. Stephan has no kids, which I found out he hadn’t been frank with me about, but I’ll get to that later. Stephan worked as a local truck driver for a Detroit based soda company but said he wanted to be an over the road truck driver.

Within a year of us dating, Stephan found a job working as an over the road truck driver and the pay and the benefits were superb. Over the next couple of years, things got serious between Stephan and we ended up pregnant.

The day of my ultrasound, I was so excited to find out the sex of our baby. Since finding out that I was pregnant, the only thing I kept saying was, I hope that it’s a boy this time.

I asked Stephan, if we had a boy, would he want his son to be a Jr. That’s when he tells me that he had a son that died who was already a junior. The baby had died at three months old from sudden infant death syndrome, about ten years ago. I was pissed to say the least. That’s something I think he should have been honest with me about when I asked him did he have any kids when we first started talking.

I had genuinely wanted both of our first child together to be a boy, but after learning that he already had a son, it didn’t even matter to me anymore what I was having as long as my baby was born healthy. Needless to say, the ultrasound showed that we would be having a girl.

A year after Jada was born, the talk of marriage came up, and then another year later, we were married. We had a courthouse wedding and from there, we honeymooned in Myrtle Beach for five days. Every girl’s dream, right?

Kurtis ended up moving out of the house that he and Stephan shared together and moved in an apartment located in downtown Detroit, which would be closer to his job and so that me and the kids could move into the house.

It was moving day for me that I discovered that Stephan had, what I would have assumed was a drinking problem. And a horrible one it was. He wasn’t a drunkard, and he never showed any signs of problematic behavior after drinking. He just drank incessantly when he was at home and there were bottles of vodka stashed in almost every room of the house, except for the room his brother slept in before he moved out.

When I asked him if the alcohol was his and if he had a drinking problem? He answered, Yeah, they’re mine and no, I’m not an alcoholic, he stated defensively. He removed the bottles of alcohol that were in the room that the kids were going to be sleeping in and put them in the kitchen cabinet. There were bottles of vodka in the laundry room, the bathroom, in closets, and drawers. I even found a bottle in one of the larger floor vases while we were moving my furniture into the house.

Stephan was on the road so much during the time that we were dating, that I didn’t get to spend a lot of time at his house. I didn’t like spending the night at the house he and his brother shared together because it felt weird trying to have sex with his brother there at the house too, so most of the time when we did hook up, we went to a hotel. We would get drinks, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. I would have never pegged him to be a heavy drinker, but a social drinker, like myself.

About seven months into the marriage, the lies of all lies became known when Stephan received a citation in the mail, stating that he had to go to court because his CDL had been suspended due to DUI.

Funny thing is for the past month he'd been working, but that couldn’t be possible because his CDL had been suspended. So, where the fuck had my husband been for the past month?

I picked up the phone and called him. He answered on the second ring.

Hello?

Where the fuck are you? And before you tell me a bald-faced lie, I have a citation in the mail from Fayetteville, Arkansas, saying that you have a court date in three weeks because of a DUI.

Baby, I can explain…

The only thing I want you to explain to me right now is where the fuck are you?

I’ve been staying at Kurtis’s place.

Well, I suggest you bring your muthafuckin' ass home right now, then I disconnected the call.

I stuck it out with Stephan until he got his CDL back, which required him to go to AA classes and he had to pay some hefty fines.

Shortly after I found out I was pregnant with Caleb, Stephan’s mother passed away. I didn’t bother going to the funeral; it never even crossed my mind to go. I took the time off to go but stayed home and relaxed for three days with paid bereavement.

I had yet to meet anyone in his family other than Kurtis and his daughter, who I met when she came here to visit a couple of years ago from Connecticut. Kurtis has two adult children, a son who’s incarcerated and a daughter who is married and teaches third grade in Connecticut.

Stephan’s mother or his other two siblings didn’t even come to our wedding or send cards to congratulate us on our nuptials. He speaks to them all regularly, so I really don’t know what the problem is with them.

He said that his mother didn’t like to travel, which is why she didn’t come to the wedding and when I suggested that we visit her, he said maybe one day. Lying in a casket wasn’t what I had I mind when I said I wanted to visit his mother, so he would have to get his moral support from his siblings and the rest of his family.

I had never spoken to his mother. He never said, My mother said to tell you hello. And as far as I know, she had never asked about Jada, other than when I first had her.

Things took a turn for the worse after the death of Stephan’s mother. He relapsed and started back drinking again, this time, though, he caused a major accident on the road. Thank God it wasn’t fatal. He did some significant damage to the vehicle he struck, and the guy had a few broken bones and Stephan suffered a back and shoulder injury.

Stephan had to spend ninety days in jail because he was facing a civil claim for personal injury. He lost his job, and he’ll never be able to get his CDL again.

I was almost seven months pregnant when Stephan was released from jail. I had already made up in my mind that once he was released that I wasn’t sticking around.

I couldn’t be worried about him and three kids too. I know I vowed to stick it out for better or worse, but had I known from the get-go that my husband to be was a downward spiraling functional alcoholic, I would’ve left him standing in line at Walmart.

A month before Caleb was born, I left Stephan and moved in with my cousin Adina and stayed with her until Caleb was about five months old, and then we moved into the house I’m in now.

When Caleb was two years old, I filed for a divorce from Stephan. At the time he was unemployed, trying to collect disability, and staying with Kurtis.

In other words, I didn’t have shit coming from him as far as child support because you can’t