You don't know what love is

The small radio that was propped up on the rustic wooden chair in the corner of the room, provided my only company.

Sade's soft vocals cradled my sadness then transformed it into fury - and that was just in a matter of one week. But now...well now, my old friend depression had me pinned to this spongy bed, in this cold dark room.

Gentle streams of white light peeked from within the faded blue curtains and strained with all its might to be freed.

For the past few days, I slept in an "X" position, trying to fill the entire bed. Usually I would be surrounded by a warm body, but now I loathed sleeping alone.

A cycle of lonliness. First I missed him, then I hated him. Next, after I thought about all the shit that happened, I hated me for hating him.

My phone had been turned off since the moment I had arrived, and all I wanted to do was confide in Bri.

Ain't that funny?

I wanted to talk to the same person, I hid things from. If the situation was different between us, I knew at this very moment I would have probably been at her apartment singing Me, Myself and I from the top of my lungs.

That didn't matter now though. None of it did.

I tossed and turned, sick of the music playing from the broken radio.

There was no doubt that I had to have gone insane, because besides getting up to shower and eat, I just laid here and wallowed.

Suddenly, the room door opened and I pretended to be asleep. I could hear my grandmother shuffling around the room, moving things on the dresser. The sound of the curtain rings dragging against the metal rod and the bright mid-morning sunlight infiltrated my lids.

She turned off the radio and spoke,

"Allaya, wake up now. It's enough of this!", she exclaimed. "You have things to do today, and I won't let you hold up in this bed any longer." Her voice was firm.

I rolled over, brought the blue floral comforter over my head, and groaned.

"Little girl don't play with me." She warned.

My stomach twisted in pain as another wave of nausea hit me. I didn't have the strength to leave this room.

"I can't", I whispered. "I wanna stay here."

The bed dipped, and she peeled the comforter back from my face. Her red-painted finger swiped a stray tear. It's amazing that I still had some left to cry.

"Well you can't do that either. Allaya..." she sighed, petting my matted hair. "...you know you're my favorite grandchild and you should know that everything I say to you is with love."

I felt like a kid again. Like when Amir or one of my older cousins were being mean to me and I'd go to my grandmother for help. She'd do this same thing to me, calm me down with her sweet words, then she'd scold my brother and cousins. But, I should have known that this wasn't the case.

"You need to get the hell up and deal with what you got going on! You ain't a child anymore, you're about to have one, and for their sake you need to get up." Her small hands pulled the comforter off of me fully.

"That's the problem with you young people. Y'all always got a plan...always think y'all got something figured out, but then when it goes to shit you have a damn breakdown. Life ain't always one straight line of peace and happiness...and you know that. Things happen that cause us to fall down and afterwards you gotta get back up and dust ya' self off." She stood from the bed and made her way to the door.

"Gram-"

"No ma'am! I ain't want to hear it." She held up her hand. "Yes I know it hurts. I know you feel alone and you need to allow yourself to feel the pain. But you also need to take some of the blame. You did grown woman tings and end up in grown woman situations. So, act like one and take some damn responsibility. You can't just blame your daddy, or Dave or your friends. You had a part to play!" Her nose flared. "Stop letting the people in your life pay for the hurt that John caused you."

I sat back on the headboard. Looking at my hands, and finally looked up at her stoic face, but behind her eyes, I could see all of the love she had for me.

"You're about to be a mother. Think about that. There are things you have to do, old habits you need to grow out of, and sacrifices you have to make, so that you can give that little one the best life possible."

How do I do that?

"Child you woke up this morning, with good health and all your strength. This is your chance to get something right. The first thing is getting out of that bed, getting dressed and going to your doctors appointment. Then you decide if you want to harbor all of that hate, distrust and insecurity in your heart. When you figure that out, you'll be able to move forward." She finished and walked down the stairs.

My glossy eyes followed her out the open door for a minute, as if holding on to all of her words.

One by one, I placed my feet into the cold floor and stood up shakily. I pulled the oversized hoodie that I stole from Dave over my hips, then turned to look outside.

I wondered if he missed me too.

/•/

The cold gel on my stomach made me scrunch my toes up, while the beeping monitor heightened my nerves. My grandmother sensed my nervousness and she rubbed the back of my hand, as Dr. Carmichael placed the probe like device on my stomach.

"Alrighty now, here we go." she said excitedly, moving the ultrasound wand slowly. My eyes were transfixed on the monitor as the white and black lines waved across the screen. I squinted waiting for something that represented life to appear.

"Well where is she hiding?", Grammy asked rather impatiently.

Dr. Carmichael laughed and scooted closer to my stomach to move the wand further. "Sometimes, we just need a little patience. And she?...it's a little early to determine gender Ms. Pinder."

"Chall (Chile or child) I know what I know."

I began to breathe slower, becoming a bit more anxious, because I didn't see anything yet. When the screen glitched and a little figure with appendages popped up at the bottom.

"There it is!" The doctor studied the screen and referred back to the open file in her lap. "Based on what I'm seeing and the test results forwarded by your nurse, you're in the middle of your first trimester about nine weeks along."

Nine weeks, a little more than two months. I tried to do the math in my head to figure out when this all could've happened. Then it came to me, the night after the club when Dave picked me up. That's what I get for drinking brown liquor.

"Is...is everything okay...with it. I didn't know I was pregnant before and I drank alcohol early on." Fear sat on my chest with all the stupid shit I'd done the past few months. The fight with Kyle was just one night after it had been conceived. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if I'd hurt this baby.

"Well growth seems to be normal and the heartbeat is very strong. I think you've got a fighter in here Allaya. But I'm waiting on a few more tests and we'll have more information then. I'm going to print out a few copies for you...and great-grandma, and in a couple more weeks, we'll be able to tell the gender." she announced.

She handed me a paper towel and I wiped the remaining gel from my stomach and looked up at the blank screen where my growing blip once was. Dr. Carmichael handed me an envelope of photos and I took one out to marvel at it.

"Okay now the morning sickness should stop in a week. But you may experience some heartburn and..."

I'm really about to be a mother. A little tiny human was growing inside me, depending on me, loving me and I couldn't let it down. I wouldn't dare to, because my mother didn't let me down.

So, I made the decision, right there in the small white room with diagrams of pregnant women and babies on the wall, to get the fuck up and do what I had to do.

No distractions.

Just me, baby and our project. The project that I was going to put my all into for it.

I smiled wide, for the first time in days and nodded my head to myself.

"Allaya...?"

"Yes?" I answered the two women peering at me from the door.

"I have all your information and medicine at the front desk. You can also make your next appointment and sign up for some new mommy classes.", she smiled sweetly.

About half an hour later. I was sitting in the car with my grandmother, while she drove painfully slow to our next errand. She didn't tell me where we would be going, she just said get in the car.

She adjusted the small glasses on her face and smoothed the sides of her long ponytail before turning the corner to my old neighborhood.

"You gonna tell the daddy?" She asked the question I was previously contemplating. My grandmother knew all about Dave and my relationship with him - how it begun and why it ended. She was also the only person besides the select few that knew about what happened to Kyle.

"I don't know.", I answered truthfully and turned to watch all of the passing objects.

"Don't tell me you going to start keeping more secrets now Laya."

"Grammy." I sighed. "I'm already dealing with a lot and I'm sure he doesn't want anything to do with me. Things ended badly and I don't want to...to pop up with this news."

"He has a right to know."

I know he did.

This was all a lot to comb through. Intertwined feelings and lives. But I wouldn't sweep it away to the back of my mind forever, tonight I would sit down and figure it out - my feelings, what I would do next, and how I would do it.

I began to sway side to side and bounced a bit in my seat as my grandmother began to speed up the gravel road to my childhood home.

She parked right in front of the large home with its French architecture, and overgrown veranda.

I got out and breathed in deeply the salty air from the beach. With pure nostalgia I looked up at the once quaint structure, it wasn't too shabby looking. But I could tell that it would definitely need some work.

"Allaya we have to go this way to meet the contractor first."

I followed behind her through a carved out path in the bush off the side of the property. Tall coconut trees and crab grass all around us as we walked deeper in. Between the trees, I could see the cleared down and leveled off area with white dirt and cement.

It felt like forever, stepping over fallen rotten coconuts, sticks and avoiding large lizards that crawled past my feet.

We approached the concrete and steel structure. Men all over in yellow hard hats. The sound of power tools, hammering and chatting overpowered any murmur from nature.

"Damn.", I breathed to myself. I only saw my ideas on paper, now it was presented right in front of me. It was so much bigger than I had originally thought it would be.

My grammy grabbed my hand and made me look down at her.

"You see all that you did? Your mind thought of this, this is all you." She said proudly with admiration.

She pulled me along with her towards a man, around my age or a bit older, wearing a red hard hat and a vest with the construction company's logo on it.

"Mrs. Pinder" he greeted my grandmother with a side hug.

"Hello Ryan. How's your mommy?"

"Good good. She's been asking about that pound cake you made the other day.

"She been asking or you?" She eyed him suspiciously.

He grinned at her and scratched behind his neck shyly. "I mean...if you making one for her I might take a lil sumn sumn from it."

"Mhm that's what I thought. This is my granddaughter Allaya Daniels. She's the one that contracted your dad."

I held my hand out and in return he took it softly to shake it.

"Allaya..." he said my name like he was trying to remember something. "Now that I see your face...I know exactly who you are. You're Amir's sister right? I went to high school with y'all but I graduated three years before you.", he said smiling. "Ryan Osbourne, head contractor and project manager."

Giving him a a small one in return, I nodded my head like a remembered who he was.

"I didn't realize you were so young. Usually when we get big projects like this they're from middle-aged men or huge corporations. You must have a ton of investing... you know to buy the land. This is prime real estate, tens of millions of dollars worth actually. It's amazing that someone like you...with your age owns it."

"Actually this was an inheritance." I interrupted him. I was tired of him running on with shit that I already new.

"Ah right." He cleared his throat, noticing that he was annoying me. "Well Ms. Daniels allow me to give you the tour." Ryan reached deeper into the bed of his Dodge truck to grab a red hard hat then handed it to me.

"Laya I'm going to go look at the house." My grandmother told me gingerly, leaving me with Ryan.

I followed behind him carefully, watching my step for stray nails, and the more he showed me, the more I became amazed with how far along everything was.

"I'm glad you're liking everything so far. But we still have a few major decisions to make. Are you going to be on the island for a while longer?" He asked while checking his phone.

I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth and looked at the scenery around me. My mind was already made up, I was all in. "Actually I will be here for a while. Maybe longer than I expect, I want to see this entire venture through, maybe even run it." I said with an excited shrug.

He looked up from the device, traces of shock written on his face. "Run it? With no industry experience? You sure you know what you're doing?" his full lips turned into a sly smirk.

"Yeah I do." His doubtful look made me acknowledge a number of things. "It's gonna be hard because I gotta find an investor or investors to help me finish. But I'll get there." I was surprising myself with how optimistic I was being. Even though all the sadness and pain I was feeling earlier was just a door away, my heart was filled with gratitude.

"You don't need none of dem!" My grandmother shouted walking down the steps of the home with a box in her hand. "I got all your investments covered." She winked at me and opened the door to her car before getting in.

In a quick movement I shook my head at her outburst and ignored it completely because I thought she was joking. I folded my arms in front of me and spoke to Ryan again,

"I'm going to come back tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after until it's done." I told him truthfully. The laugh that escaped his lips proved that he didn't take me seriously.

Yes, please underestimate me so that I can embarrass you.

"Tomorrow I want to go over renovation plans for this home."

He stopped laughing and gathered his professional composure again. "But that wasn't in the original contract that you discussed with my father."

"Then make a new one. I want this done in the next six months. It's extremely time sensitive. I'll be here at eight tomorrow morning." I demanded then walked back to the car.

Men like him only speak in dollar signs and contracts. A woman like me, with plans and dreams didn't mean much unless I spoke the same language. So, I'd let the money do the talking.

Before I got in, he called my name,

"Allaya...I mean Ms. Daniels, What are you going to call it?"

I looked beyond him, through the thick bush where I could see the smallest hint of the construction.

"The Grove Luxury Hotel"

/•/

It was about eleven o' clock at night and like a true night owl, I was wide awake pondering several decisions.

My grandmother had long gone to bed about two hours ago, she was probably snoring soundly in her pink night gown and green hair curlers.

But me, I was in the garden with a cup of chamomile tea in my hand. Just me and my little one to keep me company under the stars surrounded by the sound of loud crickets and the occasional tussling of the trees.

The island's October weather provided a cool dry breeze that warranted me to drape a blanket over my shoulders, while I sipped from the steaming mug.

My legs folded underneath me, and a notebook and pen, sitting open on my lap. I had just bought it earlier today, and it was nearly halfway full with my thoughts, a few lists and plans.

On the side of me, my phone, which was still turned off since the day I arrived here. I was afraid to touch it, because I knew when I turned it one I would be swamped with notifications and messages that I didn't want to answer.

I put the mug down, and flipped a few pages into the notebook, to where I wrote a list for the baby. At the top were the words:

"Tell Dave"

Picking up the phone, I pressed down on the side button, watching it awake from it's restful sleep. As soon as it powered up properly and the network registered, it almost vibrated out of my hand from all the messages and missed calls from everyone - Maya, Eva, Bri and Nene.

But of course, disappointment set in when I saw there was nothing from Dave.

I hesitantly clicked my message app and opened my group chat with Ne and Bri, about a hundred of frantic texts asking where I was, and if I was alright. A few of Bri cursing Dave's name, because I guess she asked him where I was and his answer was not to her liking.

Then I played my voicemails from her number.

"Hey Laya, we shouldn't have left things how we did this morning. But I guess you want space so I'll give it to you."

"Allaya, I know you're still upset but let's talk about this. Call me back when you can."

"You're starting to worry me now, cause no one knows where you are. Dave's sketchy ass ain't much help and you sister is a dumb broad." She stopped herself and softened her voice. "Please...please just let me know that you're okay. Nene and I are looking for you."