Mrs. Jones: Book One (The Jones Series #1) by B.M. Hardin Read Free Book Online

Santana over and over but he didn’t answer.
    All I need was a chance to explain myself. All I needed was a chance to make things right. I couldn’t lose him. I wouldn’t lose him. Somehow I had to fix this because divorcing me just wasn’t an option.
    ~***~
    “Have you had your period?”
    I was on the phone with Joey. I was telling him about what happened between Santana and I.
    It had been a few days and Santana still hadn’t come home.
    “What?”
    “Have you had your period? I’ve been sick to my stomach the last few days. The same way that I felt when she was pregnant with the girls; and I know for a fact that she isn’t pregnant…” Joey explained.
    I tried to think back to the last time that I’d had a cycle.
    He was right.
    I couldn’t remember having one last month…or the month before that. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d taken one of the morning after pills from the drug store. As many of them that I bought throughout the year, I should have been claiming it as an expense on my taxes!
    This could not be happening again.
    And of course, if I was, there was no way to know for sure which man would be the father of my child; well except for the fact that Joey was feeling ill.
    But I hadn’t felt any symptoms. I was feeling just fine, health-wise.
    I was mind boggled as I tried to sort through dates and timelines inside of my head.
    Suddenly, I had an idea.
    “Well, Joey, I’m not pregnant. I haven’t missed a cycle,” I lied to Joey.
    We talked for a minute more and then I hurried out of the house to the drug store.
    There was only one way to find out for sure.
    I swear, I felt like a murderer on trial, awaiting the jury’s decision, as I waited on the results of the pregnancy test.
    Briefly, I remembered the first time that I’d found out that I was pregnant.
    I was still married to my first husband Tony at the time, but I had just gotten involved with Joey. Though I’d always wanted a baby, I knew that it just wasn’t the right time. And Tony had made it clear that even a baby wouldn’t make him stay with me, so I did what I had to do.
    The second pregnancy was actually in the beginning my relationship with Santana. Though Joey had still been in the mix, I was somewhat a little more excited this time around. I told Joey, hoping that it would make him leave his wife, but it hadn’t. Walking away from Santana, at the time, would have been a piece of cake, but what was I walking away to? Santana and I had had sex only a handful of times and I was positive that it was Joey’s, but with Joey’s inconsistencies and the fact that he still wouldn’t leave his wife, I found myself at the abortion clinic for the second time around.
    I’d always said that I would never do it. I would never lie on a table and let someone take away something so precious and something that God had blessed me with. But I hadn’t had much of a choice. I remembered Mama forcing my oldest sister Shante to have one when she was only fifteen years old. She cried and cried, but Mama said that she would thank her for it later. I was young at the time, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would do such a thing. It went against everything that we heard in church on Sunday’s, still yet Mama pulled my sobbing sister through those glass doors that rainy day as my brother and I sat in the car and waited for them. We were all sworn to secrecy from telling my Daddy, but years later, when Shante started having fertility problems, Daddy found out the horrible secret. To this day, Shante blamed Mama for not being able to have her own children. She and her husband were forced to adopt, but she said it just wasn’t the same. In my opinion, my sister had never forgiven Mama for it and I believed that her hatred for our mother was partially the reason why she’d married so young and why she’d agreed to move away. But Mama, not even once, apologized for what she’d done. She’d always said that sometimes in life,