The series of events that led to that day must have been lined up by a supreme being for his/her amusement because, to date, I still can't make sense of all of it. I never quite trusted Jim alright, but that could be attributed to me never seeing him in a good light ever, despite being his spawn.
A few months before, my grandpa had been forced by my uncles and aunts to leave his peaceful village abode for city life at my dad's. I didn't like it personally but my opinion was of no consequence whatsoever, for I was still a young child.
He was quite a strong man for his age. He was of average height, though relative to mystery Dad, he was short; had a characteristic limp on his left side. His mouth was far too sharp for a man his age, but all of that didn't count when the frailties of old age struck his bladder. He would finally lose control of the muscles around his bladder. He needed a tube in his private area to collect his fluids into a small bag. That was the beginning of the chain of events.
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Other old age afflictions followed. Eventually, he had to be hospitalised on one occasion. After a day by his side at the hospital, Dad would have enough of him and leave his work behind. So, he called me in to tend to him going forward, while he got back to work to provide for the family (or so I thought at the time).
I never did quite take a good look at the hospital until when I was returning from getting his food the second day. As if it is part of an unwritten rule for hospitals, the whole place was painted white. The reception was hardly manned, as the ER pressed into a small corner that the reception nurse could easily access to make her do both jobs.
The rooms were mostly stale with the characteristic smell of drugs and chemicals. Patients' beds were demarcated with cotton, barely offering any privacy.
On getting back to the hospital, there sat a woman close to my grandpa, tending to him. For no particular reason, I didn't take a liking to her. My dad would later explain that she was a day nurse that will assist me with Grandpa during the nights when she is not on duty. It was so for as long as we were there until Grandpa was well enough to go with him.
Fast forward a few months later. I was coming back from what I thought had been a hellish day. As I walked through the front door, there they both sat, steaming on the couch; my mum and elder sister, with anger-smirk on their faces. Whenever they are like that, nothing good comes of it.
Within minutes of coming home, I had been hit with the most shocking news I had had to deal with in that decade; I now had a stepbrother. I always thought my dad was a cheat, but I never thought he would commit so much to another woman as to father a child for her. Other news followed that he had already announced and introduced her to our kinsmen as his second wife. How could he keep such a secret from us!?
The height of the secret was that the woman who had just delivered his baby was the supposed day nurse assisting me at the hospital. I felt so stupid, I felt insulted, scorned, and disrespected even. In the following days, my mum took a long-term approach by not bringing hell to earth but doing a figurative ground glass in food punishment. That was when whatever chance we had left went to shit; the chance for us to build a father-son relationship had finally been toast.
Time passed, people aged, and seasons came and went, but the betrayal, the insult, and the pain didn't pass. The family began to drift apart. It wasn't long before everyone went their way and left every other person behind, seemingly in their past.
There are days that I wonder if there was something I could have done or not done. But alas, it is what it is. I have learned to remind myself that I wasn't the one that erred, but sometimes I still wonder what could have been, as against what is. The end of this story is yet to come, and who knows how it will end? Certainly not me.
