Mi Soon Come. - EsSense of Ebony Books

Author: Ebz Dixon

A Story of Love, Leaving and What's Left Behind....

Chapter One

A Boy from the Hills

The cockerels crowed before dawn, as always. Their scratchy echo bounced off the zinc roofs and settled somewhere deep in the boy’s belly. He was seventeen, firstborn of seven, and already tired of being poor in a place that pretended it wasn’t.

The house he called home was wooden, leaning slightly on stilts and patched with tarpaulin where storms had picked off the boards like chicken skin. The latrine stood like a sentinel in the back bush, mosquito-bitten and crawling with damp. But inside, the boy’s mother would tell visitors, “We well off, yuh know.” And by local standards, they were. They had a television, a radio, and the occasional salt beef.

But the boy—let’s call him Carlton—wanted more. He wanted flushing toilets, not the echo of waste hitting the pit below. He wanted sneakers that didn’t peel apart in the rain. He wanted America.

His teenage girlfriend, Sharon, was plump with their second child, Clive on her hip, Winston already causing flutters in her belly. He kissed her forehead that morning before heading down the track to catch a ride to town, where the letter from Miami waited. His aunt had sent for him. This was his way out.

“Mi soon come,” he told her.

But Sharon didn’t believe him.

And she was right not to.

Chapter Two

A Girl Left Behind

Sharon watched him walk down the gravel path, dust clinging to his boots. Clive waved after him, not understanding. She didn’t wave. She just folded her arms around her swelling stomach and blinked hard.

Carlton had promised many things—promised her love, promised her a better life, promised to send for her and the boys. But promises from men like Carlton were like rainfall in dry season: short, heavy, and gone before the soil could drink.

She didn’t cry that night. She placed Clive to sleep beside her and listened to the sounds of the bush, her hand resting on her belly. The next morning, she tied up her head, opened the old parlour her grandmother once ran, and began again. One banana at a time, one phone credit voucher at a time. She refused to starve.

Within five years, Sharon had expanded the tiny shop into a full grocery. People in the district called her “Miss Hustle.” She raised Clive and Winston alone, fed them ambition instead of pity.

She never cursed Carlton's name.

But she never forgave him either.

Chapter Three

The Hands That Held Us

The first few years after Carlton disappeared to America came down on Sharon like the dry season, relentless and revealing. No matter how tight she wrapped herself in pride, the gaps showed. There were days when the boys needed shoes and all she had was enough to buy rice, kerosene, and a small piece of chicken back. But she managed, somehow. Not with miracles. With muscle.

Summervale didn't forgive women easily. People always assumed if a man left, it must’ve been her fault — too mouthy, too proud, too fast. But Sharon kept her back straight and her eyes on the road ahead. She didn’t explain herself to anybody. She didn’t need to.

The Shop

The front room of her grandmother’s house had once been a space for Sunday rest, but Sharon converted it into a shop — one board shelf at a time. Salt, bread, flour, phone cards, soft drinks, condoms, tin mackerel, curry powder, sugar, Blue Bomber, sweet biscuits. It was small at first. But it grew. She put in a glass case with cigarettes and bought cold sodas from a cousin in Anchovy to keep in the cooler.

People came not just to buy, but to sit on her bench and talk. Sharon had a way of listening with her whole face, and her responses were never too much. She was smart, sharp, and always watching. That quiet confidence drew even the bitterest gossips to her shop steps.

The Grandmothers

Clive and Winston had something many boys didn’t: two grandmothers who loved them fierce.

Carlton’s mother, Miss Enid, lived up in Glendevon. She was a thin woman with sharp cheekbones and sharper words, but she came down every other month with a little something — sugar, canned milk, a secondhand pair of pants. She didn’t speak much on Carlton’s absence, but one time she sat on Sharon’s steps, staring out over the hills, and said, “Him get the big dreams from him father. But not the backbone to see them through.” That was all. And that was enough.

Sharon’s mother, Miss Ionie, lived on the same property — a dark-skinned woman with hands like bark and the softest laugh. She kept Winston when Sharon went to buy goods or chase down orders in town. She taught Clive how to tie his shoes and say grace. When money was thin, she made fried dumpling and mint tea and told the boys stories about duppies and Anansi to distract them from hunger.

Those women held Sharon up without asking for thanks.

Letters From Afar

Every few months, a small brown envelope would arrive from Florida or New York or Georgia. No return address. Just a note written in Carlton’s tall, lazy scrawl:

“Hope di boys good. Tell Clive to mind him brother. Enclosed $100. Buy dem shoes. Stay strong.”

Sometimes he sent barrel items: American cereal, toothpaste, khaki pants, neon socks. Once he sent a photo of himself in front of a house with snow on the roof and wrote on the back, “Better days coming.”

Clive was the first to understand that meant their father wasn’t coming home.

Winston, being younger, held on longer. He kept the photo on the shelf next to his bed for years, until one night — after Sharon scolded him for skipping school — he took it down and shoved it in the back of a drawer.

The Boys Grow

Clive was eleven when he started asking questions Sharon couldn’t answer. He’d watch the road like he was expecting something — someone — and when the dust rose from a passing van, his shoulders would fall.

“Mummy… him really gone gone?” he asked one Sunday afternoon, after helping her sweep out the shop.

Sharon stopped moving for a second. Then she crouched beside him, holding his face.

“Your father went to look better for himself. But some man only know how to look out for themselves. You hear me?”

Clive nodded, lips tight. He didn’t cry. But that night, Sharon heard him whispering with Winston, both of them asking each other what they’d do if he showed up one day, right out the blue. If they’d run to him. Or if they’d turn away.

Sharon never said it, but she prayed nightly that they wouldn’t have to choose.

To Be Continued....