God Don't Make No Mistakes Read Online Free PDF Page B

already looking at the whole picture. If a baby doesn’t complete a relationship, nothing does.”
    â€œJust listen and let me talk. You told me that your half sister Lillimae was one of the best things that ever happened to you. You didn’t let it bother you that another woman had her by your daddy... .”
    That was true. I loved my half sister, who happened to have a white mother. My relationship with Lillimae was very important to me. Other than Rhoda, she was the only female in my age group whom I could turn to in a time of crisis. Lillimae’s mother was the woman whom Daddy had left my mother and me for. Lillimae had her mother’s blond hair and blue eyes, but she also had features similar to mine. Every time I looked at her, it was like looking at the photo negative version of myself. I loved my half sister to death.
    â€œLillimae is ... an exception.”
    â€œAnd why is that?”
    â€œOh, I don’t know. I just know she is. I don’t know what I’d do without her in my life.”
    â€œUh-huh. Exactly. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
    â€œHow can you compare Lillimae with—”
    â€œNow, you shut up and listen to me!” Rhoda ordered, her voice so shrill it made me flinch. I was glad she had cut me off, because some of the words coming out of my mouth were contradicting my feelings about Lizzie’s baby. It didn’t make any sense to me that I could accept my daddy’s love child, but not my husband’s. I was concerned because I couldn’t help the way I felt. A sharp pain shot through my head, right behind the thought that I might some day accept Lizzie’s baby. “I know your mother was hurtin’ real bad when your daddy took off. Her findin’ out that he had kids by the other woman must have ripped her heart in two.”
    â€œThat happened a real long time ago. My mother eventually got over it or she would not have taken my daddy back after a thirty-year separation.”
    â€œExactly,” Rhoda said again, louder and with more conviction this time.
    â€œExactly what?”
    â€œI am not condonin’ what Pee Wee did, but don’t let it destroy you today, because you don’t know how you will feel about it next year, or in a few years. Do you understand what I’m tryin’ to say?”
    â€œHell no! And I don’t know why you’re saying what you’re saying. This is not the time to be telling me that something good might come out of this. I am too mad to even think that far ahead! When you walk in my shoes, maybe you’ll know what I’m feeling like right now.”
    â€œI haven’t worn the same shoes you have on now, but I’ve had my feet in shoes that didn’t feel too comfortable. Had my son lived, I know my husband would have accepted him and raised him as his own.”
    â€œBut Otis didn’t know that your son wasn’t his, did he?”
    â€œNo, but I was goin’ to tell him the truth one day.”
    â€œRhoda, your situation was not nearly as traumatic as the one I’m going through right now—or the one that my mother went through with my daddy. You could have kept your son’s father’s true identity hidden until the day you died. Otis and Bully look enough alike that they could pass for brothers. If your son had lived and grown up to look like his biological father, nobody would have guessed the truth. You know how bitter my mother is when it comes to Lillimae and her siblings. I don’t want to be like her.”
    â€œYes, I do know and I don’t blame your mother. But she’s not as bitter as she was when it first happened. A few years ago, she told me that she wouldn’t change anything that had happened to her because it eventually made her the woman that she is today.”
    Rhoda was right. It was because of what my daddy did that my long-suffering mother had gone from living in poverty to