I don’t believe I’ve ever told the tale about my mother after the birth of my biracial son, Benjamin. That story is filled with some of the curious circumstances that happen to white women who have to usher biracial babies around in the diverse places in various cities— malls, grocery stores, and downtown shops. They become magnets for younger men of color who see these women as easy sexual targets.

Since I was a late bloomer, so to speak, my mother didn’t have much time to know what the other side of her life might have been like until she turned forty-six years of age. I was nearly thirty before I had my first child, and it was very easy to tell that my child’s father was African American—where I was not.

As you may know, I’d been married to my high school sweetheart for eight years before he ran off with a younger woman he’d gotten pregnant. We were both positive after those eight years that I couldn’t have children. It merely turns out that I couldn’t have children by him.

My mother hated Stephen, my black lover, at first, but eventually, she got used to him. Stephen died before his son, Benjamin, was born, and, although I didn’t have to move back in with Momma back then, she did offer to watch my son when I went back to work.

That meant that there she was, a middle-aged forty-something white woman who took a half-black baby shopping and to the mall or whatever. Over a period of seven or eight months, whenever she’d take Ben out in public, Momma got hit on by black men—most of them much younger than she was. At first, it made her angry, so I’d have to hear all about the daily insults to her honor and decorum when I came to pick up the baby. Eventually, she got used to the remarks enough to tolerate them.

Then everything changed for her. Momma seemed to be perfectly content to watch Ben and take him out on the town. More importantly, I stopped hearing complaints.

It seems that one day she had met Reggie, and there was something about him and, as she later told me, something about the way he treated her that was totally different from the get-go. First, he invited her (and the baby) out to lunch with him. She accepted. Not just once either.

They began meeting for lunch on a regular basis. Momma was worried about her relationship with this man, so she wouldn’t even tell me about meeting Reggie for a while. I learned of his existence several weeks into their relationship. Momma mentioned her luncheon date in passing one day, and I told her that it was good that she had someone to take her out on the town, even if it was something as innocent as a meal together.

Momma blushed. I asked her why she blushed, and she shirked it off.

“Oh, my God, Momma! Is this man black?”

She nodded. “He’s a nice man.”

I smiled. Nice, hell, he had to be a saint.

“Reggie’s just a friend.”

Some friend! When I finally met him, he was a handsome black machinist in his late thirties who saw something sexy in a forty-six-year-old grandmother. I learned that my mother was having a love affair with a black man who was quite adept with his hands, and Momma eventually disclosed that he was even more adept with other parts of his body.

Naturally, I didn’t think that the two of them had gotten serious until I found out that, like so many of the heroines in my fictional stories, my mother confided in me that she thought she might be pregnant, and that Reggie might be the father.

I wasn’t shocked exactly, but I was taken aback. You don’t quite expect that from your own mother.

Apparently, Momma didn’t think she could still get pregnant. Turns out she was wrong. She carried the baby for a couple of months--worried to death that Daddy would find out about her pregnancy. However, the strain of hiding her pregnancy, coupled with the stress of her age, was too much for her, and she lost her baby somewhere around three months.

She felt that God had punished her for cheating on her husband, my father, and she broke it off with Reggie. They had been together for close to six months before she lost the baby. I know for a fact that she secretly pined over the loss of her baby and the loss of her lover for the close to fourteen years she had left to live. She finally passed away a couple of years back at the age of sixty-one.

Something in my head, a feeling of nostalgia, maybe a need to get close to her memory again, prompted me to try to get a hold of Reggie for the first time in ages—just to see how he was. Actually, I wanted him to tell me stories about my mother.

Reggie was surprisingly easy to locate. He still lived in the same downtown apartment after all these years. He had the same phone number that my mother had in her little notebook that I’d confiscated before Daddy could get his hands on it.

Reggie told me over the telephone that for a while, Momma was literally the love of his life. He said that secretly he’d compared every other woman he’d dated to Momma.

“We all knew that she wasn’t really a redhead, Lyssa,” he told me. “But I thought she was the most exotic lover I’d ever found. And every time I’d climaxed inside her, I dreamed that the Lord would grant me one little miracle.”

I teared up. “Oh, Reggie,” I sobbed. I remembered how miserable he looked sitting in the back of the church with members of my husband’s extended family. I was the only one who recognized him. But I didn’t get a chance to talk to him. He left immediately after the service.

He told me that morning that he’d been crushed by the loss of their baby, and subsequently by the loss of one of the greatest women ever to grace his life.

Dad outlived Momma by about eight months, so my mother never really tried to get back together with Reggie again. But I told her lover that I believed that she really expected my Dad to pass away first. If he had, she would have returned to Reggie.