Broken Piece

World's Law

Though she abandoned him at a very young age, Davison loved no one more than he loved his mother. She had been everything good in his life and sometimes her goodness had been reflected thru him. Well, if there had been anything good in him, all of it came from her. It certainly didn't come from that cruel, cold man that was his father. He  inherited mostly what that man had to give, everything rotted and mean was his inheritance and everything his father is.

His mother left him, but really, she had left his father. Davison didn't blame her, he could still remember the sound of her whimpered begging and the sound of flesh clashing violently against flesh. He could still vividly remember the bruises, the broken bones, the hospital visits. The lies. No, he couldn't blame his mother at all for her escape or the fact that she didn't take him with her.

She had vanished right from the hospital bed. He had imagined she hadn't the time to swing by his school and get him.

Don't get him wrong, she did come back for him. But it was three years later, after she had remarried some affluent black business man and was playing mother to his child. He was nine at the time, and he could still remember his first  meeting with William Barks and his four year old daughter Callie. He remembered that William didn't seem to like him much and stared down at him over his nose. He remembered the little brown girl with puffy pig tails and a huge smile, Callie, was a brat who had dropped her ice cream cone onto the front of her pink unicorn shirt. He remembered that big smile had dropped like a stone thru water and fat tears dripped from too big brown eyes. She had whined and whined her dark skin somehow flushing red underneath the brown and finally he had handed over his half eaten cone. She had smiled real big then, chirped a 'thank you, big brother' before she skipped away, off to show their mother what he had done for her. He remembered how his mother had smiled at him then and how it had made him both warm and cold.

He remembered how he was sort of jealous of how his mom mothered Callie. How she held her hand and picked her up. She dotted on the little brown girl, who was so obviously not her own.

When she had left him.

 He was jealous of their clothes, which were new and clean, unlike his handy-downs from the neighbor lady's church. He had holes in his jeans that weren't fashionable at the time and his shirts were always two sizes too large or two sizes too small. He hated the fact that his mother was living in some big mansion with her new family, while he rotted away in a trailer  by a lake that smelled like a sewer with his dad.

So, when his mother had asked him if he would like to come live with her, he denied. He had dug deep and pulled out his inner father, pulling forth everything he had ever said the man say about people who looked like bratty Callie and her father. He told her he didn't want to live with no 'kinky' headed blacks. He also said he didn't want to be tainted like she was now. These things he had heard his father say. The look on his mother's face when he told her that made him want to eat his words. He hadn't meant it, and he had absolutely wanted to go live with his mother, no matter where she lived. He wouldn't mind being tainted or treated any better than how he was with his dad. A card board box or a frozen waste land (he hated snow), it didn't matter to him. But he had remained firm, stubborn, exactly like his father.

So, after that, he remained with his dad, seeing his mother only a couple dozen times throughout his childhood. He knew she gave his father child support, but what the man did with it was a mystery. He and his mother both knew it didn't really reach him just made it so that his father had enough left to keep the lights running . So most of the times, when she would swing by when he got out of school usually waiting pulled over on the side of the long dusty road leading up to his place. She wouldn't dare go up to the trailer, he knew. She would take him out to eat or to other things he may have wanted. It was those times she would give him a large sum of cash and tell him to hide it from his father, hid away in the text books he knew his father wouldn't ever touch unless it was to throw them at him.

She would have been in his life more if he hadn't been so bitter about her one true love. Callie. She would rave and gush about her little Callie. So, sometimes, he would avoid her, not answer her calls or see her waiting outside his school for him and leave school a different way.

He loved his mother dearly, but he was just so bitter. So hurt. That may have been the reason why he pretended not to notice the stress lines on her face or the loss of weight around his senior year. It may have been why when she told him about how mean, shallow, and just plain nasty some of the rich people she was forced to be around were, he thought she deserved it. Who was she to believe that people like them had any reason to mingle in that social class? His mother was just a country girl who married her high school sweet heart and regretted it. They didn't come from money and their names didn't mean anything.

When he was a sophomore in college, his mother revealed her biggest heartbreak to him. Her precious, sweet, Callie was distancing herself from her and called her ugly names. She cried on that park bench they had met at for a whole hour as she explained the humiliation she was facing at the social events she was forced to attend. Her accent was the biggest thing, where people would pretended not to be able to understand what she was saying or because they knew her backstory somehow. Her husband had been cheating on her. Horrible rumors had been spread about her. His mother was miserable. She simply wasn't cut out for the world of rich and famous.

Davison had been furious, but he couldn't do much but offer her a place to stay at his apartment. He told her she should leave, like the last time she was being mistreated. But she hadn't wanted too, she said Callie needed her. She claimed Callie was just going thru a faze and would stop treating the only mother she knew so horribly. He wasn't so certain and told her as much. She told him he was wrong and that he simply didn't know Callie and really regretted not getting them together a couple of times so they at the very least could have been friends.

This had angered him, after all, how could she continue to choose Callie over him when he was her flesh and blood? Why was Callie everything while he was nothing? After that, he had promised to be done with his mother and that had been the last time he saw her.

Then, he heard she died, it nearly broke him completely, he would even argue it did. It was eleven years later and he had just started to make a name for himself. He and a buddy from college had started a tech company which somehow became very successful. It was the third year when they made their first million and it only got better from there. He had been contemplating getting in contact with his mother, wanting to show her his success and for her to be proud of him. But it was too late.

He wanted to know what happened, he needed to know what happened. It became an obsession, a singular focus. It took a whole year to get a story out of someone. A socialite and friend of one Callie Barks, told him what happened that night. She told him of the humiliation his mother suffered when William brought his mistress to the charity event his mother was hosting. She told him how Callie had been the last straw and how she had embarrassed his mother, by pointing out she wasn't her 'real' mother and that she was just some white woman acting as if she was. Those words had sent his mother racing from the event where she was ultimately struck while blindly racing across the road.

Davison had seen red. How dare they do that to his mother? He had wanted to march over to that oversized mansion and kick William Barks' ass and curse Callie Barks out in a way she likely had never been before.

But that hadn't seemed like enough to him. His mother had suffered for years because of these people she obviously loved more than her own flesh and blood. No, a onetime punishment wasn't good enough.

His true idea began to form when he came to know that William Bark's company was going through finical hard times. Barks Co. was failing. Since starting his own company, he had been thrust into the world that had taken his mother and that he hated so much, and he had heard of Mr. Barks. He knew the man was power hungry and image driven. He had heard that the man was practically going around begging for favors from other business owners. But no one trusted him, after some business he had gotten in some odd years ago. No one was willing to take a chance on the man and neither was he.

But he was willing to take a chance on revenge.