A Good Man is Hard to Find

Chapter Three

Five years we had together. Five of the happiest and most memorable years of my entire life. After I got discharged from the hospital, Felix as promised accompanied me back to the apartment I shared with Nathan. The look on Nathan's face was priceless when he opened the door and saw me with my new man. Felix was shocked as well, I kinda forgot to mention to him that Nathan was not only a vicious woman beater, but he was also an African American man. I think his ethnicity just added more fuel to the fire and before I knew it Nathan was on the floor with Felix relentlessly kicking him in the stomach. Not one ounce of me felt guilty for it, after everything this dipshit had put me through it was nice to watch him getting a taste of his own medicine. What surprised me more than anything was Nathan's inability to fight back. So, he can hit and nearly kill a woman, but when a man comes at him he turns into a pathetic little field mouse. After Felix was done beating and spitting on Nathan, I packed my most precious possessions such as my babies ultrasounds and the one picture I had of my newborn baby and I in the hospital. Felix took the picture from me, gently tracing his finger along my baby's face and looked up at me with tears in his eyes. "Don't worry darling, one day we will have a baby of our own." His comment made my heart sing with happiness. This man wanted to be with me, we had only known each other for two days and he had already made up his mind that he wanted to start a family with me, me a nobody. I felt like the luckiest lady in the world, starting a new life and leaving this dismal one behind.

Six months after that we got married in a little intimate ceremony with only four witnesses. My mother and father, who I had reconnected with, were in attendance along with Felix's Mother and his friend Walter. By that time I had been accepted and welcomed into Felix's friendship group known as the Ku Klux Klan, it was the first time in years that I truly felt like I belonged somewhere. I had become a mother hen to our group, baking sweet treats for them all and having them around the house for Sunday dinners and being an agony aunt, especially to Walter with his marriage woes and subsequent divorce. After my horrific relationship with Nathan and all the hate I felt I had no problem with this group and what they stood for. We should take back our country and our identity, why should we accommodate these ethnic minorities? We are Americans and it's high time that we rid the country of those who don't belong here. A lot of my old friends called me a hypocrite, especially since my own son was mixed race. How could I possibly support an organisation like this? My answer remains the same. One black man completely fucked my life up and now I am quite happy to sit back and watch all these other black people who don't belong here get what they deserve. From the outside a lot of people saw Felix as a complete arrogant arsehole and a bully, but to me he was the most wonderful, loving and caring husband that I always dreamed of having. We tried for years to have a baby and unfortunately it was never meant to be, we never gave up hope even though every month Mother Nature would call and my heart would get broken for the thousandth time. Felix never made me feel inadequate or blamed me for our childless marriage, I was always scared that he was going to find someone else. Someone prettier, smarter who could give him the family that his heart desired. But he stayed with me and continued to love me right up until that fateful day when I lost him. If I knew then what I know now, there is no way on earth that I would have planted that bomb underneath that girls car, if I hadn't then the love of my life would still be alive and I wouldn't of ended up in prison. When I saw his car go up in flames my whole world came crashing down around me, I wanted to be dead too. If I could have traded places with my husband I would have, but I couldn't and instead of being allowed to mourn him I was swiftly carted off into police custody and subsequently sentenced to ten years in prison.

Truth be told, prison wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be. Walter came to visit me regularly, having him made me realise that I wasn't the only one who was grieving. Walter missed him too, he revealed to me that the man who we thought was Ron Stallworth was actually an undercover cop, sent in to take the Klan down and ruin us all. I knew it! As soon as that man walked into our house the first time I knew there was something that wasn't quite right with him. Felix knew too, that's why he wanted to hook him up to the polygraph test. He kept on saying to me that he knew he was a Jew, I was completely blindsided by him at that point. He came across so believable, that he hated black people and Jews and I completely fell for his act. If Felix was here now I know that he would stop at nothing to make sure that arsehole paid for what he did with the intrusion into our lives and he would have gotten what he deserved.

Prison life was ok. Granted, I was stuck looking at four walls and was subjected to hard work but it gave me the motivation, drive and passion to get as strong and as lean as I could be. 84lbs later and I looked like my old teenage self, the girl I was before I met Nathan. I wished more than anything that Felix could be alive to see me looking like this, he accepted and loved me when I was at most worst and heaviest. It would have made him so happy to see me healthy and confident, a woman vastly different to the one he first met outside the hospital that morning. I spent so many years crying myself to sleep missing the man who had changed my life and craving his touch and presence so desperately. After a while that stopped and I knew that all I had left in me was anger and determination so that when I was released I could go after the one man that had taken so much away from me, Flip Zimmerman.