Read Online The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men by Ernessa T. Carter - Free Book Online

I saw that the door to my parents’ bedroom was closed. As far back as I could remember, my mother had demanded an open house. No closed doors unless somebody was inside the room, sleeping or doing homework. That had been her policy. And as a teenager, I had often been annoyed when I closed my bedroom door before leaving for school, only to find it wide open when I returned home.
    But now the door to my parents’ bedroom stood closed. And though no ticking sound emanated from the other side of the door, I somehow knew there was a bomb inside that room.
    “Don’t,” something whispered inside of me, unsettled.
    But I did, dismissing the subconscious warning and turning the round,scratched-up brass knob anyway, like a girl in a horror film; then I found something truly horrible inside.
    First of all, there was my mother’s gold wedding band, defiant in its simplicity, refusing to speak to Rick T’s later success.
    Second of all, there was what the ring lay on top of. A piece of white paper, which had probably come from the printer downstairs.
    I approached the note the same way that I would have approached a dead body. Fearful, but needing to see it for myself. In many ways, this note was my mother’s dead body, which, in the back of my heart, I now knew was lying in the hospital’s morgue.
    I picked up the ring, then picked up the note.
    My mother liked to talk. Later, at the funeral, both Janine and I would recall how often she would give hour-long answers to simple questions like, “Where did you get that refrigerator magnet from?” or “What’s a hernia?” The reason we were both so great at research, we told fellow funeral-goers, was because we had learned early to look things up ourselves rather than risk a lengthy answer from our mother.
    But on paper she had always been economical with her words. In the early days, when she was still writing all of Rick T’s lyrics, the unknowing critics had praised him (and therefore my mother) for the spare yet effective way she managed to paint a picture of the projects where she (not Rick T) had grown up, with poetry beating like a diamond in her heart.
    Thursday and Janine—
    I know you will find this, because your father doesn’t come into this room anymore. You are my daughters. Do better. Don’t be pathetic. Don’t ever be pathetic like me. I love you from the top of your heads to the bottom of your toes.
    And that was it. No signature. Of course it didn’t need one. She knew we would know who wrote this note. I sat there—for a few seconds, for acouple of hours, I would never be sure. All I knew was that an uncertain portion of time later, someone said, “Thursday.”
    And when I looked up, my father was standing in the doorway. My father, tall and attractive not in the true sense, but in the showbiz sense. He had a face that people could look at for a long time because he reminded them of somebody they knew. Somebody they liked. A cousin, a brother, a friend, a father.
    Right before his own father had died, Rick T had driven us to visit our paternal grandparents for the first time. Their house had only been a few neighborhoods over, and I had been surprised to find out that they lived so nearby. My grandmother opened the door, dressed in what my mother called a church suit, even though it was Wednesday.
    “Oh Ricky, I’m glad you’re here,” she said.
    He started to hug her, but she shooed him away. “No, no, get upstairs to your father. He wants to see you bad.”
    My father took the stairs three at a time, running to meet a man he hadn’t spoken to in almost fifteen years, of whom I’d never even seen a picture.
    “Mom, I have to go to the bathroom,” my ten-year-old sister tended to address all of her needs and wants to my mother back then, even the ones with which she had nothing to do.
    “It’s right down this hallway, through the kitchen,” my grandmother told Janine.
    “I remember where it is. I’ll show you,” my mother said, also to