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

Janine.
    For the rest of the short visit, the two women would continue to talk through Janine and me, never addressing each other directly, not even to say good-bye when my father came storming down the stairs fifteen minutes after we arrived and said with a face made of angry stone, “Let’s go. Let’s go now.”
    While we were alone in the living room together, waiting for my mom and Janine to come back, my grandmother smiled at me and said, “You arethe pretty girl twin of your father. Down to the eyes. The only thing that’s not his on you are these adorable dimples.” She squeezed my cheeks, even though I was twelve, too old for cheek pinching.
    I preened, happy to be compared to my father and resenting my dimples, which I had inherited from my mother’s mother, a salty old woman who refused to move from the projects and would spend most of our visits saying things like, “Ain’t you smart? I bet them white people be falling all over you the way you talk. You probably think you one of them. Well, you gonna find out when you get older. You ain’t that special.” And then just a few minutes later, “I don’t know why your mama don’t bring you round here to visit more often.”
    “Where’d you get these dimples?” my pleasant and pretty grandmother asked me, her preacher’s wife eyes taking me in like I was a delight just for existing.
    “I don’t know,” I answered, not wanting to bring my other grandmother into the conversation, or even my own mother, who I could already tell she disliked. She did not, I discerned over the short amount of time we spent together, think my project-born mother was good enough for my suburb-raised father. She would later not even attend my mother’s funeral. And by denying my dimples, I had implicitly agreed with her. I would think about this small betrayal often in the guilty years following my mother’s death. But back then, like all children of the famous, I idolized the parent who spent the least amount of time with me, and took the one I saw every day for granted.
    That is, I took her for granted until that night, when I read her suicide note, and looked up from it to find my father standing in the doorway.
    He had been one of the first artists to make it big off the rap game, but in the year 2000, the year my mother died, he was in his early forties and it was beginning to show—not on his face, but in the fashion choices he made to hide the signs of his advancing age. Back in the nineties, during the height of his career, he had worn a beard, but then gray hairs had startedpopping up, springy steel harbingers of the trajectory of his career. And now he shaved every day, wearing a variety of baseball caps to cover his head and its receding hairline.
    I had teased him about this, the last time I saw him before I left for China. He had laughed with me, all good-natured, and told me that he was planning to get some track pants, too, to cover up his gut. “I’m going to wear them like those old men playing chess in the park.”
    I had laughed, Janine had laughed, my mother had laughed. We had all laughed together, my mother especially, pretending that we were what we appeared to be: a happy family.
    And now my father stood in the doorway in his baseball cap and track pants, worn with a baggy “ENYCE” T-shirt that, yes, masked his gut.
    I put it together in those moments. My mother hadn’t been in a car accident, swerving to avoid an animal or another car, as originally believed. She had barged through that divider and driven herself over the cliff.
Thelma and Louise
style. When I had stepped onto the plane, my mother had still been alive, undergoing hours of surgery to save the failing organs that had been beaten to death when her car had crashed into the divider and then rolled down the steep hill beyond it. But when I stepped off the plane, my mother was dead, having refused to go along with the lifesaving procedures, her life spirit tugging and tugging