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Authors: Ernessa T. Carter
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against the surgeons’ efforts until they let her go and called her time of death.
Rick T, stuck in a mire of Janine’s tears and paperwork that needed to be signed after my mother’s body had been processed, sent Brenda to pick me up and keep me at the house until he got there and could tell me the news himself. He had not known about my mother’s letter because, as my mother had said, he did not come in this room anymore.
Janine hadn’t made the trip upstairs with him. And neither had Brenda. However, I could sense that my father’s mistress was still downstairs, face appropriately sorrowful, but her heart hovering. Like a vulture.Waiting, waiting, and smiling on the inside because my mother was dead, and she would finally have Rick T out in the open and all for herself.
The wedding band dropped out of my hand to the ground, bouncing with a metallic clink before rolling under the bed.
“Is that your mama’s ring?” my father asked.
With a running start, I jumped on my six-foot-tall father and raked my fingernails across his face. “Why did you send your mistress to pick me up? How could you let her come into our home?” I asked him, shrieking every word. “You arrogant, narcissistic, cheating son of a bitch!”
I had never gotten in a fight in my entire life, but Sharita was only five-two and had grown up in Kinloch, which, according to her, was one of the rougher neighborhoods in St. Louis, rife with large, mean black girls who wanted to fight her after issuing accusations like “You think you all that” and “You think you better than me, but you ain’t shit.”
“The secret,” Sharita told me at Smith College’s BRIDGE orientation program for students of color, “is to always go for their head. Doesn’t matter how big they are, they all got soft heads. Don’t be noble. You got to be willing to throw dirt in their eyes if it comes to that.”
My father and I fell sideways, rolling across the floor like my mother’s car had rolled down that hill. Despite my head attack, he managed to push me off of him and get to his feet, confused and disoriented. And my father, the king of “It Wasn’t Me,” lied to me like I had heard him lie to my mother. “Brenda’s not my—”
I didn’t let him finish. I took a glass from the nearby nightstand and threw it at his head with a vicious sideswipe. He screamed, grabbing the side of his head where the glass had shattered against it. Blood streamed through his fingers as Rick T made wounded animal sounds.
“Thursday, stop,” Janine said from the doorway.
When I saw my little sister at the door, standing behind my bleeding father, I did what she said. I came to a panting stop, only to have the house turn against me. It pushed me out of the room, stumbling by my father,rushing past Janine, and running by Brenda downstairs before it spit me out the front door, where I violently threw up in my mother’s flowering bush.
How the hell was I supposed to live without a mother? My father was all career, sharp flow, and surface charm. He didn’t know a damn thing about love. He had funded the whole venture, but it had been my mother that had made the four of us into a family, and now, for all intents and purposes, it was just Janine and me.
I should have started crying then, with the kitchen-sink melodrama that I had left inside the house and the taste of recently ejected airplane food still in my mouth. However, my eyes remained a desert of anger and recrimination when I looked out onto the cul-de-sac.
But then a car pulled up to the curb and two people who looked like Risa and Sharita climbed out. And as they walked toward me, I began to realize that it really was them.
That’s when the tears finally came. My two best friends blurred in front of me and they caught me in their arms when I fell toward them. They held me; my taller friend, Risa, keeping me steady from above, and my shorter friend, Sharita, propping me up from below.
“What are you
Rick T, stuck in a mire of Janine’s tears and paperwork that needed to be signed after my mother’s body had been processed, sent Brenda to pick me up and keep me at the house until he got there and could tell me the news himself. He had not known about my mother’s letter because, as my mother had said, he did not come in this room anymore.
Janine hadn’t made the trip upstairs with him. And neither had Brenda. However, I could sense that my father’s mistress was still downstairs, face appropriately sorrowful, but her heart hovering. Like a vulture.Waiting, waiting, and smiling on the inside because my mother was dead, and she would finally have Rick T out in the open and all for herself.
The wedding band dropped out of my hand to the ground, bouncing with a metallic clink before rolling under the bed.
“Is that your mama’s ring?” my father asked.
With a running start, I jumped on my six-foot-tall father and raked my fingernails across his face. “Why did you send your mistress to pick me up? How could you let her come into our home?” I asked him, shrieking every word. “You arrogant, narcissistic, cheating son of a bitch!”
I had never gotten in a fight in my entire life, but Sharita was only five-two and had grown up in Kinloch, which, according to her, was one of the rougher neighborhoods in St. Louis, rife with large, mean black girls who wanted to fight her after issuing accusations like “You think you all that” and “You think you better than me, but you ain’t shit.”
“The secret,” Sharita told me at Smith College’s BRIDGE orientation program for students of color, “is to always go for their head. Doesn’t matter how big they are, they all got soft heads. Don’t be noble. You got to be willing to throw dirt in their eyes if it comes to that.”
My father and I fell sideways, rolling across the floor like my mother’s car had rolled down that hill. Despite my head attack, he managed to push me off of him and get to his feet, confused and disoriented. And my father, the king of “It Wasn’t Me,” lied to me like I had heard him lie to my mother. “Brenda’s not my—”
I didn’t let him finish. I took a glass from the nearby nightstand and threw it at his head with a vicious sideswipe. He screamed, grabbing the side of his head where the glass had shattered against it. Blood streamed through his fingers as Rick T made wounded animal sounds.
“Thursday, stop,” Janine said from the doorway.
When I saw my little sister at the door, standing behind my bleeding father, I did what she said. I came to a panting stop, only to have the house turn against me. It pushed me out of the room, stumbling by my father,rushing past Janine, and running by Brenda downstairs before it spit me out the front door, where I violently threw up in my mother’s flowering bush.
How the hell was I supposed to live without a mother? My father was all career, sharp flow, and surface charm. He didn’t know a damn thing about love. He had funded the whole venture, but it had been my mother that had made the four of us into a family, and now, for all intents and purposes, it was just Janine and me.
I should have started crying then, with the kitchen-sink melodrama that I had left inside the house and the taste of recently ejected airplane food still in my mouth. However, my eyes remained a desert of anger and recrimination when I looked out onto the cul-de-sac.
But then a car pulled up to the curb and two people who looked like Risa and Sharita climbed out. And as they walked toward me, I began to realize that it really was them.
That’s when the tears finally came. My two best friends blurred in front of me and they caught me in their arms when I fell toward them. They held me; my taller friend, Risa, keeping me steady from above, and my shorter friend, Sharita, propping me up from below.
“What are you
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