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ISBN: 9781598589566
152 pages
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Chapter 1

Chantelle!”

It’s easier to wake the dead than to wake my youngest child. I was grateful for her ability to sleep so steadfastly when she was a baby. I could run the vacuum cleaner and blast my Marvin Gaye albums in the next room and it wouldn’t bother Chantelle. She slept through thunderstorms, crowded bus rides and, unfortunately, half of high school and all of community college. But that was then and this is now.

“Chantelle, get out of that bed!”

She has slept through her first two babies and I’m praying baby number three does not happen in my house. Both of Chantelle’s children have been awake for forty-five minutes this morning and she has yet to rise and greet the new day. When I was a young mother, I could hear my babies’ eyelids open in the next room. I swear this child of mine has no maternal instincts.

Interrupting my beauty regimen, I lay down the small tube of mascara on the dresser. Leaving the comfort of my tiny master suite, I travel across the distance of the abbreviated hallway wearing only a white bra and half slip. I peer inside the doorway of Chantelle’s bed­room to find six-year-old Dominique leaning against the bed, where Chantelle’s lifeless body is resting. My oldest granddaughter is dress­ing for school in low- rider blue jeans and a hot pink belly shirt. One­year-old Ciera is standing in her crib in the corner of the room in what appears to be (and smells like) a soaked diaper, tipping her bot­tle of milk high into the air and sucking it tenaciously. No doubt the bottle was filled by Dominique, who has developed strong maternal instincts in the last year since her sister came into the world.

“I don’t think so, little missy. Put on something respectable to wear to school,” I say sternly to Dominique.

“But I just bought her that outfit,” a groggy Chantelle inter­jects without even raising her head from the pillow.

Looking down with disapproving eyes at both Chantelle and Dominique, I say, “Good, you’re up. And you’re still not wearing that belly shirt to school. Put on something respectable, or I’ll pick out something for you.” On that note, I turn and head back to the comfort and pleas­ant smell of my bedroom.

My mama makes me sick. She’s always up in my business about what me and my kids wear. I happen to enjoy the latest fashions and it’s important to me to dress myself and my kids in the hippest and tightest clothes. She thinks it’s a waste of money. That’s too bad, because I earn my own money now. I’m not on public assistance anymore and nobody can tell me what to do with my money. I have my own job working for FedEx at the airport. When I get my paycheck every two weeks, it’s straight to Lafayette Square Mall, and it’s none of her business.

I’m a grown woman with two kids and I don’t think my mama should try to tell me what to do, anyway. She’s trying to run my life, when she hasn’t done such a great job of running her own. Look at this broke down house we live in and the crappy car she drives, that she won’t even let me borrow. She acts like she’s rolling in a Hummer or a Chrysler 300 when I ask for the keys. She’s a trip.

She won’t even let me have my man over at night. After all, he is Ciera’s father and I really don’t see the problem. When he comes over to chill for the evening, she watches us like a hawk. Walking through the liv­ing room every five minutes and making comments like, “It’s getting late, don’t you think, Chantelle?” She has no right to tell me when it’s time for my company to leave. That’s why, when she goes to bed, I sneak my man right through the front door and lead him into my bedroom. Most of the time, Dominique sleeps in the bed with Mama, anyway.