Should Have Known Better

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know!” I answered loudly and worn down. Her questions were like hot pokers, stabbing into my chest. “Look, we’re just going to Atlanta to get your father, like I said.”

“But Jayshanna’s—”

“Cheyenne, you shut up and be quiet,

” I yelled at her in a way I don’t believe I ever have before.

I looked at the mile marker on the side of the road. We’d be in Atlanta in two hours. Reginald hadn’t answered my text asking where he was.

6

My eyes bounced from the odometer to the road to the trucks making afternoon deliveries and then back at the odometer again. I counted each mile, each long stretch of road I passed over like a red light flashing in my eye. First two, then ten, next twenty, and fifty. My chest tightened as if I was expecting something—a blow, a hit, a kick. I opened the window, all four and let the hot air come rolling around my neck. Back to the odometer, the road, the trucks, the odometer again.

“Go on in and say good-bye to your father,” my mother had said after we alone managed to stuff my last box of clothes into the backseat of the car. It was late summer and it seemed like every car in every driveway on our street was filled with the boxes of my classmates leaving for college.

I closed the car door and looked at my mother standing on the other side. The heat had her bangs wet and stuck to her forehead.

“Go on,” she pushed. “He’s having his coffee. Just say good-bye and kiss him on the cheek. Tell him you love him.”

“He ain’t tell me he loves me. He ain’t kiss me on the cheek and say good-bye,” I said. I was taller than my mom already. Too big to be stuffed into a closet. And every day that I stayed in that house I was becoming more loud and angry at all the closets she’d pushed me into, and all the reasons she’d had to do it. “Ain’t even taking me to school. I went to the school he picked. What more does he want from me?”

My mother walked around to the side of the car where I was standing, limping carefully on a bad leg she’d worn down with work. She was still young. Still beautiful. But time was hard on her body. It creaked in places it shouldn’t and slowed far faster than my father’s.

“He’s just scared,” she said. “You can’t tell when he’s scared yet?”

“I can tell when he’s angry.”

“You’re his only child. You’re leaving. He’s scared something might happen to you. That you’ll leave this house and forget your Bible. Lose your way.”

“Mama, don’t say that to me,” I said. “He might be scared, but it ain’t about me losing nothing. He just wants to control me—the same way he controls you.”

“Girl, I suppose it is time for you to leave this house. Your mouth is getting bigger than your fist.” She came in close to me. “Now, you’re getting older and you are getting smart. But I’m still your mother and there’re some things I know about this world and how it works that you don’t yet understand. You may be moving out of my house, but you’re still going to live by my rules. And if I tell you to do something, I expect it to get done—and quickly. Now, you carry your narrow tail in that house and you tell him—”

“But he ain’t even care enough to take me to school. He hates me. And I hate—”

“You stop that talk and go in that house,” she whispered harshly, pointing at the house.

“Mama, I’m not—”

“You want to get out of here?” she asked. “You want to go to that school? Who you think gonna pay for it? Who? Me? On my knees? Scrubbing walls and begging for weekend work? I can’t do it. I can’t. You need him. You need him!”

He prayed, one hand pressed against my forehead, the other holding his Bible with the curled edges, until my feet were swelling over the edges of my shoes and Mama slid a chair up behind me in the middle of the living room floor.

But he wouldn’t let me sit down.

Told her to move the chair and turned to some other curled page to pray for some other thing I hadn’t yet done, but he was sure I’d do.

A word against greed. Lust. Against dishonoring my family. Lying. Stealing. Cities burning. God coming with a wrath so horrid I’d be burned alive. And, for this, I should be grateful. Should love this God in curled pages who’d sent a man with liquor on his breath to warn me not to grow up.

His hand got more heavy on my head. I pushed up on my heels and told myself not to cry. I couldn’t, not now. This was almost over. I was leaving. I was never coming back. Not to this God.

His voice got louder and turned to rain clouds in my ears. I rolled my fingers into balls and felt that I wanted to hurt him. To slap him to the floor and kick him into the kitchen sink. Make him pray not to be a whore.

I felt Mama holding me then. She held my fists to my sides.

“She don’t need no mercy, Edith,” Daddy said. “She got demons in her. Going to that school to be a whore. To leave my house and turn her back on the Lord.”

He slapped my head with his hand and pushed me back into my mother.