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When I hung up and finally got ready for bed, I said another prayer. This time I prayed for everyone—for Tamia, and Tasha, and Mommy, and Daddy, and Nana Rue, and Grandma Lucy, and Piero and Bartolo, and Lionel and Baby Prada, and Kyle, and Julian, and the girls in my class, and even Pookie Po and Ms. Pearl and their doggie cousin Miata. The world was a hard place. Things happened to all of us that sometimes we couldn’t understand or take. We all needed a little bit of sunshine in our lives.
Mother Still Knows Best (The Remix)
“Hurry up and get in, Troy. I’m blocking traffic,” my mother said, watching me in the rearview mirror as I stuffed luggage into her trunk.
“Mom, no one’s behind you. You’re fine.” I put my last bag in and closed the trunk.
I’d called my father early in the morning to ask him to give me a ride to the airport and he wasn’t home. “Off at the golf course with Dr. Williams,” my mother said. I could tell she was still in bed. “I’ll come and take you, Troy.”
Bad news.
My mother was good at a lot of things, but driving just wasn’t one of them. Having been chauffeured around by Grandma Lucy’s drivers all her life, my mother hadn’t learned to drive until she was well into her twenties and she drove like it. She darted in and out of traffic like a madwoman, cutting people off and cursing through the window. What was worse was that to add to her reckless driving skills, she still wanted to carry on regular conversations with people in the car. My mother was famous for doing 90 down the FDR while on her cell phone. And she had the tickets to prove it.
“Oh, I thought I saw someone behind me,” she said nonchalantly, eyeing herself in the mirror as I got in. “Hey, baby.” She smiled and leaned over to kiss me. “I’m so happy you called me.”
“Hi, Mom,” I said, returning the kiss. As usual my mother looked stunning, sitting across from me in the car. Even though she didn’t have on a dab of makeup and her hair was pulled back in a bun, she looked flawless. She was fifty-six, but you’d never know. There wasn?
??t a wrinkle on her face. She once had told me it was “a blessing from the melanin gods.” I prayed they’d bless me, too.
“I think it’s just great that you’re getting away from the city with your girlfriends.” She pulled into traffic without looking in her side mirror. “It’s always a good idea to get a break, you know? To say goodbye to the city for a while.”
“Yeah, I know.” I looked in my bag to make sure I had my e-ticket. Tasha and I weren’t able to get the same flight going into L.A.; she had an early appointment at her doctor’s office. They wanted to make sure everything was okay with her pregnancy before she got on the plane.
“And I know you could use a break from that Julian, too,” she murmured in a motherly way.
“Mom, I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m serious. The best thing you can do is just forget about that boy.”
“Jesus, Mom. I’m not going to talk about Julian all the way to the airport.” I looked out of the window.
“Oh my, she’s calling on Jesus and cursing her mother. What’s wrong with the world?”
“I didn’t curse you, Mom,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Well, the point is, you could’ve, and I don’t appreciate it.”
“How are you going to say you don’t appreciate me doing something I didn’t do?” I looked at her. We weren’t even out of Manhattan yet. There was no way I’d survive all the way to JFK. “Okay, you know what, I’m not even playing into this. I’m just going to be quiet,” I said.
“Fine, don’t talk to me. You can ignore the problem, but it won’t just go away. I know I taught you that.”
“Fine,” I agreed.
“Fine.”
We were both silent. I looked at the cars disappearing behind us. She was weaving in and out of traffic like I was about to miss my flight.
“So how’s Kyle doing?” my mother asked, breaching our agreement of silence. I knew it wouldn’t last long.
“Mom!”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry, Troy. Don’t get so touchy.” She reached over and rubbed my knee. “I know this is a stressful time for you, but I just want to know what’s going on.”
“Kyle is just my friend. That’s it. But I’m not saying anything else about him. I don’t want to talk about men right now. This weekend is about me and my girls.”
“That’s fine, baby. Just let me say one more thing and then we can drop it.” She looked at me. I nodded my head just to make her stop. “Okay, let me say this—”
Someone jumped into our lane, cutting her off. “Watch it, speedy,” my mother said, sliding her window down. “Can’t you see this is a damn Mercedes?” She closed the window, beeped her horn, and swerved around another car.
