Prologue

New Chapter Every Sunday

Photo by Yucel Moran on Unsplash

She watched the teens walk into the restaurant. It was one of those cavernous restaurants in a strip mall with guac from a jar and chips from a bag. The teens were a gaggle of white girls with the tallest and blondest commanding the attention of all of her minions.

“How do I get friends like that,” she asked nobody in particular at our table.

My niece was nine going on thirty-nine at the time. A little girl needs a mother and hers died before she could ask her the really tough questions that only a mama could answer like, “how do I get friends like that?”

My brother is the best of all of my father’s children. He is younger than me, but that doesn’t change the fact that I aspire to be more like him. Spend some time with him and you’ll feel the same way. He is a good man, the best man, beautiful brown skin covered in a scary array of tattoos, piercings, and quiet. It’s the quiet that scares so many people when they meet him. But even he wasn’t prepared for the old soul living in his home.

“You get friends like that one of two ways, mija. You’re full of shit and everyone believes you so they follow along, or you’re such a good human that others gravitate to you because they know you’re a safe place in a sometimes shit world,” I said. She stared at me not sure whether or not to believe me. God, I hate when she stares at me like that. Like everything inside of me is now on the outside and she’s sifting through the whole of me, judging, deciding what’s worth keeping and what needs to be discarded.

“Which do you want to be, mija?” She looked back at the gaggle of adolescent girls being seated at a booth at the other end of the restaurant. As they crammed into their booth, the tall blonde said something and all the other girls and the waitress laughed.

“I don’t know yet.”