Obviously Read online

  But my mom has always wanted all of us to be well-rounded. We did so many activities: soccer, band, speech and drama, tennis, webbies, the talent show. We were poor, but we never felt poor, because my mom was adamant about finding free or very cheap things for us to do and learn. Maybe it’s because she finished her degree in her thirties, or because she saw how the world opened up for my sister Tasha when she went to Stanford for undergrad. Back then, I don’t think I really appreciated all the time my mom had scheduled away from my beloved couch and TV set. I was a person who liked the idea of doing things, but the act of doing things a lot less.

  I struggle to imagine what kind of person I’d turn out to be if my mom was less passionate or ambitious on my behalf. I used to feel bad for myself, like, “poor me, I wish my mom would just butt out and let me be sedentary,” but now that I am my own boss, I try to keep myself motivated. To try new things rather than trying nothing. And suffice it to say I have my mother to thank for that. Perhaps I’m not a perfect musician (though I am using an app to learn how to play piano, so in your face, traditional way of doing things), and I never became a star athlete. But I stopped being afraid to try because I had someone in my corner who believed in me even when I couldn’t see that for myself.

  I think you’d like my mom. I really do.

  George

  A guy makes a Twitter joke. It’s about “daddy issues” and women who “have them.” He thinks he’s clever, and eleven retweets and twenty-eight faves affirm him. Women with fathers who treat them poorly—that’s the whole joke. Who’d ever love them?

  * * *

  * * *

  I didn’t go to my father’s funeral. I stayed at home and ate KFC mashed potatoes and gravy and watched Mad Men seasons one and two on Netflix. I maintain that this was the better decision.

  * * *

  * * *

  A few days after my dad died, I got my wisdom teeth removed. I only had three, which is supposedly more common than you’d think. When I came to, the doctor was hugging my mom and telling her I’d be just fine. My mom (rightly) found this display to be super weird. Why was this old man in a white coat hugging her body? And why wouldn’t I have been fine? It was a routine surgery with an incredibly high survival rate. On the Sunday of my father’s funeral, I found out I had developed a pretty gnarly infection and had to be placed on antibiotics. Maybe the doctor really did know something we didn’t.

  * * *

  * * *

  When I called my boss at the water company, Charlie, to tell him my dad died, I was startled by my eyes suddenly wetting and my voice cracking.

  “Oh my goodness. Akilah. I am so, so sorry. Take all the time you need. Don’t even worry about anything. Just be with your family and take care of yourself,” Charlie told me.

  I wasn’t on the verge of tears because I was sad about losing a parent; I wanted to cry because I was so relieved. For the first time in more than a decade and a half, I felt a weight lifted. It was over. He was over. He couldn’t hurt our family anymore. I wanted to cry for the greener pastures his death represented. For my mom who’d been tricked with twenty-five years of lies. For my brother who needed a father who really saw him, you know? And a dad who could be someone worth looking up to. For my sister Lanie whose mood ebbed and flowed with his mercurial affection and lack thereof. For me, and all my helpless rage. I needed to cry for all of them.

  Warped Tour 2011 was the hottest day of my life. My friend McKenna made good use of her metallic green VW Beetle and drove us to Riverbend—the outdoor music venue of choice in Cincinnati—for the annual event. The air was thick and humid and nasty. It was like being dipped in nacho cheese. We spent most of the day in a haze, bumping into friends and emptying our bank accounts on lukewarm bottled water. As the more invested pop-punk fan, I convinced McKenna to stay just long enough to watch Gym Class Heroes, a band whom I had met and befriended six years earlier at the same concert series, take the stage. Their live performances are electrifying and would make all the sweat and headaches worth it, I promised her.

  We stayed and the performance was one of the best of the day. We jumped up and down in the front row, and the band came and sang right in our faces. I took so many pictures and videos. Our headaches subsided, and being surrounded by the B.O. of thousands of people in Vans sneakers stopped grating on our nerves. As the band left the stage, we made a beeline for the Beetle and decided that Chili’s would be the dinner/decompression spot for the evening.

  As we scanned the menus, my phone rang. It was my mom.

  “Do you mind if I take this?”

  “Nah, it’s cool,” McKenna assured me.

  And then our conversation went like this:

  “So . . . Your father died today.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmph. Well, that’s kind of perfect because I have the wisdom teeth appointment Friday, so the bereavement leave from work will give me, like, the full week off.”

  “Yeah. You should call your sister. She seemed pretty upset. Bo just stared out of the car window when I told him. He couldn’t look at me.”

  “Hmm. Okay. I’m at dinner. I’ll be home later. Love ya, bye!”

  “Love ya, bye!”

  As I hung up, I took notice of McKenna’s expression. Her giant blue eyes looked even more impossibly huge as she asked me what happened.

  “Oh! My dad’s dead,” I said, probably too nonchalantly.

  “What? Are you okay?” she checked.

  “Yeah, dude, it’s fine. I think I’m gonna get this fajita rollup thing . . .” I said. And that was that.

  * * *

  * * *

  The Sunday before George Elmer died, I joked to my mother that if he was gonna go soon, this week would be ideal. With the surgery and the music festival taking up two days, this would be the only way to get the full week off of work. In hindsight, humor was the only way we could ever talk about what my father had done. My wit and cynicism came from a place of being overwhelmed by years of sadness and circumstance. Finding the light was the only way to survive.

  * * *

  * * *

  I was nineteen and very much in love the summer that I met Elita. My boyfriend dragged his blond Southern charm to the Greater Cincinnati Area to stay with me for a week. It was incredibly romantic. In an attempt to make and save a little money, we took jobs at the “Taste of Cincinnati,” a two-day event, handing out promotional flavored water. Five hundred dollars for a day and a half of handing out water was the best gig in town, and we made a really great team. He spent his time changing out the ice and lifting twenty-four packs of mango-strawberry and pomegranate-açaí bottles while I explained to overheated tourists that this entire flavor really was available for zero sugar or calories.

  On our final day of working, our legs ached, we were sweaty, and we just wanted to go home. That’s when she approached. A girl, maybe a couple inches taller than me, with familiar high cheekbones and a beauty mark in the middle of her clavicles, just like mine. We both knew immediately, but she asked to make sure.

  “Are you my sister?” she asked so faintly I’m surprised I heard it.

  “Is George Hughes your dad?” I countered.

  “Yeah. This is so weird,” she said. And I handed her a sample of the mango-strawberry water.

  I knew she was real.

  * * *

  * * *

  The last conversation I ever had with my father was at three a.m. on the phone. He called me back after I left him a scathing voicemail on his answering machine. Since I knew he had an answering machine, I knew his wife would hear the message as I left it. In it, I detailed how pathetic he was. How bad I felt for his wife who stuck with him, knowing all the while that he was a sociopath. How she babysat us as kids and I’m grateful that she didn’t poison me and my siblings knowing what she knew. How insanely pathetic it was that
he lied about the girl who reached out to me on Facebook, asking if I was his daughter. How pathetic it was that he denied his other children to my mother, as if that would somehow make anything better.

  He called me back, and I answered promptly. Before I could say, “Hello?” he called me a tramp, and I genuinely laughed into the receiver, almost dropping the phone from my body convulsing at his lack of self-awareness. I told him how ironic I found it that he was the one with a million kids and a bunch of families and maintaining that lie for nearly thirty years, but I’m the tramp. Priceless.

  The last thing he ever said to me was “I’m going to come to your house and kill you. You’re going to die tonight, bitch.”

  I smiled, considering this.

  “I’d like to see your old ass try.”

  And that was that.

  Summer 2007 was an equally bad and good time in my life. I loved my friends and my retail job at the mall. I was at war with my body, and an older boy I knew from high school did something unforgivable to me when I had a sleepover with his sister. It haunted me every night for a few years. The only person I told about it was him, the boy who did it. I asked him what the fuck he was thinking. Why would he do that to me? He told me he was fucked up. That his dad wasn’t around and it made him crazy; that the hole where his father should be rotted within him and that was the reason for his sociopathic tendencies. That was obviously B.S. Both our dads sucked, but only one of us was a supreme creep.

  That July I lost a lot of weight from being too sad to eat and sleeping upwards of fifteen hours a day when not working at the store. This was the second time in my life that I thought I might die young.

  At some point that summer, Lanie told me that Dad had been diagnosed with bone cancer. She said he was looking thin, that she thought he was going to die.

  I told her I didn’t care. I didn’t.

  * * *

  * * *

  Finals week of the first semester of my sophomore year at college was tough. I was clinically depressed, exhausted, and pulling all-nighters for days at a time. I showed up to my campus position at Media Services wearing the same outfit two days in a row. No one noticed.

  At around two a.m. that Tuesday in 2006, I got a phone call, which was unusual in the lonely days of winter. I took the call in bed, since my roommate was out of town and I wasn’t disturbing anyone. It was Mom.

  “Lanie is hysterical right now. She left me a voicemail and I don’t know what it means. She was just crying and screaming. I might have to go to Morehead . . . something about a message on Facebook?”

  She was worried. I was worried. I opened a tab in Firefox and clicked to Facebook. I had a new message.

  I read it aloud, not thinking it might be best to keep it to myself for a day or so:

  Hey my name is Elita and I just found out that I have some brothers name Chephren, Mark, George and Bolani [sic]. I go to Wright State and I was just wondering if you were related also. I was told I had two more sisters one that went to Berea and one that go [sic] to Morehead. I would love to hear from you!!!!

  The phone line went silent. It was the kind of silence that you can actually hear. If this moment had occurred in a movie, it would have been written into the script, followed by a gasp and sad piano or strings. It was the sound of two hearts breaking simultaneously for the exact same reason.

  “Whoa,” I whispered. I knew my father hadn’t been there for me growing up, but I didn’t realize he hadn’t been there for three families’ worth of children. I realized that my mother didn’t know—that if she had known, I wouldn’t even be alive.

  I hated him.

  They mispronounced my name at high school graduation and I refused to cross the stage until they said it right. I was the only student representative to the Board of Education in the commonwealth. I had pictured the finality of high school often in the weeks prior. None of my fantasies included the principal fumbling over the eleven syllables encompassed in my name. I also didn’t imagine that my father would choose not to attend my graduation.

  This was the day I decided to stop excusing the decisions of bad people.

  The principal finally got it right on try 2.5, and I walked across the stage and hugged each member of the Board of Education and waved to my mom.

  * * *

  * * *

  Dad came over to our house on my eleventh birthday. I remember opening the front door with a big smile. We’d hug, and he’d tell me happy birthday and notice how much I’d grown. Then he’d hand me my gift.

  I went in to hug him, and he didn’t hug back. At least, not really. I looked up at him and said, “I’m so excited!”

  “Huh. Why?” he asked, clueless.

  “Because it’s my birthday!” I continued, expectantly.

  “Oh. Well . . . happy birthday, Kiwi,” he added, detached. I stood my ground and smiled, not getting it.

  “You look kind of short, li’l bit. Where’s your mom?”

  And that was that.

  On my fifth birthday, my mom told me to pick up the upstairs telephone. I ran into Tasha’s room and obliged. It was him.

  “Your mom says you have a song for me,” he said lovingly.

  “Sing the song, Kilah!” Mom pleaded. I smiled from ear to ear, singing “You Are My Sunshine” at full outdoor-voice volume. I heard him clap on the other line.

  “That was beautiful, Kiwi,” he said. I didn’t realize that he had ruined that birthday until years later.

  * * *

  * * *

  I’m four years old and wearing a navy blue cardigan with gold buttons down the front. Lanie is dressed just the same. It’s windy and I think I might blow away on the walk from Mom’s car up to his front door. Lanie and I hold hands. Ms. Laura lets us in through the screen door. We wave goodbye to Mom.

  We spend two nights at his house. He makes fun of my inability to eat foods that touch. He asks me if it’s okay that he makes me a sandwich with the bread touching the cheese. We only see him at dinnertime.

  I stand on the enclosed patio outside his kitchen and watch his boxer, Dewey, chase butterflies around the yard. I’m scared to meet him, but I like watching him run around freely and like that he comes up to the bottom part of the screen door to meet my face when I try and fail to whistle for him. If my dad has this, he must be good. Only good people get this.

  Ms. Laura re-braids our hair and gives us a bath. She kisses our foreheads before bed and when we leave the next day, she gives us dolls to take home. I’m buckled into the leather back seat watching the teal analog on his car’s radio as funk music plays. I look out the window to the highway. There’s an old company that has a sign that’s a tin man who appears to be running in slow motion halfway between his house and ours back across the river. I think about it until I fall asleep. I wake up in my mom’s arms, being put down in my bottom bunk. Things are peaceful. Everyone is innocent.

  * * *

  * * *

  I log on to Twitter and read the tweet about daddy issues. I read hundreds of tweets like it every year. I unfollow and block without remorse.

  Where to Say Your Dad Lives When He’s Dead

  “Hell, but I’m not sure which circle.”

  “Underground.”

  “Depends on what you believe.”

  “On a farm upstate with all the other dogs.”

  “Bad memories mostly.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  The Little Cheerleader That Couldn’t

  Never have I ever seen an episode of the ’90s hit 90210. If you’d told me that one day I’d be at the Sundance Episodic Story Lab and asked if I’d seen it by one of the writers of the show while it was in its prime, and that I’d subsequently lie and say I had seen it, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. Still, it happened, and I responded with “yes.”

  I didn’t expect a follow-up question, and
none came. Why would it? Everyone else there had seen the show and was aware of its place in pop culture history. Had he asked who my favorite characters were, I’d have answered, “Flapjack and Suzie, respectively.” If those are characters on the show, then I’d continue to bullshit why their teen tribulations spoke to me (at the tender age of five while the show originally aired). If they were not characters, as I suspect, I’d just admit that my intersection with the show does not extend beyond the theme song, but that theme song was incredibly important to me.

  If you play the first eight notes and the important clap clap afterward, I will immediately be transported back to Ninth District Elementary School, a formative home for me from ages three to eight. My mother works at the school as a family resource center coordinator whose job ranges from getting vouchers for less fortunate students to buy things like clothes, shoes, and school supplies to putting on the annual Readifest, which is an entire festival that sees dentists, hairdressers, and teachers in dunk tanks prepare students for the next school year. Marilynn always liked to work late, so Lanie, Bo, and I spent after-school time roaming the halls, finding other kids with whom to loiter.

  One fateful day I made my way to the hallway outside my mom’s office that had a little alcove where kids would line up in the morning and be walked to their classrooms. Instead of cross-legged first graders, there were about twelve fourth through sixth graders with high ponies tied with colorful scrunchies and big, puffy bangs awaiting instruction from Meredith Teddy, a preschool attendant and the school’s cheerleading coach.