Coal to Diamonds Read Online Free PDF Page B

shit through my mother’s front door. I stopped in my tracks as I clambered off the school bus, watching the man’s movements, confused.
Is this the right house? Do I live here?
I was easily disoriented with all the movingaround. Then I saw Akasha and my brothers peeking out at the guy as he pulled trash bags and boxes over the threshold.
    You comin’ or goin’?
asked the annoyed bus driver, and I climbed out of the bus and into my new family.
    This is Mike
, Mom introduced him as I maneuvered my way around his stuff. Behind me Mike continued lugging his things into our home.
    Later that night, Mike made us dinner. Spaghetti. It could have been homey, if it wasn’t so creepy. When you think about what teachers have to go through to work with kids, getting fingerprinted and whatnot, when you think about how a professional nanny arrives with references and background checks, it’s baffling that any lady can just move any old blind date into her home, a scant two weeks’ acquaintance suddenly stepdad to a posse of kids. Over my spaghetti I shot Mom a look that was stuffed with unspoken accusations and pissed-off bewilderment. She gave me a look in return and I dropped my gaze to my pasta. I knew what Mom’s look was telling me:
Dry it up
. That was her number-one favorite phrase. The mom who was so cool and understanding when my friends came over, freaking out about their fucked-up families, vanished when it came to her own kids. She shut herself down and demanded we do the same.
Dry it up
. I heard her voice in my head as easily as if she’d spoken out loud, but Mom wasn’t talking. She was controlling us kids with significant glances, picking at the edges of her spaghetti and smiling sweetly, thankfully, at Mike the Blind Date.
    It was around this time that my mother told me Homer Ditto was not my father. Nope. Mom had had a fling with some other guy who was my dad. Some dude who didn’t stick around too long, who Mom was happy to get rid of. She chose Homer, and Homer chose me, so he lent me his name even though I didn’t have his blood. Now, you might think that finding out I was an illegitimatechild was a big deal, but there is so much mixing and matching where I come from, families spilling over into other people’s houses, what’s yours gets determined by what feels right, not by anything technical. Dad was the guy who’d been nicest: Homer Ditto.
    Probably Mom would have let me think forever that Homer was my bio-dad if my actual birth father hadn’t stepped in with an out-of-the-blue desire to be paternal. The man lived in Rockford, Illinois, and when he’d asked my mother what sort of a gift I’d like, the first thing that popped into her mind was something from the Rockford Peaches, and a signed baseball showed up at our home soon thereafter.
    One of my most favorite movies is
A League of Their Own
, about the Rockford Peaches, the first professional female baseball team. They were women in the 1940s who stepped up to play baseball while all the men were off fighting the war. Everyone thought they were big jokes. But they were tough and talented and knew there was no crying in baseball.
    I was happy to have that signed baseball, but I—along with everyone else in my family—was not interested in letting my birth father back into my life.
    The span of time my mom spent with my birth dad was a great and terrible era. Great because I was born. Terrible because the man who’d knocked Mom up was violent and awful. No one understood why my mother had left good-natured Homer to be with my bio-dad. He often took his fury out on my brothers, Homer’s kids. The constant meanness and physical brutality he’d inflicted on them as kids stuck in their minds. In my home his name invoked hatred, and suddenly he was trying to come back around, calling Mom on the phone and sending me the best gift I’d ever gotten.
    It never made any sense for me to feel responsible for the abuse my brothers suffered. I was a