Hold Me in Contempt Read Online Free PDF

it, I sometimes wondered what had happened to all those poor people and their kids who’d lived in the old chain-popping, hip-hopping Brooklyn I knew growing up.
    Tamika and my other cousin Leah were giving me some serious side eye for being late. I completely expected it. Like the other parents in the room, most of whom were white and dressed liked they’d purposely gotten ready in a dark closet, they thought the most important thing anyone could do was to be somewhere supporting someone’s kid. Potty poop or pottery fair, we all had to stand at attention and act like whatever they were doing was the most important thing in the world. Still, I knew my cousins’ issues ran even deeper than that, so I had to accept their ridiculous criticism.
    â€œI’m sorry I missed it,” I said to them after I’d secretly slid twenty dollars into Miles’s hand before he ran off to flaunt his victory medal in front of his friends. “My back was hurting and I had to lie down for a little while.”
    â€œHum,” Tamika said, cutting her eyes at me even harder. “You’re his godmother. I’m just saying, it would be nice if you’d try to be here on time . . .  ​just once.” She looked at Leah for an agreeing nod that made me roll my eyes.
    â€œReally? So, this is what we’re doing? Right here? At the match? I’ve been at, like, half of his matches. I know most of the parents in this room. More than both you.” The same throbbing started at my spine again. I had to be careful with them. They were sisters and so catty, they’d make you feel like scratching their eyes out. When Kent and I were younger we’d call them “the wicked sisters of the East Coast.”
    â€œWhatever, Kim. He’s ten. This is important stuff. He needs you to be here for him right now,” Tamika said so sharply I knew nothing she was saying had anything to do with me or my tardiness.
    Tamika and Leah were the children of my mother’s baby sister. Like Kent and me, they grew up hard and fast while our mothers were in the street, and when most teenage girls were thinking about trying out for the cheerleading squad, they were both pushing baby strollers and collecting welfare checks. Neither one of them was stupid though. When Tamika got pregnant with Miles, she dropped out of high school, got her GED, and enrolled at LaGuardia Community College. Leah was only fifteen when she had her son, Monk, so she stayed in school, but after graduation she followed Tamika and they finished LaGuardia and City College together. Leah and Tamika were now beyond successful. They’d left Harlem for a changing Brooklyn when Aunt Donna died of AIDS in the late nineties; they were raising their sons together in a brownstone they’d purchased with the secret life insurance policy our grandfather took out on our mothers when they started using drugs. Any cliché you could apply to teenage mothers made good could be attached to their success, but my cousins remained psychologically tortured by everything that led to that actual success. The list was long, and somewhere in there was Aunt Donna’s drug use, her death, and the fact that no matter how smart they were, there was nothing they could do about either of those things. But as heartbreaking as that was, that wasn’t even what was at the top. There, like the final sentencing from a judge handing out twenty-five years to life, was a string of four fathers no one had seen since their children were conceived: Tamika’s father, Leah’s father, Monk’s father, and Miles’s father. It was a wound that had affected the sisters in different ways. For Tamika, it meant that she was set on making every man pay for what Miles’s father had done to her by abandoning them. And since most of them had stopped coming around, I was on the list as well.
    â€œMika, you know I love Miles, and I’m