Love in a Carry-On Bag Read Online Free PDF

would ask, throwing up a little bit in her mouth.
    “Right back, and don’t answer the telephone. If it’s me, I’ll let the phone ring once, hang up and then call again,” she’d say, bolting the thick wooden door behind her.
    It was always the store and even though the bodega was a block away, the run could take her mother hours to complete. From the moment she walked out, Erica would feel her stomach spin, as if she were on a carousel ride that had suddenly lost control. To cope, she medicated herself with back-to-back reruns of Welcome Back Kotter , Good Times , The Jeffersons , and Alice .
    Sometimes her mother would return with a greasy bag of fried chicken wings and soggy fries from the Chinese store, but most times she came home empty-handed, jeans soaked in urine and smelling like she had bathed in a bottle of Bacardi. Erica couldn’t stand to see her mother liquored up and each night before bed, she knelt against her canopy bed with her bare knees pressed into the cold wooden floor, begging God to send her father back. She would seal her plea with The Lord’s Prayer and two Hail Mary’s, but as the seasons passed, he never came.
    Then one day when she was in her mid-twenties she received a Thanksgiving card from him with a fifty-dollar bill Scotch-taped to the left side. It was simply addressed to E-Bird, his pet name for her with no return address. A few weeks later, he sent her a Christmas card with another fifty and a photo of his new family.
    There were four people in the photo, clustered in shades of green like sprigs from a mistletoe: a thick-skinned woman with a gap between her teeth and tits the size of Texas, a young boy with crescent-shaped eyes and a smile that mirrored her own, a little girl with braids and rainbow beads. Her father’s wavy temples had grayed, but his face held the same handsome sheen. Just looking at him conjured his waxy scent into her living room. The little girl sat in Erica’s father’s lap, sucking her index finger with eyes that screamed into the camera, “My Daddy.”
    The fifty-dollar bills came almost monthly after the first one but Erica never responded, choosing to forget about the bills collecting in the drawer of her nightstand. One day she planned to stuff the money in a big envelope with pictures of her missed dance recital, basketball games and graduations.
    On the bad days, she wished that she could send him snaps of her terrified self; when the electricity had been shut off, and their spoiled food invited every rodent in Newark to camp out in their home. Or when her mother stole her elementary school’s candy-drive money, and the principal scolded her daily in front of her classmates. Or when Ms. Frances, her babysitter’s mother, refused to let her daughter watch Erica and her sister, and was kind enough to yell her reason from her screened-in-porch, just in time for Erica’s business to reach the neighbors’ table with dessert.
    “’Cause that woman ain’t never coming back,” Ms. Frances puffed on her Marlboro Red, “and the Daddy ain’t shit either.”
    The assistants had long finished their water cooler talk about their weekend hangovers and Erica’s half-sipped coffee was stone cold. Peering at her online banking, she calculated her remaining bills for the month. Rent and cable were due at the end of the week. The company was late again with the check for her expenses, so she would have to pay AmEx and wait to be reimbursed. With a phone call, she could delay paying her student loans and her dry cleaning would have to stay put. But even with this, she was still short. Her sister, Jazmine, was away at Clark Atlanta University and Erica put a small allowance into her account every month. So when she picked up the telephone to call Jaz, it was more out of need to share information than to expect real help.
    “Sha-low.”
    “Is that how you answer the telephone?”
    “Girl, I knew it was you. Caller-ID, duh.”
    “Your mother’s in