BooksBarbecue
Back At Dawn
Chapters (39)
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  3. Dedication
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  39. Copyright

When I was born my parents were unwed, but not for lack of trying. The legal age to be married in Ohio then was sixteen, that is, unless a parent consented. My grandmother despised my father, and the hatred between the two was instant and mutual. No matter how hard my mother lobbied, my grandmother refused to sign off on it.

“It’ll turn out shit,” she had said (as recanted by my mother many years later). “I’ll be damned if I’ll allow myself to be the one responsible for it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“The hell I don’t.”

She turned sixteen a few weeks after I was born, but they didn’t wed until six months after that. Though he didn’t come right out and say it, my father wanted my mother thin in a wedding dress, and by the time she finally won the battle against pregnancy weight, there wasn’t enough money for a proper ceremony. Instead they married at the local courthouse minus the white dress my mom had romanticized. It was a victory for my grandmother.

He was twenty-nine when he met my mother, making him fourteen years older. She was an only child; my father was not, having two older brothers and a younger sister, none of whom he ever mentioned. I didn’t learn any of their names until I, myself, was sixteen. That should have been an early indication of the type of man my father was, that he had no contact with his own family—whether it was because of him or because of them, I don’t think it matters—but if my mother had her doubts, she never let on.

I was much closer to my mother, always grasped her legs during the early years we lived in Cleveland. She was a small woman with a big heart, fiercely loyal in regard to family, and even with the hatred that existed between my father and grandmother, it was still hard for my mother to be away from her. She hated Cleveland, hated the dilapidated one-bedroom apartment we lived in on West 65th Street, and when I was three and my grandmother had her first stroke, it wasn’t an opportunity for my mother to move, but a necessity. Spencer was nearly an hour southwest of us and my grandmother lived alone. My father said no. When my mother said she was going regardless, the three of us moved together a few weeks later on the day before Thanksgiving, and on the next day my grandmother laid out a spread. It was one of the few days deprived of strain, the bottles of wine being poured without judgment.