A House Is Not a Home by James Earl Hardy Read Free Book Online Page B

someone else Sally?”
    â€œUh, yeah.” Sally is Anderson’s first cousin. She’d kicked out her sixteen-year-old daughter, Erica, when she discovered copies of lesbian porn videos in her room, hidden in a hole cut out in the middle of her bed’s box spring. Erica was taken in by her gay uncle, whom Sally hasn’t spoken to in fifteen years. Sally has been giving Erica the silent treatment for eight.
    â€œI can hear her now,” Mitchell began, scrunching his face then sneering in a hoarse voice similar to hers: “‘You gonna let him raise your son and turn him into a homo ?’”
    Anderson chuckled. “Something like that. I tried to brush it off, but . . . it bothered me. And the fact that it bothered me really bothered me. I thought I was over thinking like that.”
    â€œWell, there will always be some fragments that remain. The feeling probably isn’t as strong now that you know it’ll be a girl, but it probably is still there. That doesn’t make you a horrible person.”
    â€œBut I feel like one.”
    â€œThe important thing is that you recognize it and grow from it. And you’ve made the effort over the years. Don’t you remember asking whether seeing you walk around half-naked made me this way?”
    Anderson thought back. He remembered. He looked embarrassed.
    â€œI understood where that came from; you just didn’t know. And you’ve come a long way since then. You didn’t view my being the father of your son or daughter as negative until she put that bug in your ear, and that says a lot. Did you tell Mom?”
    â€œNo. I knew she would tell me what I already knew to be true.”
    â€œThen why did you tell me?”
    â€œI . . . I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to do.”
    â€œSee. And you thought you didn’t know any better . . .”
    Anderson continued to feel guilty about it but (unbeknownst to his wife and Mitchell) felt twice as guilty about passing the responsibility of raising his only child onto someone else, especially when he had the means to do it himself. And his angst was fueled by how much more desirable and sexy he found his pregnant wife to be, not to mention the excitement he felt over seeing the ultrasound, feeling the baby kick, attending the Lamaze classes, and witnessing the birth (he didn’t become ill or faint in the delivery room).
    But all that changed the first time Destiny (Raheim chose her name) spent the weekend with her grandparents. The romantic cloud that hung over Anderson’s prebirth experience quickly disappeared, thanks to the 2 A.M. feedings; the nerve-racking, never-ending crying; and those dreaded diaper changes. And this was the easy stuff: the older they get, the more complicated and stressful the mechanics of caring for them becomes (and the worries multiply). He couldn’t get used to any of this seven days a week for the next eighteen-plus years. So he, like his wife, is always glad when that first and third Friday rolls around and Destiny visits—and almost as glad when she goes back home to her daddy on Sunday. Anderson is very content with her being Granddaddy’s little girl.
    Grandma, on the other hand, treats her like a mama’s girl. And while she hasn’t verbalized it, even Destiny can see that the connection they share is something that could exist only between a mother and daughter. So while the plan is to tell Destiny the whole story when she turns eighteen (she knows that she was adopted and that, in the words of her uncle Gene courtesy of Mommie Dearest , “Adopted children are the luckiest because they were chosen”), Mitchell predicts it will happen sooner than they think (just last month, Destiny noticed how much she looked like Grandma when she was a little girl). And given how close they are, it won’t be that big a shock (or, as these revelations usually do, cause turmoil