I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway by Tracy McMillan Read Free Book Online

smells of Charlie perfume and unchanged diapers. Whichever sense the images are connected to, they are not so much clear as they are indelible and unchanging over time. That’s how I know they’re real.
    I have memories going back to age three, which isn’t really amazing when you consider how much was going on. My personal theory is that when people don’t remember their childhoods, it’s because not much was happening that a kid would consider newsworthy. When things are crack-a-lackin’—Mom’s a-leavin’, and Dad’s a-gettin’ jailed—you remember plenty.
    The first place I remember is my grandma McMillan’s in Gary, Indiana. But it’s not her house I remember so much as the restaurant where she worked. Thelma was a short-order cook at a coffee shop around the corner. While she fried eggs and bacon and sausages and hash browns and served them to the neighborhood people, my cousins Russell and Ray and I used to jump on a pile of old mattresses in a back room. A scene that sounds (and was) superghetto but that I remember as being superfun.
    I stayed at Thelma’s only a couple of months. The story of exactly how I came to leave there would make a great first episode in a TV series I should pitch about a detective who traces the lives of kids from broken families back to the source of their original dysfunction. In the show, a couple of smart detectives (one of them me) would run around putting together all the pieces of how someone’s life (okay, mine) got so fucked-up.
    My real-life investigation starts with a phone call to Phyllis, the longtime girlfriend of one of my dad’s posse members, who still lives in South Minneapolis. I get her number from Cadillac, who is stillmy dad’s best friend on the outside. Cadillac lives in Los Angeles, and though I don’t see him often, we speak regularly on the phone. He became an actor in his fifties and now has a cool career playing character parts in movies and television. He’s the only posse member who never did time. He’s like a godfather to me.
    “You call her,” he says of Phyllis. “She knew your mom. And she likes to talk.”
    He’s so right. As part of the inner circle, Phyllis was good friends with Linda, which means she had a front-row—or should I say ringside—seat to my early-life drama. When she picks up the phone, it’s like we’ve known each other forever.
    “Girl, I knowed you since before you was born.” Phyllis’s got a tenor sax for a voice—bright and reedy and impossible to ignore. “I sure did. I knew your mama and your dad’s girlfriend Yvonne, too. I loved Linda. Mmm-hmm .”
    Phyllis says “mmm-hmmm” the way teenage girls say the word “like.” Like, constantly.
    Mmmm-hmmm.
    There’s a thing in writing TV cop shows—it’s the first thing you learn—where the detectives go looking for A, but they always find B. It’s how you keep the story surprising. It’s also what happens, apparently, in real life.
    Before talking to Phyllis, I thought I knew all about My Life, the Early Years. I’ve had countless conversations with Cadillac—about pimping, hustling, my dad, my mom, and Minneapolis in the 1960s. But talking to Phyllis is different—she’s a chick, so she has all the chick-type information. Like what folks were wearing.
    “Linda was sharp, girl,” Phyllis enthuses. “Mmm-hmm. She was sharp . She had herself a mink coat. You know they had the coats made out of the females and the coats made out of the males? She had the really expensive one.” Actually, I didn’t know this. Learn something new every day. “I used to call her Miss Jackie Kennedy, ’cause she look just like Jackie.”
    Well, maybe not quite just like Jackie. I’ve seen pictures from this era, and indeed, Linda had a bouffant (on a good day—on a bad day a bouffant is just a rat’s nest), and a couple of cute Oleg Cassini knockoffs. With her big orangey-hazel-brown eyes and wide smile, Linda definitely had her something. And charisma