❒ Scour online listings daily.
❒ Find a house ahead of your fortieth, ahead of your imminent doom.
❒ Never mind that a house is an investment, a belief that things, on the whole, will get better.
❒ Find a house on a hill, set back from the road, a sturdy brick rancher or a quaint bungalow that needs work.
❒ Search outside of Richmond, not too far from the city, since Baby Girl’s still finishing art school here. Keep up your commute, rising before dawn to burn up the road to Williamsburg. Never mind the long drive, the lights you’ve left on, the busted toilet your landlord won’t fix, which is always, always running.
❒ Put a thumb on the scale for any location named for (but not in truth near) a broad body of water. Appomattox Drive. James River Road. Chesapeake Way. Try again for that gated subdivision, the one with the outlier security booth, its zebraed boom barrier blocking the entrance. That flimsy arm of protection that could shield you (and Baby Girl) from the flaring world. Never mind the dark skinned guard who wouldn’t even let you in after you failed to produce the flier for the so-called open house.
❒ Catch the older lady at the credit union, the one with the smoldering accent, the one who makes the loans. The one who reminds you of your own mother, if your mom had been brown and Latina, instead of Black with an Uhura-do, hailing from Carolina. Wear your hair bone straight, a fresh weave with the tight itch of corn- rows beneath, like something true but hidden. Tell the older bank lady you’re earning more than ever—no need to mention it’s a third as much as anyone else in your office, which you know because you manage their books. Confide that there’s a blazing cake birthday close on your horizon. Ask her, for real, what can she do for you.
❒ Check your credit score with that app on your phone when you bolt awake in the middle of the night. Scroll to see how swiftly the Amazon burns. Scroll to see how many hundreds of species have been lost or consumed within the last twenty-four hours. Scroll to see which items you’ve saved in your cart, primed to ship at your beck and call. Check to see if Baby Girl has written back and make sure your long-ago ex—her father—remains out west, with all those states like a bulwark between you. Scroll through his newly posted pics, a fresh twenty-two-year-old under his arm. Her cherry pout. Her mocking lashes. Her wet doe eyes. Her gaze veers like yours used to, betraying that same ember of dread. Flip the phone on the bedsheets to dampen its glare and stare up at the blackened ceiling. Lift the phone again, refresh, refresh, to see what might have changed.
❒ Watch Terminator 2 for the umpteenth time, at the gym, on the treadmill, on your cell phone in your palm. Marvel at the heroine, Sarah Connor, a hell-bent single mother voice-overing the end of mankind. Jog faster, noting how buff she’s become, working out in the sanatorium in tie pants and a tissue-white tank. The men with the keys smirk like, That bitch is crazy, but you know she’s just facing the truth of what’s barreling home. Imagine yourself like a Black Sarah Connor, eyes open at least, core strong and ready. Turn up the slope, the bleating speed, and run.
❒ Find a house on a hill, with a wide drainage ditch, set safely back from the road. Look for leaks in the unfinished basement. Look for a master bedroom that floods with light. Look for wide windows that butterfly open onto a clear view of the driveway. Picture yourself framed by plate glass, a doomed goddess in yoga pants, a faux-fur vest, and Birkenstock sandals. A shotgun’s smooth stock balanced on your shoulder, angled out to shoo a gang of hungry men past your property line.
❒ Ask your Realtor, in her carmine suit, about the crack snaking through an edge of kitchen tile. Ask her about the peeling paint shutters—could they contain lead? Considering these and other defects, would the sellers lower their asking price? Would the sellers throw in that generator shining in cobwebs in the corner of their unfinished basement? Explain: You’re looking for something eclectic, a house with a wood stove, a gravity-fed spring. Don’t confess that your current landlord has blocked your number as your basement rental slowly fills with water. Rivulets run like beads down your easternmost wall, and a bloom like mold invades your nostrils. Some nights you wake floating, your nose grazing the ceiling.
❒ Stockpile reading glasses, and dental floss, and royal-blue-topped jars of petroleum jelly—no need to be text-blind, or toothless, or ashy, even as you tumble toward annihilation. Stockpile toilet paper, and ammunition, and that sweet pastel cereal Baby Girl used to love when she was nine. Stockpile Plan B (while you still can) and plant slippery elm in the kitchen garden, along with nightshade and white oleander. Be ready for the emergency inside the emergency, for when the hordes bang against your door and you find you’ve grown so lonesome too, so ravenous, really, that you rush to let them in.
❒ Unearth Pop’s ancient gramophone and crank it until warbled music lifts from his dusty records. His Ella. His Billie. His Earth, Wind & Fire. Sing along with Ray Charles, “Take me home, country roads,” as if to mimic Pop’s baffling nostalgia for places that never once welcomed him: the VA hospital that put off his procedure until his legs withered and died beneath him. His blighted stumps, the tick of fever, a stench like stagnant water. It always begins with a gasping breath in and ends with a shallow breath out.
❒ Bundle Baby Girl’s coarse watercolor papers, along with your gleaned sewing kits and Ma’s rust-tinged pinking shears. Try hard to remember that all of it hangs together, how each wavering piece connects or clings on to some other. When you bolt awake to blackness, try hard to divine where the tears will run first and deepest. Picture how you (and your sweet girl, if only she answers) might hide from the damage a little longer.
❒ Look for hardwood floors and hardwood trees, an arbor raising vines. Look for a patch of sun that might nourish a kitchen garden. Turn on the nearest faucet: How long does it take for the water to run hot?
❒ Beg Baby Girl’s forgiveness for missing the reception for her first big exhibition, even if you were stalled in traffic. Even if she claimed that it was “fine.” Nineteen and still those flush, plump cheeks, the restless way her limbs swing from a black tank top and tattered cut-offs. Her clear brown skin, darker than yours, her hair tie-dyed at the edges. The haphazard way she divides it, twin braids flung out to either side like a Black Pippi Longstocking. Study her old posts for a vestige of hope: her stitched paper sculptures, her swaying installations, though she hasn’t updated them in months.
❒ Learn how to build a fire, clean a wound, skin and gut and say grace for a small once-living thing. Practice those old self-defense moves, a series of katas, like dancing. Remember that one bracing hold that extracted a rare look of shock from your ex’s features. Sometimes you can subvert a thing by using its own brute force against it— though this might not be one of them. Ask yourself, do you want these last goodish years to be your bitch-be-cray-cray Sarah Connor years; or would you rather go out with the heady extravagance everyone in lit windows along Hanover seems to still be relishing?
❒ Liberate your hair as soon as you are able, as soon as the shelves at the Farm Fresh go fallow and your office shutters its doors. Consider braids, like your daughter wears, or a tufted fro like Angela Davis in her seventies Wanted posters. Wear Birko-Flor sandals with mossy-green Army surplus socks—because, by now, why the fuck not?
❒ Because, by now, you may as well be free. Lay your hand on your new luna moth tattoo, the one that young brother at the parlor embossed over your heart. Remember how he set each fine, searing line, how whole moments later, the marks raised themselves like Lazarus.
❒ Vote, but don’t expect it to save you.
❒ March, but don’t expect it to save you.
❒ Pray, but don’t expect it to save you.
❒ Beg Baby Girl’s forgiveness for marrying her father when you were so young, younger even than she is now. Beg forgiveness for bringing her into a world where the man who swore to love you set crimson bruises around your throat. Plead forgiveness for her hide-and-seek childhood, the couches you slept on that smelled either of mildew or of smoke. The bus depots and vending-machine meals, though now, in hindsight, it all feels like a kind of training. . . .
❒ Beg forgiveness that you failed to pray or march or vote or work soon enough or hard enough to afford her a chance to own something of her own someday: a home, verdant and wild, that might sustain and shelter her.
❒ Find a house on a hill, while the interest is low. Breathe in, check the listings. Refresh, refresh, refresh.