Jalondra Davis, Daddy Page 5
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My mother cries. However, he does not make it easy to hate him. We go to Disneyland on my eleventh birthday, and all gruff fudge and blue two hundred pounds of him swoops to grab a little white boy out of the way of one of those trolley things rolling through the park. All my life, as I stomp and shake on the dusty track at Pop Warner games, I look up at him in the stands leading the crowd in cheers, yelling advice to the football coaches. He has to be dragged to ballet recitals and award assemblies and parent conferences, but when we bring home art and science project assignments, he gets grumpily, grudgingly excited. Under his rough hands, my little sister’s barge holds the most coins; my nephew’s volcano actually erupts. He spends three days on the Popsicle stick log cabin I have to turn in with my report on Laura Ingalls Wilder in the fourth grade. His shirt is stained with paint, his fingernails full of papier-mâché, his mind occupied with new ideas: a stone fence, a window, and little Lego flowers in the yard. This is my teddy bear, my protective grizzly, and the source of my creative spirit. I adore him.
There is no soft way to say a word like bitch. There is no love, no tenderness, no appreciation in a word like bitch. But there are those who have mastered its harshness, so that the force of the consonants thump at your chest and make you two inches tall and swallow your voice along with all the air in the room.
