Redwood Court by DéLana R. A. Dameron

Author:DéLana R. A. Dameron [Dameron, DéLana R. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2024-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

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EVEN BEFORE TEETA DIED, MIKA had turned over her Saturday mornings to Weesie. They both loved a yard sale hunt, so on Friday nights, Weesie would pull out the classifieds and they would map their early morning scavenging. Mika enjoyed those mornings (and the occasional flea market trip) because her allowance went much further than at the mall or even the dollar store. Once, she found a brand-new pack of notebooks—six of them!—for seventy-five cents, but when she asked the woman to break her five-dollar bill, the woman said, “Kid, do you have a quarter? I’ll take a quarter,” so Mika got all those notebooks without blowing her allowance.

She asked Major for her weekly allowance to take with her to the Chitlin Strut.

“The what?” Major said it in a way that made it sound more like a statement than a question.

Mika shrugged her shoulders. “Grandma wants me to go with her out to the country to this thing, the Chitlin Strut, to meet some new cousins of ours.”

Major was always tinkering with some electronic device in the living room. This made Rhina mad, that her flowered velveteen couch with wood armrests was always covered with a speaker here, needle-nose pliers there. When he wasn’t working making sure the public television broadcasts went out uninterrupted, he was doing somebody’s handiwork—last year he changed the engine on their neighbor Mr. Henry’s car after hitching it to his back bumper and dragging it to Forestwood Drive. Mika and her mother had dumped salt and baking soda on the carport to try and dry up the oil stains for weeks after. This year it was computers, and Major thought he’d make a real go at it—a whole business of building and selling them, building networks. He was trying to convince Mika, ever under his wing up until about now, that she should learn how to build a website, because that would be the future, he said; but she was in eighth grade, and while she wasn’t free enough to go to the mall by herself or with her girlfriends and their boyfriends, she was too old to still be called a daddy’s girl and sought her distance by going to Redwood Court. At Redwood Court, as long as she made her bed and took out the trash and vacuumed the occasional room, she was free. Some days, Weesie would run an errand and leave her home, and that’s when she’d sneak-ride her bike past the stop sign at the end of the cul-de-sac.

She waited for her father to look up from the innards of the computer he was working on, what he called a “motherboard.”

“I just need a few dollars to eat while I’m out. Grandma says I might have a cousin my age. Donnell. He’s from Tampa. We don’t really know how we’re all related, but she wants to meet them Saturday.”

“Why this place?” Major asked. Mika knew better than to come to her father without all the anticipated questions answered.

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