The Do-Over by Sharon M. Peterson EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Sharon M. Peterson
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available for Download
- Series: None
- Price: Free
- File Size: 2 MB
“Know your worth.
Then add tax.”
– MIMI
There was a rumor my grandmother, Mona Raye Perkins, bashed my
grandfather in the head with a frying pan. A cast iron one that still sat on her
stove where it had lived for as long as I could remember.
“Mimi,” I asked one day as a child, when curiosity got the best of me,
“did you really put him in the hospital?”
She smirked and took a long pull on the cigarette that might as well have
been surgically grafted to her fingers. The smoke clung to her clothes,
mingled with the flowery undertones of White Shoulders and the faint, yet
permanent smell of canned green beans from her years working as a school
lunch lady.
“I sure did. That lying, no-good rat bastard deserved it too,” she said
before eyeing me through the cigarette smoke. “How old are you?”
“Nine.”
“Well, that’s a story for when you’re older.” She winked and pointed at
the chipped coffee table taking up prime real estate in the cramped living area
of her single wide. “Now, hand me the remote. Days of Our Lives is on.”
I knew she wasn’t lying or putting me off in the hope I’d forget. Mimi
differed from every other adult I knew. She always told me the truth, and she
never softened it. “Shit by any other name is still shit,” she’d say. “Why call
it anything else?”
Mimi had a million of these sayings—Mimi-isms, I called them. My
mother forbade me to repeat them, but that didn’t stop me from memorizing
each one and writing them in the Lisa Frank journal I kept in my nightstand.
Then again, my mother disapproved of everything about Mimi—from the
tiny green trailer she lived in at the Forest Lake Mobile Park in the small
border town of Eagle Pass, Texas, to the garden gnomes she let the neighbor
boys arrange in compromising positions in her yard. Mother hated that Mimi
laughed too loud, never watched what she ate, and didn’t care one bit what
anyone thought.
On the list of People I Wanted to Be Like When I Grew Up, Mimi was
number one.
I wanted to wear loud clothes, heavy on the animal prints, and tight pants
and prance around in sky-high heels. I wanted to brush off my mother’s
impatient disapproval. I wanted to be unafraid to just be me.
Even now, at twenty-seven, I spent most of my life being a square peg my
mother tried to cram in a round hole. The look of utter exasperation—lips
pursed, fists stuck on her hips, all accompanied by a heavy sigh—it was
always for me, never my sister.
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