Excerpt from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"If I hear about that 'strawberry blonde' bitch once more," my grandmother said, "I'm gonna smash that record to pieces. I don't want her 'white' music in my house."

Out front a virile jacaranda tree made a lifelong enemy of my grandmother, shedding pulpy blossoms that stained the staircase black. Armed with a push broom, a transistor radio, and a Dodgers cap, she'd sweep through thick lavender rainstorms twice a week. There was also a lemon tree in back, honey-colored kitchen cabinets, and exterior stucco walls painted cornbread yellow.

"All this damn yellow," my grandmother said. "Looks like cowards live here."

• • •

My grandmother was "the man of the house." She was overseer of chores, washer and clothesline hanger of garments, food shopper (with a personal two-wheeled basket trolley she pulled up the stairs), head chef and dishwasher, payer of utilities, trimmer of hedges, sweeper of our front staircase, and controller of the single television in the living room complete with a cable hookup and an oversized recliner that Emilio had originally bought for him and June to share. Well into his midsixties, Emilio dressed for work in a suit jacket, tie, and fedora. He rode the bus almost an hour to and from his job as a line cook in a Glendale delicatessen and came home exhausted. After feeding our dogs fermented chicken and liver dinner leftovers from a greasy paper bag, he wanted nothing more than to watch television in a comfortable chair. Instead, Emilio floated like a ghost across my grandmother's line of television sight without a kiss or a greeting to his own separate bedroom. (My mother, grandmother, and grandfather each took the three small bedrooms in our house; I shared my grandmother's bed until I was sixteen because my mother wanted to save her bed for husbands.) No matter how late he came home or tired he was, out of respect, Emilio never sat in that recliner. That was his wife's chair.

June's beat started with a predawn coffee. On Sundays before church at La Placita on Olvera Street, she'd splash in some Kahlúa. "I know God is bullshit, but it makes me feel better for an hour," she'd say, sipping from an oversized mug.

A pink, smog-tinged sunrise melted atop an endless field of marzipan streetlight while she readied me like a mother for school. My mother, Maria, was elsewhere, getting herself ready for work. She hated mothering me.

"Don't run too fast on the playground," Grandma said while tying my shoes, "because you still can't tie your laces. Make sure you have your lunch tickets with the right date on them," she said, and patted down my pockets, "or else you won't eat." I "blech"-ed out my tongue, imagining my government-sponsored school lunch choices: sloppy joe paste on spongy hamburger buns, shellacked pizza toast, and fruit that tasted like old toothpaste.

"Don't be spoiled," my grandmother said. "And don't untuck your shirt like a cholo," she said, slipping a Le Tigre shirt over me. "Make friends with them. They know how to fight. Now take my hand," she said, "and walk on the outside, near the street. So men won't think I'm a whore."

I pulled my hand away from hers in fourth grade and then at her escort to the bus stop in seventh grade; after that, she settled on her crow's nest of a front porch. The vantage point was wide enough that she could watch me walk down the entire length of Portia Street to the corner, where I'd wave good-bye from the front of Little Joy Jr.

"It's a gay bar," my grandmother said. "Go inside if any pervert follows you. It's the safest place in the neighborhood."

When I was off to school, it was time to start her day.

If every ghetto has a hierarchy, my grandmother June was the unofficial mayor of Echo Park. She collected our neighborhood stories and bartered them with everyone, whatever their language. She could float with uncommon ease among Echo Park's different worlds and ethnicities, telling dirty jokes to the blood-cloaked Mexican butchers at Roy's Market who'd pull me chicharrones (fried pork rinds) from heaven; the beautiful azure-smocked Latina cashiers at Pioneer Market (my first crush was a black-haired Pioneer cashier named Felicia); the Korean-run video stores in the 1980s that smelled of boiled cabbage whose owners called her Grandma; the Italians at Capra's Deli who made the mistake of putting an underwhelming Snoopy fondant on my birthday cake: "I don't know what the hell that thing on my grandson's cake is, but that ain't Snoopy!"; and the Jewish owners of Gerry's Department Store, one of several local businesses that extended our family in-store credit for years of loyal patronage despite, sometimes, periods of absence punctuated by a grotesque fight, like the one with the store's matriarch, Shauna, over ten dollars.

Excerpted from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse. Copyright © 2014 by Brando Skyhorse. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.