Excerpt from Memorial by Bryan Washington, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

All of a sudden, we're just one more soap opera among way too many, but that's when Mike's mother laughs, shaking her head.

She says something in Japanese.

Mike thumps the glove compartment, says, Ma.

*

My parents pretend I'm not gay. It's easier for them than it sounds. My father lives in Katy, just west of Houston, and my mother stayed in Bellaire, even after she remarried. Before that, we took most of our family dinners downtown. My father was a meteorologist. It was a status thing. He'd pick my sister and my mother and me up from the house, ferrying us up I-45 just to eat with his co-workers, and he always ordered our table the largest dish on the menu—basted pigs spilling from platters, pounds of steamed crab sizzling over bok choi—and he called this Work, because he was always Working.

A question he used to ask us was, How many niggas do you see out here telling the weather?

My mother never debated him or cussed him out or anything like that. She'd repeat exactly what he said. Inflect his voice. That was her thing. She'd make him sound important, like some kind of boss, but my father's a little man, and her tactics did exactly what you'd think they might do.

Big job today, she'd say, in the car, stuck on the 10.

This forecast's impressive, she'd say, moments after my father shattered a wine glass on the kitchen wall.

I swear it's the last one, she'd say, looking him dead in the eyes, as he floundered, drunk, grabbing at her knees, swearing that he'd never touch another single beer.

Eventually, she left. Lydia went with our mother, switching high schools. I stayed in the suburbs, at my old junior high, and my father kept drinking. He lived off his savings once he got fired from the station for being wasted on-air. Sometimes, he'd sub high school science classes, but he mostly stayed on the sofa, booing at the hourly prognoses from KHOU.

Occasionally, in blips of sobriety, I'd come home to him grading papers. Some kid had called precipitation anticipation. Another kid, instead of defining cumulus clouds, drew little fluffs all over the page. One time my father laid three tests on an already too cluttered end table, all with identical handwriting, and only the names changed. 

He waved them at me, asked why everything had to be so fucking hard.

*

A few months in, Mike said we could be whatever we wanted to be. Whatever that looked like.

I'm so easy, he said.

I'm not, I told him.

You will be, he said. Just give me a little time.

*

It's past midnight when we pull onto our block. Most of the lights are out. Some kids are huddled by the curb, smoking pot, fucking around with firecrackers.
When a pop explodes behind us, the kids take off. That's their latest thing. Mike's mother doesn't even flinch.

Ma, says Mike, this is home.

We live in the Third Ward, a historically black part of Houston. Our apartment's entirely too large. It doesn't make any sense. At one point, the neighborhood had money, but then crack happened and the money took off, and occasionally you'll hear gunshots or fistfights or motherfuckers driving way too fast. But the block has recently been invaded by fraternities from the college up the block. And a scattering of professor types. With pockets of rich kids playing at poverty. The black folks who've lived here for decades let them do it, happy for the scientific fact that white kids keep the cops away.

Our immediate neighbors are Venezuelan. They've got like nine kids. Our other neighbors are these black grandparents who've lived on the property forever. Every few weeks, Mike cooks for both families, sopa de pescado and yams and macaroni and rice. He's never made a big deal about it, he just wakes up and does it, and after the first few times I asked Mike if that wasn't patronizing.

Excerpted from Memorial by Bryan Washington. Copyright © 2020 by Bryan Washington. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.