Excerpt from A Country You Can Leave by Asale Angel-Ajani, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1

There is no release from life's turmoil, so put your back into it.

In a gulch somewhere between the San Jacinto and Santa Anas, my mother, Yevgenia, slows the car at the sign welcoming us to the dubiously named Oasis Mobile Estates. She cuts the engine behind the property manager's battered truck and goes about the task of cleaning herself up. She pulls a rubber band out of her stiff, dyed-black hair. She scrunches it back to life. Tweezers in hand, she yanks the rearview mirror down to brutalize her already emaciated eyebrows. When she smell-checks her armpits, I know there is a man inside.

"Don't I get a vote?" I ask, watching Yevgenia resuscitate her breasts by scooping them up in her bra. Our drive from Nevada to California has been nonstop. For miles, nothing but hot dust, windswept trash, and nameless mountains closing in on our resentments.

My mother ignores me. Instead, she looks through the bug-splattered windshield, her eyes turned to the heaven she doesn't believe in. She blows hard through her mouth. Traces of old beer and tobacco stir in the narrow space between us.

"People who cast votes decide nothing. People who count votes decide everything." Pushing the car door open with her shoulder, she says, "Stalin. Look it up."

"Hey," I call out as she heads to the manager's trailer, her red tank top plastered to her back with sweat. "Use a condom."

There's a brief pause in her step. Her body tenses. Then I hear it. The source of what I yearned for most in childhood, her husky laugh, etched by decades of chain-smoking.

Waiting for her to score whatever it is she thinks she'll get from a place like this, I crane my neck to survey the Oasis Mobile Estates. Nestled in shriveled patches of yellow desert grass wedged between boulders heavily scarred by acid rain, this "oasis" is a decrepit collection of rusted metal boxes lined up along small tributaries of roughly hewed roads. The only sign that I'm in the year 2000 is a flat-roofed Circle K squatting a half mile outside the trailer park. Fiery air blasts through the open car window from the direction of the Mojave. I shove my hand down the back of my jeans to pull my sweat-drenched underwear out of my crack.

Eventually, the door of the property manager's tin hut opens. My mother emerges with a man in tow. Her skirt is straight, her tank top tucked in. They hadn't done it. This is a bad sign. It means she's serious about the place. They approach the car and I overhear Yevgenia casually lying about where we have just been, saying Denver and not Las Vegas. That she's leaving a job rather than leaving yet another guy who turned out to be broke. The property manager, with his tangled waist-length black hair and weathered brown skin, is smitten. He follows my mother, eyeing her swaying hips.

"Don't just sit there like a dum-dum," my mother says to me through a fake smile. Her voice comes from the earthy place deep between her legs. It drips with allure, turned up by the presence of a man who has something she wants. "Get out of the car. Say hello to Carlos."

Out of habit, I do as she says. But inside I smolder. I raise my hand in a half-hearted greeting. Yevgenia glares.

"This is my daughter, Lara," she says. And I wait for it. Maybe secretly, Yevgenia does too. The scrutiny of a white woman with a Black child.

There. Carlos's eyes flick between me and my mother. The appraisal of biological proximity. Her straight hair to my curly, lopsided Afro. Her rounded, fleshy curves to my limp, flat lines. Her light, white skin, the known story, to my dark, open question.

"Call me Papa Bear," he says, straightening his face, giving us a pass. "Everyone does."

He's got a bum knee, so we follow Papa Bear's slow, limping figure down the cracked asphalt road. He heads with purpose toward the main artery of the Oasis. Dead Man Walking isn't a film I've seen but the title comes to mind. I try not to notice Papa Bear's disability, but his lurching movement ignites an involuntary jumpiness within my own body. I hate myself for it and glance at my mother. Her attention is on two women standing next to the trailer we're approaching.

Excerpted from A Country You Can Leave by Asale Angel-Ajani. Copyright © 2023 by Asale Angel-Ajani. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.