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

"Oh, damn it to hell." Papa Bear kicks at the ground and puffs of dust plume. "Don't mention what you're paying to anyone," he says, reaching into his pocket. The keys clink together as he softly tosses them to my mother.

Yevgenia turns to me, her face flush with victory. "Get the suitcase."

My shoulders drop.

If an inanimate object can bully, it's the blue suitcase. Since Yevgenia never takes a standard approach to anything, I have learned to watch the case. Before she buys groceries, or stops reusing the same plastic utensils, or thinks about getting any furniture, Yevgenia will put the blue suitcase in the corner of a room with a door, marking her territory. If she leaves it in the car, I know we will be moving on. But it's not just the suitcase itself and what it represents that bullies. It's what is contained inside. The multicolored spiral-bound notebooks, their torn pages like slim fingers slipped through prison bars, taunt me. In these notebooks live my mother's authoritarian edicts, philosophies, and communiqués, mostly regarding sex and men and politics and reading habits. The notebooks will be the sum total of her legacy and my meager inheritance. When she's bored or drunk or both, she gets the suitcase, rummages past Technicolor photos of herself smoking with friends outside a drab apartment block in Cheryomushki or posing arm in arm with lecherous-looking Italian men in front of the Colosseum, and reads out loud from her lists.

Yevgenia claps her hands at me. "Chip-chop."

I hate when she says that. It's so colonial. "It's chop-chop," I mutter, walking to the car.

* * *

Shun men who are actors. Or models. They are looking for validation. Their lives are all about hoping and waiting, which means they will make you hope and wait for a good orgasm too.

Armageddon arrives at the Oasis on the first of the month. It starts early in the afternoon with the TVs turned up at top volumes, mariachi music piping from radios, and hard rock or hip-hop blaring too much treble from busted car speakers. It is only a matter of hours before all the day drinking transitions to sloppy drunken parties spilling out of trailers to carports and into the narrow streets. A fight starts, a tremor that turns into an all-out brawl until the cops come and shut it down. After a night of reckoning, the part of the Oasis that slept through the chaos wakes, too early, to grab hold of the cool Saturday morning before the sun starts scorching. This time belongs to the Oasis's elderly residents. Ms. Eunice, a trim African American woman who keeps busy riding up and down the streets on her bright red electric mobility scooter, the basket on the handlebar stuffed with papers and plastic bags. Her cane is jammed in the basket too, aluminum knocking against aluminum as she rides over the potholes and cracks in the road. Then there's Lourdes's husband, Gus, tinkering under the hood of his truck, his small transistor playing Spanish talk radio. The white-haired sisters, Mickey and Minnie, speed-walk the neighborhood in their pink and pale blue sweatpants. Papa Bear, though not elderly, sits out under his carport, a lawn chair backed up against the bumper of his truck as if he's tailgating, drinking a cup of coffee.

"You're up early," he calls to me. I am trudging down the road from the Circle K. Yevgenia is still out from the night before and there was no bread for toast.

"Yeah, too early," I say, because he is the landlord. But I'm lying—9:00 a.m. is late for me. The truth is, I have been up for hours, keeping vigil for my mother, as I often do. I can't sleep when she's not home.

"Ask your mom for the killer hangover cure she has. It works." He chuckles, raising his coffee mug, in salute.

"Sure." I guess he doesn't know I am five years away from the legal drinking age. Or maybe he thinks, given how Yevgenia is with liquor, that I'm the same way. I always find it curious, the idea of what traits or behaviors a parent passes to their child. I don't do the things my mother does. I don't drink or smoke or have sex. The no drinking and no smoking parts of my monastic life are easy. I hate the taste. But sex? This is not a question I will solve on my walk home from the Circle K.

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.