Total pages in book: 32
Estimated words: 30055 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 150(@200wpm)___ 120(@250wpm)___ 100(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 30055 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 150(@200wpm)___ 120(@250wpm)___ 100(@300wpm)
I nod, then start my bike and roar out of the parking lot.
2 | Kristina
The smell of sausage and strawberries hangs in the air as I scrape the dishes and listen to my father on the phone in the living room.
I made his favorite breakfast, even though it’s nearly seven o’clock. Sundays, my mother always cooked our breakfast for dinner as services and activities at the church took up most of the day.
My heart still clutches in my chest because I still feel her everywhere. Even in the waffles I made and covered in her signature strawberries and sugar recipe, which is my father’s favorite. She passed away a year and half ago from breast cancer. From diagnosis to the end we only had four months, but in a way, I guess it was a gift because we knew her time was short and we did everything we could to make the most of it.
She was the perfect pastor’s wife, as was her mother before her, and I’m coming to understand it’s what my father expects of me—even though I graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Michigan with a degree in microbiology.
My gut tightens and there’s the familiar anxiety building in my chest at the thought of the assumed track my father thinks my life should take. I’m not ready to get married. I came back home after graduating only to help my him while I tried to figure out what’s next for me. I may want to get my master’s and go into medical research.
But when he looks at me, all he sees in the next pastor’s wife, and from what’s been going on I have a horrible suspicion he already has my pastor picked out.
That thought turns the tightness into nausea, and I close my eyes for a moment as I try to clear away the sick feeling.
As I rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher, my father’s voice is distant, heading toward his office here at the house. It’s a typical pastor’s church home. Big enough, but not too big, with a private office and entrance at the other end of the house away from the bedrooms.
He’s talking to Mrs. Willington, whose husband is in the hospital, and she’s looking to my father for support. It’s part of his job, I understand, and honestly I think it’s great that everyone finds such comfort from him, but it’s always been ironic that he has time for anyone that calls from his flock, but for me, I’ve pretty much been on autopilot when it comes to him since as far back as I can remember.
There’s a knock at the front door and I lean over to see my friend, Jillian, waving through the glass.
“Entre vous.” I yell, waving as I dry my hands on my mother’s embroidered white apron, then I close up the dishwasher, get it started, and take one last look around the kitchen to be sure everything is in order.
My father likes order.
“Wasss up, homey?” Jillian saunters through the living room and into the kitchen in some exaggerated long step like she’s in a rap video.
“Really? Wass up, homey?” I give her a confused stare.
Jillian was my assigned roommate at University of Arizona. Unlike most roommates, however, we became best friends instead of arch enemies. Her father is the head of the School of Applied Sciences and Technology and has so many degrees from Ivy League schools and MIT, I can’t even count them on my fingers. He immigrated to the United States from Sierra Leone with his mother, when he was twelve. They barely made it out alive and spoke no English. Jillian’s mother, on the other hand, is the head of African American Studies at the university, so Jillian’s had the full academic upbringing and is culturally the polar opposite of my world, but that hasn’t stopped us from becoming as close to sisters as I could have imagined.
We even fight like sisters sometimes.
“Hey.” She shrugs. “Doesn’t work?”
I shake my head. “If it works for you, I guess.”
She is one of the smartest people I know and that’s saying something. She’s letting her hair go natural after straightening it for most of the years we were in school. She’s reminds me of Zoe Kravitz with Pam Grier’s seventies hair. She’s stunning and smart, with a heart of gold, and my first and only best friend outside of my mother.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” She asks me, crinkling her nose. “We’re going to a bar, and you look like June Cleaver.” She squints, checking me over. “Are you wearing pearls?”
“Shut up.” I snap back, my hand going to my throat. “Aren’t pearls in?”
I run my hands down the front of my dress, looking down at myself.
“You are hopeless, you know that? Four years together and you still dress like you’re on Happy Days.”