Momma's Little Black Book

It took a few minutes before I realized the smell of dinner burning was coming from our kitchen. Oh no. Heart racing, I ran for the oven and yanked it open to see if there was anything left to be salvaged before Momma walked in the front door. It didn’t do any good because the smoke that filled my face and lungs left me blinded and gagging for air.

I slammed the oven door shut, coughing and wiping my eyes as I groped for the buttons to turn it off. Stupid. Momma worked hard all day and all I had to do was go to school and make dinner.

I snatched the oven mitts from a drawer, held my breath, and pulled what was left of dinner from the oven. The tears running down my face no longer had anything to do with the smoke. I had worked hard on dinner tonight. It was Momma’s birthday dinner and I wanted it to be extra special. Now it was just extra burnt.

The smoke detector went off. I grabbed the closest thing I could find to fan it with, the pages of the story I was trying to write for a contest. While dinner was burning, I was racking my brain, writing and rewriting the worst story I had ever heard. But I had to write well because this contest had a $20,000 grand prize, and I knew exactly what I would do with the money.

And that is what Momma came home to on her 40th birthday. Her 14-year-old daughter, on tippy-toes, wrapped in smoke, frantically fanning the blaring smoke detector. And no dinner.

Momma left the door wide open and worked her way around our cozy home doing the same to the windows.

“But we’re letting all the heat out.”

“And the smoke with it.”

The alarm finally stopped blaring so I dropped my arms while I worked to hold back a fresh wave of tears. We didn’t have money to waste on burning dinners and heating up the outdoors. “I’m sorry.”

“I think that’s good enough. Help me shut the windows?”

The silence was uncomfortable. I knew, by the way Momma moved, that her back was bothering her again.

Normally, this was my favorite time of the day. Momma would get home and put her feet up while we ate dinner. She would tell me all the strange things she saw as she cleaned houses. The way she shared had us both laughing and forgetting that our clothes were always wearing thin, the food was scarce, and there was no money for the surgery Momma needed to fix her back.

Momma didn’t complain or punish me but I saw something in her eyes that affected me just the same. Maybe she was counting the cost of a lost meal. Maybe she was calculating how long she had to endure back pain before she could sit down. She didn’t say much as she pulled bread, peanut butter, and jelly out and began to make us both a sandwich.

“Go sit down, Momma. I’ve got this.”

Our eyes met as her lips curved into a smile. “If the kitchen is where you are, the kitchen is where I’ll be too. We’ll sit down together.”

I didn’t waste time talking as I helped slap the sandwiches together and carried the plates to the couch.

“Happy birthday.” I smiled before trying to rub the peanut butter from my front teeth with the tip of my tongue.

“Thanks, dear.” Momma smiled and took another bite.

Sometimes she told me stories from when she was growing up. Some of them were sad but I learned a lot about her that way. Like why she checked my homework every day. She was only able to get through the 8th grade before her parents made her stop school and start cleaning houses. That’s all she’d ever done. That’s not what she wanted for me.

She never used her closet. She put her clothes in a dresser or hung them on a rod in her room. When she was a kid, her parents locked her in the closet on summer days and school breaks while they worked. They said it kept her out of trouble. She wouldn’t touch my closet either, so I learned to hang my clothes as soon as I was tall enough to get the hanger to catch on the rod over my head.

Momma wrote in a little black book every single night. She never let me touch it. She said, when she was a kid, the only thing her parents left in the closet with her was a pencil and some paper. At first, she wrote about being in the closet but they didn’t like that and burned the pages each day. She thought if she wrote about happy things, she could make them happy. But they didn’t like her happy stories either so they burned those too.

That’s why she didn’t let anyone read what she wrote. I often asked her to, but she always smiled and shook her head. “It’s nothing. Just the stories I tell myself to make the time pass while I scrub someone’s toilet.”

I had even tried to find her little black book when she showered or was at work. I started to think she kept it with her at all times. One time I hugged her, just as an excuse to feel around for the book, but it was nowhere on her.

Now, Momma smiled and told me, “Mrs. Smith had her baby.”

“Aww. I wish I could see it.” I had never seen a new baby in real life before.

“It’s a girl and she’s cute as can be. She reminded me of you when you were brand new. Chubby cheeks. Head full of hair.”

It was so cool when Momma talked about when I was little. I wanted to hear more.

We chatted before I took our plates to the kitchen to wash up. I knew Momma was pulling her little black book out and settling in to write before we got ready for bed. When I walked in the kitchen, I remembered that cleaning up wasn’t going to be simple tonight. I had to get the burned edges scrubbed out of the pan. I sighed and got to work.

Kitchen and dishes cleaned, I headed to the living room with my homework and a novel from school. I plopped on the couch next to Momma and opened the book.

Momma looked through the pages of my homework. When she was done, she patted my leg and set the homework on the coffee table. “Good job.” She picked up her little black book and moved to the edge of the couch. I wanted to help her up, but she didn’t seem to like it when I noticed her pain, so I pretended to read instead.

She stood and took a step. I don’t know what happened, but she must have had a bad pain because she made a weird noise, grabbed her back, and fell right in front of me. I wanted to catch her, but instead, my body moved out of her way. She crashed into the coffee table and flopped to the floor.

I raced over. It looked like she was sleeping, but there was blood coming from her head and I couldn’t wake her up. That’s when I called 911 and everything got fuzzy. An ambulance came and they got her to wake up before they took her to the hospital.

I was supposed to go to the neighbor’s house, but I stopped when I noticed Momma’s little black book peeking out from the end of the coffee table. Did I dare touch it? Pick it up? Read it? I wanted to do the right thing and leave it alone. But I had been aching to know what Momma wrote about for years. All my life, it seemed, she’d been writing in the little black book. There must be more than one book by now, but I had no idea what she did with them when she filled them up.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I snatched the book and ran next door. The neighbors tried to talk with me. They must have thought I was quiet because of what was happening with my mom. “She’ll be alright. It was just a back spasm that made her fall and hit her head. She’ll be home in no time.”

I just wanted them to leave me alone so I could read every word Momma had written before it was too late. I was not disappointed as I turned page after page of that little black book.

I had never read stories like these before. They were stories of people who traveled on adventures together, laughed together, cried together, and won battles together. I was so caught up in the stories that I forgot I was reading Momma’s little black book. Instead, I was there, on the adventures and in the battles with my new friends from the story. A ray of sunshine hit my eyes and brought me back to the neighbor’s house. Morning already.

My heart raced. Why didn’t Momma share her stories? Why would she keep all of this to herself? Where were the rest of the books she’d filled up over the years? Was this one, giant series of adventures with the same characters or were there other stories too? I had so many questions. There was only one person with the answers. But she would flip if she knew I had read this book.

Then it hit me. This was it! The contest I had been desperately trying to write for. The contest that could pay for Momma’s surgery. I had to do this before she got home.

I rushed to the living room. “Can I use your computer?” How much time did I have?

“Sure.” I was led to the small desk in the corner where the neighbor opened a laptop and put in a password. “There you go.”

I plopped down and checked the contest directions one more time. I typed furiously and entered Momma, and an adventure from her story, into the contest.

She was home by that afternoon. I didn’t want to tell her about the contest but I wasn’t used to lying to her either. When she sat on the couch, I handed her the little black book.

She sighed. “Did you read it?”

“Yes. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read and I’m trying not to be mad at you for never reading me your stories. Are there more?”

Momma studied my face and nodded. “You liked it?”

“Of course. Where’s the rest of it?”

Momma decided to listen to the doctor and take a few days off work. During that time, she pulled a whole collection of little black books from a locked box on the shelf in the back of her empty closet. We read them all together, starting with the first one. Every one of them made my heart race, made me laugh, made me cry. They were amazing.

By the time we were done, I confessed that I had entered a piece of her story into the contest. She was quiet at first, but then she sighed. “It’s fine. It can’t win. No one else will ever know about my stories.”

But it did win.

Not only did Momma get her surgery, but she also got the attention of a publisher. They talked Momma into letting them read all of her little black books. And she never had to scrub someone else’s toilet again.