CHAPTER TEN
I
n my sixteen years of life, I'd experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good included times my father brought delicacies home on weekends. He would say to my mother, “Tope, I want you to have a night off.” It was his way of pampering her.
The bad included my mother's sickness—at least, I'd always believed her episodes were a sickness. For years I'd seen her suffer from spasms. It wasn't embarrassing until my classmates began to make snide remarks about her. I had always wondered why my father never took her to see a doctor, and now I was doing the same, even after my father's death, because my mother had instructed me to ignore it.
The ugly was when my father and kid sister died. There was nothing unusual happening, it was a bright sunny day. Based on what I'd se
