The Pride – page 28
“Momma, this isn’t our phone number. You have the last two numbers backwards.” Quantavianna erased the phone number and wrote it over in much neater penmanship than Romina. This was how Quantavianna checked her mother’s forms. She convinced Romina to fill everything out in pencil, and then Quantavianna would erase what her mother wrote and fix all her many mistakes. Most days, Quantavianna just fixed the mistakes without pointing them out to her mother, but when she was feeling especially irritated Quantavianna made mention of some of the mistakes Romina made over and over again on all her paperwork. Quantavianna was feeling a little, extra irritated today.
“OK, just fix it, Quantavianna, and get back to your homework.” Romina tried not to sound annoyed. She hated having to ask her children to help her with reading and correcting her forms, bills and mail. Usually, Emmanuel helped her, but she wasn’t sure when she’d see him this week, and she wanted to try to find a better-paying job without him knowing about it.
“Did you mean to make yourself 52 years old?” Quantavianna tried to make her question sound like an innocent inquiry.
“No, Quantavianna,” Romina turned toward Quantavianna and slammed her open hand onto her hip. Quantavianna bowed her head as Romina stared hard at her.
“Sorry,” Quantavianna said quietly and finished erasing and rewriting the incorrect information on the job application. Quantavianna knew her mother’s information by memory now. She’d helped her with so many of these forms, it was just second-nature to her now.
“No, I’m sorry, sweetie,” Romina exhaled.
‘Momma, can I ask you a question?” Quantavianna walked over to her mother with the corrected application.
“Of course. Ask me anything.” Romina accepted the application from Quantavianna and pulled her into a close one-arm hug as she held the application in her other hand and read the changes.
“Can you really type 50 words a minute?” Quantavianna rested her head on her mother’s stomach.
“Uh, no,” Romina admitted embarrassed to have to confess this in front of all her children.
“Can you type at all, Momma?” Quantavianna knew she was treading on thin ice, but she felt compelled to press the issue. When her mother went out on job interviews that she was obviously not qualified for, she would come home in a bad mood and Quantavianna hated to live through the days of tears and depression.