We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,27

home until late. He had spelled her name wrong: “Teresa.” They’d been married nearly thirty years.

He didn’t know that my mother had called the bank that day. She’d tried to pay their property taxes and the check bounced. Their bank account was overdrawn. She remembered the night before, when my father announced that he wasn’t paying for braces for my little sister. “She doesn’t really need them,” he’d said.

He had just been on another business trip.

Something in my mother finally broke.

She turned the note over and took a pen.

“I am leaving you,” she wrote.

She went to her brother’s house. My uncle was living in Fremont with a roommate, and then my mom became his roommate. Tracy stayed with my dad and finished high school, but there was a point when she was living with my mom in Fremont and going to high school in Pleasanton.

My mom insists she only found out about the affair when she met someone who knew Dad from AT&T.

“You have a beautiful home,” she said.

“You’ve been to my house?”

“Yes,” she said. “Cully was the chair of the tennis tournament last year.” The lady described the house, and also the other woman. She had been standing next to Dad, acting as if our house was her house.

I wasn’t ever formally introduced to the other woman. She just appeared, now with a name. Toni.

My parents divorced my senior year of college. The divorce was final in early June. He married the other woman on June 9. I graduated from UCLA on June 16. Dad skipped my college graduation, because Toni insisted on an immediate Hawaii honeymoon. I don’t blame her. My graduation was going to be a family moment shortly after the family had been dismantled.

But of course I had to go to Dad’s wedding. By then, they had moved to Phoenix, Arizona. It was never clear when they bought their new house. But it didn’t matter. They had, and this wedding was on. My dad had invited his mother—whom we all called Mama Helen—to fly in from Omaha, but he had neglected to tell her the reason why. He couldn’t tell her he was getting remarried, because, well, he hadn’t told Mama Helen he’d gotten divorced.

It was Mama Helen’s first flight, and she brought hard-boiled eggs and chicken packed in little baggies. She smelled up the plane, and since she was hard of hearing, she also spent the whole flight yelling.

Phoenix in June was hell degrees. When we arrived at Dad and Toni’s house, we came upon a crew of aunts and girl cousins making homemade wedding souvenirs. Before she had time to figure out what was going on, someone rushed over and took Mama Helen out dress shopping “for an occasion.”

My sisters and I joined our aunts at the table. Half of them had only just found out about the wedding themselves. Somebody looked up from the tchotchkes we were making and asked, “Did anybody tell Mama Helen?”

My father was called in.

“Did you tell Mama Helen you’re getting married?” an aunt asked.

“I’m gonna tell her,” he said.

“Does she know you’re divorced?” said someone else.

“I’m gonna tell her. I’m gonna tell her.”

The place went up in guffaws. “Oh, shit!” said a cousin, as the rest did impressions of my dad’s frightened face.

When he finally got the nerve to tell his mother, shortly before the ceremony, Mama Helen’s solidarity with my mom was like Sister Souljah. It was fascinating because, mind you, this woman was never a fan of my mother’s. She called her “piss-colored” for the bulk of the marriage. But this whole deal didn’t sit right with her. Not at all.

She decided to speak her mind at the church. My soon-to-be stepmother had a family member who was the pastor. He went on and on about this blessed union. That’s when Mama Helen piped up from the front pew in her deaf-lady voice.

“She’s a whore,” she said to no one in particular, meaning the entire church. “Home-wrecker.”

NOW, OUR BOYS CALL TONI NANA, AND SHE IS A LOVELY GRANDMOTHER. She and my dad still take their trips to Hawaii. People move on.

After the divorce, Mom left Pleasanton to move back to Omaha. She was ready to start over. Instead of an easy retirement, she chose to help a relative who had a problem with drugs. This relative repeatedly got pregnant, and one by one, these babies came to live with my mother shortly after their births. This retirement-age woman adopted these children, now aged nine, eight, and