Excerpt from A Country You Can Leave by Asale Angel-Ajani, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The Toyota is in the carport. Yevgenia returned while I was out. Not that I was too worried. My mother can't stomach more than seventy-two hours with a man. Any more than that is too much domesticity. Of course, the men never see it coming. Yevgenia is a deceptive lover. Attentive to needs of a sexual nature, but don't ask her to pass a pack of smokes, get a beer from the fridge, or scratch that hard-to-reach spot in the middle of your back. By the time someone might look at her and wonder if she will be the intense, clingy type, she vanishes, leaving bruised egos and blue balls in her wake. It's brilliant, really, the way my mother gets what she wants from people, men in particular.

I was eleven when I finally paid attention to Yevgenia's lessons about men. It was after I told her about seeing one of her "friends" sitting on my bed, sniffing a pair of my underwear. Yevgenia's reaction was surprisingly satisfying. We drove out from Burbank to a barren tire shop in Castaic in search of this guy.

Not finding him, she went after his car. "Fucking pervert!" Yevgenia shouted as she brought the crowbar down over her head into the windshield. At first, the smash of glass was anticlimactic. Small fractures extended moderately from the epicenter. My mother hit the window again and again until she was sweating and bits of window sprayed over the dashboard. Even after all the windows of the car were broken she kept hitting, and I knew she was beating back a history that had nothing to do with me.

Later, by the side of the road, Yevgenia took a swig from her makeshift flask. I stared at the small cut across her cheek where a bubble of blood swelled and ran toward her jaw. She seemed oblivious to it. Instead, she gripped the old perfume bottle filled with dark bourbon tightly, until her knuckles were white. "Sex before puberty is a bodily violation," she said. "It will age you. If a man touches you when you're not ready, you tell me and I'll kill him."

That was the extent of my sex-ed talk. I understood then, between me and my mother, this kind of violence was an act of love.

Excerpted from A Country You Can Leave by Asale Angel-Ajani. Copyright © 2023 by Asale Angel-Ajani. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.