The address was a small house on a dead-end street.Overgrown hedges. A mailbox with the flag up. A porchwith a plastic chair and a coffee can full of cigarettebutts.
I sat in my car for eleven minutes. I counted.
Then I walked up and knocked.
She opened the door. Fifty-seven years old. Shorterthan I remembered, but I was five when I last saw herso everything was bigger then. Gray roots growingthrough faded brown hair. Housecoat. No makeup.Lines around her mouth from decades of smoking.
She looked at me. Her eyes went wide and then herwhole face crumpled. Her chin started trembling. Shereached both arms toward me.
“Jolene. Oh my God, Jolene. My baby.”
I stood there. I didn’t move. I didn’t reach back. I justlooked at her.
“You said you’d come back real soon.”
She started crying. Full body crying, the kind whereyour shoulders shake and no sound comes out for thefirst few seconds.
“I know. I know. Baby, I was forced. Your daddy, heowed, the people he owed, they said they’d hurt you ifI didn’t, I had to, I had no choice.”
“You had a choice. You could have called the police.You could have run. You could have done anythingexcept hand your five-year-old daughter to a strangerfor $800.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“It was exactly like that. Darlene told me every day thatI was rotten. That you sold me because I was bad. Ibelieved her, Mama. I believed her for thirty years.”
She was sobbing now. Reaching for me. I steppedback.
“I can’t do this,” I said. “I thought I could, but I can’t.”
I walked back to my car. I sat in the driver’s seat. Iclosed the door. I looked at the house. She was stillstanding in the doorway, crying.
I drove home.
Curtis was on the porch when I got back. Biscuit wasnext to him. He didn’t ask what happened. He justhanded me a glass of sweet tea and sat down.
We sat there for a long time. The sky went from blue toorange to dark.
Eventually I said, “She cried.”
“Yeah.”
“She said she had no choice.”
“What do you think?”
“I think she had a choice. I think she made it. And Ithink she’s been telling herself a different version forthirty years because the real version is too ugly to livewith.”
Curtis didn’t say anything. He just put his hand onmine.
I still have the letter. It’s in the nightstand drawer. Ihaven’t thrown it away. I haven’t read it again. It justsits there. Every night before I turn off the lamp I seethe corner of it sticking out.
Some mornings I wake up and I’m five years old again.Yellow sundress. Grocery bag. Hot pavement. Mymother waving from the porch.
She was smiling.
I don’t know if I’ll ever call her. I don’t know if I’ll evergo back. I know I’m not rotten. It took me thirty yearsto learn that, but I know it now.
