I said, “I want to go to Macon.”

—

I drove alone. Curtis offered to come. I said no. This was mine.

The address was a small house on a dead-end street. Overgrown hedges. A mailbox with the flag up. A porch with a plastic chair and a coffee can full of cigarette butts.

I sat in my car for eleven minutes. I counted.

Then I walked up and knocked.

She opened the door. Fifty-seven years old. Shorter than I remembered, but I was five when I last saw her so everything was bigger then. Gray roots growing through faded brown hair. Housecoat. No makeup. Lines around her mouth from decades of smoking.

She looked at me. Her eyes went wide and then her whole face crumpled. Her chin started trembling. She reached both arms toward me.

“Jolene. Oh my God, Jolene. My baby.”

I stood there. I didn’t move. I didn’t reach back. I just looked at her.

“You said you’d come back real soon.”

She started crying. Full body crying, the kind where your shoulders shake and no sound comes out for the first few seconds.

“I know. I know. Baby, I was forced. Your daddy, he owed, the people he owed, they said they’d hurt you if I 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 anything except hand your five-year-old daughter to a stranger for $800.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“It was exactly like that. Darlene told me every day that I was rotten. That you sold me because I was bad. I believed her, Mama. I believed her for thirty years.”

She was sobbing now. Reaching for me. I stepped back.

“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. I closed the door. I looked at the house. She was still standing in the doorway, crying.