Quitter by Erica C. Barnett

Author:Erica C. Barnett [Barnett, Erica C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty

Cindy

A gap in my own biography had started to bug me more and more, like an unraveling thread in a sweater that grows and grows until you have to cut the whole thing out. I decided it was time to contact my birth mom.

I had been thinking about Cindy superficially for many years, but there was always a period at the end of the story. Cindy was my birth mom, but she left, and no one ever heard from her again. My mom is my mom, and I don’t need a new one. Cindy didn’t want to see me, and now she’s living her life somewhere, or not, and that’s all there is to say about that. Maybe she’s alive, maybe she’s dead. Either way, it’s none of my business.

But then, sometime after I turned thirty, I thought: Am I being immature about this? I don’t know what really happened. Maybe my dad kicked her out. Maybe I have siblings. Maybe she was an alcoholic, too, and just couldn’t handle being a mom. So I decided to ask about her.

As it turned out, Cindy had been right under my nose all along. After she left my dad, she had moved away for a while but eventually came back to Mississippi, taking a series of jobs not far from where my grandparents still lived—first selling cars, then running a forklift at a chain hardware store in Jackson—the same chain my granddad worked for in Meridian.

I found all of this out from my grandmother, who seemed oddly nonchalant about this question it had taken me more than twenty-five years to ask.

“Oh, yes, Jesse sees Cindy and her mother from time to time,” Mama Opal told me on the phone. “Her family still lives right up forty-nine in Quinton. Are you just wondering, or did you want him to give her a message?”

I pictured my grandmother, standing to the side in my parents’ wedding photo, lips pursed in disapproval as the teenage couple smiled nervously at the camera. “I want to talk to her,” I heard myself saying. Did I? “Do you think he can make that happen?”

Within a week, I had an email, phone number, and an answer: Of course Cindy would love to hear from me. Would she? I started cautiously, with an email. “I have so much to ask you,” I wrote. We made a date to talk on the phone, and then suddenly—as if there had never been any reason for this conversation not to happen—I was hearing her voice, gravelly as a chain-smoker’s, on the other end of the line.

Armed with a list of questions, I settled on the floor in front of my couch and began my interrogation. Why did she leave? She was seventeen, and she wanted to be carefree. Where did she go? To Virginia Beach, to live with her mother. Did she ever try to get in touch with me? No, but she had looked me up online and knew a few basic facts about my life.

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