My feet seemed to carry me down Main Street of their own accord, past a Starbucks that hadn’t been there in the early nineties, and then down several tree-lined roads, until I was standing outside my old house.
The grass was a little too high, and the windows could use a washing, but other than that, the little gray house was pretty well maintained. I couldn’t remember which one of Cora’s friends used to tend to all the mechanics of the house for her. I could see his face, dark and sweaty. And I could see the flashlight he always carried with him, because he only came around at night. But I couldn’t remember his name. Was he still doing maintenance work for her under the cover of night? Or was this someone else’s house now? Someone who would look at me strangely when I knocked on the door and who would not be able to tell me where Cora got off to. She wasn’t exactly the type to leave behind a forwarding address.
I knocked on the door. And waited. Then I waited some more.
Mama Jane wasn’t due back to pick me up for another two hours still, and like I said, I’m a very patient girl.
Several minutes after my first and only knock, a small woman opened the door.
“What you want?” she asked me through the screen door.
I couldn’t see her face against the dark shadows of the house, but I knew it was Cora from the harsh, cigarette-hardened sound of her voice. “It’s me. Davidia—”
“I know who you is. What you want?”
“May I come in?”
Hesitation. Then she pushed open the screen door and moved out the way so I could come in.
The first thing that hit me when I walked in was the smell. The air had the heavy stench of cigarette smoke, which I hadn’t experienced in quite a while. California had strict indoor smoking policies for businesses, and even the artists I knew who smoked did not do so inside their own apartments and with closed windows. They weren’t hard-core like Cora.
The aggressive smell of the place made my mother seem like a throwback. Had it smelled like this when I lived here? Had Mama Jane been taken aback that a teenager could so reek of cigarettes when I climbed into her cab that first time?
The second thing that hit me was that Cora had grown older. She wore a wig now. And her heart-shaped beauty was gone, replaced with the creases of hard living, heavy drinking, and her two-pack-a-day habit. She had also shrunk some, so now even though I was only five-four, it felt like I was towering over her.
“Why you come here?” she asked, picking up her pack of cigarettes—still Virginia Slims, I noticed.
I kept on looking around the room: at the mirror that I had stared at myself in before I left forever; at the connecting kitchen, where I had made myself a fresh batch of Hamburger Helper every Sunday and Wednesday, which I then ate as leftovers during the days in between. I now couldn’t abide the taste or even the smell of Hamburger Helper. Even during my tightest months, I couldn’t bring myself to eat it.
I doubted she would respond well to Why are you such a mean, hateful bitch? or Why couldn’t you have shown me even a speck of compassion growing up? So I asked her the only question I had that she might answer.
“Is Elmer my father?”
Cora let her Virginia Slim dangle in her mouth. “You ain’t got no right coming around here asking me questions like that.”
“I ain’t got no right?” My voice just about crackled with anger. “You don’t have no right. How are you going to just stand there after all these years and still refuse to tell me where I came from?”
“You don’t come from no place.” Cora started coughing then, but she kept on talking around her smoker’s hacks. “You ain’t shit. I found you under a rock. A shitty rock. And I took you home cuz nobody else wanted your ugly, dark ass.”
I turned my back on her. How could she actually be worse than I remembered? It didn’t seem possible. “Okay, I’ll go ask him myself.”
“He dead,” she said.
I turned back to face her. “I don’t believe you.”