Chapter 14

14

I was eight years old and it was far past my bedtime. I’d been standing in the hallway in my nightgown listening to my mother and father fight in the living room.

There had been the sound of breaking glass. I knew it was the figurine of the woman in the full Southern dress holding the sun umbrella. I’m not sure where it had come from—a wedding gift perhaps. They’d been arguing about something he found in her coat pocket, and then my mother’s trips to the city, and then someone named Lenny, and then me. My father felt I was becoming too quiet, too withdrawn. That I could benefit from some more attention from her once in a while.

“She doesn’t need me, Seb.”

“You’re her mother, Cecilia.”

“She’d be better off if I wasn’t.”

When my mother started sobbing, really crying, something I hadn’t heard from her before despite the vitriol they flung at each other on a near nightly basis, I turned to go back to my room; my face was hot and the strained shrill of her voice made my stomach clench. But then I’d heard my father say my grandmother’s name. He said, “You’ll end up just like Etta.”

My father’s footsteps headed for the kitchen. I heard the heavy bottom of two glass tumblers hit the counter and then the splash of whiskey. The drink calmed her down. They were done. I knew this part of the routine—the point where she tired herself out and my father drank himself to sleep.

But that night she wanted to talk.

I slid my back down the wall and crouched on the floor. I sat there for the next hour and listened to her speak to him, those fragments of her past burning my mind for the first time.

That night, my father slept in the bedroom with her, which he rarely did. When I woke up in the morning their door was closed. I made myself breakfast and went to school, and that night they didn’t fight. They were calm, civil. I did my homework. I saw my mother touch his back as she put the plate of overcooked chicken in front of him. He thanked her and called her “dear.” She was trying. He was forgiving.

This would become something I did often over the next few years after that night. In my bed upstairs, when I heard Etta’s name and I knew something had set my mother off again, my heart would race. I barely breathed as she spoke so that I could hear every word she told my father. Those rare nights were like gifts to me, although she would never know it. I was desperate to know who she was before she became my mother.

I started to understand, during those sleepless nights replaying the things I’d overheard, that we are all grown from something. That we carry on the seed, and I was a part of her garden.