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“Anything?”

I stared hard at her hair, noticing how gray it had gotten. My brothers all had brown hair like our dad, but I’d gotten Mama’s blond, so it was hard to tell she had been going gray, but suddenly, it was easy to see.

She had been a knockout in her day, beautiful beyond what people probably knew to do with back then. My whole life, all the pictures lining the walls of the house out at the farm showed a long-haired beauty who laughed a lot.

My daddy had known what to do with that beauty. He locked that shit down, put a ring on it, and knocked her up right quick. But now I wondered what she had been like before that, before she became someone’s wife, someone’s maid and cook. Before she had been expected to come to heel when her husband put his foot down.

Had she been wild and free? A romantic? Or a pessimist like she was now? I realized I didn’t really know my own mama.

But while I registered that fact, I tried to will her into looking into my eyes and having an open conversation with me for once.

It occurred to me that a few weeks ago, I would’ve given anything to have her look at me and not be disappointed. I wasn’t kidding myself—I still wanted that. I wanted it badly, but now I knew I could live without it.

I might have to live without it.

It felt like an hour had passed, but finally, she said, “Well, maybe I didn’t know what to say.”

“Okay. I can understand that. It wasn’t like we had experience or knowledge of that kinda thing back then. It wasn’t somethin’ we dealt with in our sheltered lives. But what about now?”

“You think you were sheltered?”

“Well, yeah. I’m not sayin’ it was always a bad thing, but there were a lot of things I knew nothin’ about until I grew up and moved out. Until that day, the day Daddy… the day Daddy caught me kissin’ Paula—until that day, I truly thought if I didn’t go to church at least twice a week, I’d be struck down by God. Obviously, that’s not true.” I held my arms out to my sides, proving no lightning bolts had come for me yet.

“That’s a different conversation for another time,” I said, “but I don’t know who God is. I don’t know who it is you believe in, ’cause I could never believe in a God who hates me, who thinks I shouldn’t have been born or that there’s somethin’ wrong with me. That’s not my God, Mama.”

She peeked at me, but mostly her eyes stayed on the table.

“I’m your daughter,” I whispered, but then I made my voice louder. “Didn’t you see me cryin’? Didn’t you see the way Daddy talked to me, hear the awful things he said to me? Didn’t you know how it made me feel? How it broke me? How I dreamed about runnin’ away so I wouldn’t have to feel like every breath I took let you down?”

I wondered if she could feel the desperation finally exploding out of me, the feeling inside my body that filled every cell, every thought, every memory. The sadness and hurt that I wasn’t enough for her. That soul-deep rejection I felt every time she wished I was someone else.

That was too scary to confront. Much scarier than the fact that I was gay, but it was all a byproduct of it.

“Maybe I was afraid to make your daddy mad.”

“What?”

Finally, she looked up, biting the inside of her lip for a minute. “I was brought up to obey my husband, Abey. If I had spoken to you about any of this, that would’ve been disobedient. It’s not an excuse, but it’s the reason.”

“Daddy forbade you to discuss it with me?” I’d figured as much, but still, it hurt to hear.

“More than once. I begged him.”

“Why?” Did she even know? Had my daddy even known why he hated me?

She scoffed softly. “Because you scared him, and it’s a pretty well-known fact that big, strong men who think they rule the world and that women are here just to do for them, well, they don’t take well to things they don’t know or can’t control.”

“What was so scary about a fifteen-year-old girl kissin’ another girl? It was just a peck on the lips.”

She sighed. “Our church told us that if a man lay with another man, or a woman with another woman, they were p—that it wasn’t… right. It wasn’t what God wanted, and it was unnatural.”

She stopped herself from calling me a child molester, and my hands began to shake. I was terrified of the answer to the question I was about to ask, and hearing her say it out loud would break me in two.

“Do you think that? Truly? That I could hurt a child?” She didn’t answer, and it looked like it might physically hurt her to look in my eyes. “Look at me, please, Mama.”

She did finally. She lifted her head, and her blue eyes landed on my matching ones. There was a lifetime of sadness and regret in hers. “I don’t know what I think,” she said. “But no. I don’t think you’d hurt anyone. But I didn’t know the first thing about that stuff back then, only what I’d been told, what we were made to believe. How would anything I said back then have been helpful or made a difference?”

I hadn’t known the relief I’d feel when she said it. I couldn’t have accepted any kind of relationship she tried to have with me if she’d truly thought I would ever hurt a child like that. I’d never realized how much the possibility of her believing such disgusting things about me had become a disease inside me.