Free Cooking as Fast as I Can by Cat Cora

her anymore, and what was she going to do? She’d shot the light fixture, which had apparently satisfied her appetite for gun violence. She handed the gun over to me. After I sat her down and made sure she was all right, I got the hell out of there.
    I dropped her revolver into my purse and forgot about it. A week later Natalie and I and a few guys she knew decided a bar crawl was in order. It may have been after exams. We drank at home, then hopped into the car and sped down the dark highway in search of a great bar someone knew down in Purvis, or maybe Lumberton. The radio was cranked, windows rolled down, we were hollering and singing into the night. Then, the red and blues started flashing behind us. We weren’t especially panic stricken, not at first. Your average Mississippi cop was unmoved in the face of an open beer. Usually they’d sidle over to the window and say, “I’ll just take that beer from you and give you this ticket. Now don’t let me catch you again and get on home.”
    But this particular officer pulled the driver out of the car, and without any cordial chitchat handcuffed him and tossed him into the back of his patrol car. Natalie and I were in thebackseat clinging to each other, drunk and sobbing. “We’re going to jail! Some crazy backwater jail where we’re going to get raped and murdered.” We were scared, but it wasn’t until I remembered the pistol in my purse that I saw spots before my eyes and felt my internal organs clench with fear.
    The cop found the gun and took us all back to the station. I was sobering up quick and thought with horror of how my parents and Grandmom would react. They would be disappointed, sad, and pissed, and not necessarily in that order. I thought about their utter devotion to me, their commitment to helping me get through school, the way they dropped everything and probably broke a few speed limits themselves racing down to Hattiesburg to help me move. They really didn’t deserve this.
    I was handcuffed, fingerprinted, and booked for carrying a concealed weapon. I explained that the reason I had the gun was that I’d taken it away from a friend who’d threatened to kill herself. I offered to show them how I didn’t even know how to shoot the thing. I said I was happy and relieved that they had confiscated it. I was smart enough to keep saying a friend and not my girlfriend. I would probably still be in jail had I dropped that bomb on those good old boys.
    They confiscated the pistol, issued me a fine, and released me.
    Not long after that, I found out that I’d finally passed algebra.

seven
    M y mom kept a scrapbook for each of her kids, and on the inside of mine, written on the bottom left corner of the front cover in black permanent marker, it said: Born April 3, 1967. Adopted April 10, 1967. The large, clear hand proclaims there are no secrets here. My parents made a point of treating my adoption, and also the adoption of my brother Mike, as if they were the most normal family events.
    Then as now, adoption is closed in Mississippi, but when I turned twenty-one I was given the chance to find my birth mother. I’d wondered about her, of course, but at that moment all I really knew was that I came from good, healthy stock. A few years earlier, when I was around eighteen, I became curious about my health history. I can’t remember why I was so curious, other than I was beginning to understand that I didn’t share my parents’ DNA, but had the DNA of other people who might be wandering the earth with some inheritable syndrome or disease that I should know about. I’d asked my parents, and they said all they knew was that the Mississippi Children’s Home had given me a clean bill of health before my adoption was finalized.
    What I didn’t know was that my question inspired my mom to contact the Children’s Home. She learned that my birth mother called the home every year