Free Cooking as Fast as I Can by Cat Cora Page B

me.
    Joanne was fifteen when she went to a concert with a friend and fell hard for the drummer in one of the bands. His name was Knox, and he was twenty, an older man. He had long hair that hung over one eye. When she wound up pregnant, his daddy told her daddy that marrying her was out of the question, that it would ruin his life. It was 1966, and her options were to have an illegal abortion, to have the baby and keep it, or to have the baby and put it up for adoption. She knew a girl who’d snuck away to New York for an abortion, but her parents were God-fearing Mississippi Christians and no way no how was this ever going to happen.
    She was packed off to a foster home before she was even showing. Her foster parents were an old couple and business was so good they built an addition onto the back of their house specifically to house their foster children. The old man liked to wander back and look through the bathroom window and watch her while she bathed. When she told her parents about this, they sent her to the unwed mothers’ home in New Orleans. The first day she was there she was on the trolley by herself and a man exposed himself to her; she was immediately whisked off to the Florence Crittenton Home, where she met girls from California and New York. She liked her roommate, a teacher from up north who had her baby only a few days before I was born.
    Joanne told me that she had the option not to see me, and even though she knew it would bring her heartbreak shehad to hold me, count my fingers and toes, and look into my eyes. She passed me over to the Mississippi Children’s Home, and then she went home herself, to Greenwood. She was sixteen.
    Still, a month later she took the bus back to Jackson, then a taxi to the Children’s Home. She marched in, shaking with the nerve of what she was about to do, and asked to have me back. She thought that if she walked in the door of her parents’ house with a babe in arms, they would glimpse their own flesh and blood and experience a change of heart. But she was too late; I had already been placed with Spiro and Virginia Lee Cora.
    She didn’t believe them. “You’re lying!” she screamed. “I know she’s back there. Let me see her. Let me have her back.” She was hysterical. No one could calm her down. The woman at the front desk called Joanne’s dad. Joanne’s mom had reported her missing earlier in the day, and had had a pretty good idea where she was headed.
    â€œEvery year on your birthday I would call the Children’s Home and ask whether you were okay. They couldn’t tell me anything other than that you were alive. Once I sent a doll, but I’m not sure whether you ever got it. I’ve spent a lifetime looking for you. I knew that if I glimpsed you in another woman’s arms or in a stroller, or playing with a bunch of kids at the park, or even later, hanging out at the mall, that I would absolutely recognize you.”
    Only a few years earlier, Gaylon, a friend of hers, spied a picture of the new crop of Gayfer Girls on the department store wall near customer service. Thinking she recognized me, she called Joanne, who rushed over to see for herself. “I knew it was you,” she told me. “I didn’t even need to see your birthmark.” I smiled at that old southern saying, which means I know you so well I would recognize you anywhere.
    I felt dizzy trying to absorb the reality of this—that while I’d been going about my business growing from child to teen to young adult, the woman who’d given birth to me was looking into the faces of all the girls she came upon on the street, seeing if it was me, her daughter.

    After our reunion, Joanne and I saw each other a lot. We met for lunch, and sometimes she came to dinner at our home on Swan Lake Drive. Once she invited me to drive up to the small town of Belzoni, in the Delta, to the house where my birth father, Knox, lived.