The Ones I Come From

When I was little, my mama convinced me I came only from her.

“It’s why we look so much alike." She would say, with a pinch of my freckled cheeks and a tug on one of my unruly curls. I would look into her light brown eyes that mirrored my own and believe her.

My nana, who shared the same curly hair and freckly face, would shake her head and scold my mama behind closed doors of our yellow house, but neither of them would correct what I knew to be true: I was my mother’s daughter, and hers alone.

It was not until Sunday school in the third grade when mean, white-haired Ms. Martha forebodingly told the class Jesus was not Joseph’s son, but Mary’s alone! My hand shot up to announce that I was the same, Ms. Martha nearly had a heart attack, and the two women who raised me were forced to set the story straight.

“His name was Jack. I don’t know anything else, and don’t ask me either." My mama was unable to look me in the eye as she shoved a photograph into my hands. A younger version of her and a man in a cowboy hat and a long sleeve button up stood with their arms around each other on the side of a road dotted with cacti. His face was hidden by the hat, and all I could see was he was tall and tan. Nana told me later they met in West Texas during mama’s “wild phase” and she came back home with me in her belly, and that was that.

The photograph was pinned to the cork board in my bedroom beside cutouts of celebrities from my J-14 magazines and printed song lyrics I had doodled hearts around. Over time, cutouts of shirtless men replaced the pre-teen friendly ones, and poems about boys that broke my heart took the place of the song lyrics, and by my senior year of high school, a college acceptance letter to UT covered it all.

But the photograph remained.

The photograph was there when I came home from college every summer. It was there when we celebrated my first job and Nana’s long overdue retirement. And there when I left the lake early Memorial Day Weekend brokenhearted because the man I thought was proposing, announced he was in love with someone else. The photograph was there, at twenty-five years old, when my mama called me during a happy hour with friends in downtown Dallas, and I had to step outside the restaurant to better hear her trembling voice that whispered, “Jack wants to meet you, baby.”

As I look up at the yellow, two-story house with a white wrap around porch that could use a new coat of paint, I know the photograph will be there. 

Except this time, for the first time, so will he.

I open the creaky screen door with my stomach in my throat. My nana greets me with one of my favorite cinnamon sugar cookies and a hug. I am barely able to return her embrace because across the beige carpeted living room, he sits on the couch.

My mama leaps up from her chair at the sight of me, fidgety and anxious. I can guarantee she has been picking her fingernails to the quick. She offers me a tentative smile, but I am too fixated on him. Jack stands up slowly, a cowboy hat in hand. He does not appear nervous like my mama. He is calm, like me.

His hair is peppery, his eyes blue, and his skin like leather.

We look nothing alike, and I have a strange urge to laugh at this stranger across the room from me.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hello,” I reply.

“We’ll let you two get on,” My mama offers quietly, squeezing my shoulder as she walks by to join nana in the kitchen.

“I’ve been wanting to meet you for a while now,” Jack says. I want to ask what he means by a while, but instead I say nothing at all. “Your mama says you got a fancy job in the city.”

I nod. Mama tells everyone that.

“Listen, I…I hope it’s okay that I’m here.”

“It’s okay,” I say, reassuring myself more than him.

“I wanted to reach out a lot sooner than when you were all grown up,” He says, his voice cracking a bit at the end.

“It’s okay,” I repeat.

“You see, I drank a lot when I met your mama,” He attempts to explain. “If I’m honest, I drank a lot up until a couple years back, but I...I’m sober now.”

“That’s good,” I say, and I want to be genuine, but it comes off flat.

He shrugs. “I just thought it was the right thing to do. To meet you.”

A silence follows and questions gnaw at me. The kitchen is silent, and I know Mama and Nana have their ears pressed up to the door.

“You live in West Texas?” I ask and he nods eagerly. “What do you do?”

“Well I work the oil fields.”

Of course he does.

“Did you know about me? When she was pregnant?”

Another nod. Of course he did. Though I am surprised by how much knowing this does not bother me.

“I don’t look like you,” I say abruptly. Jack looks dumbfounded, and I can feel him studying me. From my head of unruly brown curls pinned half-back all the way down to my dainty feet.

“No, you don’t.” He admits. “You look your mama.”

Tears fill my eyes. We exchange a few more niceties. I do not invite him to stay for dinner and he does not ask to join. He shakes my hand when we say goodbye and I notice, like me, he does not bite or pick his nails.

“Thank you,” I say at the door, smiling. “For coming.”

He tips his hat at me, hops in his pick-up truck, and leaves.

“How was that?” Nana asks as her arms wrap around me from behind, holding me close.

“Like meeting a stranger,” I reply. My mama sits on the stairs, watching us with a sad look, but not saying a word.

When I go to bed in my childhood bedroom that night, the photograph is still there. 

--------------------------------

The photograph is there, one year later, when I get a call in my new office with a door. Pouring over spreadsheets, I am tempted to press ignore, but mama’s contact photo in my cellphone grins up at me and the guilt of being her only daughter wins.

“Hey mama, can I call you-"

“Come home,” She interrupts, with emotion in her voice I have only heard once before. “It’s Nana.”

The photograph is there on the corkboard of my room as I lay on the bed holding nana’s apron tight to my chest. It smells of cinnamon and sugar; it smells of her. Hot tears roll down my cheeks and when I see the photograph across the room, I feel compelled to rip it down; to tear that stupid picture in two.

“Goodness did she love you." Mama interrupts my rage, leaning against the frame of the door, her own grief pooling in her eyes. 

“She did, huh?” I reply, searching for reassurance even though I already know the answer.

“She saw my belly when I got out of the car all those years ago,” Mama continues, lost in a memory. “And she didn’t ask a single question. She just looked me in the eye and said, ‘well alright, let’s raise this baby up.’”

My vision goes blurry with tears and I can barely see the photograph now.

“You know how I used to tell you that you only come from me?” She asks, and my heart lurches at the words. “Well, I lied.”

“Mama-” The man I met once is the last thing I want to talk about now.

“You come from me and from her,” She whispers.

I press the cinnamon sugar smelling apron to my face and cry.

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The photograph is not there anymore.

It sits in the bottom drawer of an old oak writing desk in a new home. When my curly haired daughters ask me who my daddy was, I pull it for them. They laugh with blue eyes like their daddy’s and tell me I don’t look like mine. I smile, nod, and tuck it back away.

On the corkboard I hang in my eldest daughter’s room I pin a photograph of two women and a baby in front of a yellow house: my nana, my mama, and me.

The women who raised me. The only ones I come from.