Crave - Laurie Jean Cannady

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void she could no longer fill. The walk from Grandma’s porch to the curb had never been so much of a journey. She looked through the open window, saw her daddy’s bronze face, his round chin, which sat heavily on his chest, obscuring his neck. He didn’t look so mean, so demanding in that car by himself. He just looked like her daddy, the man who’d worked at the shipyard all of his life, the one who sold liquor to his little brother and then gently collected his rumpled, inebriated body after he’d passed out in the yard. She saw that man who’d loved hard, so hard sometimes she felt as if she were being strangled.

      Momma walked that last stretch of yard, paused at the open window, and placed her hand on the door. She leaned down to him, careful not to lean too far in. He locked eyes with her. She heard him questioning why she hadn’t gotten into the car even though he never opened his mouth. Momma swallowed, but her throat was as dry as the dirt yard she’d just traveled. She fingered the rim of the car window, wishing she could slink into the thin opening.

      Granddaddy, again, didn’t open his mouth, still speaking with his eyes, penetrating, growing more demanding with blinks. Momma had no response. She did not have his powers. It was hard enough to speak with her tongue.

      His eyes widened at first, then retreated into his face. Their eyes met again, but his, this time, looked away. She heard an “umpf” escape him, as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. He raised his fist, but no blow came. The hum of the car engine was the only sound, the only feeling radiating through their bodies. Then there was a shift, not of her, but of the car. She felt it go into gear. She opened her eyes and saw her daddy looking at her in wonder, as if he were meeting her for the second time and trying to place where they first met.

      She considered telling him it wasn’t her fault, that Pop had done this, and she had never really been willing, but there was no use. No matter how far she walked from that reality, the blame would always find its way back. So, she remained quiet and watched her daddy, shoulders slumped near the steering wheel, hand hanging on the shifter. She watched as her daddy slowly coasted away.

       MISSING INGREDIENTS MISSING INGREDIENTS

       Missing Ingredients Missing Ingredients

      Soon after Momma learned she was pregnant, she sent Pop a letter. He revealed his life was just beginning as he trained for the Air Force and they could never actually be together because she was so young. He questioned whether she’d given it to someone else, probably because it had been so easy for him to take it. He decided the baby wasn’t his, but because he wanted to assist her, he’d get his cousin to give her pills, so all their troubles could disappear. She never wrote him again. Just months after her sixteenth birthday, she became a single mother. Grandma Rachel decided she would take care of the baby so Momma could go back to school, but months after the baby was born, Grandma Rachel suffered a massive stroke and died.

      Momma met my father, Carl, on the school bus when she was six months pregnant with Pop’s baby. Fortunately for Momma, her pregnancy didn’t broadcast a “This body is busy making another body” signal. Momma’s pregnancy was inviting, her body tight, round in all of the right places. In those first months, she lost weight and that made her features more striking than they’d been before she got pregnant.

      After she’d asked to sit next to him, he cautiously sparked a conversation with her, knowing what all guys at Cradock High knew: she was a Boone girl, the youngest, and that meant you didn’t mess with her, unless you wanted to be messed with. But somebody had already messed with her, he saw. Messed with her real bad because she sat, chin resting on her hand, books opened but unread, belly bigger than it should have been when a body was that small. And those thin fingers, curled under her chin, none of them wore a wedding band, which would have bestowed honor upon her situation.

      When I was ten months old, Momma rushed me to the hospital because I couldn’t breathe. My chest, filled with crackles, rumbles, and bubbles, sounded as if Pop Rocks were sizzling inside of it. Of course, I can’t remember any of this, due to the age/memory handicap, but there are things the body knows, even if the mind has not the capacity. I’d contracted pneumonia. Mucus, which lined the walls of my lungs, expanded like insulation foam. I’d suffered an unbreakable fever for more than a week and had a whining cough reminiscent of a car with a faulty starter.

      Momma waited as long as she could to take me to the hospital, not because she wasn’t concerned, but because she had my older brother, Champ, at home and my younger brother, Dathan, in her belly. Plus, sick babies didn’t normally require hospital care. A pot of boiled onions, a sponge bath, and a round of steam-filled bathroom visits could usually do the trick.

      She packed bottles of water mixed with Pet Evaporated Milk and the cloth diapers she’d washed earlier in the kitchen sink. She prepared a meager meal for Champ of flour bread and a slice of the block of cheese she’d picked up from the welfare office. She did not know who would watch him while she was at the hospital with me, but she had to get moving. Movement often led to solutions and she required solutions for so many things in that moment.

      Believing it would be too easy to say “no” to a voice, she did not make calls. Instead, she caught a cab to her sister’s, rehearsing the dialogue that would convince her to watch my brother. Knowing Momma, there was no pleading, no crying, maybe some adamant reassurances it would only be a couple of hours. Whatever the exchange, Momma continued to the hospital with me alone.

      The cab pulled into the emergency room driveway. Momma handed the driver the last of her money, which would have been spent on food and milk for us children. She pushed through the emergency room doors, rushed to the glass window at the registration desk, holding my limp body. I was wrapped in a cloth blanket, folded longways. With my arms and legs pinned so tightly to my body, I might have been mistaken for a caterpillar in a cocoon. Momma leaned on the desk, not out of disrespect, but exhaustion.

      “What’s wrong?” the nurse asked curtly.

      “She’s not breathing right,” Momma replied.

      “How long has she been sick?”

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