I Knew It Was Missing - Bonnie Smetts

I knew something else was missing, I knew a lot was still missing. “And my daddy, you ever knew my daddy?” My anger had unleashed something in me now.

“Rawling, you’re pushing me to talk about your momma. She had men around her, always around her, more than after you were born. So really, who knows who might have been,” Shirley says, not looking at me directly.

“I got one picture of him, or someone who’d had to been him holding me when I was a baby,” I say. And now she is looking at me and she’s not looking one bit comfortable.

“How do you know it’s you?” she says.

“Because I found it in the same box where I found my momma with her momma,” I say. “And that picture of me with my daddy, somebody had written my name along the bottom. That’s gotta be me and that’s gotta be my daddy,” I say.

“Well, who knows, it could’ve been just about anyone, hon,” Shirley says. And I guess she’s right but I don’t want her to be right. I want to know who’s who in my life. And I can’t tell if Shirley’s telling me the truth or not. “I could show it to you. Maybe you’d recognize him.”

Shirley goes crazy with this. “Rawling, I can’t be getting involved in the part of your life that’s done, gone and been over with for all these years. I’ve already said enough, sharing what should’ve probably been left alone. Like you should have just left your grandmother alone.”

“And you have to promise me you’re not going back out to bother those nice people. You got to just leave people be, Rawling,” she says. She’s circling the kitchen now, she’s thrown open those swinging doors and she’s making a wide loop around the prep table in the center of the room. Raolo’s pretending we’re not there. And I hope he’s not understanding a bit of this. I feel like a naked person, here talking to Shirley about who I am and who my people might have been or that I even got people.

My momma always said the woman that raised her was all that she’d known about and that was that and that woman, kind as she’d been, was gone. And I’d learned not to ask, ever, and I’d learned to look down at my desk when teachers asked about families. They’d learned not to ask me after the first time or two when it was plain that I didn’t have any thing to say.

“I’m getting that picture, that picture of the man who’s gotta a chance of being my daddy,” I say. And now I’m the crazy one, slamming the back door, running up the stairs to my room and pulling that black box from under my bed.