I’m not sure I should keep the box. The black box that’s got every piece of me that nobody thought to tell me and just let me find out after momma died. If I were stronger here, I’d throw the damn box in the dumpster before I leave the diner and my little room for good. All the bad that momma kept hidden from me lives in the box.
I don’t know why I touch this picture of me with my daddy. Somebody wrote my name along the bottom, somebody thought to do it. Why would my momma have written the name of her baby there, like she’d already known who I was.
My car’s still at Roy’s and I don’t have the stomach to get it. I never want to see him again, and yet I gotta see him to get my car. And then I got this picture of his daddy, my daddy holding me. Roy never knew, he couldn’t have known, either.
And that’s why I look up from where I’m sitting on the floor of my room above the diner. Maybe my momma, my momma with not an ounce of courage inside her, wrote my name along the bottom of this picture but never shared it with no one. No, that’s not right. My daddy’s holding me. And I’m younger than Roy, which means that Roy must have been growing up somewhere with someone when I came along. Somebody in Nordeen had to have known all about me and Roy. And not one single person ever had to sense, the kindness, some kind of heart to tell us we were related?
I’m gonna be sick again. In two days since I found out, sitting in the dark or crawling to the bathroom to throw up again, is all I can do. And I feel it starting all over again. I want to sleep so I can’t think or feel or be alive. I’m just gonna curl up here and pull the blanket down from the bed. I’m gonna stop breathing and keep my eyes closed. If I pull the cover real tight, I can’t hear any think. Air is going in tinier than a bird’s breathing and I’m feeling better and I think sleep’s coming finally. And I can’t know until tomorrow that I’ve finally fallen asleep.
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You have really accomplished something impressive here! I think that rendering the emotional state of a character undergoing some big turmoil - as Rawling is doing here - and making it work on both an emotional & literary level is next to impossible. And you do it absolutely perfectly here! I love all of this. I read it twice, just for the pleasure of it. And I think that this line - Air is going in tinier than a bird’s breathing - is probably one of the most evocative and beautiful things I've ever read. If I invented Creative Caffeine just to get you to write this book, my work is done!
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