My paternal grandmother is looking for a second chance. In 1969, Audrey left behind an abusive husband and five young children. Rumor was that she left with the mailman. Leaving one small town in Georgia for another. Most likely leaving one painful family situation for one equally painful.
When Herbert, her first husband and my grandfather, died from the cancers eating his stomach, liver and lungs, Audrey came back. She came back looking for those children: Leroy, Wilma, Brenda, Larry Clyde and Johnny. She came back to that small town in Georgia, hoping for a second chance. Apparently her second husband had also passed and she wanted her family back.
But what happens when a mother leaves? Is a hole left by her absence? Was she missed and mourned? Most likely, yes. Most likely for the first ten years, she was missed like crazy. When her children began to marry and have their own children, they probably wished like hell that Audrey could see those grandchildren. But a lot changes between ten years later and thirty.
By the time she returned, those grandchildren were beginning to have children. The hole left by Audrey’s departure 3 decades earlier was covered up by years of ritual: Christmases, marriages, births, deaths, divorces. The newest members of her family had no idea who she was. Even their parents only knew her as a face in one or two fading photographs. She never even had a color as far as her grandchildren and great-grandchildren knew; only a black-and-white woman who didn’t seem to smile.
Audrey hasn’t had an easy life. She married young, married an unhappy alcoholic young man who worked hard at the sawmill and even harder at the hootch. By the time she was twenty, she had two children and a new bruise each week. Her beauty (she was truly beautiful, something rare in that small apple picking town) and her love for life were quickly marred by the everyday life she led. I can imagine that the mailman offered something she could only imagine: a world beyond the end of the road. Maybe even a world beyond the borders of such an oppressive life.
I can almost give a damn for her. I can almost give her a second chance. But I know what happened to that family after she left. Her abusive husband became an abusive daddy. The oldest boy went from handsome high school jock to alcoholic jerk in five years. The two girls grew up to be old and bitter, taking their only pleasures from fatty foods and fat juicy gossip. The youngest son became a slob who gambled other people’s money and sold dope for a living. And Larry Clyde married six times by age 40. Always trying to find his mother.
There is no second chance. As a granddaughter to Audrey, I will forgive but not forget. Or rather, I will not remember. I only know her as a black-and-white woman who never smiles. My son will never know her at all.