At the clinic, she was given a pregnancy test that confirmed what Mama already knew, and after the abortion, Lydia was occupied with the memory of what had happened. That her mother had not asked her, did she want to keep her baby? Though Lydia definitely hadn’t wanted to bear Tony Crawford’s baby, she thought her mother should have asked. Instead, when her name had been called in the lobby, Mama told her, it was time now. She asked Lydia if she wanted her to be in the room with her, and her daughter said yes. Then Lydia had lain on the table and a nice but businesslike white doctor had pricked a needle inside her while Mama had held her hand. There was a sucking noise, and the slight cramps that the doctor told her to expect were more than that. The pain nearly overwhelmed her, and she wanted to piss herself. But in a few minutes, it was done, and Lydia only bled normally, not the clots that would have been cause for alarm. The relief would come days later, but before that, there were the familiar feelings of self-hatred and shame. She wasn’t a good girl anymore; she was tainted. And because Lydia was busy nursing both of those emotions as if they were twin babies she’d birthed, she forgot to ask Mama about what else went on in a marriage. What else should she know?
Five years later, Lydia went down to the Fulton County courthouse and married the man she loved. By then it was too late. Nothing her mother could say would push Lydia from her path, even after Lydia found those cellophane packets in Dante’s drawer.
She wanted to let go of her panic, and then anger. She’d grown up with drugs. Not in her parents’ house, naturally, but there had been drugs in her high school. Everybody drank beer. There was weed, too, which was harmless, a plant that didn’t do much, unless you were drinking while you smoked. A few bold kids stole Valium from their parents’ medicine cabinets, but those were very rare treats.
Like the stolen pills, cocaine was for special occasions. Once in a while, somebody at a party had a packet of powder but kept that confidential, only sharing it with a chosen number, and Lydia was always asked, did she want a line? And she’d smoked primos, too, joints with coke sprinkled inside. She really liked those, how the coke sent you flying, but the weed chilled you out. She and her high school friends had agreed that primos and even straight powder cocaine were completely different from smoking crack rocks.
Crack was ghetto and trashy. You didn’t bring rocks to a party or smoke them when you were kicking it with your friends. It was like a tacky outfit that you hung in the back of your closet, because you never wanted people to see you with it on. And anybody who smoked rocks went downhill rapidly, like the miserable souls who frequented the crack house three blocks away from Lydia’s high school. The neighborhood had once been a nice, middle-class area, and the house had been a showpiece, but something happened at the beginning of Lydia’s sophomore year. The kids at school said the people who had lived in the house had died and their only child, a son, smoked rocks. Within weeks, the house had turned into a residence haunted by addicts struggling up the steps and hanging outside. And it hadn’t mattered how many times somebody called the law. The police would raid the house and the addicts would scatter, but forty-eight hours later, the smoking would begin again.
Lydia thought of what smoking crack would do to her husband. His lips constantly dry from the chemicals. An empty stare to his eyes, and her heart contracted, but that Sunday, when she called him to let him know she had arrived back on campus safely, he sounded his usual self. He only missed her, he said. He had a hard time sleeping without her.
“Do you want to tell me something?” she asked.
“Why don’t you ask me what you want told?” he asked.
Lydia liked her husband’s openness. She hated somebody beating around the blackberry bush, too.
“Dante, we need to talk.”
“Uh-oh. What’d I do?”
“I saw something in your dresser drawer. I was just putting your underwear in the top drawer, like I always do. I promise I wasn’t snooping.”
“Lydia, let’s talk about this on Friday when you get here. Okay, baby?”
“But Dante—”
“Woman, what I say? We’ll talk about on the weekend. Good night, okay?”
On Friday, her classes were over at noon, and she already had her bag packed in the trunk of the car. She stopped in Chicasetta at the Pig Pen and picked up pork chops, several bunches of greens, two plump ham hocks, and a package of frozen lima beans. For dessert, she wanted to make a pound cake, and also bought eggs and butter. There was already rice in the apartment; she made sure to buy five pounds every month.