And what did it matter anyway? What difference would it make now?
As they had so many times before for so many years, the questions pounded through Libby’s head.
Until now, she’d always held out hope—preposterous or not—that she would come to some understanding of her mother’s life. That she would someday be at peace with Barb’s decisions. A trip to Barb’s Knits was Libby’s own personal quest for the Holy Grail, her chance to get as up close and personal as she could with the woman she’d last seen—
“Don’t go there,” she warned herself, and as she had done so expertly before, she put the thought out of her head. Call it a twist of fate. Or just a sick trick played by a brain that was mush and a body that was exhausted beyond being able to care. No sooner had one memory been suppressed than another surfaced. It was vague and disjointed, as memories often are, seen through the eyes of a child but processed now by an adult who wondered how much of it was real and how much had been distorted and repositioned into new shapes like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.
“Don’t go far, honey!”
In her mind, Libby could see Barb standing at the end of a grocery store aisle. Her dark hair spilled over her shoulders. Her skirt, with its swirls of green and red and blue, was so long it was hard to see that her feet were bare. There was a white carnation tucked behind her ear, and she was wearing the red-and-blue beads Libby had strung for her at a street fair. Barb’s eyes were bloodshot, and she swayed the way she did when she played the Beatles or the Rolling Stones on the record player in the living room and she held Libby’s hands as they danced around in a circle.
“You stay close.” Barb’s words were dreamy, and she wasn’t watching her daughter when she spoke. Her eyes were on the tall man who stood at her side. He was as skinny as the green beans Grandma Palmer served at Sunday dinner, and his hair was the color of straw. It was longer than Barb’s.
Try as she might, Libby couldn’t recall his name. She wondered if she ever knew it. She was certain, though, that Barb had spent a lot of time with the man. She had a blurred recollection of long afternoons when Barb and the man stayed in his bedroom while Libby watched Sesame Street. And flashes of memory that featured the man on the guitar and Barb singing “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Libby knew that they spent a lot of their time smoking pot because the first time she smelled it in her college dorm she immediately flashed back to that day in the grocery store and the sweet scent that had clung to her mother’s clothes.
In her mind’s eye, she watched Barb wind her fingers through the man’s. She saw the way he leaned forward and whispered in Barb’s ear. She heard her mother laugh.
“You’re a wild man!” Barb didn’t say it as if it was a bad thing. She grabbed one end of the long scarf she’d knitted out of black wool and kissed the man on the mouth, right under his bushy mustache. “One of these days, you’re going to get me in real trouble.”
Barb and the man hurried down the snack aisle, and the memory ended abruptly. It picked up again with a sense of anxiety and a mother’s knowledge that the little girl who had grown into Libby was tired and bored. It must have been past dinnertime; of all the insignificant things to remember about a day that had changed her life, Libby remembered being hungry.
She also remembered the way her throat tightened and her stomach bunched when she lost sight of her mother. The beginnings of a full-scale tantrum built.
Libby was not an emotional child. It never occurred to her to be dramatic. Rather than yell, she walked around the store, and by the time she got back to where she’d started, her feet hurt and her legs were tired. She was hungrier than ever.
As clearly as if it were yesterday, she remembered eying the shelf where the chocolate-chip cookies were displayed. It was high and she couldn’t reach it. She must have been carrying something—though she couldn’t have said what—because she remembered setting that something down. With two hands free, she swept aside the packages of pretzels on the shelf closest to the floor and climbed. She could see over the edge of the cookie shelf, but her arms weren’t long enough to reach. She stretched, and her elbow knocked against boxes of graham crackers. They hit the floor.
Libby stretched some more. Finally her fingers met their mark. She clung to a package of cookies and pulled. By the time she was settled on the green tile floor again and had a cookie in her mouth and another one in her hand, she heard a voice from the end of the aisle.
“There!”
Libby looked up to see a lady pushing a shopping cart and standing next to a man in a blue shirt. He was frowning.
The lady pointed at Libby. “I told you, Greg, she’s running around the store like a wild Indian. No one’s watching her. She’s bound to get into trouble.”
“Or to get hurt.” Greg hurried over to where Libby stood in the wreckage of graham cracker boxes and cookie crumbs. He bent down and looked her in the eye. “Hey, little girl, what’s your name? And where’s your mommy?”
Libby didn’t answer. To this very day, she felt the certainty of her decision. She didn’t have to say a word. After all Barb was in the store and pretty soon she’d show up and explain that Libby was her little girl.
Her eyes round and that extra cookie tucked behind her back, Libby waited.
Barb didn’t come.
Libby looked down the long aisle in both directions.
She didn’t see Barb or hear the sound of her laugh.
Her mouth was dry. Her tummy rumbled. “Mommy?” she said, but suddenly her throat was knotted, her voice came out too quiet for Barb to hear. “Mommy?” she called again, louder this time.
Greg stood and looked in every direction. “I don’t see your mommy around,” he said. “But don’t worry, we’ll make an announcement over the PA system. Do you know your mommy’s name?”
“There was a woman.” The lady with the shopping cart craned her neck to look toward the front of the store. “I saw her a while ago. She was with that young man. You must have seen him. The one with all the hair.” She clicked her tongue. “Hippies,” she said, sounding like Grandma Palmer did when she said it.
“Those two?” Another woman came around the corner. She glanced over her shoulder at the big front windows that looked out at the parking lot. “They just left. No more than a minute ago. You don’t suppose they could have—”
“Mommy?” Libby darted forward, but she didn’t get far. The man with the blue shirt scooped her into his arms.
“We can’t have you running all over Pittsburgh by yourself,” he said. “What do you say, ladies?” He plunked Libby down in the shopping cart among rolls of toilet paper, bags of apples and six cans of tomato soup. “You’ll stay right here with her, won’t you? I’m going to call the police.”
Had Libby been paying attention, she would have known exactly what was happening. As it was, she watched in horror as the white van she recognized as Barb’s boyfriend’s cruised by the front windows and pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street.
Her eyes filled with tears and the tantrum she’d been holding back burst with the force only a four-year-old could muster.
“Mommy!” Libby’s voice rose in panic, volume and velocity. “Mommy! Mommy!”
Libby sucked in a breath, steeling herself against the sharp pain of her memories. She wasn’t sure if they were genuine or the product of an imagination that had had years to fill in the blanks. She wasn’t sure it mattered.
Barb hadn’t so much abandoned her in that grocery store as she’d simply forgotten her. Libby often wondered if Barb felt bad about what had happened. She didn’t know for sure, she only knew that soon after, Barb signed over her parental privileges to Grandma and