By Cindy Wiggins Tapia

Mama loved telling stories about Buford’s bygone days—murders, boating accidents, cars vs. train collisions, plane crashes, car wrecks, and,  in particular, the fires that haunted historic downtown, which may have inspired her to set a little flame of her own that became Cindy lore.   

“Fire!” She screamed as I walked out of her door on Garner Street that day in 2004. I hit the ceiling, and when I came back down, she shouted, “April fool!”

So, the next April first,  I walked in and sat down heavily in the chair at the opposite end of the table and lowered my head to my hands.

“What’s wrong, Cindy hunny?”

I lifted my eyes and said, “I’m pregnant.”

Everybody in the house swarmed into the kitchen. Renay jumped up and down so hard I thought she was going to punch a hole in the floor and join the wharf rats in the crawl space. Aunt Pam goes “OhMyGawd! Do you know how old you are?  You’re forty-eight years old, and you know it!”

Naw!

I had em by the short hairs, baby, and with great hilarity let the fool hammer fall.

“April fools!”

Renay stopped abusing the floor and hung her head. Mama screamed with rare laughter. Aunt Pam’s grin wouldn’t quit, and she hit me upside the arm for alarming her like that.

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t, no, uh uh, twern’t.

Aunt Flo didn’t show that month. Or the next. Every time I walked through Mama’s door, everyone snickered. So,  off to the doctor I went for a blood test. One long week later I got the results. The good news was couched in disquiet. The test was negative, but I was in menopause.

So began my two long years between nuclear heat and high tears, with Nabo rolling his eyes right alongside me. I was bad-tempered and boohooy and hot. I chewed him out for suggesting we have spaghetti for supper and cried all the way to Kroger’s to get the ingredients, so hot I wanted to hang out the window and let my tongue flap in the wind. We didn’t have heat, yet in the dead of winter,  I threw off the blankets, and Nabo would throw them back on me.

“Stop it!”

“You’ll freeze, you!”

“How can I freeze when I’m burning up?”

Mama died in the spring of 2006.  We gathered at Tapp’s. I had been out on the porch, smoking and came back in, heading back into the viewing room when my teenage niece, Brittany, pulled me aside.

“Cindy,” she whispered. “Do you have a tampon Alannah can borrow?”

“No. I don’t have periods these days.”

“Lucky!”  

Really?  Was I? I stood there with eggless ovaries and wondered what had been so important in all my pre-thirty childbearing years that I hadn’t taken the time to have a baby.

“I waited too long,” I expressed to my gynecologist one day.

“No,” he said.  “Things happen when they’re supposed to. It just wasn’t in the stars for you to have children.”

And so, I left his office to begin what I thought was the rest of my life with a man who desired the child I could never give him.