TheBanyanTree: Cindi's Life Begins

[Monique Colver]

Cindi, with an i, not a y, looked out the car window as she passed by the
Centreville Shopping Center, looking for something new, something different,
but it was all the same as it had been the week before. Dark storefronts,
the occasional bright light with a few cars pulling in and out, the three
local banks, quiet now in the dusk of a holiday weekend. One grocery store,
desultory traffic in and out, one drug store, a pizza place known for its
cheap pizza, and, oddly, a do-it-yourself crafts store, which was the
busiest of them all. And all the dark storefronts of the little places that
had closed down when the rent exceeded the income, the store owners now
adrift. Perhaps they’d gone to work for someone else, or perhaps they’d left
town altogether, searching out new opportunities somewhere fresh and new.
Perhaps they were at home, even now, cowering behind their drawn curtains
and wondering what to do next, and how they were going to pay the bills this
month.

Cindi-with-an-i didn’t know, and she didn’t particularly care. The question
was, what was she going to do now? And why?

The sky was purple in the west, and soon it would be complete dark. Usually
Cindi would be at home by the time dark fell, as if she were safer then, but
she no longer felt safe at all, even in daylight when the air was full of
promises.

Centreville was the same as it always was, a small town on the verge of
something new, and for all the years she’d waited for something to happen,
nothing had. It was still the same down on its luck struggling community,
and she was still the same single mother down on her luck she’d been for the
past 14 years, with the same job at the same insurance agency.

Except now she was no longer a mother, at least not a full time one. Her son
had decided he wanted to live with his father, a man he barely knew who
lived a thousand miles away by land, more than that by the heart. Cindi
barely knew the man herself, they hadn’t been in love, they’d barely known
one another, but her son had insisted, and her son’s father had said he
wanted his son to come live with him, that it was time he got to know him
and show him what it was like to be a man.

“A boy needs a father,” he’d said to Cindi when they’d talked on the phone.
(And a son doesn’t need a mother? Cindi had thought, but hadn’t said.)

She’d let her son go, only after making him promise to call her, and to tell
her as soon as he wanted to come home again.

“This isn’t my home anymore,” her son had answered, “My home’s with my dad
now.”

She’d wept as he flew out the front door and jumped into the car, into the
waiting camaraderie of a man he barely knew, but preferred over his mother.

And now she was alone again, more alone than she’d ever been before, as if a
piece of her had left with him, the piece that had kept her from feeling the
sharp loneliness of a summer night when the town was dark and her phone was
silent. She felt it now, and while she knew she had no choice but to return
to her home she delayed, driving down darkened streets, wondering what
people around here did at night. Where did everyone go? To their houses,
happy and content? Didn’t they feel the darkness of the night sky like a
heavy weight, like she did? Didn’t they realize how alone they really were,
even when they were surrounded by others? Didn’t they know how dangerous it
was to love, and how it could disappear in a second? How could they not see
how dangerous life was, especially at night?

She turned towards home as a prickle of something that could have been fear
but that felt a lot like emptiness settled into her spine, and she
considered her options. Go home and continue with her life as it was,
emptiness in a small town that slept with the darkness, or leave the home
she’d known and go somewhere different, somewhere with more light. Somewhere
that wasn’t as empty as the night sky. Someplace that felt like home.

She parked her car in the driveway of her rented house, a shabby two bedroom
built long before she’d been born, but instead of trudging up the front
steps as she had on her way out, her step was light, as if she could start
dancing if only there were music, and suddenly she wasn’t afraid of the dark
anymore.

-- 
Monique Colver