by Brit Bennett
One afternoon, when the campers had gone home, Mrs. Sheppard hugged Aubrey and guided her into her office for tea. What would it be like to sit in there? Not drop envelopes on the desk or duck her head in the doorway to ask a question but to sit. Did the pink curtains look more purple? Were the photos of Luke on the desk angled so that she might be able to see his smile from the couch? Nadia tried to refocus then on the envelopes she was stuffing, but it was too late. Her mind was flooded. Luke, the boy, squeezing between his parents in the front pew and tugging at his tie, or sitting in front of her in Sunday School, where she studied him instead of the Bible, memorizing the swirl of his curly hair. Luke clomping around in cleats after football practice, or ripping through the church parking lot blasting music that made the old folks clamp hands over their ears. Her stomach leapt, like she’d missed a stair. Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.
—
THAT NIGHT, before falling asleep, Nadia opened her nightstand and felt around for the baby feet. A gift, if you could call it that, from the free pregnancy center after she’d learned her test was positive. The counselor Dolores gave her a plastic bag full of pamphlets with titles like “Caring for Your Preborn Baby,” “Secrets of the Abortion Industry,” and “Can the Pill Kill You?” Under a handout titled “True Love Waits,” the counselor had tucked a purple Precious Milestones card, explaining the stages of a baby’s development, week by week. Attached to the card was a lapel pin, a pair of tiny golden feet in the exact shape and size, Dolores told her, as those of her own eight-week-old baby.
Before leaving, Nadia had thrown up quietly inside the clinic bathroom. Then she’d dumped the pamphlets in the trash, shoving all of them through the narrow slot until she reached the card on the bottom, the one attached to the baby feet. She had never seen such a thing before—a pair of disembodied feet—and maybe the sheer oddness compelled her to keep the pin. Or maybe she had known then that she would have an abortion. She had felt her choices strung in a tight balance, and when she hadn’t been able to throw the pin away, she knew that there would be no baby, that this pin was all that would remain. She had hidden the lapel pin in the back of her drawer, past old notebooks and hair ties and an empty jewelry box her father had bought her years ago. Every night before bed, she dug through the drawer for the pin and held it in her palm, stroking the bottom of golden feet still glinting in the dark.
—
IN LATE SPRING, Oceanside was blanketed in so much mist, the locals called it May Gray. When darkened skies lasted into summer, it became June Gloom. No Sky July. Fogust. That spring, the fog was so thick, the beaches were empty until noon, surfers, unable to see ten feet in front of them, abandoning the coast. The type of thick, billowing fog that rolled fat and lazy, so much fog that the ladies at Upper Room covered their hair in hats and scarves to protect press-and-curls on their way into the church. The fog had brought with it news: the first lady had hired a new assistant and her name was Nadia Turner.
Latrice Sheppard had never had an assistant before and everyone doubted she would be able to keep one. She was tall and demanding, not some meek wife who sat in the front pew, silent and smiling. When the elders, and sometimes her husband, suggested she had too much on her plate, she said that she had not been called to sit, but to serve. And she served with the homeless ministry, the children’s ministry, the sick and shut-in ministry, the drug recovery ministry, and the women’s ministry, where she personally led outreach to the battered women’s shelter. She’d grown used to the chaos of her life, running around Upper Room from meeting to meeting, stuffing clothes donations for the homeless into the trunk of her car, hopping on the freeway to bring toys to the children’s hospital. To the battered women’s shelter, to the youth detention center, to everywhere that needed going until she ended up back home to cook dinner for her husband. But she’d never had an assistant and she didn’t want one now.
“I just don’t like the look of her,” she told her husband one morning.
“You don’t like the look of a lot of folks,” he said.
“And am I wrong?”
“It isn’t a reason to fire someone.”
Behind his desk, John sipped his coffee and Latrice sighed, pouring herself another cup. Out the window, she could see the fog rolling into the church parking lot. Enough to make her about sick of it. She was from Macon, Georgia. She knew rain and she knew humidity, but she hated this strange in-between, especially since springtime in Georgia was when azaleas and peach blossoms and magnolias bloomed and the weather was perfect for barbecues and porch-sitting and driving with the windows down. But here, she could barely see out to the road. It was enough to make her more frustrated than she already was.
“Honey, we all like Brother Turner,” she said, “but I don’t need some fast-tailed, know-nothing girl following me around all summer!”
“Latrice, the Word says that the good shepherd leaves the ninety-nine—”
“Oh, I know what the Word says. Don’t you preach at me like I’m some little woman in your congregation.”
John slipped his glasses off his face, the way he always did when he wanted to make a point. Maybe some things were easier for him to say once she was blurred, out of focus.
“We owe her,” he said.
She scoffed, turning in front of the window. She refused to be indebted to anyone, let alone a girl she’d done nothing but help. She had been the only one quick enough to act. That morning, her son had sat slumped over the kitchen table, his head in his hands, while her husband paced across the kitchen floor. Both her son’s stillness and her husband’s constant movement irritated her. She had barely woken up, hadn’t even taken the rollers out of her hair. A pregnant girl before she drank her morning coffee.
“You couldn’t have found you a girl who didn’t go to Upper Room?” she’d finally asked.
“Mama—”
“Don’t Mama me. You know it’s yours? Who knows how many of these boys she been with?”
“It’s mine,” he said. “I know it.”
“A high school girl,” she said. “Is she even eighteen?”
“Almost,” he said softly.
“After everything we taught you,” John said, “after we raised you up in the Word, after we told you about living in sin, you go out and do something as dumb as this?”
She had witnessed this scene dozens of times before, her husband yelling at Luke. For joyriding with his friends, theater-hopping, sneaking beer onto the beach in old Coke bottles, smoking reefer in Buddy Todd Park, goading Marines into fights. He wasn’t a bad kid but he was reckless. Black boys couldn’t afford to be reckless, she had tried to tell him. Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead. How many times had she told Luke to be careful? But he’d messed around with a girl who was not even legal yet—what would Robert think? He would be angry, of course, but how angry? Angry enough to haul Luke to the police station?
“She wants to get rid of it,” Luke said.
He looked defeated, brushing tears from the corner of his eye. She hadn’t seen him cry in years. Her boy, like all boys, had long outgrown her mothering. She’d watched Luke’s growth spurts, the stretch marks on his shoulders from summers of weight lifting, and the more mannish he became, the less he felt like her son. He was someone else now, a furtive and cagey person who disappeared behind closed doors and stopped talking on the phone when she entered the room. In elementary school, he’d wrestled with his friends on the living room rug, but in high school, she’d seen him shove a friend into a wall so hard, a picture fell off its hook. What bothered her most was the surprise on his face when she’d yelled at him to stop, as if roughness came so naturally, he was startled to find it a problem.
A daughter grows older and draws nearer to her mother, until she gradually overlaps her l
ike a sewing pattern. But a son becomes some irreparably separate thing. So even though she hated to see her son cry, she was grateful for the chance to mother him again. She pulled him to her shoulder, stroking his hair.
“Shh now,” she said. “Mama’s taking care of it.”
At the bank, she withdrew six hundred dollars, and slid the cash in an envelope for Luke to give the girl. John hadn’t slept that night, tossing in bed, then pacing across the bedroom floor.
“We shouldn’t have done this,” he said. “My spirit-man is grieved.”
But Latrice refused to feel guilty about it. They hadn’t forced the girl to do anything she didn’t already want to do. A girl who didn’t want a baby would find a way to not have one. The good thing to do—the Christian thing—would be to make it a little easier on her. Now the girl could go off to college and leave their lives. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but thank God it wasn’t the disaster it could have been.
Still, John felt grieved, and when Robert Turner had arrived at church on Sunday, his wrecked truck already felt like a sign, the beginning of a long judgment. So John had gone to Robert’s house and offered the girl a pity job without even consulting Latrice first. Now the girl would be all under her this summer, only because John wanted to atone for undeserved grief.
“I don’t owe her a thing,” she said. “I’m all paid up.”
FOUR
At Elise Turner’s funeral, the whole church arrived early, spilling out of the pews.
We have known hard deaths before. Sammy Watkins, who’d been stabbed outside a bar, his body crumpled and wedged between two trash cans. Moses Brewer, who’d been found in Buddy Todd Park, bludgeoned to death. Kayla Dean, a fourteen-year-old shot by Mexican Bloods because she’d been wearing her boyfriend’s bright blue jacket. For a week, her high school had erupted in brawls between blacks and Mexicans until police arrived in riot gear and sheriff’s helicopters circled overhead. All the while, Upper Room remained a source of calm, Pastor Sheppard urging sense in a situation that made none. To be killed over a jacket. A child, waiting for fish tacos outside Alberto’s, who’d borrowed a jacket because she was cold, because her mother had fussed at her for coming home without one and tempting sickness. At Kayla Dean’s funeral, Upper Room had encircled the wailing mother and held her up, soundlessly, because hard deaths resist words. A soft death can be swallowed with Called home to be with the Lord or We’ll see her again in glory, but hard deaths get caught in the teeth like gristle.
We have known hard deaths, but the difference was that Elise Turner had chosen one. Not a handful of pills to stretch sleep, not a running motor in a closed garage, but a pistol to the head. How could she choose to destroy herself so violently? We’d all squeezed into pews, not knowing what to expect. What would the pastor say? Not the usual funeral scriptures, those would not do. We wouldn’t see her again in glory because what glory awaited a woman who’d sent a bullet into her own head? She had not been called home to be with the Lord—she had simply chosen to leave. Imagine, having the gall to choose when so many had that choice taken away from them. How dare she opt for a hard death when the rest of us were trying to manage the hard lives we’d been given?
We have never understood it, although maybe we should. We are, after all, the last ones to have seen Elise Turner alive. The morning she killed herself, we’d gone to Upper Room early to get started on our praying. At first, when we’d peeked through the sanctuary doors, we only saw a person wrapped in a down coat, slumped forward in front of the altar in what looked like prayer or sleep. A bum, probably. We stumbled across them sometimes in the mornings, sleeping across the pews.
“All right now,” Betty said, “you got to go. We won’t tell nobody we seen you but you got to go on now.”
No response. Probably a drunk bum. Lord, now those we couldn’t deal with. Passed out drunk after mistaking the offering basket for a toilet, leaving broken beer bottles around for the babies to cut their feet.
“Okay,” Hattie said, “now why don’t you hop on up? We don’t wanna have to call the police.”
We edged closer, noticing, for the first time, past the fur collar, long, dark hair swept up away from a slender yellow neck. A neck that looked too clean for a bum’s, too delicate for a man’s. Agnes touched the strange woman’s back.
“Elise! What you doin’ in here?”
“I . . . I came in here last night and . . .” Elise looked dazed as Flora helped pull her to her feet.
“Girl, it’s morning already,” Agnes said. “You better get on home to your child.”
“My child?”
“Yes, honey. What you doin’ sleepin’ in here all night?”
“Robert probably worried sick,” Hattie said. “Get on home, then. Go on.”
At the time, we’d laughed as we watched Elise head through the morning fog to her car. Oh, wait till we told the ladies at bingo about this. Elise Turner, asleep in the church like an ordinary bum. They would have a field day with that one. She had always seemed a little strange to us anyway—dreamy, like her mind was a balloon on a long string and she forgot to reel it in sometimes.
For years, we’ve fixated on that final conversation. Elise had hesitated before going out to her car, a pause that varies in length throughout our memories; Betty says it was a long moment, Flora, a brief hitch. Should we have known Elise would drive off and shoot herself? Was there any way of knowing? No, nobody could’ve predicted it, not if Robert hadn’t even known. Elise Turner was beautiful. She had a child and a husband with a good government job. She had gone from cleaning white folks’ toilets to styling hair at the salon on base. A pretty black woman living as fine as any white woman. What did she have to complain about?
—
THAT SUMMER, Nadia Turner haunted us.
She looked so much like her mother that folks around Upper Room started to feel like they’d seen Elise again. As if her restless spirit—and no one doubted it was restless—was roaming the place where it had last been seen. The girl, who haunted the church halls with her beauty and her sullenness, barely noticed the stares, until one evening, when Second John offered her a ride home from work in the church van. He pulled onto the street, and for a second, their eyes met in the rearview mirror.
“You look so much like your mama,” he said. “Gives me chills to look at you.”
He glanced away, bashful almost, like he’d said the wrong thing. At dinner that night, she mentioned his comment to her father and he glanced up, as if he’d needed to remind himself of what her face looked like.
“You do,” he finally said, cutting his meat, his jaw set the way it always did whenever she tried to bring up her mother. Maybe that was why he always ran off to Upper Room, why he couldn’t stand to be around her. Maybe he hated looking at her because she only reminded him of all that he’d lost.
The night before her mother died, Nadia had caught her staring out the kitchen window, arms deep in soap suds, so gone in her own mind that she hadn’t noticed the sink almost overflowing. She’d laughed a little when Nadia shut off the water.
“Look at me,” she’d said. “Off daydreaming again.”
What had she been thinking about in that moment? Weren’t your final hours supposed to be dramatic and meaningful? Shouldn’t their last conversation have been emotional, even if it hadn’t registered to her at the time? But there was nothing special about that last moment. She had laughed too and brushed past her mother to the refrigerator. The next morning, she’d woken to find her father sitting on the edge of her bed, his face in his hands, so quiet she hadn’t even felt him sit on her mattress, weightless in his grief.
She still searched for clues, for strange things her mother had done or said, for signs that she should’ve noticed. At least then, her mother’s death would make sense. But she couldn’t think of any hints that her mother had wanted to die. Maybe she’d never really known her mother
at all. And if you couldn’t know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?
She was lonely. How could she be anything else? Each morning, her father dropped her off at Upper Room, and each afternoon, she sat on the church steps, waiting for him to pick her up. After work, she passed the hours in bed, watching old episodes of Law & Order, waiting for the next morning when she would awake and start her routine all over again. Sometimes she thought she could pass time like this, one day falling into another until autumn. The hot winds would arrive and she would blow out with them, on to a new school in a new state where she would start a new life. Other times, she felt so miserable, she thought about calling her old friends. But what would she say to them? She’d had a mother and now she didn’t, and she’d been pregnant but now she wasn’t. She’d thought with time the distance between her and her friends would narrow, but that gap had only widened and she couldn’t find the energy to pretend otherwise. So she remained alone, working silently in the first lady’s office all morning, then shuffling outside at noon to eat lunch on the church steps. One afternoon, she was picking at her peanut butter sandwich when she noticed Aubrey Evans heading toward her. The girl smiled, clutching a sky blue lunch bag that matched her sundress. Nadia should have known she couldn’t just bring a brown bag like everyone else.
“Can I sit here?” she asked.
Nadia shrugged. She didn’t want to invite the girl to join her but she couldn’t very well tell her not to. Aubrey squinted into the sunlight and lowered herself onto the step. Then she unzipped her bag and pulled out tiny plastic containers, carefully arranging them on the step beside her. Nadia stared at tubs filled with macaroni and cheese, slices of steak, potato salad.
“That’s seriously your lunch?” she said. Of course it was. Of course Aubrey Evans’s parents cooked her elaborate feasts for her lunch, because God forbid, she should have to eat something as normal as a sandwich.