The Mothers

by Brit Bennett

  Aubrey shrugged. “Want some?”

  Nadia hesitated before reaching for the brownie and breaking off a corner. She chewed slowly, almost disappointed by how delicious it was.

  “Wow,” she said. “Your mom made this?”

  Aubrey carefully zipped up her lunch bag. “I don’t live with my mom,” she said.

  “So your dad, then.”

  “No,” she said. “I live with my sister, Mo. And Kasey.”

  “Who’s Kasey?”

  “Mo’s girlfriend. She’s a really good cook.”

  “Your sister’s gay?”

  “So?” Aubrey said. “It’s really not a big deal.”

  But she’d gotten prickly, so Nadia knew that it was. She still remembered how years ago, the congregation had been convinced that Sister Janice’s daughter had been turned into a lesbian because she’d started playing rugby at the junior college. For weeks, the old folks had whispered about how no girl should be playing football—it just wasn’t right—until she showed up on Easter Sunday holding hands with a shy boy and that was that. At Upper Room, a gay sister was a big deal and she wondered how she’d never heard about Aubrey’s. Maybe because Aubrey didn’t want anybody to know. Nadia couldn’t help it, she was surprised. The life she’d imagined for Aubrey—a stay-at-home mother, a doting father—was melting away into something murkier. Why did Aubrey live with her sister, not her parents? Had something terrible happened to them? She felt a sudden kinship with a girl who didn’t live with her mother either. A girl who was also a keeper of secrets. Aubrey tilted the brownie toward her and Nadia silently broke off another piece.

  —

  THIS IS WHAT SHE KNEW about Aubrey Evans:

  She’d appeared one Sunday morning, a strange girl wandering into Upper Room with nothing but a small handbag, not even a Bible. She’d started crying before the pastor asked who needed prayer and she’d cried even harder as she rose and walked to the altar. She was saved at sixteen, and since then, she’d attended church services each week and volunteered for the children’s ministry, the homeless ministry, the bereavement committee. Babies, bums, grief. A hint about where she’d come from, maybe, although Nadia only knew what most people did: that Aubrey had arrived at Upper Room suddenly and within a year, she’d seemed like she’d always belonged.

  Now, each afternoon, the girls ate lunch together on the church steps. Each afternoon, Nadia learned more about Aubrey, like how she’d first visited Upper Room because she’d seen it on television. She was new to California then and camped out in front of the TV, watching the wildfire coverage. She had never heard of wildfire season and she had lived all over, so she thought she’d heard of everything. She’d spent two damp years in Portland, where she wrung rain out of her socks, then three years freezing in Milwaukee, another muggy year in Tallahassee. She’d dried out in Phoenix, then re-frosted in Boston. She felt like she’d been everywhere and nowhere at all, like she had flown to thousands of airports but never ventured outside of the terminal.

  “Why’d you move so much?” Nadia asked. “Was it, like, a military thing?”

  She had lived in Oceanside her whole life, unlike all the military kids from school who had followed a parent from Marine base to Marine base until they’d ended up at Camp Pendleton. She had never lived outside of California, never gone on exciting vacations, never left the country. Her life already seemed so singular and flat and dull, and she could only comfort herself with the fact that the good stuff was ahead.

  “No,” Aubrey said. “My mom would just meet a man. And he’d move somewhere, so we’d go too.”

  She had accompanied her mother as she followed boyfriends from state to state. A mechanic she’d loved in Cincinnati, a grocery store manager in Jackson, a truck driver in Dallas. She had never married although she’d wanted to. In Denver, she’d dated a cop named Paul for three years. One Christmas, he gave her a small velvet box and her hands shook while opening it. It was just a bracelet, and even though she cried later in the bathroom, she still wore it around her wrist. Aubrey never mentioned her father. She told one or two stories about her mother, but only stories that had happened years ago and Nadia began to wonder if her mother was even still alive.

  “Did she—I mean, your mom isn’t—” But Nadia stopped herself before she could finish. She barely knew this girl. She couldn’t ask if her mother was dead too. But Aubrey understood and quickly shook her head.

  “No, no, nothing like that,” she said. “I just—we don’t get along, that’s all.”

  Could you do that? Leave your mother because you two fought sometimes? Who didn’t fight with her mother? But Aubrey said nothing more and her reticence only made Nadia even more intrigued. She imagined the lovesick mother chasing men from state to state, how, when each affair ended, the mother would have cursed and cried, flinging clothes into a suitcase; how Aubrey and her sister must have known that when love left, they would have to leave too.

  —

  “WHAT WERE YOU LIKE,” Nadia asked once, “as a little kid?”

  She was sitting in the passenger’s seat of Aubrey’s Jeep, her bare feet warming on the dashboard. They were stuck in the perpetually long drive-thru line at In-N-Out, behind a brown minivan full of jostling kids. Earlier, Aubrey had suggested they go somewhere for lunch—Del Taco or Carl’s Jr. or even Fat Charlie’s. Luke Sheppard worked there and maybe he’d recognize them from church and offer a discount. But Nadia had shaken her head and said that she hated seafood.

  “What was I like?” Aubrey smiled, her fingers dancing on the steering wheel. She always did that, repeated the question. Like she was stumped in a job interview and needed to buy time.

  “Yeah, you know, as a little kid. I was a brat. No one could tell me shit. Surprise, right?”

  She laughed, then Aubrey laughed. Another one of her habits, waiting for someone else to laugh before she joined in.

  “I was . . . I don’t know. I played soccer. I had a lot of friends.” Aubrey shrugged. “My best friend had this trampoline. We’d jump on it for hours. My mom told me not to—she said I’d break my neck. So I always lied to her.”

  “What a badass.”

  “One time,” Aubrey said, “we were super hungry, so we brought out this leftover cornbread to eat. It was really crumbly, though, but we kept jumping and eating and all the crumbs were flying up with us and we couldn’t stop laughing.”

  She smiled, like she was still proud of this tiny childhood rebellion, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. Another thing she did all the time: smile when she didn’t mean it.

  When the fire season began, Aubrey had been living in California for three months. She had not known that wildfires could be a normal part of the calendar year, an event you expected as regularly as snow or rain, and the idea terrified her. Her sister told her that she shouldn’t worry about wildfires, not in Oceanside at least. Along the coast, you were as safe as anyone could be. But she still followed the local news as reporters coughed in fields where flames licked behind them and helicopters swept over scorched ground, and that was how she first saw Upper Room. The church was serving as a temporary evacuation site, and a reporter interviewed the pastor, a large, dark man named John Sheppard.

  “We’re just glad to help,” he said. He had a deep, sonorous voice, like the type of man who might narrate a book-on-tape. “We’re grateful God has placed us in a position where we can give back to our community. So if you’ve been forced out your home, come to Upper Room and let us be a home to you.”

  Later, she told Nadia, she realized that the pastor’s plea had drawn her in. She was between homes then—she had been between homes her whole life—and she still felt like a guest in Mo and Kasey’s house. Each time she did her laundry, she folded her clothes and returned them to her suitcase, afraid to fill the drawers. But no one made her leave Oceanside, so she’d visited Upper Room one Sunday and that was
that.

  That year had been the worst fire season Nadia could remember. The local news ran flashy graphics calling October “The Fire Siege” and even after the peak months had passed, fifteen wildfires burned throughout Southern California that winter. If you had to evacuate, the sheriff’s office left an automatic phone call, but her mother had always said that if you waited for the call, it was already too late. A sheriff’s call only gave you a fifteen-minute warning, so last fall, her mother had packed bags in advance and left them by the front door.

  “You think this is silly,” she told Nadia, “but you always got to be prepared. Even for things you can’t see.”

  She had grown up in Texas, in between tornado and hurricane country, so she knew how to prepare for disaster. Unlike you California girls, she used to tell Nadia, who never thought about earthquakes until the world started shaking right under them.

  That winter, her mother’s death would be an earthquake jolting her out of her sleep. But earlier, in September, Nadia had watched her mother pack bags of clothes, water jugs, and photo albums. Then they’d left for church, where a crying girl had appeared in a light blue dress that fit her too tightly around the middle, as if she had just put on weight. Her curly hair was tied back in a ponytail and she wore white canvas sneakers scuffed at the toes. She dressed like someone who had never been to church before imagined she ought to dress. The girl was mourning, and months later, in her own grief, whenever Nadia saw Aubrey at school, she envied how easily the girl had shown her sadness, how completely the church embraced her. Was that all it took, kneeling at the altar and asking for help? Or did you have to invite everyone in on your private sorrow to be saved?

  Later, in the dying evening light, the girls swung gently in the ratty old hammock hanging in Nadia’s backyard. Her father never used his hammock anymore—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him relaxed enough to enjoy it—but Aubrey had wanted to lie in it as soon as she followed Nadia outside. “It feels like such a California thing to do,” she’d said, so every evening that week, they’d swung in the hammock and talked as the sun lowered in the sky.

  Nadia glanced at her father through the screen door. He’d cooked them dinner each night that week and hadn’t complained about fixing Aubrey an extra plate. He seemed pleased to do it, almost. He smiled and tried to tell jokes about his day on base that would’ve been swallowed with mouthfuls of food had he and his daughter been alone. Maybe he was glad to have company again, or maybe there was something special about Aubrey that made him open up.

  Across from her, Aubrey licked a dab of ice cream off her thumb and asked Nadia what her father was like.

  “What do you mean?” Nadia said. “You know what he’s like. You see him around.”

  “As a person. He’s nice, but he doesn’t talk much.”

  “I guess he’s nice. I don’t know. Serious. Likes to be by himself. Why? What’s your dad like?”

  “I don’t know. He left when I was little.”

  “Fine. Your mom, then.”

  Aubrey chewed on her thumbnail. “We haven’t talked in a while.”

  “How long is a while?”

  “Almost a year.”

  Nadia had since grown used to the ebb and flow of their conversations, the opening up and shutting down, the ease forward, the retreat, so she just nodded and pretended to understand, the way she would pretend all her life when friends complained about their mothers. Rolling her eyes along with them while they ranted about mothers who disapproved of their jobs or their boyfriends, always sympathizing, always smiling, even though she hated them for complaining. She understood Aubrey even less. What did it feel like, she wondered, to be the one who’d left?

  —

  IF YOU DROVE east from the beach, if you left behind the surf shacks and bait shops and ice cream parlors, the lean surfers, the rent-a-cops cruising along the harbor, you’d reach the Back Gate. The entry to Camp Pendleton was guarded by armed Marines, but outside its border was a not-bad, not-good neighborhood. Here’s how you could tell: the fences were higher but the houses wore no metal gates over their windows; the Pizza Hut hid behind bulletproof glass but they stayed open late at night; and cops still patrolled, more than they did in good neighborhoods, but more than they did in bad neighborhoods already abandoned to their own chaos. In this not-bad, not-good neighborhood, Aubrey lived with her sister and her sister’s girlfriend in a little white house. The house itself was simple, but Aubrey’s bedroom was surprisingly ornate. The walls were painted a dusty green with silver flowers, and white Christmas lights traced the ceiling. Silver curtains rippled in the windows and swaths of lace draped over the bed like a wedding veil. Her first visit, Nadia had wandered through the room slowly, her arms behind her back, afraid to touch anything, as if she were in a museum.

  “I couldn’t sleep when I first moved in,” Aubrey said, pointing to a dream catcher that hung from the ceiling. “Kasey thought this might help.”

  Kasey was slender and lean like an alley cat, and she had long, dirty-blonde hair she liked to rumple in the middle of conversations, as if to prove how little she cared about how her hair looked. She was a bartender downtown at the Flying Bridge and she liked telling stories about her regulars. A man who hated touching dry glass. A woman who was deathly afraid of pickles.

  “You know, them big ones they give you with your sandwich? Scared shitless. Runs and screams if you bring one near her, even if it’s still in a jar. Wild, huh?”

  Kasey had traveled west eight years ago with her big brother, who was stationed at Camp Pendleton. She was lovesick over a straight girl and had fled to California to forget about her. On the long drive from Tennessee, she’d plucked the dream catcher off a shelf at a truck stop, wanting it for no other reason than the fact that she could want it. Now the dream catcher drifted inside a bedroom almost painful in its effort. Aubrey said that her sister helped her decorate the room after she’d moved in.

  “Mo thought we needed to do something together,” she said. “We hadn’t seen each other in a few years.”

  “Why not?” Nadia said.

  “She left for college.”

  “And she just never came back?”

  Aubrey shifted slowly, one foot to the other. “Well, she didn’t like Paul.”

  “What was wrong with him?”

  “He hit my mom,” she said.

  “Oh.” Nadia paused in front of the bookshelf. “Did he hit you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Nadia couldn’t imagine a grown man hitting her. Even when she’d misbehaved as a child, her father had always carried her to her mother, who did the spanking, as if discipline were something to be dealt with between women.

  “Well, what’d your mom say?” she said.

  “She’s still with him.” Aubrey shrugged, then hopped off the bed. “Come on. Let’s go outside.”

  Nadia finally understood, why Aubrey had left and why her mother had let her, why her sister had helped her create a bedroom out of a Disney movie, why Mrs. Sheppard cherished her. In a way, Nadia almost felt lucky. At least her mother had been sick—at least she’d only tried to hurt herself. At least her mother would’ve never let a man hit her child. Her mother was dead, but what could be worse than knowing that your mother was alive somewhere but she wanted a man who hit her more than she wanted you?

  On the Fourth of July, Nadia sat on Aubrey’s porch, watching the neighbors set up fireworks in the street. The city was hosting a fireworks show downtown at the pier, but it wasn’t the Fourth of July without illegal fireworks, Kasey had said. She was appalled by the strictness of California fireworks law, so she cheered on the people who smuggled them over from Tijuana to set off in the neighborhood. What was the harm? It wasn’t as if people were setting off bombs. She sipped her beer, wrapping an arm around Monique, who watched the neighbors in the street and shook her head.

 
; “Someone’s gonna blow a hand off,” she said. “I just know it.”

  She was not a mother but she had a mother’s gift of rushing to the worst possible outcome. She was a trauma nurse at Scripps Mercy Hospital, so she encountered the worst possible outcome daily. But even if she hadn’t been a nurse, she was the type to worry. When she came home from work, she always asked if they had eaten. She reminded Aubrey to take her vitamins and called after her to grab a jacket, it gets chilly downtown, oh don’t look at me like that, you know you always get cold. A man in the middle of the street squawked as a car swerving around the display nearly hit him. Monique shook her head again.

  “You warm enough, babe?” she said.

  Aubrey was sitting under a blanket with Nadia. She rolled her eyes a little.

  “I’m not a baby, Mo,” she said.

  “You’re my baby,” her sister said.

  Kasey laughed and Aubrey rolled her eyes again, but she didn’t look upset, not really. It was the fake-annoyed look you give to someone who could never actually bother you. Sometimes Nadia envied Aubrey, even though she felt guilty for considering the thought. Aubrey had lost her mother too, but she was loved by her sister and her sister’s girlfriend and even the first lady, three women who cared for her only because they wanted to. Both girls had been abandoned in the sand. But only Aubrey had been found. Only Aubrey had been chosen.

  Monique and Kasey’s love for Aubrey hung in their eyes, and even though it wasn’t meant for Nadia, she inched closer, holding her hands up to the warmth. In the street, the neighbors huddled around, giving directions in Spanglish. Teenage girls herded babies onto the grass, while old men in flannel shirts redirected traffic and boys on skateboards looked out for cops. Reggaeton and rap blasted out windows, rattling through cars parked in driveways. Soon, fireworks would illuminate the pier, but Nadia wanted to be nowhere else but here, in a house where everyone was wanted, with a family where anyone could leave but nobody ever did. A firecracker lit up the sky, and she jumped, delighted and a little surprised, at the first spark.