The Mothers

by Brit Bennett

  —

  LATRICE SHEPPARD HAD GHOST EYES.

  One brown and one blue, which meant, her granddaddy had told her, that she could see heaven and earth at the same time. Her mother had gasped the first time she’d held her—something must be wrong, the blue eye blinded, maybe, already filmy with disease—but the doctor had said it was too soon to tell. “Takes time for a baby’s eyes to adjust to the world,” he’d said. “Just pay attention. If the eyes squint or cloud, there may be cause for concern.” So she’d spent the first years of her life with her mother’s face always inches from hers, studying her eyes. Maybe that was why she’d always felt there was something wrong with them, even though she could see fine. The brown eye seemed ugly next to the blue, the blue next to the brown, and she learned that it was better to just be one thing, to distill yourself into something as simple as you could. She had already begun her unending growth spurt—by the second grade, she was the first to line up in the school picture—and at lunch, she ate alone on the playground while the other girls double-Dutched to a rhyme they’d made up about her:

  Latrice, the beast

  She’ll make you her feast

  Got two odd eyes and two big feet

  The height she couldn’t hide, but the odd eyes, she tried to. She started wearing sunglasses whenever she could, in the grocery store, in her bedroom, even in the classroom, handing her teacher a fake note from her doctor describing her sensitivity to light. Later in life, she would consider her odd eyes a blessing. Not ghost eyes, but she had been gifted with a second sight nonetheless: she could look at a girl and tell if she’d been hit before. Forget bruises and scars—hit women learned to hide or explain those away. No need for stories about running into doorknobs or tripping down stairs—all she needed to do was lock her odd eyes onto theirs and she knew a woman surprised or outraged by pain from a woman who’d learned to expect it. She saw past flawless skin to diamond-shaped iron burns, gashes from golden belt buckles, necks nicked by steak knives, lips split by class rings, faces blooming purple and deep blue. She’d told Aubrey this the third time she’d invited her for tea, and after, Aubrey had stared into the mirror, wondering what else the first lady saw. Was her entire past written on her skin? Could Mrs. Sheppard see everything that Paul had done to her? At least now she knew why Mrs. Sheppard had been so kind to her. Why, after the altar call, Mrs. Sheppard had found her in the church lobby and offered her a hug; why, the following Sunday, Mrs. Sheppard had given her a small Bible with a floral cover; and why, the Sunday after that, Mrs. Sheppard had invited her into her office for tea. Aubrey didn’t even drink tea, but for months she’d sat on the other side of the gray striped settee, dropping sugar cubes into her cup. She took her tea sweet—sugar, honey, and cream.

  “That’s fine in here,” Mrs. Sheppard had told her once, “but out in public, folks might think it’s juvenile, a young lady doctoring up her tea with all those sweets.” She’d corrected Aubrey gently, but Aubrey had felt so embarrassed that weeks later, she’d only added a single sugar cube to her tea.

  One afternoon, she sipped the bitter tea and asked Mrs. Sheppard what had happened to Elise Turner. She lofted the question casually, as if she hadn’t been wondering it for weeks—no, months, ever since Pastor Sheppard had somberly announced the news to the congregation. At the time, he hadn’t offered a cause of death, which had raised suspicions the way only a sudden, unexplained death could. A woman Elise Turner’s age didn’t just die naturally; she hadn’t seemed ill and if she hadn’t suffered some terrible accident, then what could’ve happened to her?

  “I just don’t know,” Sister Willis had said in the ladies’ room after service. “Somethin’ just don’t sound right to me.” And even though the other women around the sink had nodded, no one had expected the news that trickled in, days later, that Elise Turner had shot herself in the head. The congregation had already imagined possible shameful tragedies—an accidental drug overdose, a drunk-driving accident, even a murder caused by circumstances the pastor had thought it best to obscure. Maybe Elise had taken a lover (she could do better than Robert, couldn’t she?) and in the seedy motel room where they’d conducted their affair, the lover had killed her.

  Despite the lurid speculation, no one had been prepared for the reality of Elise Turner’s death, especially not Aubrey. She had never known Mrs. Turner but she’d felt as if she did, at least a little, the way you could know someone you’d only seen from a distance. On Sundays, she’d seen the Turners enter Upper Room—the husband stiff-backed in his suit, the wife smiling at the greeters in the lobby, the daughter a spitting image of the mother. They’d reminded her of a family out of television. The strong, manly father, the beautiful mother, and the daughter, who had somehow been blessed with beauty and smarts. In AP Government, Aubrey sat near the back, watching Nadia breeze into class with her friends, and whenever she slipped through the door after the bell rang, she appeased Mr. Thomas with a smile before he could write her up for detention. How could he punish her? Week after week, when he listed the top ten test-scorers, her name was on the whiteboard, as if it had been written in permanent marker. She was going to a big university someday, everyone knew it, while Aubrey would shuffle off to the community college with the rest of their class. On Sunday mornings, she watched this girl—this Nadia Turner—slide into the church pew beside her mother and her father, and she wondered what it would be like, to go to church with your family. Mo didn’t believe in God. Kasey did, only abstractly, the way she believed in the universe’s ability to right itself. Neither was happy that Aubrey had started going to church, although they hadn’t said so directly.

  “Are you sure you want to spend so much time there?” Mo would say. “I mean . . . don’t you think it’s maybe a little too soon?”

  Too soon for what, she’d never said, but she didn’t have to. She worried that Aubrey had turned into some religious nut. That she would start seeing images of Jesus in burnt toast, or speaking in tongues mid-conversation, or picketing outside gay weddings. When Aubrey had seen the Turners on Sundays, she wondered what it would be like to be their child, to be smart and beautiful, to have a father and a mother who held your hands during prayer. She thought about the mother especially, who seemed nothing like her own. Elise Turner, young and energetic and beautiful, who laughed in the lobby before service, always greeted as soon as she stepped inside, who had spoken to Aubrey once before, when they’d passed each other before the Christmas play.

  “You dropped something, honey,” Elise Turner had said, pointing at Aubrey’s program, which had fluttered to the carpet. Her voice was cool and silky, like milk.

  How could a woman like that kill herself? Aubrey knew it was a stupid question—anyone could kill herself, if she wanted to badly enough. Mo said that it was physiological. Misfired synapses, unbalanced chemicals in the brain, the whole body a machine with a few tripped wires that had caused it to self-destruct. But people weren’t just their bodies, right? The decision to kill yourself had to be more complicated than that. Across the couch, the first lady raised an eyebrow as she leaned forward to refill Aubrey’s teacup.

  “What do you mean?” Mrs. Sheppard said. “You know what happened to her.”

  “I just know she shot herself.”

  “Well, that’s all there is to it, honey.”

  “But why?” Aubrey said.

  “The devil attacks all of us,” Mrs. Sheppard said. “Some folks just aren’t strong enough to fend him off.”

  She sounded matter-of-fact as she slowly stirred her tea, the spoon clanging against the cup. She was also nothing like Aubrey’s mother—too assertive and steady and sure of herself. Her mother was one of the weak women Mrs. Sheppard would pity or scorn, depending on how much she knew. Right now, she didn’t know much. Only that Aubrey had moved in with her sister because she and her mom hadn’t gotten along. She hadn’t told Mrs. Sheppard about Paul, who drank bottles of whiskey o
n weekends and sometimes hit them but always cried about it after because he didn’t mean to, his job was so stressful, they just didn’t know what it was like, being out on the streets all the time, not knowing if you’d make it home. He’d moved in a year before she’d left, and for a year, he had made nightly trips to her room, pushing her door open, then her legs, and for a year, she had told almost no one. Almost, because she’d told her mother after the first time it happened and her mother had shook her head tightly and said “No,” as if she could will it to be untrue.

  Across the couch, Mrs. Sheppard reached for a cookie.

  “Now, why do you want to know about all this?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Aubrey said. “Nadia never talks about it.”

  She couldn’t exactly ask Nadia herself, although she thought about it often when they were together. Did Nadia know why her mother had killed herself? Was it even better to know?

  “I see you two out there eating lunch all the time.” Mrs. Sheppard smiled, brushing sugar dust from her fingers onto a napkin. “I didn’t know you got on like that.”

  “She’s nice.” Aubrey paused, taking a sip. “She’s . . . I don’t know. Funny. She makes me laugh. And she doesn’t let people run over her. She’s not afraid of anything.”

  “I just wouldn’t get too attached if I was you,” Mrs. Sheppard said.

  Aubrey frowned. “Why?”

  “Now, don’t look at me like that. You know she’s runnin’ off to school in the fall. Making new friends in the dorms. Folks change, that’s all. I just don’t want you to get hurt, honey.”

  Mrs. Sheppard passed her the plate of shortbread cookies and Aubrey silently took one. The first time she’d visited Nadia’s house, she’d spotted on her bookshelf a clay Noah’s Ark statue small enough to fit in her palm. A white-haired Noah stood on the deck, tiny giraffe and chimp and elephant heads poking out the portholes. She’d reached for it but Nadia had grabbed her hand.

  “Don’t,” she’d said. “My mom gave me that.”

  Aubrey had drawn her hand back, embarrassed for violating a rule she hadn’t known existed. But she saw then that Nadia didn’t speak about her mother because she wanted to preserve her, keep her for herself. Aubrey didn’t speak about her mother because she wanted to forget that she’d ever had one. And it was easier to forget when she was with Nadia.

  She didn’t want to think about Nadia leaving for college. She felt at home in Nadia’s motherless world. Later that evening, she drove her friend home. They went out in the backyard and rocked in Mr. Turner’s hammock until the sky faded into black. Nadia stretched a long leg over the side and pushed her bare toes against the grass, careful not to upset their delicate balance.

  FIVE

  We were girls once. As hard as that is to believe.

  Oh, you can’t see it now—our bodies have stretched and sagged, faces and necks drooping. That’s what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it’s from and where it’ll return. But we were girls once, which is to say, we have all loved an ain’t-shit man. No Christian way of putting it. There are two types of men in the world: men who are and men who ain’t about shit. As girls, we’ve lived all over. Sharecropping in the cotton fields of Louisiana until the humid air sucked our shirts to our backs. Shivering in freezing kitchens while packing lunches for daddies heading to Ford plants. Shuffling slowly over icy Harlem sidewalks, stuffing ripped fabric in coat-pocket holes. Then we’d grown up and met men who wanted to bring us to California. Military men, stationed out at Camp Pendleton, who promised us marriage and babies and all that sunshine. But before we woke to pink clouds drifting over the coastline, before we found Upper Room and each other, before we were wives and mothers, we were girls and we loved ain’t-shit men.

  You used to be able to spot an ain’t-shit man a lot easier. At pool halls and juke joints, speakeasies and rent parties and sometimes in church, snoring in the back pew. The type of man our brothers warned us about because he was going nowhere and he would treat us bad on the way to that nowhere. But nowadays? Most of these young men seem ain’t-shit to us. Swaggering around downtown, drunk and swearing, fighting outside nightclubs, smoking reefer in their mamas’ basements. When we were girls, a man who wanted to court us sipped coffee in the living room with our parents first. Nowadays, a young man fools around with any girl who’s willing and if she gets in trouble—well, you just ask Luke Sheppard what these young men do next.

  A girl nowadays has to get nice and close to tell if her man ain’t shit and by then, it might be too late. We were girls once. It’s exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way. No shame in loving an ain’t-shit man, long as you get it out your system good and early. A tragic woman hooks into an ain’t-shit man, or worse, lets him hook into her. He will drag her until he tires. He will climb atop her shoulders and her body will sag from the weight of loving him.

  Yes, those are the ones we worry about.

  —

  SINCE HE’D SEEN NADIA TURNER LAST, Luke had broken seven plates, two bowls, and six glasses. “A personal record,” his boss Charlie had announced during the morning’s staff meeting. “No, scratch that—a company best. Give it up for Sheppard, folks. Making history one fuckup at a time.” Luke never dropped dishes. He’d spent years grabbing footballs out of the air, snagging them out of the reach of defenders, cupping his hands underneath them before they hit the grass. In fact, he was heralded throughout Fat Charlie’s Seafood Shack for his miraculous catches; the highlight reel, if one existed, would have consisted entirely of Luke Sheppard: Luke grabbing sippy cups before they teetered to the floor, Luke palming bowls tipped by wayward elbows, Luke righting trays sliding off their stands as customers applauded and coworkers clapped him on the back. But since Cody Richardson’s party, there’d been no heroics, no last-minute saves, no godlike displays of reflex and awareness. The commentators on SportsCenter, if SportsCenter covered workplace athleticism, would’ve hung their heads and said, “Too bad, that Sheppard kid sure had shown a lot of promise.” Now glasses slipped right through his hand or slid off his tray, and Luke, who worshipped the save, the graceful leap into the end zone, found himself instead kneeling on the sticky floor, watery Sprite soaking his pant leg.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Charlie said, hovering over him.

  “I know, I know.”

  “You trying to break every dish I own?”

  “I said I’m sorry. What you want me to do? I’m cleanin’ it.”

  “I want you to learn how to hold a cup. A monkey can hold a cup, Sheppard. A fucking chimp.”

  Luke pushed past Charlie on his way to the trash can and that slight shoulder tap—the inch of space he’d forced Charlie to yield—felt like that moment after the doctor injected pain medicine into his leg. A pinch, and then relief.

  Focus, that’s what Luke needed to do. Concentrate on one thing at a time. The smooth motion of his arm when he reached for the cup, the way the glass felt against his palm as he tightened his grip. And he did focus, from time to time. He survived a shift without dropping anything. Then Nadia returned to him, a sharp, sudden pain like hunger. Kissing her in the beach shower, his hands, still gritty with sand, on her stomach, his lips passed against the back of her suntanned neck. Later kneeling at the edge of his bed, hooking his fingers under the sides of her bikini bottom, her skin smoldering under his hands. She smelled like the ocean. She felt like the ocean when he was inside of her, rocking and rocking and calm. When it was over, he’d kissed the side of her face, the soft skin near her ears, the light baby hair turned curly from their sweat. His mouth had never touched anything that delicate.

  He spent his dinner break smoking in the alley behind Fat Charlie’s with CJ. They used to play high school football together. CJ, a burly Samoan with long, curly hair, had been a decent nose tackle and earned a few letters from D
ivision III schools, nothing like the recruitment packets and personal visits Luke had received. Still, they’d both ended up here, in an alley that smelled like wet garbage and sea air and cat piss. Luke leaned against the wall, passing the joint.

  “You good, uso?” CJ said. “You got a weird look on your face.”

  “Just some shit with this girl,” Luke said.

  “Who? Shorty with the books?”

  Luke hesitated, then needing to tell someone, said, “She told me she was pregnant.”

  CJ laughed, a strange, wheezing laugh.

  “Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “Real simple. Don’t give her shit until you know it’s yours. I don’t care how fuckin’ cute that kid looks, don’t even buy his ass some diapers before you swab him—”

  “She ain’t been with no one but me,” Luke said.

  He didn’t know that, of course, but he knew he’d been her first. She hadn’t admitted that she was a virgin but he’d felt it from her tightness, from the little gasp she’d made once he’d entered her, from the way she clenched her eyes when he’d barely moved. Three times he asked if she wanted him to stop. Three times she shook her head. She was the type of girl who never wanted to admit that she was in pain, as if not confessing it made her stronger. Her mother had died two months ago and he knew that was the reason she was fucking him. Why she hadn’t mentioned his limp, why she’d pulled his Fat Charlie’s shirt over his head, even though it smelled like sweat and grease. She was a seventeen-year-old with a dead mother and she wanted him to fuck the sadness out of her. Every time he felt guilty for hurting her, she wrapped her arms tighter around his back so he sank deeper, moving as slowly as he could until he finished with a tiny shudder. Later, he pretended not to notice the blood on her sheets. He rolled closer to her and slept on top of the uneven spots.