by Brit Bennett
“And you have all your documents?” he said. “Your passport and stuff?”
Shadi had driven her to the passport office to get her picture taken. He already had stamps in his from visits to France, South Africa, and Kenya, and she realized, waiting in the tiny office, that her mother had never even left the country. This would be her life, accomplishing the things her mother had never done. She never celebrated this, unlike her friends who were proud to be the first in their family to go to college or the first to earn a prestigious internship. How could she be proud of lapping her mother, when she had been the one to slow her down in the first place?
Winter in England was gray and dreary, but it was better than a Michigan winter. Anything was better than a Michigan winter. She felt like every winter would kill her, and when she reached the skyless Februarys and bleak Marches, she promised herself she would book the soonest flight back to California. Then spring broke, always unexpectedly, and Ann Arbor slipped into its quiet, humid summers and she felt normal again, sunning her legs at restaurant patios, lounging on rooftops, and willing the sun to hang above her longer. This had surprised her most about Ann Arbor—she could feel normal here. In Ann Arbor, she was not the girl whose mother had shot herself in the head. She was just a girl from California, a girlfriend to an ambitious boy, a student who loved to party but somehow always made it to class. At home, loss was everywhere; she could barely see past it, like trying to look out a windowpane covered in fingerprints. She would always feel trapped behind that window, between her and the rest of the world, but at least in Ann Arbor, the glass was clearer.
Whenever they Skyped or texted or talked on the phone, Aubrey asked when she would come home. “Soon,” Nadia always said, although she found countless reasons not to return: summer internships in Wisconsin and Minnesota, service-learning trips in Detroit for Thanksgiving, Christmas at Shadi’s, where there was no baby Jesus or manger but his mother set up a tree and sled and reindeer, their whole house as American and wintry as a Coca-Cola commercial. Nadia wondered if it was only for her benefit, if they thought this would make her feel comfortable, like if she had cancelled last minute, they would’ve just rolled away all the decorations like a play set and ordered Chinese food. She tried not to think about her father, alone on another holiday, and she turned in Shadi’s bed, toward the window and the houses blanketed in snow.
—
TWO YEARS AFTER Nadia Turner vanished, Luke Sheppard began walking to Martin Luther King Jr. Park to watch the Cobras. He’d never even known the semiprofessional football team existed until he’d gotten hurt. Then he’d started looking for football everywhere: downloading NFL podcasts, watching Pop Warner games out the window of his truck, listening to the cheerful bleat of the whistle as little boys, tottering under pads and helmets, knocked into each other. Parents in lawn chairs cheered, when the boys tackled, when they fell, when the ball squirted out of their arms, when they did anything at all. Luke had stumbled upon the Cobras that winter, a month after he moved into his apartment. He’d gone to MLK Park to do pull-ups because he couldn’t afford rent and a gym membership, and halfway through his workout, a bus pulled up, black and copper with a snake, flicking its tongue, coiled on the side. He pretended to do push-ups while the team climbed out and split into their practice formations. The receivers—lanky, lean, and cocky, he could always spot them—bunched up before practicing their routes. He eased close to the ground, then away. The grass rose and fell, and he felt his hamstrings tighten, his fingertips missing the stubbly firmness of a football.
That was three months ago. Now he searched online for any mention of the team. He’d learned the names of the starting offensive players, their day jobs, and their nicknames, and when he saw them around town, waiting for an oil change or pushing a cart through Walmart, he mumbled them to himself. (Right tackle Jim Fenson, plumber, Fender-Bender.) He went to the park early on Saturday mornings to watch the team practice. He missed falling into those neat lines. He wanted to get back into football shape, stop eating fried food between shifts, stop drinking beer and smoking weed, and start treating his body like a machine again, an unfeeling, unwanting thing. He’d lowered to the ground for another push-up when he noticed the coach heading toward him.
“Thought you looked familiar,” Coach Wagner said. He grinned, sticking out his hand. “I remember you. San Diego State. Speedy wide-out. But that leg—”
“It’s better now,” Luke said.
“Yeah?”
He ran a hitch route. His right leg felt gummy from the lack of exercise, his left burning as soon as he cut inside. When he trotted back over, Coach Wagner was frowning.
“Getting there,” he said. “Look, call me when it’s healed up all the way. We could use you.”
The Cobras did not pay their players—any money the team made went toward equipment and transportation—but Luke didn’t care. He slid the business card into his pocket. Beside the coach’s phone number, there was a glossy emblem of a snake and he ran his thumb across it his whole walk home.
“Don’t you think you should focus on your career?” his mother asked the next night.
He hunched over the kitchen table, stirring his dirty rice. He hated going to Sunday dinner at his parents’ house but not enough to turn down free food and free laundry. When he walked in, his father cleared his throat and said, “Didn’t see you at church this morning,” and since Luke had stopped coming up with creative excuses, he just shrugged. He daydreamed during his father’s endless grace and while his parents discussed Upper Room, he ate, imagining how long the leftovers he would take with him might last. He normally survived Sunday dinner without saying much, but he’d brushed the business card in his pocket and felt an unusual excitement. For the first time, he’d felt like he had news worth sharing. But his mother just raised an eyebrow and his father sighed, slipping his glasses off his face.
“Get a job, Luke,” his father said.
“I have one,” Luke said.
“I mean a real one. Not that restaurant crap.”
“And what about your leg?” his mother said. “What happens when you get hit again?”
“It don’t hurt that bad.”
His mother shook her head. “Listen, I know you love football but you got to be realistic now.”
“When are you gonna take some responsibility, Luke?” his father said. “When?”
Maybe he was being irresponsible, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to be good at something again. By June, he was going to the park every day to run drills. CJ couldn’t throw a tight spiral but he learned the routes, the sharp angle of a post, the soft curl of a buttonhook. He knew where to put the ball and he joked that if Luke could catch balls thrown by him, he’d be able to grab the ones thrown by a real quarterback. CJ wasn’t as bad as he thought, which annoyed Luke; he envied CJ, even with his mediocre talent, because he had a body that worked right, that followed orders without complaint, not one that had splintered apart.
“I’m slow as shit, man,” he said, huffing.
“I mean, you fucked up your leg.” CJ plopped on the grass in his gray gym shorts from high school, which still had his name written on the thigh in marker. “It’s gonna take some time.”
“Ain’t got time,” Luke said. “Let’s go again.”
After evening workouts, he bought CJ a beer and they drank outside Hosie’s, watching girls in bikinis trail in from the beach, sand clinging to their legs.
“You still talk to your girl?” CJ asked one night.
Luke took a sip of lukewarm beer, always slow, tiny sips, wanting to make it last.
“Who?” he said.
“That high school chick you was fuckin’ with.”
“She’s not my girl,” Luke said.
“I heard she’s living in, like, Russia right now.”
“Russia?”
“Or some shit like that. She’s
living in Russia and fucking with some African nigga.”
Luke sipped his beer again, swishing it around his mouth. When she’d first left, he used to obsess over the college boys Nadia was touching. He imagined them, never athletic boys like him, but preppy boys in Michigan sweaters, who scurried around campus, stacks of books clutched against their chests. Now he had a name. Shadi Waleed, some Arab-sounding motherfucker. At Fat Charlie’s, he searched him on the computer in the staff room and found pages of articles Shadi had written for some newspaper called The Blue Review. A blog post—of course he blogged—about, Luke was surprised to discover, football. Football as in soccer, but he was shocked that Shadi was interested in regular things like sports, although the blog post was about how France’s World Cup hopes rested on their Muslim forward and wasn’t that ironic? Luke didn’t understand what was so ironic, but it must’ve been another thing that Shadi Waleed knew that he didn’t.
He finally landed on Shadi’s Facebook—his breath caught when he saw the profile picture. Shadi lounging on a black chair outside a restaurant, Nadia Turner on his lap in a long, floral sundress, smiling behind sunglasses, her hand gently draped across Shadi’s shoulder. She looked older now, her face more angular, her cheekbones sharpened. She looked happy. Luke flipped through the other photos—mostly posters for campus events, a few of Shadi hunching over a woman in a headscarf who must’ve been his mother—but he always returned to the one of Nadia in Shadi’s lap. Her life had gone on like nothing had happened, but Luke was stuck, wedged in the past, always wondering what would’ve happened if they’d kept the baby. Their baby.
“Who the fuck is that?” a busboy asked Luke, pointing at Shadi’s smiling face. “Your boyfriend?”
He cackled, but Luke shoved away from the computer so hard, the desk shook.
—
WHEN HE JOINED THE COBRAS, Luke thought his anger might finally subside, but instead, he felt it growing. Football was a safe place to be angry. Every time he laced up, he cupped his anger, keeping it safe. The first time he got hit in practice, he saw a white flash, his mind washed over with pain, then he pushed himself off the ground and hobbled back to the huddle. That hit made him feel like himself again. He started shit-talking, taunting men double his size, who could cripple him with another blow.
“That’s all you got, bitch? Come on, motherfucker, try me again!”
The next play, the same linebacker came loping toward him and Luke cut inside, breezing past him as the ball smacked into his hands and he sprinted into the end zone. He felt almost disappointed he hadn’t been hit again. His anger belonged here. Hell, all of the Cobras were angry. Everyone had a story of near fame and missed chances: the coach who’d fucked them over, the family debt that forced them to drop out and get a job, the recruiter who never saw their full potential. No one’s anger was more welcomed than his because the team pitied him the most. He was the youngest, the one most robbed of his future, so the other players were kind to him. Roy Tabbot invited him on fishing trips. Edgar Harris changed his oil for free. Jeremy Fincher loaned him a tux so he didn’t have to rent one for a friend’s wedding.
“Don’t fuck it up either, dickbreath,” Finch said, handing over the garment bag. It was the nicest thing anyone had done for Luke in months.
When there was no practice, Luke went to team barbecues. He stretched on white lawn chairs as the Cobras crowded around grills, arguing about the best way to marinate a steak. Finch said that steaks didn’t need marinade at all, none of that foo-foo pussy shit, just eat the goddamn meat like you’re meant to. Ritter said sorry, he didn’t want to eat the steak straight off the cow, it meant he wasn’t a fucking Neanderthal, not that he was a pussy, and Gorman said of course Finch knew a lot about eating meat. The wives carried out bowls of potato salad and macaroni and cheese, sometimes joining in the group and jibing the men, and Luke thought, I could have a life like this.
He sat by the kiddie pool, watching the Cobras’ children splash, and when they climbed out, they jumped on him, their bodies slick and cold as they tried to tackle him. He pulled himself out of a dog pile and found one of the wives—Gorman’s or Ritter’s, he could never remember—standing over him, blocking the sun from her eyes. She was smiling.
“You’re so good with kids,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said, embarrassed by how good that made him feel.
Late after one barbecue, when the party had died down and he sat under the fading tiki torch, finishing off his beer, he told Finch that he had been a father once, long ago.
“Fucking bullshit is what it is,” Finch said. “She wants to get rid of your kid? You got no say in that. But say she wanted to keep it. Guess who she’s hitting up for money? Guess whose ass is getting hauled off to jail if he can’t pay? A man’s got no rights anymore.”
Luke drained his beer, watching the flame above them flicker and dance. He felt pitiful, but if a man couldn’t feel pitiful late at night after drinking too much, when could he?
“She left me,” he said. “She went to Europe and shit and now she’s fucking some Arab motherfucker.”
Finch hooked an arm around his neck. “I’m sorry, brother,” he said. “That’s some bullshit and we both know it. I love my wife more than anything, but I’d kill her if she got rid of my baby.”
His eyes bulged a little, and Luke could tell he meant it. He suddenly felt sick. He stood too fast, the ground beneath him tilting and he felt dizzy, like when he used to put on his mother’s reading glasses and run around the house. Finch refused to let him walk home and pulled him inside. His wife put sheets on the couch for him, even though Luke told her he was fine with just a blanket. He felt touched by her extra effort, until he realized that maybe she just didn’t want him to puke on her couch. He hoped he wouldn’t. He stretched out, feeling the bumps in the cushion, his body taut with pain. He was grateful for how much he felt everything now. The wife brought a blanket from the hall and he closed his eyes as it fluttered on top of him.
—
MRS. FINCHER’S NAME WAS CHERRY. First name like the fruit, last name like the bird.
“Not Sherry,” she said. “Everyone wants to call me Sherry. Why would I want to be named after liquor?”
“I went to high school with a girl named Chardonnay,” Luke said.
“Well, you’re a baby,” she said. “You probably went to school with a girl named Grapefruit.”
She was always doing that, calling him a baby. He didn’t mind it. She wouldn’t tell him her age but he figured she was around thirty-five, not old but at the age where women start to think they are. If he ever got married, he decided, he would find a woman older than him. Too much pressure, being the older one in the relationship. When you were the baby, a woman didn’t expect much from you. She wanted to take care of you and he felt comforted by it all, her attention and her low expectations. If an actor over fifty appeared on TV, Cherry would say, “I bet you don’t even know who that is,” and he would shrug, even if he did, because it made her laugh. He’d sit at the counter while she made her kids sandwiches and although he never asked, she always made him one too.
He wasn’t attracted to her, not the way he usually was to women he chose to spend time with. She was fat. She had a too-wide smile and a strong chin. She was Filipina and she’d grown up poor in Hawaii. Luke had never even thought about there being poor people in Hawaii.
“Don’t y’all just surf and roast pigs and wear grass skirts and shit?” he asked. Cherry didn’t talk to him for two days.
“You got to shut off that TV and fucking go somewhere, Luke,” she said later. “Paradise ain’t paradise for everyone.”
She’d met Finch when he was stationed at Kaneohe Bay. She’d waited tables nearby at a tourist trap called Aloha Café, where the menu featured items with names like Surfside Steak and Luau Lamb Chops. Finch ordered the Beach Bum Brownies, but he kept calling them Butt Brownies, wh
ich made her laugh. She was eighteen. By the time she reached Luke’s age, she had married, moved to the mainland, and birthed three kids. Luke liked her children but he wondered if they were the only reason Cherry and Finch were still together. When he came over to watch a game with Finch, he studied the two of them, expecting to spot some invisible bond between them. But Finch rarely acknowledged Cherry and she was quiet around him, as if they had parceled out space in the house, carved it up like warring countries fighting over territory. Cherry behind the kitchen counter, passing through the living room like a tourist, Finch awkward anywhere near a stove, instead sprawling across the couch.
At Cobras parties, Cherry sipped pinot grigio with the other wives, always seeming a bit bored. Once Luke had heard the other wives call her stuck-up and he thought about her stories about eating sugar sandwiches for dinner, how she rarely saw her parents, who worked at the Dole cannery, how she’d grown up thinking that everyone knew their parents vaguely, by shadows cast in late nights or half-remembered forehead kisses at dawn. How she’d gotten married and grown fat and still felt the need to hoard—stashing candy bars in end drawers, packing old clothes in garbage bags at the back of her closet—because what if there wasn’t enough? Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full.
“I’m starting a new diet tomorrow,” she said, unwrapping a Reese’s cup she’d tucked in her coupon drawer.
“Which one?” he said.
“The one where you can only eat what the dinosaurs ate.”
“Didn’t they all die off?”
She laughed. “That’s why I like you, Luke.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re honest,” she said. “Because you don’t say, ‘Oh Cherry, you don’t need to go on a diet.’ What bullshit. The people who tell you that are the same ones calling you a fat ass once you leave the room.”