The Mothers

by Brit Bennett

  “Nah, nah,” Bill said. “You got to want more than that.”

  Luke laughed. “Like what? I’m supposed to wanna be president or some shit?”

  “That’s the problem with you brothas,” Bill said. “You got lazy. You know why? Because you know these young sistas will pick up the slack. Grown men living with their mamas, whole mess of kids running around, ain’t got a job. Somewhere along the way we became a race of men happy to let women take care of us.”

  Luke had grown up listening to old folks at Upper Room make similar speeches, about how they’d fought so hard just to watch his generation throw any progress away. As if he owed them somehow for being young and ought to personally repay them for their humiliations. Still, he liked hanging out with the old men in the hallway, listening to their stories and imagining their lives. Bill never listened to the trainers when they tried to guide him through his exercises. He was too stubborn, too softened, over the years, to pain. Who could blame him? He was old with no one waiting for him on the outside. He just wanted to talk shit with his buddies and look at pretty nurses. Luke was the only one who could get Bill out of his wheelchair.

  “You’re pretty good at this,” Carlos told him.

  Luke had convinced Bill to finish his quad stretches, cheering him on until the old man plopped back in his wheelchair with a huff. In the doorway, Carlos looked impressed.

  “You should look into physical training,” Carlos said. “Shit, you been here long enough.”

  Luke told Aubrey, and the next day, she printed out a list of qualifications he needed to become a physical therapy assistant. Two years of school, which discouraged him, but Aubrey said the time would pass anyway—why not spend it chasing after something he wanted? She’d squeezed his shoulder and he felt himself relaxing. She was right, and besides, if he had learned nothing else in rehab, he’d learned how to be patient. He’d spent the past few months relearning how to walk. He felt that he could wait for anything.

  When he was finally released from the rehab center, strong enough to lean on a cane alone, time seemed to rush at him. He missed the soft seconds in the center, days that blurred into one another, time marked only by mealtimes and exercise routines and Aubrey’s visits. Out in the world, he felt time racing past him and he could never catch up. In the center, he’d been a fast learner, nimble compared to the others, but at his parents’ house, he felt like he was moving in slow motion, like every effort to get out of bed and shower, to dress himself and cook breakfast, took three times as long. During the day, he worked on his applications to physical therapy programs and tried to find a job. But he didn’t have any real skills and most unskilled jobs required that you at least be able to lift fifty pounds. Finally, he asked his father if there was any work he could do at Upper Room.

  “Maybe I can do something around the grounds,” he said. “Pick up trash. I don’t know. Something.”

  Luke felt embarrassed, begging for pocket change, but his father placed a warm hand on his shoulder and smiled. He had probably been waiting for this moment for years. When his only son would return home, humbled, and ask to help out the ministry. Maybe he’d imagined this moment when Luke was born—a son who would inherit the church someday. A son standing beside him at the altar, leading teen Bible studies, following him through the halls of Upper Room. How disappointed his father must’ve been, given instead a son who worshipped pigskin, who spent his Sunday praise in front of the television, who hadn’t been called by God to do anything but run and catch.

  “The church is growing,” his father said. “Getting older. We could use someone to visit the sick and shut-in.”

  “I can do that,” Luke said.

  He understood sickness better than anything else. Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body. So when he knocked on doors, carrying donated meals, he did not tell the sick to get well. He just came to sit with them while they weren’t.

  He still saw Aubrey around Upper Room. He’d been worried at first that she wouldn’t talk to him now that he was out of rehab, that maybe their friendship had been restricted to that space. But she always seemed glad to see him. She never came by the house, although he hinted that that would be okay. But on Sunday mornings, she sat beside him, not in the front pew where he’d sat with his parents as a boy, but in a back pew near the aisle so he could stretch out his bad leg. Each Sunday, when his father laid hands on the sick, she glanced at him, and each Sunday, he looked away, studying the fringes on the rug. One week, she leaned in toward his ear.

  “Do you want to go up?” she asked. “I’ll go with you.”

  How could anyone believe healing was that easy, only a matter of asking for it? What about those who remained sick? Did they just not ask hard enough? But she reached for his hand, her fingers wedged against his purity scar. Their palms kissed and he felt, for the first time, that he could be whole.

  —

  ON A BRISK MAY NIGHT, Luke pushed through the concession stand crowd with his plastic cup of overpriced stadium beer. CJ trampled after him, carrying a cup of beer that sloshed against his hand. He didn’t like baseball but he’d agreed to the Padres game because they rarely hung out now that they no longer worked together. CJ had wanted to check out a football game—in the springtime, you could always find an arena game or even a spring practice—but Luke told him he wanted to watch baseball. He didn’t, really, but he couldn’t put himself through more football. He’d already given football too much. He would find something new to love.

  During the seventh-inning stretch, the crowd began to sing as an animated Friar Fred danced on the scoreboard. CJ moved his lips, the way Luke mouthed along to church hymns. When they sat, CJ took a sip of his tepid beer before setting it back on the ground.

  “I gotta get out of fuckin’ Fat Charlie’s, man,” CJ said.

  “And do what?”

  “I don’t know. Anything else. Maybe join up.”

  “Marines?”

  “Shit, maybe. What else I know how to do?”

  He couldn’t imagine CJ in camp or huffing through the desert with a gun strapped to his back. Could CJ even pass the fitness test? He was strong enough, sure, but you had to run three miles and he had never seen CJ run thirty yards.

  “What if they send you out somewhere?” Luke said.

  CJ shrugged. “At least it’s something. I gotta be on my shit like you. You got a future. What I got?”

  An old black vendor climbed the metal stairs, hollering, “Peanuts! Who wants a big bag of salty nuts?” The crowd laughed and Luke sipped his beer, wiping his mouth with a grease-splotched napkin. He wasn’t used to anyone else envying his life. He lived at home and collected fifty dollars each week from his father that felt more like an allowance than a paycheck. He leaned on a cane when he had to walk a long distance and at the stadium, he’d been patted down and wanded three times after the metal rod in his leg had set off the detectors. But he was building something, at least. He was starting his physical therapy classes in the fall. He spent his weekends with a girl who calmed him, who pieced him together. A pretty brunette in a retro Tony Gwynn jersey passed and he wondered if he could bring Aubrey to a game. She’d look cute in his cap, and maybe they’d get caught on the Kiss Cam and she would lean toward him, not embarrassed by the cheers of the crowd. He would hope for the Padres to hit a home run just to see her face when fireworks shot across the sky.

  At the top of the eighth, a small black boy in an Angels jersey three times too big for him hopped on the seat, yelling for the cotton candy man. The vendor didn’t notice, starting down the aluminum steps.

  “Ay man!” Luke stood, wincing at the sudden movement. “Right here!”

  He pointed at the boy. The vendor stopped and the boy stumbled down the row, climbing over legs as he waved his dollars in the air.
The man stooped with the carousel of pink and blue swaths of cotton candy and the boy jumped, pointing to the baby blue. He wiggled impatiently as the vendor gave him his change, then he smiled, triumphant, holding the cotton candy in his hands. Everyone ushered the boy down the row, hands against his back so he didn’t trip. Luke’s finger brushed against the smooth inside of his thin arm as he passed.

  “Tell me a secret,” Aubrey said later.

  Luke stretched out on his bed. His room was warm from the late spring heat but he couldn’t open a window or Aubrey would be cold. She was always cold and he liked that about her, how he felt responsible for warming her. She was curled against his chest and he bent to kiss her forehead. His parents were gone for the evening but he knew she hadn’t come over to do more than cuddle. When they’d first started dating, he’d tried to find times to spend with her alone. He knew she was waiting to have sex but she wouldn’t want to wait forever. Just a matter of time, he figured, until she felt ready. But months later, they still hadn’t had sex yet. Often, when Aubrey visited, they didn’t even go near his bedroom, eating dinner with his parents instead or sitting together on the porch swing. Maybe it was weird for her, hooking up in her pastor’s house, so he started visiting her at her sister’s house instead, even though he felt awkward in a house full of women. He stepped inside a bathroom with a counter covered in girly products—bottles of all shapes and sizes, moisturizers, facial cream, serum, leave-in conditioner—and washed his hands with pink soap that left his skin feeling soft and smelling like powder. It made him feel unmanly, so he started washing his hands with the orange dishwashing soap in the kitchen instead.

  No matter where they went, they didn’t have sex. Kissing was fine and sometimes touching was okay, but always over the clothes and always above the waist. He’d never dated a girl before who he hadn’t seen naked and he burned, imagining what it would be like to really touch her. When they spoke on the phone at night, he pictured her in bed, lying against the sheets in tiny shorts and a tank top with no bra. He touched himself sometimes as she talked about her day, thinking about how her nipples would look poking against white cotton. He always felt guilty afterward for defiling her image. Dirty.

  Under her thin T-shirt, he could make out the swell of her breasts and he wanted to touch her but he stopped himself. She wanted a secret. She was trying to be serious. He thought about mentioning the boy at the baseball game. He hadn’t stopped thinking about the smoothness of the boy’s skin but that sounded creepy, even in his own head. She wouldn’t understand. He barely understood it himself.

  “I got a girl pregnant once,” he said. “She didn’t keep it.”

  Aubrey was quiet a minute. “Who is she?” she finally said.

  “A girl I used to know,” he said. “I loved her, but she didn’t want the baby.”

  “What happened to her? The girl, I mean.”

  “It was a long time ago,” he said. “We haven’t really talked since.”

  She reached for his hand. He felt relieved, even though he still couldn’t bring himself to tell her the whole truth.

  “Tell me something,” he said. “Something you never told anyone.”

  She stared up at the ceiling. Then she said, “When I was little, I used to think I had superpowers.”

  He laughed. “What?”

  “Super senses,” she said. “Not powers, because they didn’t make me feel stronger. But you know how in biology class, they used to talk about how animals adapt? Like how over time, fish at the bottom of the ocean started doing weird things like glowing in the dark so they can lure prey and survive? It was like that.”

  “What type of superpower?” he said.

  “Like I could smell if a man was good or bad. Or I could jump out of my skin when he touched me.”

  “Who?”

  “And I could hear really good,” she said. “I could hear him moving throughout the apartment, like a rat clicking through the pipes. I could hear him before he got to my room. And I always wondered why my mom never heard but I told myself she couldn’t. Because she didn’t have super senses.”

  She started to cry. His clumsy hands cupped her face and he kissed her wet cheeks, her jaw, her forehead. He buried his face in her neck, wanting to keep her in her skin.

  EIGHT

  We forgot about Nadia Turner, the way any unseen person is unthought of. She was a pretty, unmothered girl who’d wrecked her daddy’s truck, and after, she fell out of our minds. Except for the few moments she popped up, like when someone asked Robert Turner how his daughter was doing and he said fine, just fine, finishing up her sophomore year. Or working an internship in Wisconsin this summer, yeah, some government thing, who knows. Robert continued to lend his truck. The first lady did not hire another assistant. But we didn’t see Nadia Turner again. Not Thanksgiving. Not Christmas. Not long patches of summer while we were sweating in our prayer room, cycling through cards filled with requests. In hot months, wanting always reaches its peak.

  Only years later, years after we heard the rumor, have we collected the signs. Betty says weren’t it peculiar that she’d never wanted to volunteer in the children’s church room, not even when she was flitting and following Aubrey Evans around? Agnes, the most attuned to spiritual things, says she passed the girl in the church lobby once and saw a baby trailing behind her. A little boy in knee socks, and when Agnes glanced back, he was gone. Oh I knew, she says, when we bring up Nadia Turner. I knew right away, just as soon as I seen her. I can always tell an unpregnant girl.

  After a secret’s been told, everyone becomes a prophet.

  —

  A WINTER, AND THEN ANOTHER, and then another. Soon, Nadia had been gone so long, she felt guilty about returning home at all. By senior year, she thought of Oceanside as a tiny beach setting trapped inside a snow globe; occasionally, she might take it down from her bookshelf and gaze at it, but she could never fit inside. As graduation neared, she took the LSAT and applied to law school at NYU and Duke and Georgetown, any program that might keep her away from home, finally accepting an offer from the University of Chicago. She had planned to work throughout the summer in Ann Arbor, then move to Chicago in the upcoming fall. But home tugged her back in the form of a breathless phone call from Aubrey: Luke had proposed that night, they were getting married, she wanted Nadia to hear it first.

  “What’s the matter?” Shadi asked, when she hung up the phone. He perched on the edge of the couch. “I thought she’s your friend.”

  “She is.”

  “So why aren’t you happy?”

  “Because her fiancé’s a dick.”

  “Then why’s she marrying him?”

  “She doesn’t know it.”

  A different man, a more perceptive one, might have asked how Nadia knew. But Shadi just pushed off the couch and went to boil noodles for dinner. He didn’t ask certain questions about her life before him because he didn’t want to know the answers. She was happy to oblige him, avoiding any mention of the summer before college altogether. She couldn’t tell him about Luke and the baby. Shadi was a good, progressive boy but maybe he wouldn’t understand why she’d gone to the abortion clinic. Maybe abortion seemed different when it was just an interesting topic to write a paper about or debate over drinks, when you never imagined it might affect you. And since she couldn’t tell him about the baby, she couldn’t explain why she’d been so devastated when Aubrey visited two years ago and announced that she’d been spending time with Luke. At first, Nadia didn’t even hear her. She was so excited to see her, she could hardly believe that Aubrey was actually here, in the passenger’s seat of Shadi’s Corolla, which he’d graciously lent her so she could pick Aubrey up from Detroit Metro Airport. On the ride back to Ann Arbor, Nadia kept glancing at Aubrey and grinning, already imagining the dive bars she would bring her to, the frat parties that would make Cody Richardson’s house seem as quiet and peaceful as a libr
ary. She would be introducing her college boyfriend and her college friends to her back-home friend, those two disparate parts of her life blending in a way that felt sophisticated and mature. Then she realized that Aubrey had mentioned Luke.

  “What?” she’d said.

  “I said, me and Luke have been spending time together.”

  “What?” Nadia said again.

  “I know,” Aubrey said. “Don’t you think it’s weird?”

  “Why would it be weird?”

  “I don’t know. We just never really spent time together before but now . . .”

  She’d trailed off cryptically. Spending time, what did that even mean? Fucking? No, Aubrey would’ve said something if she’d broken her virginity pledge, wouldn’t she? So if they weren’t having sex, what were they doing together? That had bothered Nadia the most. Luke courted Aubrey. He took her on trips to the zoo, where he’d bought nectar so they could feed the birds. Aubrey sent Nadia pictures of them posing in front of the birdcage, Luke dripping with tropical birds on his arms, or the two of them celebrating their first anniversary at Disneyland, Luke wearing a Goofy baseball cap with dog ear flaps. Nadia couldn’t imagine Luke ever wearing a cutesy hat in public, let alone planning a date that took more effort than sending a text message a few hours in advance. He was different now. Or maybe he was different with someone other than her.

  She’d never thought their relationship would last. How could it? What could they possibly have in common? What could possibly bind them together? Instead, she’d scrolled incessantly past photographs of the two of them sitting together on the edge of a dock or sharing dinner downtown or posing in the kitchen with Pastor and Mrs. Sheppard on Thanksgiving. Mrs. Sheppard beaming, an arm around Aubrey’s waist, as if she had actually selected her perfect daughter-in-law years ago. She must have felt relieved that Luke had finally realized it.