The Mothers(14)

“Oh, your body’ll make some sounds all right,” she’d said, wrapping her hand around Nadia’s.

That first Sunday, her father had not been with them. Her mother had apologized for his absence to the pastor after service when she shook his hand in the receiving line.

“My husband, he just got back from overseas,” she’d said. “And he’s not much the churchly type.”

Nadia’s father had arrived home a week ago. She was four then and she barely remembered him, although she was old enough to understand that was a shameful thing to admit. In the months counting down to his return, her mother had gathered Nadia into her lap and pulled out a photo album, flipping slowly past pictures of her father holding her as a baby. In one, she was curled up like a kitten against his chest and her father, young and strapping in dress blues, smiled into the camera. He had a mole by his nose and short dark hair that looked plushy, like the bristles on her mother’s makeup brush. She studied his face, searching for features that were also hers. People had always said she looked exactly like her mother.

She had been wary around him at first, shy even. He’d knelt to hug her outside of the terminal and she had drawn back, startled by this man in camouflage hefting a giant duffel bag, his face darkened by desert sun. The time she’d spent studying his photographs had not prepared her for the reality of him, his size and smell. He frowned.

“She don’t remember me?” he said to her mother.

“Well, she was nothin’ but a baby when you left.” Her mother gave her a little push. “Go on and hug your daddy. Go on.”

She took a few steps forward and her father pulled her into a hug. His chest felt hard. She smiled at him, even though the hug hurt. Her father held her in his lap on the drive back home, while her mother complained that she ought to be in a car seat.

“She ought to be getting used to me,” he said.

“It just takes a little time, Robert,” her mother said.

“I don’t care,” he’d said. “I don’t care how long it takes. She’s gonna love me.”

Now her father paused at an intersection, before turning onto the road that led to the church. She hadn’t been on this ride since the morning of her mother’s funeral. That drive had been a blur—she’d felt like she’d been cast in a play she hadn’t tried out for and was suddenly expected to know all the lines. Would she have to speak at the service? What did anyone expect her to say? That one day, she’d had a mother, and the next, she didn’t? That the only tragic circumstance that had befallen her mother was her own self? In the backseat of the hearse, she’d found a run in her panty hose and quietly picked at it until it became a gaping hole, finding peace in the unraveling.

“I need you to take this seriously,” her father said. “Nice thing Mrs. Sheppard is doing for you.”

Maybe, but she didn’t understand why the first lady had felt inclined to help her at all. Luke’s mother hated her, ever since the seventh grade when she’d caught Nadia kissing Deacon Lou’s nephew behind the church. He was the type of boy she’d liked then—tall and rangy, draped in a T-shirt three times too big—and she’d traced his zigzag cornrows, pressing him against the side of the church as they panted into each other’s mouths. She’d never kissed a boy before, really kissed him. Earlier that year she’d dated a boy for three weeks, but they’d only kissed once after a circle of their friends dared them, so it didn’t really count. But this kiss was a real kiss. She felt it burning through her as he slipped his hand up her shirt and rubbed her through her training bra, and she thought he might have felt it too when he suddenly pulled away, as if he’d touched something hot. Then she followed his gaze over her shoulder to where the first lady stood. She’d snatched Nadia by the arm and dragged her back into the church, shaking her wrist as she fussed at her.

“I’ve never seen such a thing in my life! Carrying on like that behind the church!” Mrs. Sheppard gave her wrist another good shaking, leaning her face close to hers. “Don’t you know nice girls don’t do that? Don’t you know that?”

She still remembered the way the first lady’s face had suddenly loomed close to hers. She had one brown eye and one blue eye, and in that moment, both became a disorienting blur. She’d dragged Nadia back to Sister Willis’s class. For the rest of Sunday School, Sister Willis made Nadia sit in the back of the room by herself, writing My body is a temple of God a hundred times before she could be dismissed. Her mother hadn’t said much on the ride home, but when they pulled into the garage, she’d quietly shut off the engine and sat in the car a minute, still holding the steering wheel.

“My mama tried to keep me away from boys,” she said. “Obviously it didn’t work, so I won’t tell you that. You just gotta be smart and you gotta be careful. Boys, they can go around careless their whole lives. But you can either be careful now or careful later. That’s your only choice, really. You got big things ahead of you. Don’t you give that up for nobody.”

“But it’s just kissing,” Nadia said.

“Don’t let it be more than that,” her mother said. “Don’t end up like I did. That’s the only thing you could do that would break your daddy’s heart.”

Her father was a Marine, stoic and tough with a chest so hardened with muscle that his hugs even hurt. She’d never thought herself capable of breaking anyone’s heart, let alone his. But her mother was seventeen when she’d gotten pregnant. She must’ve known from experience how that had hurt her own parents. And if getting pregnant was the most harmful thing Nadia could do, then how much pain had her unexpected arrival caused? How much had she ruined her mother’s life, if her mother told her that a baby was the worst thing that could happen to her?