The Mothers(17)

Before leaving, Nadia had thrown up quietly inside the clinic bathroom. Then she’d dumped the pamphlets in the trash, shoving all of them through the narrow slot until she reached the card on the bottom, the one attached to the baby feet. She had never seen such a thing before—a pair of disembodied feet—and maybe the sheer oddness compelled her to keep the pin. Or maybe she had known then that she would have an abortion. She had felt her choices strung in a tight balance, and when she hadn’t been able to throw the pin away, she knew that there would be no baby, that this pin was all that would remain. She had hidden the lapel pin in the back of her drawer, past old notebooks and hair ties and an empty jewelry box her father had bought her years ago. Every night before bed, she dug through the drawer for the pin and held it in her palm, stroking the bottom of golden feet still glinting in the dark.

—

IN LATE SPRING, Oceanside was blanketed in so much mist, the locals called it May Gray. When darkened skies lasted into summer, it became June Gloom. No Sky July. Fogust. That spring, the fog was so thick, the beaches were empty until noon, surfers, unable to see ten feet in front of them, abandoning the coast. The type of thick, billowing fog that rolled fat and lazy, so much fog that the ladies at Upper Room covered their hair in hats and scarves to protect press-and-curls on their way into the church. The fog had brought with it news: the first lady had hired a new assistant and her name was Nadia Turner.

Latrice Sheppard had never had an assistant before and everyone doubted she would be able to keep one. She was tall and demanding, not some meek wife who sat in the front pew, silent and smiling. When the elders, and sometimes her husband, suggested she had too much on her plate, she said that she had not been called to sit, but to serve. And she served with the homeless ministry, the children’s ministry, the sick and shut-in ministry, the drug recovery ministry, and the women’s ministry, where she personally led outreach to the battered women’s shelter. She’d grown used to the chaos of her life, running around Upper Room from meeting to meeting, stuffing clothes donations for the homeless into the trunk of her car, hopping on the freeway to bring toys to the children’s hospital. To the battered women’s shelter, to the youth detention center, to everywhere that needed going until she ended up back home to cook dinner for her husband. But she’d never had an assistant and she didn’t want one now.

“I just don’t like the look of her,” she told her husband one morning.

“You don’t like the look of a lot of folks,” he said.

“And am I wrong?”

“It isn’t a reason to fire someone.”

Behind his desk, John sipped his coffee and Latrice sighed, pouring herself another cup. Out the window, she could see the fog rolling into the church parking lot. Enough to make her about sick of it. She was from Macon, Georgia. She knew rain and she knew humidity, but she hated this strange in-between, especially since springtime in Georgia was when azaleas and peach blossoms and magnolias bloomed and the weather was perfect for barbecues and porch-sitting and driving with the windows down. But here, she could barely see out to the road. It was enough to make her more frustrated than she already was.

“Honey, we all like Brother Turner,” she said, “but I don’t need some fast-tailed, know-nothing girl following me around all summer!”

“Latrice, the Word says that the good shepherd leaves the ninety-nine—”

“Oh, I know what the Word says. Don’t you preach at me like I’m some little woman in your congregation.”

John slipped his glasses off his face, the way he always did when he wanted to make a point. Maybe some things were easier for him to say once she was blurred, out of focus.

“We owe her,” he said.

She scoffed, turning in front of the window. She refused to be indebted to anyone, let alone a girl she’d done nothing but help. She had been the only one quick enough to act. That morning, her son had sat slumped over the kitchen table, his head in his hands, while her husband paced across the kitchen floor. Both her son’s stillness and her husband’s constant movement irritated her. She had barely woken up, hadn’t even taken the rollers out of her hair. A pregnant girl before she drank her morning coffee.

“You couldn’t have found you a girl who didn’t go to Upper Room?” she’d finally asked.

“Mama—”

“Don’t Mama me. You know it’s yours? Who knows how many of these boys she been with?”

“It’s mine,” he said. “I know it.”

“A high school girl,” she said. “Is she even eighteen?”

“Almost,” he said softly.

“After everything we taught you,” John said, “after we raised you up in the Word, after we told you about living in sin, you go out and do something as dumb as this?”

She had witnessed this scene dozens of times before, her husband yelling at Luke. For joyriding with his friends, theater-hopping, sneaking beer onto the beach in old Coke bottles, smoking reefer in Buddy Todd Park, goading Marines into fights. He wasn’t a bad kid but he was reckless. Black boys couldn’t afford to be reckless, she had tried to tell him. Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead. How many times had she told Luke to be careful? But he’d messed around with a girl who was not even legal yet—what would Robert think? He would be angry, of course, but how angry? Angry enough to haul Luke to the police station?