The Mothers(20)

Aubrey shrugged. “Want some?”

Nadia hesitated before reaching for the brownie and breaking off a corner. She chewed slowly, almost disappointed by how delicious it was.

“Wow,” she said. “Your mom made this?”

Aubrey carefully zipped up her lunch bag. “I don’t live with my mom,” she said.

“So your dad, then.”

“No,” she said. “I live with my sister, Mo. And Kasey.”

“Who’s Kasey?”

“Mo’s girlfriend. She’s a really good cook.”

“Your sister’s gay?”

“So?” Aubrey said. “It’s really not a big deal.”

But she’d gotten prickly, so Nadia knew that it was. She still remembered how years ago, the congregation had been convinced that Sister Janice’s daughter had been turned into a lesbian because she’d started playing rugby at the junior college. For weeks, the old folks had whispered about how no girl should be playing football—it just wasn’t right—until she showed up on Easter Sunday holding hands with a shy boy and that was that. At Upper Room, a gay sister was a big deal and she wondered how she’d never heard about Aubrey’s. Maybe because Aubrey didn’t want anybody to know. Nadia couldn’t help it, she was surprised. The life she’d imagined for Aubrey—a stay-at-home mother, a doting father—was melting away into something murkier. Why did Aubrey live with her sister, not her parents? Had something terrible happened to them? She felt a sudden kinship with a girl who didn’t live with her mother either. A girl who was also a keeper of secrets. Aubrey tilted the brownie toward her and Nadia silently broke off another piece.

—

THIS IS WHAT SHE KNEW about Aubrey Evans:

She’d appeared one Sunday morning, a strange girl wandering into Upper Room with nothing but a small handbag, not even a Bible. She’d started crying before the pastor asked who needed prayer and she’d cried even harder as she rose and walked to the altar. She was saved at sixteen, and since then, she’d attended church services each week and volunteered for the children’s ministry, the homeless ministry, the bereavement committee. Babies, bums, grief. A hint about where she’d come from, maybe, although Nadia only knew what most people did: that Aubrey had arrived at Upper Room suddenly and within a year, she’d seemed like she’d always belonged.

Now, each afternoon, the girls ate lunch together on the church steps. Each afternoon, Nadia learned more about Aubrey, like how she’d first visited Upper Room because she’d seen it on television. She was new to California then and camped out in front of the TV, watching the wildfire coverage. She had never heard of wildfire season and she had lived all over, so she thought she’d heard of everything. She’d spent two damp years in Portland, where she wrung rain out of her socks, then three years freezing in Milwaukee, another muggy year in Tallahassee. She’d dried out in Phoenix, then re-frosted in Boston. She felt like she’d been everywhere and nowhere at all, like she had flown to thousands of airports but never ventured outside of the terminal.

“Why’d you move so much?” Nadia asked. “Was it, like, a military thing?”

She had lived in Oceanside her whole life, unlike all the military kids from school who had followed a parent from Marine base to Marine base until they’d ended up at Camp Pendleton. She had never lived outside of California, never gone on exciting vacations, never left the country. Her life already seemed so singular and flat and dull, and she could only comfort herself with the fact that the good stuff was ahead.

“No,” Aubrey said. “My mom would just meet a man. And he’d move somewhere, so we’d go too.”

She had accompanied her mother as she followed boyfriends from state to state. A mechanic she’d loved in Cincinnati, a grocery store manager in Jackson, a truck driver in Dallas. She had never married although she’d wanted to. In Denver, she’d dated a cop named Paul for three years. One Christmas, he gave her a small velvet box and her hands shook while opening it. It was just a bracelet, and even though she cried later in the bathroom, she still wore it around her wrist. Aubrey never mentioned her father. She told one or two stories about her mother, but only stories that had happened years ago and Nadia began to wonder if her mother was even still alive.

“Did she—I mean, your mom isn’t—” But Nadia stopped herself before she could finish. She barely knew this girl. She couldn’t ask if her mother was dead too. But Aubrey understood and quickly shook her head.

“No, no, nothing like that,” she said. “I just—we don’t get along, that’s all.”

Could you do that? Leave your mother because you two fought sometimes? Who didn’t fight with her mother? But Aubrey said nothing more and her reticence only made Nadia even more intrigued. She imagined the lovesick mother chasing men from state to state, how, when each affair ended, the mother would have cursed and cried, flinging clothes into a suitcase; how Aubrey and her sister must have known that when love left, they would have to leave too.

—

“WHAT WERE YOU LIKE,” Nadia asked once, “as a little kid?”

She was sitting in the passenger’s seat of Aubrey’s Jeep, her bare feet warming on the dashboard. They were stuck in the perpetually long drive-thru line at In-N-Out, behind a brown minivan full of jostling kids. Earlier, Aubrey had suggested they go somewhere for lunch—Del Taco or Carl’s Jr. or even Fat Charlie’s. Luke Sheppard worked there and maybe he’d recognize them from church and offer a discount. But Nadia had shaken her head and said that she hated seafood.