The Mothers(26)

Focus, that’s what Luke needed to do. Concentrate on one thing at a time. The smooth motion of his arm when he reached for the cup, the way the glass felt against his palm as he tightened his grip. And he did focus, from time to time. He survived a shift without dropping anything. Then Nadia returned to him, a sharp, sudden pain like hunger. Kissing her in the beach shower, his hands, still gritty with sand, on her stomach, his lips passed against the back of her suntanned neck. Later kneeling at the edge of his bed, hooking his fingers under the sides of her bikini bottom, her skin smoldering under his hands. She smelled like the ocean. She felt like the ocean when he was inside of her, rocking and rocking and calm. When it was over, he’d kissed the side of her face, the soft skin near her ears, the light baby hair turned curly from their sweat. His mouth had never touched anything that delicate.

He spent his dinner break smoking in the alley behind Fat Charlie’s with CJ. They used to play high school football together. CJ, a burly Samoan with long, curly hair, had been a decent nose tackle and earned a few letters from Division III schools, nothing like the recruitment packets and personal visits Luke had received. Still, they’d both ended up here, in an alley that smelled like wet garbage and sea air and cat piss. Luke leaned against the wall, passing the joint.

“You good, uso?” CJ said. “You got a weird look on your face.”

“Just some shit with this girl,” Luke said.

“Who? Shorty with the books?”

Luke hesitated, then needing to tell someone, said, “She told me she was pregnant.”

CJ laughed, a strange, wheezing laugh.

“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “Real simple. Don’t give her shit until you know it’s yours. I don’t care how fuckin’ cute that kid looks, don’t even buy his ass some diapers before you swab him—”

“She ain’t been with no one but me,” Luke said.

He didn’t know that, of course, but he knew he’d been her first. She hadn’t admitted that she was a virgin but he’d felt it from her tightness, from the little gasp she’d made once he’d entered her, from the way she clenched her eyes when he’d barely moved. Three times he asked if she wanted him to stop. Three times she shook her head. She was the type of girl who never wanted to admit that she was in pain, as if not confessing it made her stronger. Her mother had died two months ago and he knew that was the reason she was fucking him. Why she hadn’t mentioned his limp, why she’d pulled his Fat Charlie’s shirt over his head, even though it smelled like sweat and grease. She was a seventeen-year-old with a dead mother and she wanted him to fuck the sadness out of her. Every time he felt guilty for hurting her, she wrapped her arms tighter around his back so he sank deeper, moving as slowly as he could until he finished with a tiny shudder. Later, he pretended not to notice the blood on her sheets. He rolled closer to her and slept on top of the uneven spots.

CJ blew a puff of smoke toward the crumbling tile roof and tossed what was left of the joint in a puddle.

“Still,” he said. “You better get that kid tested. If you even act like he’s yours, the state’s taking all your money. Happened to a dude I know. The laws are all fucked up.”

“She didn’t keep it,” Luke said.

“Well, shit.” CJ clapped him on the back. “That’s even easier. You got lucky, homie.”

Luke didn’t feel lucky. When Nadia had first told him, he’d felt wired, the way he used to feel right after he’d finished lifting, like little sparks were running under his skin. Just to think, that morning his biggest worry had been getting to work on time so he wouldn’t get fired from his shitty job. And now a baby. A whole fucking baby. He felt terrible—she looked miserable, barely eating anything—but a small part of him had felt amazed by what they’d done. He’d helped create a whole new person, a person who’d never existed before in the entire world. Most days, the biggest thing he managed to accomplish was to recite the lunch specials from memory. He imagined rushing to the break room, once she left, to log on to the work computer and Google when pregnancy shows, how to stop pregnancy sickness, how much it costs to raise a child. Then Nadia told him she wanted an abortion. He’d promised he’d get her the money, even though he’d only saved two hundred for his apartment, wads of cash tucked in an orange Nike box under his bed. It had been all too easy to blow his paychecks on beer and sneakers, and he’d felt stupid, pulling his life’s savings out of a shoebox. How had he ever thought he could find a way to raise a kid?

He hadn’t planned to leave her at the clinic. But the day of the appointment, when he slid his cell phone into his work locker like he did every day, it dawned on him how easy it was to walk away. He had done his part and she had done hers, and he would never have to see her again. He wouldn’t have to imagine what she might look like after the surgery—grief-stricken, in pain—or find the right words to comfort her. He wouldn’t have to tell her that she had made the right decision or that he felt like he had barely made a decision at all. He could just lock the phone up and walk away. This was his gift, a body tied to no one.

But then he’d seen her at Cody Richardson’s party. And she hadn’t looked unpregnant. He’d only seen the word once before, years ago, when his father’s congregation had joined a protest out in front of the abortion clinic. He was just a boy then, clinging to his mother’s side because the other marchers made him nervous. A red-faced man in a camouflage puffy vest stomped around, chanting, “It’s a war out here, man, and we’re the front line.” An old black man held a sign that said ABORTION IS BLACK GENOCIDE. A nun carried a photo of a bloody baby’s head squeezed by forceps. There’s no such thing as an unpregnant woman, the sign read, just a mother of a dead baby. Years later, Luke hadn’t forgotten that sign. The word unpregnant had stuck with him even more than the graphic photograph—its finality, its sheer strangeness, not not pregnant but a different category of woman altogether. An unpregnant woman, he’d always thought, would somehow wear her unpregnancy as openly as pregnant women did. But when Nadia Turner had pushed inside the party, she looked no different than when he’d last seen her. Leggy in her high heels, a red blouse hugging her breasts, paining him with her prettiness. She wasn’t even crying. He was the weak one who couldn’t bring himself to face her.