The Mothers(27)

Now he couldn’t stop breaking things. If you dropped one dish during your shift, Charlie just humiliated you at the next staff meeting. Two and he took you off tables for the rest of the night. Luke counted the tip money in his pockets—fifteen dollars in crumpled ones and a few nickels. Not even gas money. He glanced at CJ, who was still grinning at him, in awe of his good fortune.

“Guess I am lucky,” Luke said, blowing smoke into the sour air.

—

THAT SUMMER, Nadia spent more nights in Aubrey Evans’s bed than in her own.

She slept on the right side, farthest from the bathroom, because Aubrey got up more in the middle of the night. In the morning, she brushed her teeth and left her toothbrush in the holder by the sink. She ate breakfast in the chair nearest the window, her feet bunched up on the edge of her seat. She drank her juice out of Kasey’s bright orange Vols cup. She left clothes in Aubrey’s room, accidentally at first—a sweatshirt forgotten on the back of a chair, a swimsuit left in the dryer—then she forgot things on purpose. Soon, when Monique dumped a laundry basket on the bed, the girls’ clothes tangled into an indistinguishable knot.

It wasn’t hard to move into someone else’s life if you did it a little at a time. Aubrey no longer asked if she wanted to spend the night—after work, when they walked out to the parking lot, Aubrey unlocked the passenger’s side and waited for Nadia to climb inside. Aubrey was lonely too. She hadn’t made many friends at school. She’d spent more time volunteering at church than going to football games or dances. It was strange, learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.

“You sure you’re not wearing out your welcome over there?” her father asked one night.

“No,” she said. “Aubrey invited me.”

“But you’re over there all the time now.”

“So now you care where I go,” she said.

He paused in her doorway. “Don’t get smart with me,” he said.

She went anyway, even though on most nights, she and Aubrey did nothing at all, lounging on the couch, watching bad reality TV and painting each other’s nails. They drove downtown and ducked inside little shops at the harbor. Last summer, Nadia had worked there at Jojo’s Juicery, smiling plaintively while people squinted at the rainbow-colored menu above her head. She had daydreamed while following smoothie recipes on laminated index cards taped to the counter. She served rich white people, mostly, who strolled with pastel sweaters tied around their shoulders, as if carrying them was too much work. She had never been inside any of the harbor restaurants like Dominic’s Italian or Lighthouse Oysters—fancy places she could never afford—but she joked with the waiters sometimes when they came inside Jojo’s. A waitress at D’Vino’s told her how a Hollywood producer had yelled “Al dente! Al dente! That means ‘to the tooth’!” at her and sent his linguine back three times until it was firm enough. He was trying to impress his date, a weathered blonde woman who barely reacted, which just seemed sad—what was the point of being a Hollywood producer if you had to yell at waitresses to impress women? At least no one would try to impress a date at Jojo’s. During work, she liked to stare out the glass at the boats docked along the harbor, their colorful sails furled, but sometimes it made her sad. She’d never been inside a boat and they were docked twenty feet away. She’d never been anywhere.

Some evenings, she stayed after work to help Aubrey volunteer. They packed food baskets for the homeless and cleaned Sister Willis’s classroom, scrubbing the chalkboards and scraping Play-Doh off the tables. On Friday nights, they hosted senior bingo, dragging in stacks of metal chairs, setting up snacks, and calling out numbers the seniors asked them to repeat at least three times. Other nights, the girls sipped smoothies along the harbor and peered into shop windows at trinkets. In the coming darkness, the boats bobbed and swayed, and later, when she crawled into Aubrey’s bed, Nadia felt like one of those boats, bobbing in place. She was leaving for college in two weeks. She was drifting between two lives, and as excited as she felt, she wasn’t quite ready to lose the life she’d found this summer.

Sometimes Kasey grilled and they all ate dinner in the backyard, then walked down the street for Hawaiian shaved ice. Monique told them stories about work, about a hallucinating man who’d gouged his own eye out, a woman who’d fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a fence, nearly impaling herself on the post. One evening, she told them about a girl who had taken illegal abortion pills from Mexico and couldn’t bring herself to admit it until she almost bled out on the E.R. floor.

“What happened to that girl?” Nadia asked later, while they all washed the dishes.

“What girl?” Monique handed her a wet plate.

“That girl. The one who took those pills from Mexico.”

She still couldn’t bring herself to say the word abortion. Maybe it would sound different falling out of her mouth.

“Horrible infection. But she pulled through. These girls are so afraid to tell someone they’re pregnant, they get these pills cheap online and no one knows what’s in them. She would’ve died if she hadn’t had enough sense to get help.” Monique handed Aubrey a plate. “Don’t you girls ever do something like that. You call me, okay? Or Kasey. We’ll take you to a doctor. Don’t ever try to do something like that on your own.”