The Mothers(63)

“Why a date?”

He pressed her hand against his heart and rolled onto his side. She’d always heard that men hated to cuddle and it surprised her that Luke liked to be on the inside, cuddled by her. She had almost laughed the first time at the idea, but it made sense in a way, that everyone would want to be held. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed his muscled back.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just want to take you somewhere nice.”

“What if someone sees us?” she said.

“Let them,” he said. “I don’t care.”

“You’re married.”

“What if I wasn’t?”

For a moment, she allowed herself to imagine it, how simple he made it seem, like a gate stood between him and freedom and all he needed to do was slip a finger under the latch. Luke was good at this, always finding an escape. She remembered watching him on the football field, amazed by how his body seemed to know, down to the second, when to juke left or right, always aware of the direction danger appeared. He’d escaped her once before; she couldn’t help him do the same to Aubrey. Aubrey sitting on that metal table inside the fertility doctor’s office, how small she’d looked next to the size of her wanting.

“You can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because she loves you,” she said. “We’re just fucking around, but she loves you.”

“It’s not just fucking,” he said. “Don’t say that—”

“It is to me,” she said.

He silently dressed but paused halfway, his pants hanging at his ankles. He looked like he might cry, and she turned away. He didn’t love her. He felt guilty. He’d abandoned her once and now he was latching onto her, not out of affection but out of shame. She refused to let him bury his guilt in her. She would not be a burying place for any man again.

Luke forgot his watch on her nightstand, so the next morning, she brought it to Upper Room. When she pulled into the parking lot, Mother Betty was shuffling across the street from the bus stop. The DMV had taken her license after she failed her last driving test.

“They got me on those questions,” she said. “Who knows the answers to all those little questions anyway? I been driving sixty-six years and never hit nobody but these people gonna say I can’t drive because of their little questions?”

She watched Mother Betty slowly sift through her ring of keys to unlock the front door, her hand shaking. It wasn’t right, a woman her age waiting for the bus before daybreak.

“I can give you a ride,” Nadia said. She fumbled through her purse for a piece of paper. “I’ll give you my number and you just call me when you’re ready to go to work. Okay?”

“Oh no, honey, I couldn’t trouble you.”

“It’s no trouble at all. Really. Please.”

She held out the scrap of notebook paper. Mother Betty hesitated, then accepted it.

“You got a caring spirit,” she said. “I can sense it in you. Just like your mama.”

Nadia left Luke’s watch on Mother Betty’s desk. She drove home, glancing at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She touched the image but did not see her mother’s face, only smudged glass.





TWELVE


Years later, we realized the watch should have told us everything. Only two reasons a woman might have someone’s husband’s watch:


She’s sleeping with him.

    She repairs watches.



Nadia Turner didn’t look like a watchmaker to us. But even though the truth hadn’t dawned on us yet, we still pitied Aubrey. On Sunday mornings, when we gathered around her in the church lobby, we felt her sadness swell. Agnes peered into the life of a baby girl born to parents who distrust each other. A girl who distrusts the world too, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand. She feels the coldness spreading between her parents and second-guesses everything: if her parents can pretend they are in love, what else could they be lying about to her? What else could the world keep from her, hold away in its hand?

She may hear this story, someday, and wonder what it has to do with her. A girl hiding her scared in her prettiness, an unwanted baby, a dead mother. These are not her heartbreaks. Every heart is fractured differently and she knows the pattern of her cracks, she traces them like lines across her palm. She has a living mother and besides, she was always wanted. Prayed for, even. Now she’s grown, or at least she thinks she is. But she hasn’t yet learned the mathematics of grief. The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains. She’s heard her granddaddy preach about the good shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine behind in search of the one lost sheep.

But what about the flock he abandons? she wonders. Aren’t they lost now too?

—

THAT FALL, Nadia Turner mothered. In the gray mornings, while her father slept, she scraped his keys off the hallway table and pulled his truck out of the driveway. She rolled down the window, sticking an arm out into the damp air, and cruised through quiet streets, past coffee shops flipping “Closed” signs, women in bathrobes strapping backpacks on children at bus stops, surfers in wetsuits with boards racked on tops of trucks, until she reached a prim white house with blue trim. She began to feel like a valet, hopping out to help Mother Betty up the high truck stairs, especially once the other Mothers began to ask her for rides.