The Mothers(68)

“People always think men want boys,” Russell said. “Like we couldn’t imagine loving something that isn’t exactly like ourselves.”

“You wouldn’t want a son?”

“Too dangerous,” he said. “Black boys are target practice. At least black girls got a chance.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“What’s not true? Why you think I enlisted? My pops told me, you better learn to shoot before these white men shoot you, and I did. I been all the way to Iraq and I could walk down the street here and get my head blown off. You don’t know what that’s like.”

She scoffed. “I’m scared all the time,” she said. “I never feel safe.”

“Well, you got your husband to protect you.”

“My husband’s the one who hurts me,” she said. “He thinks I don’t know he’s in love with someone else.”

She had never said it out loud before. There was something freeing in admitting that you had been loved less. She might have gone her whole life not knowing, thinking that she was enjoying a feast when she had actually been picking at another’s crumbs. Across the table, Russell slid his hand on top of hers. She stared at his rough skin, then the waiter came by with the bill and she forced herself to pull away.

—

FIRST JOHN TOLD LUKE about the pie. A slice of lemon meringue, shared between his wife and another man at a diner on the pier. The men were moving folding chairs into the meeting room before men’s Bible study when the head usher broached the topic, a little bashfully, his eyes scraping the floor. First John’s wife had been at lunch with one of her girlfriends earlier that week and she’d happened to see Aubrey sharing lunch with a man. A congregation member, she’d thought at first, but she’d never seen him around church before. The man had seemed hungry. His eyes never left Aubrey’s face.

“I don’t mean to stir up no mess,” First John said, “but I’d want to know if it was my wife.”

The pie had angered Luke the most. A lunch may have just been a meal, but splitting dessert was intimate. His wife and this strange man dipping forks into the soft cream, her fork, then his, then hers again, falling into an easy rhythm. This man must have watched her lift the fork to her mouth, his hungry eyes following as it disappeared between her lips. Maybe later, in a dark corner of the parking structure, he’d sucked the meringue off her tongue.

“How was your date?” he said, when he returned home.

Aubrey was sitting on the couch, folding laundry. She wore a brown shirt, a baggy gray cardigan that hung open to her waist, the type of drab outfit that made Luke feel, in that moment, that both of them were older than they had any right to be.

“It wasn’t a date,” she said.

“Then what was it?”

“Lunch.”

“How come you didn’t tell me about it, then?”

“I don’t have to tell you about every lunch I go to.”

“If you’re out with some strange nigga, then yes, you fucking do!”

He never yelled at her. He snapped sometimes but he always felt horrible after, because she flinched when he raised his voice, which made him feel as guilty as if he’d actually hit her. He would never hit her but he felt that she believed it was always possible, so he’d forced himself to monitor his anger around her—to quiet his voice, to control his body, to never punch a wall or throw a glass, like he’d so badly wanted to. He never wanted her to feel scared of him, the way she felt around most men. But not this man she’d gone to lunch with. If Luke were married to another woman, he might have believed that lunch was just lunch. But he knew Aubrey. She didn’t have male friends she went out with alone. If she’d gone to meet up with this man, lunch had to mean more.

She stared at him evenly. “I never ask where you go,” she said. “I never ask when you’re sneaking off to see Nadia.”

He swallowed. “That’s different,” he said.

“Why? Because you love her?” She laughed a little, shaking her head. “I’m not stupid. I’m not in law school but I’m not stupid.”

“Please,” he said.

“Stop. You don’t have to lie to me anymore. You’ve always loved her—”

“Please.”

“She’s the one you want.”

“Please,” he said.

Her calmness scared him. He would understand if she had screamed and yelled or cried and cursed. He expected her to, but she was eerily calm and that was how he knew she would leave him. Maybe not right away but someday, he would return home and find her shelf cleared in the bathroom, her half of the closet empty. He’d be lonelier than he had been at the rehab center before she’d brought him a donut wrapped carefully in crinkly paper, a small gift he hadn’t imagined himself capable of receiving. He stood in the doorway while she folded his sweaters across her chest, her arms holding his arms and crossing them into her heart.





THIRTEEN


I just don’t know that girl’s problem,” Betty said.

We all peeked out the blinds, watching Nadia Turner pull out of the church parking lot. For weeks, she’d been silent and rude; she hardly spoke when she pulled up to our houses, answering in one word when we tried to be friendly. With that type of company, we would’ve been better off hiring a taxi. When she picked us up from church, she always paced outside of her truck, like she was late or something. Where she got to go? Who she got waiting for her but her daddy, and not like he was going anywhere.