The Mothers(7)

So the morning of the protest, the congregation gathered in front of the unbuilt clinic. Second John, who had driven the carless in the church van, and Sister Willis, who had instructed her Sunday School students to help color in the protest signs, and even Magdalena Price, who could hardly be bothered to do anything around Upper Room that required her to step out from behind her piano bench, had come down to the protest to, as she put it, see what all the fuss was about. All of us had circled around the pastor and the first lady and their son—a boy then, kicking dirt clods onto the sidewalk—while the pastor prayed for the souls of innocents.

Our protest only lasted three days. (Not because of our wavering convictions but because of the militants who joined us, the type of crazed white people who would end up on the news someday for bombing clinics or stabbing doctors. The last place any of us wanted to be was near the scene when one went off the deep end.) All three days, Robert Turner drove downtown at six a.m. to deliver a new batch of picket signs from the church. He and his wife were not the protesting type, he told the pastor, but he’d figured that transporting the signs was the least he could do, truck and all.

This was ten years before he would be known around Upper Room as the man with the truck, a black Chevy pickup that had become Upper Room’s truck because of how often Robert was seen driving from church, an arm hanging out the window, the truck bed filled with food baskets or donated clothes or metal chairs. He wasn’t the only member with a truck, of course, but he was the only one willing to lend his at any moment. He kept a calendar by the phone and whenever anyone from Upper Room called, he carefully scheduled them in with a tiny golf pencil. Sometimes he joked that he should add the truck to his answering machine greeting because the truck would earn more messages than he did anyway. A joke, although he wondered if it was true, if the truck was the only reason he was invited to picnics and potlucks, if the true guest was the truck, needed to haul speakers and tables and folding chairs, but no one minded if he tagged along too. Why else would he receive such warm greetings when he stepped into Upper Room each Sunday? The ushers clapping his back and the ladies at the welcome table smiling at him and the pastor mentioning, once, in passing, that he wouldn’t be shocked if Robert’s good stewardship landed him on the elders board one day.

The truck, Robert believed, had turned things around for him. But there was also his daughter. People are always tenderhearted toward single fathers, especially single fathers raising girls, and folks would have cared for Robert Turner still, even if that terrible thing hadn’t happened with his wife, even if she had just packed a suitcase and left, which to some, it seemed like she did anyway.

—

THAT EVENING, when her father pulled his truck into the garage, Nadia was curled in bed, clutching her twisting stomach. “The cramps might be bad,” the dreadlocked nurse had told her. “Expect them a few hours or so. Call the emergency number if they’re severe.” The nurse didn’t explain the difference between bad cramps and severe ones, but she’d handed Nadia a white bag curled at the top like a sack lunch. “For the pain. Two every four hours.” A clinic volunteer offered to drive Nadia home, and when she climbed into the white girl’s dusty Sentra, she glanced out the window at the nurse, who watched them drive off. The volunteer—blonde, twentyish, earnest—chatted nervously the whole drive, fiddling with the radio dials. She was a junior at Cal State San Marcos, she said, volunteering at the clinic as part of her feminist studies major. She looked like the type of girl who could go to college, major in something like feminist studies, and still expect to be taken seriously. She asked if Nadia planned to go to college and seemed surprised by her response. “Oh, Michigan’s a good school,” she said, as if Nadia didn’t already know this.

That was two hours ago. Nadia clenched her eyes, passing through the cold center of the pain into its warmer edges. She wanted to take another pill even though she knew she should wait, but when she heard the garage door rumble, she shoved the orange vial into the white bag, everything inside her nightstand drawer. Anything unusual might tip her father off, even that nondescript bag. Since she discovered that she was pregnant, she’d been sure that her father would notice something was wrong with her. Her mother had been able to tell when she’d had a bad day at school moments after she climbed into the car. What happened? her mother used to ask, even before Nadia had said hello. Her father had never been that perceptive, but a pregnancy wasn’t a bad day at school—he would notice that she was panicking, he would have to. She was grateful so far that he hadn’t, but it scared her, how you could return home in a different body, how something big could be happening inside you and no one even knew it.

Her father knocked three times and nudged her bedroom door open. He wore his service khakis today, which seemed like a second skin, how naturally he fit within sharp pleats, a row of badges across his chest. Her friends used to be surprised that her father was a Marine. He didn’t seem like the boys they’d grown up seeing around town, cocky and buff and horsing around in front of the Regal, flirting with passing girls. Maybe her father had been like that when he was younger but she couldn’t imagine it. He was quiet and intense, a tall, wiry man who never seemed to relax, like a guard dog on his haunches, his ears always perked up. He leaned in her doorway, bending to unlace his shiny black boots.

“You don’t look so good,” he said. “You sick?”