The Mothers (11 page)

“She's not my girl,” Luke said.

“I heard she's living in, like, Russia right now.”

“Russia?”

“Or some shit like that. She's living in Russia and fucking with some African nigga.”

Luke sipped his beer again, swishing it around his mouth. When she'd first left, he used to obsess over the college boys Nadia was
touching. He imagined them, never athletic boys like him, but preppy boys in Michigan sweaters, who scurried around campus, stacks of books clutched against their chests. Now he had a name. Shadi Waleed, some Arab-sounding motherfucker. At Fat Charlie's, he searched him on the computer in the staff room and found pages of articles Shadi had written for some newspaper called
The Blue Review
. A blog post—of course he blogged—about, Luke was surprised to discover, football. Football as in soccer, but he was shocked that Shadi was interested in regular things like sports, although the blog post was about how France's World Cup hopes rested on their Muslim forward and wasn't that ironic? Luke didn't understand what was so ironic, but it must've been another thing that Shadi Waleed knew that he didn't.

He finally landed on Shadi's Facebook—his breath caught when he saw the profile picture. Shadi lounging on a black chair outside a restaurant, Nadia Turner on his lap in a long, floral sundress, smiling behind sunglasses, her hand gently draped across Shadi's shoulder. She looked older now, her face more angular, her cheekbones sharpened. She looked happy. Luke flipped through the other photos—mostly posters for campus events, a few of Shadi hunching over a woman in a headscarf who must've been his mother—but he always returned to the one of Nadia in Shadi's lap. Her life had gone on like nothing had happened, but Luke was stuck, wedged in the past, always wondering what would've happened if they'd kept the baby. Their baby.

“Who the fuck is that?” a busboy asked Luke, pointing at Shadi's smiling face. “Your boyfriend?”

He cackled, but Luke shoved away from the computer so hard, the desk shook.

—

W
HEN HE JOINED TH
E
C
OBRAS
, Luke thought his anger might finally subside, but instead, he felt it growing. Football was a safe place to be angry. Every time he laced up, he cupped his anger, keeping it safe. The first time he got hit in practice, he saw a white flash, his mind washed over with pain, then he pushed himself off the ground and hobbled back to the huddle. That hit made him feel like himself again. He started shit-talking, taunting men double his size, who could cripple him with another blow.

“That's all you got, bitch? Come on, motherfucker, try me again!”

The next play, the same linebacker came loping toward him and Luke cut inside, breezing past him as the ball smacked into his hands and he sprinted into the end zone. He felt almost disappointed he hadn't been hit again. His anger belonged here. Hell, all of the Cobras were angry. Everyone had a story of near fame and missed chances: the coach who'd fucked them over, the family debt that forced them to drop out and get a job, the recruiter who never saw their full potential. No one's anger was more welcomed than his because the team pitied him the most. He was the youngest, the one most robbed of his future, so the other players were kind to him. Roy Tabbot invited him on fishing trips. Edgar Harris changed his oil for free. Jeremy Fincher loaned him a tux so he didn't have to rent one for a friend's wedding.

“Don't fuck it up either, dickbreath,” Finch said, handing over the garment bag. It was the nicest thing anyone had done for Luke in months.

When there was no practice, Luke went to team barbecues. He stretched on white lawn chairs as the Cobras crowded around grills,
arguing about the best way to marinate a steak. Finch said that steaks didn't need marinade at all, none of that foo-foo pussy shit, just eat the goddamn meat like you're meant to. Ritter said sorry, he didn't want to eat the steak straight off the cow, it meant he wasn't a fucking Neanderthal, not that he was a pussy, and Gorman said of course Finch knew a lot about eating meat. The wives carried out bowls of potato salad and macaroni and cheese, sometimes joining in the group and jibing the men, and Luke thought, I could have a life like this.

He sat by the kiddie pool, watching the Cobras' children splash, and when they climbed out, they jumped on him, their bodies slick and cold as they tried to tackle him. He pulled himself out of a dog pile and found one of the wives—Gorman's or Ritter's, he could never remember—standing over him, blocking the sun from her eyes. She was smiling.

“You're so good with kids,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said, embarrassed by how good that made him feel.

Late after one barbecue, when the party had died down and he sat under the fading tiki torch, finishing off his beer, he told Finch that he had been a father once, long ago.

“Fucking bullshit is what it is,” Finch said. “She wants to get rid of your kid? You got no say in that. But say she wanted to keep it. Guess who she's hitting up for money? Guess whose ass is getting hauled off to jail if he can't pay? A man's got no rights anymore.”

Luke drained his beer, watching the flame above them flicker and dance. He felt pitiful, but if a man couldn't feel pitiful late at night after drinking too much, when could he?

“She left me,” he said. “She went to Europe and shit and now she's fucking some Arab motherfucker.”

Finch hooked an arm around his neck. “I'm sorry, brother,” he
said. “That's some bullshit and we both know it. I love my wife more than anything, but I'd kill her if she got rid of my baby.”

His eyes bulged a little, and Luke could tell he meant it. He suddenly felt sick. He stood too fast, the ground beneath him tilting and he felt dizzy, like when he used to put on his mother's reading glasses and run around the house. Finch refused to let him walk home and pulled him inside. His wife put sheets on the couch for him, even though Luke told her he was fine with just a blanket. He felt touched by her extra effort, until he realized that maybe she just didn't want him to puke on her couch. He hoped he wouldn't. He stretched out, feeling the bumps in the cushion, his body taut with pain. He was grateful for how much he felt everything now. The wife brought a blanket from the hall and he closed his eyes as it fluttered on top of him.

—

M
RS
. F
INCHER
'
S NAME WAS
C
HERRY
. First name like the fruit, last name like the bird.

“Not Sherry,” she said. “Everyone wants to call me Sherry. Why would I want to be named after liquor?”

“I went to high school with a girl named Chardonnay,” Luke said.

“Well, you're a baby,” she said. “You probably went to school with a girl named Grapefruit.”

She was always doing that, calling him a baby. He didn't mind it. She wouldn't tell him her age but he figured she was around thirty-five, not old but at the age where women start to think they are. If he ever got married, he decided, he would find a woman older than him. Too much pressure, being the older one in the relationship. When you were the baby, a woman didn't expect much from you. She wanted to take care of you and he felt comforted by it all, her attention and
her low expectations. If an actor over fifty appeared on TV, Cherry would say, “I bet you don't even know who that is,” and he would shrug, even if he did, because it made her laugh. He'd sit at the counter while she made her kids sandwiches and although he never asked, she always made him one too.

He wasn't attracted to her, not the way he usually was to women he chose to spend time with. She was fat. She had a too-wide smile and a strong chin. She was Filipina and she'd grown up poor in Hawaii. Luke had never even thought about there being poor people in Hawaii.

“Don't y'all just surf and roast pigs and wear grass skirts and shit?” he asked. Cherry didn't talk to him for two days.

“You got to shut off that TV and fucking go somewhere, Luke,” she said later. “Paradise ain't paradise for everyone.”

She'd met Finch when he was stationed at Kaneohe Bay. She'd waited tables nearby at a tourist trap called Aloha Café, where the menu featured items with names like Surfside Steak and Luau Lamb Chops. Finch ordered the Beach Bum Brownies, but he kept calling them Butt Brownies, which made her laugh. She was eighteen. By the time she reached Luke's age, she had married, moved to the mainland, and birthed three kids. Luke liked her children but he wondered if they were the only reason Cherry and Finch were still together. When he came over to watch a game with Finch, he studied the two of them, expecting to spot some invisible bond between them. But Finch rarely acknowledged Cherry and she was quiet around him, as if they had parceled out space in the house, carved it up like warring countries fighting over territory. Cherry behind the kitchen counter, passing through the living room like a tourist, Finch awkward anywhere near a stove, instead sprawling across the couch.

At Cobras parties, Cherry sipped pinot grigio with the other wives, always seeming a bit bored. Once Luke had heard the other wives call her stuck-up and he thought about her stories about eating sugar sandwiches for dinner, how she rarely saw her parents, who worked at the Dole cannery, how she'd grown up thinking that everyone knew their parents vaguely, by shadows cast in late nights or half-remembered forehead kisses at dawn. How she'd gotten married and grown fat and still felt the need to hoard—stashing candy bars in end drawers, packing old clothes in garbage bags at the back of her closet—because what if there wasn't enough? Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full.

“I'm starting a new diet tomorrow,” she said, unwrapping a Reese's cup she'd tucked in her coupon drawer.

“Which one?” he said.

“The one where you can only eat what the dinosaurs ate.”

“Didn't they all die off?”

She laughed. “That's why I like you, Luke.”

“Why?”

“Because you're honest,” she said. “Because you don't say, ‘Oh Cherry, you don't need to go on a diet.' What bullshit. The people who tell you that are the same ones calling you a fat ass once you leave the room.”

He liked that she thought of him like that—honest, shrewd, unsentimental. He found himself spending more time around her, even though he knew he shouldn't. He wasn't used to having friends with wives but he understood that there were boundaries you ought to respect. And even though he knew he shouldn't visit when Finch wasn't home, he still swung by the house sometimes before his
afternoon shift. He usually made up some excuse—he wanted to return a socket wrench Finch had lent him, he lost his playbook, he thought he'd left his water bottle on the coffee table. In reality, he just wanted to talk to Cherry, who always seemed interested in his life. She told him where he should look for a better-paying job, how he should consider going back to school, how he should stop stalking Nadia's Facebook.

“That's your first mistake,” she said. “You never go sniffing around an ex. Why would you want to see how happy she is without you?”

Cherry was right. She was right about many things, and he liked asking her for advice. He couldn't ask his own mother, not anymore, not since the morning he'd told her about the pregnancy and she'd returned with cash. He didn't blame her for helping him but he knew something had shifted between them in that moment—his mother had done something he'd thought her incapable of, and the boundaries of their relationship had suddenly moved, leaving him disoriented, like stepping into a room and feeling for where the walls had once been but instead only touching air.

“What're you two hens jabbering about?” Finch said, when he came into the kitchen and caught them in mid-conversation. Cherry always said “Nothing” and went back to being her silent self. It amazed Luke, how quickly she could shift. Maybe all women were shapeshifters, changing instantly depending on who was around. Who was Nadia, then, around Shadi Waleed?

“I saw your video,” Cherry said one day when Luke came by to return a book he'd borrowed called
Blu's Hanging.
Here, she'd said, handing it to him. Here's your poor Hawaiians. He'd almost told her that he didn't have to read about it to believe her but he read the book anyway because he could tell it mattered to her. He liked it enough,
even though he'd read online that the treatment of Filipino characters might be a little racist. Was that true, he'd planned to ask her. Was it true that in Hawaii, Filipinos are treated like blacks?

“What video?” he said, half listening as he tried to find the spot on the shelf where the book had been.

“What do you mean?” she said. “What other video is there?”

“Oh,” he said. “That one.”

“Finch had some of the guys over,” she said. “They kept watching it again and again and again.”

He had a sudden, clear image of the Cobras hunched around Finch's computer, replaying the video of his injury and laughing. Jesus Christ, look at Sheppard! One more time, okay, wait for it, wait for—oh shit! The bone and everything! He'd thought he was a Cobra but he wasn't. He was just a gruesome joke.

“Can I see it?” Cherry asked.

“You already did,” he said. He felt strangely betrayed by her, as if she, of all people, should've known better than to watch the video.

“No,” she said. “Your leg.”

She'd spoken so casually, it took him a moment to even realize what she'd asked. “Why?” he said.

“Just want to,” she said. “I can't even understand how you walk on that thing half normal, let alone play.”

She was curious, but not like he'd imagined the Cobras, searching for a laugh. She looked like a person climbing out of a wrecked car, eager to inspect the damage to convince herself it wasn't worse than what she imagined. He sat on the La-Z-Boy near the bookshelf, quietly rolling the leg of his sweatpants up to his knee. His mother had cried when she'd seen him in the hospital bed, his shattered leg propped up in front of him, and not wanting to worry her, he had
smiled and said, “It's fine, it don't even hurt.” His father had called later that afternoon from Atlanta—he was delivering a keynote address at a pastors' conference that night but he'd sent a prayer cloth in his stead. When his mother had placed it on his busted leg, Luke hadn't felt the healing power of God. He'd felt nothing, and maybe, that was the same thing.