The Mothers (3 page)

—

W
HEN IT WAS OVER
, Luke never came for her.

An hour after she'd called him, she was the only girl still waiting in the recovery room, curled in an overstuffed pink recliner, clutching a heat pad against her cramping stomach. For an hour, she'd stared into the dimness of the room, unable to make out the faces of the others but imagining they looked as blank as hers. Maybe the girl in the yellow dress had cried into the arms of her recliner. Or maybe the redhead had just continued her crossword puzzle. Maybe she'd been through this before or she already had children and couldn't take another. Was it easier if you already had a child, like politely declining seconds because you were already full?

Now the others were gone and she had pulled out her phone to call Luke a third time when the dreadlocked nurse dragged over a metal chair. She was carrying a paper plate of crackers and an apple juice box.

“Cramps'll be bad for a while,” she said. “Just put some heat on 'em, they'll go away. You got a heat pad at home?”

“No.”

“Just heat you up a towel. Works just as fine.”

Nadia had hoped she might get a different nurse. She'd watched the others swish through the room to dote on their girls, offering smiles, squeezing hands. But the dreadlocked nurse just shook the plate at her.

“I'm not hungry,” Nadia said.

“You need to eat. Can't let you go until you do.”

Nadia sighed, taking a cracker. Where was Luke? She was tired of this nurse, with her wrinkled skin and steady eyes. She wanted to be in her own bed, wrapped in her comforter, her head on Luke's chest. He would make her soup and play movies on his laptop until she fell asleep. He would kiss her and tell her that she had been brave. The nurse uncrossed, then recrossed her legs.

“Heard from your friend yet?” she asked.

“Not yet, but he's coming,” Nadia said.

“You got someone else to call?”

“I don't need someone else, he's coming.”

“He's not coming, baby,” the nurse said. “Do you have someone else to call?”

Nadia glanced up, startled by the nurse's confidence that Luke would not show, but even more jolted by her use of the word
baby.
A cotton-soft
baby
that seemed to surprise the nurse herself, like it had tripped off her tongue. Just like how after the surgery, in her delirium, Nadia had looked into the nurse's blurred face and said “Mommy?” with such sweetness, the nurse had almost answered
yes.

I
f Nadia Turner had asked, we would've warned her to stay away from him.

You know what they say about pastors' kids. In Sunday School, they're running around the sanctuary, hollering, smearing crayons on the pews; in middle school, a pastor's son chases girls, flipping up their dresses, while his sister smears on bright lipstick that makes her look like a harlot; by high school, the son is smoking reefer in the church parking lot and the daughter is being felt up in a bathroom stall by the deacon's son, who is quietly unrolling the panty hose her mother insisted she wear because ladies don't show their bare legs in church.

Luke Sheppard, bold and brash with wispy curls, football-built shoulders, and that squinty-eyed smile. Oh, any of us could've told her to stay away from him. She wouldn't have listened, of course. What did the church mothers know anyway? Not how Luke held
her hand while they slept or played with her hair when they cuddled or how after she'd told him about the pregnancy test, he cradled her bare feet in his lap. A man who laced his fingers through yours all night and held your feet when you were sad had to love you, at least a little bit. Besides, what did a bunch of old ladies know?

We would've told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.

—

T
EN YEARS BEFORE
Nadia Turner's appointment, we'd already made our first visit to the abortion clinic downtown. Oh, not the way you're thinking. By the time that clinic was built, we would've laughed like Sarah at the thought of having babies, unwanted or otherwise. Besides, we were already mothers then, some by heart and some by womb. We rocked grandbabies left in our care and taught the neighborhood kids piano and baked pies for the sick and shut-in. We all mothered somebody, and more than that, we all mothered Upper Room Chapel, so when the church started a protest out front, we joined too. Not like Upper Room was the type of church to fuss at every little thing it didn't like. Shake fists at rated-R movies or buy armloads of rap CDs just to crush them or write letters to Sacramento to ensure the state's list of banned books stayed long and current. In fact, the church had only protested once before, back in the seventies,
when Oceanside's first strip club was built. A strip club, minutes from the beach where children swam and played. What next, a brothel on the pier? Why not turn the harbor into a red-light district? Well, the Hanky Panky opened and even though it was a blight to the community, everyone agreed that the new abortion clinic was much worse. A sign of the times, really. An abortion clinic going up downtown just as easy as a donut shop.

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.

—

T
HAT 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?”

“Just cramps,” she said.

“Oh. Your . . .” He gestured to his stomach. “Need anything?”

“No,” she said. “Wait. Can I use your truck later?”

“For what?”

“To drive.”

“Where are you going, I mean.”

“You can't do that.”

“Do what?”

“Ask where I'm going. I'm almost eighteen.”

“I can't ask where you're taking my truck?”

“Where do you think I'm taking it?” she said. “The border?”

Her father never cared about where she went, except when she asked to borrow his precious truck. He spent evenings circling the truck in the driveway, dipping a red velvet square into a tub of wax until the paint shone like glass. Then as soon as someone from Upper Room called for a favor, he jogged out the door, always running to his truck, as if it were the only child, needy and demanding of his
love. Her father sighed, running a hand over the graying hair she cut every two weeks, the way her mother used to, her father sitting in the backyard with a towel draped around his neck, her hands guiding the clippers. Cutting his hair was the only time she felt close to him.

“Downtown, okay?” she said. “Can I borrow your truck, please?”

Another wave of cramps gripped her, and she flinched, pulling her blanket tighter around herself. Her father lingered in the doorway a moment before dropping his keys on her dresser.

“I can make you some tea,” he said. “It's supposed to—your aunts, they'd drink it, you know, when—”

“You can just leave the keys,” she said.

—

T
HE DAY AFTER
she was accepted into Michigan, Luke brought Nadia to the Wave Waterpark, where they rode inner tubes down the Slide Tower and the Flow Rider until they were soaked and tired. At first, she'd worried that he'd suggested a water park because he thought she was childish. But he had as much fun as she did, yelping as they splashed into pools, or dragging her to the next ride, water beads clinging to his chest, his wet sideburns glinting in the sun. After, they ate corn dogs and churros at the tables outside Rippity's Rainforest, where kids too small for the slides padded in floaties. She licked cinnamon sugar off her fingers, sun-heavy and happy, the type of happiness that before might have felt ordinary, but now seemed fragile, like if she stood too quickly, it might slide off her shoulders and break.

She hadn't expected a gift from Luke, not when her father had barely congratulated her. Look at that, he'd said when she showed him the e-mail, offering her a side hug. Then he'd passed her in the
kitchen later that night, eyes glazing over her as if she were a once-interesting piece of furniture he'd since tired of. She tried not to take it personally—he wasn't happy about anything these days—but she still teared up in the bathroom while brushing her teeth. The next morning, she awoke to a congratulations card on her nightstand with twenty dollars folded inside.
I'm sorry
, her father had written,
I'm trying
. Trying what? Trying to love her?

She stretched her legs across Luke's lap and he kneaded the smooth skin near her ankles while he finished his corn dog. He'd never seen her like this before—hair wet and kinky, her face clean of makeup—but she felt pretty as he smiled at her across the table, touching her ankle, and she wondered if his gentle touch meant more, if he might even be in love with her a little bit. Before they left, she tried to take a picture of the two of them but Luke cupped his hand around her phone. He wanted to keep their relationship a secret.

“Not a secret,” he said. “Just private.”

“‘That's the same thing,” she said.

“It's not. I just think we should be low-key about this. That's all.”

“Why?”

“I mean, the age thing.”

“I'm almost eighteen.”

“‘Almost' ain't eighteen.”

“I wouldn't get you in trouble. Don't you know that?”

“It's not just that,” he said. “You don't know how it is. You're not a pastor's kid. The whole church in my business all the time. They'll be up in your business too. Let's just be smart, that's all I'm saying.”

Maybe there was a difference. You hid a secret relationship out of shame, but you might keep a relationship private for any number of
reasons. All relationships, in some way, were private—why did anyone else need to know as long as you were happy? So she learned how to be private. She didn't reach for his hand in public or post photos of them online. She even stopped going to Fat Charlie's after school every day, in case one of his coworkers began to wonder about them. But after Luke had left her at the abortion clinic, she forgot about being private and drove her father's truck to Fat Charlie's. She knew he closed on Thursday nights, but when she arrived, she didn't see him on the floor. At the bar, she waved down Pepe, a burly Mexican bartender with a graying ponytail. He glanced up from drying a glass with a brown rag.

“Go ahead and put that cheap-ass fake away,” he said. “You know I ain't serving you.”

“Where's Luke?” she asked.

“Hell if I know.”

“Doesn't he get off soon?”

“I ain't in charge of his schedule.”

“Well, have you seen him?”