The Mothers

A Greek chorus of churchgoers known as the Mothers opens by saying, “We didn’t believe when we first heard because you know how church folk can gossip.” They note that secrets quickly get out of control in their community, referencing the time that Betty, the pastor’s secretary, witnessed the church’s head usher having brunch with an unknown young woman. Betty quickly spread the news to everybody in the congregation, attracting suspicions of all kinds until the usher appeared at Upper Room (the church) that Sunday and introduced the woman in question as his great niece. Now, though, a new rumor is afoot, and the Mothers think it feels “different.”

“All good secrets have a taste before you tell them,” the Mothers say, asserting that they wish they took a moment to consider the taste of this new rumor before repeating it. Unfortunately, though, they don’t do this, instead sharing “this sour secret, a secret that [begins] in the spring Nadia Turner [gets] knocked up by the pastor’s son and [goes] to the abortion clinic downtown to take care of it.” They explain that Nadia is seventeen when this happens, and that she’s living with her father, Robert, but not with her mother, Elise, because Elise committed suicide six months ago. Since this tragedy, Nadia has “earned a wild reputation,” and everybody in Upper Room has heard about her “sojourns across the boarder to dance clubs in Tijuana” and her late nights spent flirting with strapping young Marines.

The Mothers admit that all of the stories they’ve heard about Nadia might not be true, but they know one thing for sure: Nadia Turner spends “her senior year of high school rolling around in bed with Luke Sheppard,” and when the springtime rolls around, she’s pregnant with his baby.

Shortly after Elise Turner killed herself, Nadia started skipping school and riding busses through San Diego, getting off wherever they took her. On occasion, she journeyed to the Marine Corps base, where she flirted with recruits, sometimes kissing them until doing so made her want to cry. She rode these buses as a way of escaping her “old life” at school, where she used to have hordes of friends and a support network of teachers. After her mother’s suicide, she’s surprised when she thinks back on “how rarely she [was] alone” in those days leading up the tragedy. “Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her chemistry teacher to her friends and back home to her parents,” Bennett writes. “Then one day, her mother’s hand was gone and she’d fallen, clattering to the floor.”

Now, after her mother’s suicide, Nadia hates being around people at school—her teachers are too forgiving and tentative around her, and her friends no longer tell jokes when she sits with them at lunch, “as if their happiness [is] offensive to her.” When she has to choose a partner one day in AP Government, her friends avoid pairing up with her, forcing her to work with Aubrey Evans, a highly devoted Christian who wears a purity ring. Nadia thinks Aubrey is “probably the poor holy child of devout atheists” and is overcompensating for her parentage by committing herself so vigorously to religion. As they start working together, Aubrey leans close and says, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry. We’ve all been praying for you.” Although this sentiment is “sincere,” Nadia disregards it, since she hasn’t been to church since her mother’s funeral.

One day, Nadia skips school and goes to the Hanky Panky, a local strip club. Even though she looks “like a kid with her backpack,” the bouncer lets her into the dark club, a place where “you could be alone with your grief.” Nadia likes this privacy, which contrasts with how her father has been coping with hardship. Robert has thrown himself into the church, attending both Sunday services each week, going to Bible study on Wednesday nights, and even showing up at the Thursday night choir practices despite the fact that he doesn’t sing. “Her father propped his sadness on a pew,” Bennett notes, “but [Nadia] put her sad in places no one could see.”

Sitting in a lowly lit corner with a drink she bought with her fake ID, Nadia watches the dancers onstage, whose bodies are “stretched and pitted from age.” Visiting the Hanky Panky becomes a habit, and on her third time at the club, an old man sits down and flirts with her until a middle-aged black stripper shoos him away. The stripper tells Nadia to follow her outside, dumping the young girl’s drink down the sink on her way. Lighting a cigarette, the stripper asks Nadia if she is a runaway, commenting on her pretty eyes and saying she could get a job stripping if she wanted to, since the owner doesn’t mind letting underage girls on the floor. Nadia says she doesn’t want to dance, and the stripper replies, “Well, I don’t know what you’re looking for but you ain’t gonna find it here.” 

The stripper gives Nadia several dollars and tells her to go to Fat Charlie’s seafood restaurant, where she encounters Luke Sheppard, the son of Upper Room’s pastor. Luke waits tables at Fat Charlie’s now, though Nadia still remembers him from her days in Sunday school. Several years her senior, Luke has already been through two years of college on a football scholarship, though his athletic career ended (along with his academic career) when he broke his leg in a game during his sophomore year, the bone cracking so severely that it burst through his skin. As a result, he walks with a limp, which makes Nadia “want him” even more. “Her mother had died a month ago and she was drawn to anyone who wore their pain outwardly, the way she couldn’t,” Bennett writes.

In keeping with her attraction to Luke’s outward display of pain, Nadia thinks that “an inside hurt [is] supposed to stay inside.” In fact, she didn’t even cry at her mother’s funeral, literally supporting her father at one point while he broke down in tears. At Fat Charlie’s, Luke flirts with Nadia, telling her which items on the menu are the most disgusting. When she tries to order a drink with her fake ID, he merely laughs at her, saying, “Aren’t you, like, twelve?” “I’m seventeen,” she says defensively, but she knows this makes no difference, considering that Luke is twenty-one and knows all about adult life.

Despite their age difference, Nadia and Luke get along quite well, and Nadia begins paying him frequent visits at Fat Charlie’s. As she sits in the booths with textbooks spread over the table, he teases her for being a “nerd”—something even her mother used to make fun of her for, since she has always been disarmingly smart. “See this girl,” Luke sometimes says to passing waiters, “first black lady president, just watch.” And although “every black girl who [is] even slightly gifted [is] told this,” Nadia enjoys hearing Luke brag about her intelligence. “He didn’t treat her like everyone at school,” Bennett adds, “who either sidestepped her or spoke to her like she was some fragile thing one harsh word away from breaking.” 

One night that winter, Nadia’s father goes out of town, so she invites Luke to her house. She wants to offer him a drink, since this is what “women [do] in movies,” but there isn’t any liquor in her house. Besides, Luke wastes no time pinning her to the wall and kissing her passionately. After she and Luke make their way to the bedroom, Nadia has sex for the first time, enduring through the pain even as Luke asks her three separate times if she wants to stop. In response, she tells him to keep going, accepting and even embracing the fact that sex hurts, resolving to make Luke “her outside hurt.”

Nadia and Luke keep seeing each other privately throughout the rest of the winter and into the spring, at which point Nadia discovers she’s pregnant. At first, all Luke can say is, “Fuck.” Then he asks her if she’s “sure.” She assures him that she’s absolutely positive, since she went to a free pregnancy center that morning. At this center, which is outside of town, a nurse asked Nadia if she had a particular reason to think she might be pregnant, and Bennett notes that this woman “must’ve thought Nadia was an idiot—another black girl too dumb to insist on a condom.”

Despite what the nurse at the pregnancy center might think, Nadia and Luke did use condoms, “at least most times”—a caveat that Nadia now feels embarrassed about. “She was supposed to be the smart one,” Bennett notes. “She was supposed to understand that it only took one mistake and her future could be ripped away from her.” Sitting across from Luke after revealing that she’s pregnant, Nadia tells him she can’t keep the child. After all, she has just been accepted to the University of Michigan and thus feels like she can’t “let this baby nail her life in place.” After a moment, Luke says, “Okay, okay. Tell me what to do,” asking how much money Nadia needs for an abortion. When he asks if she’d like him to accompany her to the clinic, she tells him to simply pick her up when the procedure is over. 

Nadia takes the bus to the abortion clinic on the morning of her appointment and sits in the lobby with several other young women. Looking at a vase made of seashells, she thinks about how her mother loved to collect shells, saying that doing so calmed her. Nadia’s memory is interrupted when a “black nurse with graying dreadlocks” calls her name and tells her she should have worn more comfortable clothes. “I am comfortable,” Nadia says, feeling “thirteen again,” as if she’s “standing in the vice-principal’s office” and arguing about the dress code. But the dreadlocked nurse just shakes her head, seeming “weary, unlike the chipper white nurses.” As they move down the hall, Nadia feels this nurse judging her, thinking she’s “just another black girl who [has] found herself in trouble and [is] finding her way out of it.”

Nadia tells the technician in the sonogram room that she doesn’t want to see the screen. Determined not to “allow herself to love the baby or even know him,” she turns her head away. “Huh,” the technician says, stopping for a moment with the sensor on her stomach. “What? What happened?” Nadia asks, whipping her head around, hoping that maybe—just maybe—she isn’t actually pregnant. When she looks at the screen, though, she sees “a black oval punctuated by a single white splotch,” and the technician simply remarks that her womb is a perfect sphere. 

After the sonogram, Nadia goes to the operating room, where the dreadlocked nurse tells her that the procedure will only take ten minutes. Afterward, she waits in the lobby for Luke, but he never arrives. An hour later, as Nadia starts to dial Luke for the third time, the dreadlocked nurse brings her crackers and a juice box, urging her to eat to soothe her stomach cramps, which will persist rather uncomfortably for “a while.” Nadia tries to refuse the food, insisting that Luke will arrive soon and take her home. “He’s not coming, baby,” the nurse says, and Nadia is alarmed by her use of the word “baby”—almost as alarmed as the nurse was when, upon waking up from the anesthesia, Nadia looked into the nurse’s eyes and said, “Mommy?”