“She wasn’t like this before,” her father said. “Or maybe she was. Maybe I just didn’t know her before. Elise was always there to . . . they were so close, I couldn’t get between them and didn’t hardly want to. Mothers are selfish. You know she wouldn’t even let me hold Nadia at first? Not until the doctor made her rest. You can’t get between no mother and child. I don’t know, Pastor. I’m trying to raise her right. Maybe I just don’t know how.”
She eased back down the hallway. She didn’t want to hear more. She hated hearing her father blame himself for her mistakes, even though she knew she blamed him too. After all, she had been the one who held it together. She’d answered the door when the Mothers visited with food, while her father disappeared into the darkness of his bedroom. She had eaten the food the Mothers brought until she sickened of it, until she felt she could taste exactly who’d made what. Mother Hattie had brought the macaroni and cheese, so rich that butter pooled in the corner of the pan. Mother Agnes, rail thin, had made the apple pie, its lattices straight and ruler made. For weeks Nadia ate donated food, each bite soured by grief, until she grew tired of the old ladies, their kindly smiles masks for nosiness. So one day, she left their dishes on the front steps and ignored the doorbell. Then she drove her father’s truck to the grocery store and for dinner, she cooked meatloaf. It came out dry and brick-like, suspended in a pan of brown gel, but her father ate it anyway.
After the pastor left, she carried her mother’s clippers to the living room, where her father was watching a cowboy movie. Though it was their usual time, she thought he might ignore her, but he stood silently and stepped into the backyard. They could talk this way, over the buzz of the clippers, not having to look at each other.
“Pastor asked about you,” her father said.
The sky was filmy and light, like lavender silk rippling above her. She guided the clippers across his hair, clumps of black and gray wool falling to his shoulders.
“Okay,” she said.
“The first lady needs an assistant,” he said. “Just for the summer. Nothing fancy, but it’s money and you’ll learn some good skills.”
“I can’t work there,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I just can’t,” she said. “I’ll find something else.”
“It’s a good job—”
“I don’t care, I’ll find something else—”
“You’ll pay to fix my truck and everything else will go to your books and schooling,” he said. “It’s a good job and it’ll be good for you. Spending some time at Upper Room. It’ll help you. God will—you have to trust Him, see? You trust Him and stay in His presence and He’ll carry you through like He’s carrying me.”
He sounded like he was trying to convince himself this was a good idea. As if by spending enough time in church, she might absorb holiness into her bones. She sighed, brushing hair off his shoulders. What did her father know about what would be good for her? What did he know about her at all?
—
ON HER FIRST morning of work, she slumped against the window as her father guided his loaner car up the hill toward Upper Room. The church—tan, with a tall steeple—rose in hills of wild brush, the worst place to be in a county that burned. Out-of-towners never ventured this far north. Anyone visiting a beach town wanted sparkling oceans and cool breezes, so they stayed downtown, strolling across the long wooden pier where fishers lounged in metal chairs, poles propped over the edge, and children skipped with red pails to the Dairy Queen. But north of the beach was miles of coastal sagebrush that became kindling during wildfire season. In springtime, fires were distant from everyone’s mind, but as her father drove, she stared out the window at black stumps jutting out of the charred ground. Even though Upper Room sat in a nest of kindling, even though it would only take a gust of wind carrying a single ember to its steps, the church had never burned. A sign, the congregation often said, of divine favor. God so loved Upper Room, He spared them from the flames.
These were the stories people told themselves. She’d heard, time and time again, her mother’s own story about how God had led her to Upper Room. She had been a young mother then, a military wife new to California and lonely. She didn’t even have a high school diploma, so she cleaned rooms at the Days Inn downtown, a job her supervisor, an older black woman, told her she was lucky to have.
“Used to be a way for us to make a living,” she said. “But nowadays? They only want to hire those Mexicans. Can’t speak a drop of English but dirt cheap. Pay them right under the table. You speak Spanish?”
“No,” her mother had said.
“That’s all right. You’ll learn.”
She did, over time. Basic phrases, like How are you or Can you pass me that and all the swear words. Sometimes, when her child care fell through, she brought Nadia to work with her and the other ladies cooed over her, singing Spanish lullabies as they rocked her on balconies overlooking the beach. Her mother could barely understand the songs herself but she had heard on Oprah that it was good to expose a baby’s brain to different languages. That, she would later say, was how Nadia got to be so smart. How she’d read her first book before kindergarten, stumping the other parents so much that one mother had brought in her own book to test her, convinced she had just memorized the story. But Nadia’s mother remembered the Mexican women circling around her, cocooning her in Spanish, her brain sopping up words until it hung heavy and full.
Her own patchy Spanish only took her so far. Her husband had been deployed to the Persian Gulf, and even though she had lived in Oceanside for a year, she had not made a true friend. So in her loneliness, she’d sought out a church home. She hadn’t been sure where to begin looking. Besides the Catholic churches, dutifully named after saints, most of the San Diego churches bore nautical names like Coastline Baptist or Seacoast Community Church. With names like that, she imagined congregations filing into pews wearing swim trunks, a minister who climbed the altar with a surfboard under his arm. She tried Calvary Chapel and Emmanuel Faith, but neither felt right. Emmanuel Faith had a woman pastor who had gone to Harvard, which she’d mentioned three times in the sermon. At Calvary Chapel, a woman behind her had gotten filled with the spirit and started flailing, nearly knocking everyone in the head. For years, she bounced from church to church, each one too small or too big, too modern or too traditional. Then one afternoon, she was emptying a room’s trash can when a bulletin from Upper Room Chapel fluttered onto her foot.
“It was my Goldilocks church,” she used to tell Nadia. “I knew it as soon as I walked in. Everything about it, just right.”
On Sunday mornings, Upper Room Chapel crowded and bustled, men in suits pulling each other into rough hugs, ladies planting cheek kisses before scribbling brunch dates on scrap paper sticking out of Bibles, toddlers skirting around flowerpots in makeshift games of tag, and the Mothers, strutting past in colorful hats crowned with feathered plumes. Her first time in Upper Room, Nadia had watched from behind her mother’s knee, mystified, as their feathers bobbed up and down past her. White gloves were pulled up to their elbows, their tambourines jingled as they walked, and she’d wondered if jingling came with age, if one day, when she was wrinkled and gray, her own steps would make music. Her mother had laughed at the question.
“Oh, your body’ll make some sounds all right,” she’d said, wrapping her hand around Nadia’s.
That first Sunday, her father had not been with them. Her mother had apologized for his absence to the pastor after service when she shook his hand in the receiving line.