“You do,” he finally said, cutting his meat, his jaw set the way it always did whenever she tried to bring up her mother. Maybe that was why he always ran off to Upper Room, why he couldn’t stand to be around her. Maybe he hated looking at her because she only reminded him of all that he’d lost.
The night before her mother died, Nadia had caught her staring out the kitchen window, arms deep in soap suds, so gone in her own mind that she hadn’t noticed the sink almost overflowing. She’d laughed a little when Nadia shut off the water.
“Look at me,” she’d said. “Off daydreaming again.”
What had she been thinking about in that moment? Weren’t your final hours supposed to be dramatic and meaningful? Shouldn’t their last conversation have been emotional, even if it hadn’t registered to her at the time? But there was nothing special about that last moment. She had laughed too and brushed past her mother to the refrigerator. The next morning, she’d woken to find her father sitting on the edge of her bed, his face in his hands, so quiet she hadn’t even felt him sit on her mattress, weightless in his grief.
She still searched for clues, for strange things her mother had done or said, for signs that she should’ve noticed. At least then, her mother’s death would make sense. But she couldn’t think of any hints that her mother had wanted to die. Maybe she’d never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn’t know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?
She was lonely. How could she be anything else? Each morning, her father dropped her off at Upper Room, and each afternoon, she sat on the church steps, waiting for him to pick her up. After work, she passed the hours in bed, watching old episodes of Law & Order, waiting for the next morning when she would awake and start her routine all over again. Sometimes she thought she could pass time like this, one day falling into another until autumn. The hot winds would arrive and she would blow out with them, on to a new school in a new state where she would start a new life. Other times, she felt so miserable, she thought about calling her old friends. But what would she say to them? She’d had a mother and now she didn’t, and she’d been pregnant but now she wasn’t. She’d thought with time the distance between her and her friends would narrow, but that gap had only widened and she couldn’t find the energy to pretend otherwise. So she remained alone, working silently in the first lady’s office all morning, then shuffling outside at noon to eat lunch on the church steps. One afternoon, she was picking at her peanut butter sandwich when she noticed Aubrey Evans heading toward her. The girl smiled, clutching a sky blue lunch bag that matched her sundress. Nadia should have known she couldn’t just bring a brown bag like everyone else.
“Can I sit here?” she asked.
Nadia shrugged. She didn’t want to invite the girl to join her but she couldn’t very well tell her not to. Aubrey squinted into the sunlight and lowered herself onto the step. Then she unzipped her bag and pulled out tiny plastic containers, carefully arranging them on the step beside her. Nadia stared at tubs filled with macaroni and cheese, slices of steak, potato salad.
“That’s seriously your lunch?” she said. Of course it was. Of course Aubrey Evans’s parents cooked her elaborate feasts for her lunch, because God forbid, she should have to eat something as normal as a sandwich.
Aubrey shrugged. “Want some?”
Nadia hesitated before reaching for the brownie and breaking off a corner. She chewed slowly, almost disappointed by how delicious it was.
“Wow,” she said. “Your mom made this?”
Aubrey carefully zipped up her lunch bag. “I don’t live with my mom,” she said.
“So your dad, then.”
“No,” she said. “I live with my sister, Mo. And Kasey.”
“Who’s Kasey?”
“Mo’s girlfriend. She’s a really good cook.”
“Your sister’s gay?”
“So?” Aubrey said. “It’s really not a big deal.”
But she’d gotten prickly, so Nadia knew that it was. She still remembered how years ago, the congregation had been convinced that Sister Janice’s daughter had been turned into a lesbian because she’d started playing rugby at the junior college. For weeks, the old folks had whispered about how no girl should be playing football—it just wasn’t right—until she showed up on Easter Sunday holding hands with a shy boy and that was that. At Upper Room, a gay sister was a big deal and she wondered how she’d never heard about Aubrey’s. Maybe because Aubrey didn’t want anybody to know. Nadia couldn’t help it, she was surprised. The life she’d imagined for Aubrey—a stay-at-home mother, a doting father—was melting away into something murkier. Why did Aubrey live with her sister, not her parents? Had something terrible happened to them? She felt a sudden kinship with a girl who didn’t live with her mother either. A girl who was also a keeper of secrets. Aubrey tilted the brownie toward her and Nadia silently broke off another piece.
—
THIS IS WHAT SHE KNEW about Aubrey Evans:
She’d appeared one Sunday morning, a strange girl wandering into Upper Room with nothing but a small handbag, not even a Bible. She’d started crying before the pastor asked who needed prayer and she’d cried even harder as she rose and walked to the altar. She was saved at sixteen, and since then, she’d attended church services each week and volunteered for the children’s ministry, the homeless ministry, the bereavement committee. Babies, bums, grief. A hint about where she’d come from, maybe, although Nadia only knew what most people did: that Aubrey had arrived at Upper Room suddenly and within a year, she’d seemed like she’d always belonged.
Now, each afternoon, the girls ate lunch together on the church steps. Each afternoon, Nadia learned more about Aubrey, like how she’d first visited Upper Room because she’d seen it on television. She was new to California then and camped out in front of the TV, watching the wildfire coverage. She had never heard of wildfire season and she had lived all over, so she thought she’d heard of everything. She’d spent two damp years in Portland, where she wrung rain out of her socks, then three years freezing in Milwaukee, another muggy year in Tallahassee. She’d dried out in Phoenix, then re-frosted in Boston. She felt like she’d been everywhere and nowhere at all, like she had flown to thousands of airports but never ventured outside of the terminal.
“Why’d you move so much?” Nadia asked. “Was it, like, a military thing?”
She had lived in Oceanside her whole life, unlike all the military kids from school who had followed a parent from Marine base to Marine base until they’d ended up at Camp Pendleton. She had never lived outside of California, never gone on exciting vacations, never left the country. Her life already seemed so singular and flat and dull, and she could only comfort herself with the fact that the good stuff was ahead.
“No,” Aubrey said. “My mom would just meet a man. And he’d move somewhere, so we’d go too.”
She had accompanied her mother as she followed boyfriends from state to state. A mechanic she’d loved in Cincinnati, a grocery store manager in Jackson, a truck driver in Dallas. She had never married although she’d wanted to. In Denver, she’d dated a cop named Paul for three years. One Christmas, he gave her a small velvet box and her hands shook while opening it. It was just a bracelet, and even though she cried later in the bathroom, she still wore it around her wrist. Aubrey never mentioned her father. She told one or two stories about her mother, but only stories that had happened years ago and Nadia began to wonder if her mother was even still alive.
“Did she—I mean, your mom isn’t—” But Nadia stopped herself before she could finish. She barely knew this girl. She couldn’t ask if her mother was dead too. But Aubrey understood and quickly shook her head.