“Is there anything around here she don’t know?”
The Turner girl and her unwanted baby. For days, we could think of nothing else, and although we’d promised to keep the secret amongst ourselves, the truth trickled out anyway. Later, we would blame each other even though we never determined who’d been the first one to run her mouth. Was it Betty, who’d loved the attention so much when she shared the story that she hadn’t been able to stop herself from giving a repeat performance to someone else? Or Hattie, maybe, who had shared a ride home with Sister Willis, a woman who couldn’t, as we all knew, hold water? Or maybe someone had just overheard us at bingo and the story had spawned from there. We were all guilty in a way, which meant that none of us were guilty and all of us were surprised that next Sunday, when Magdalena Price walked out of service right in the middle of the pastor’s sermon. The pastor glanced up, watching her go, and stuttered for a moment, like he’d lost his place. He was preaching on overcoming fear, a sermon that we’d heard him deliver dozens of times. What could he have said to offend her? Then that Wednesday, during midweek Bible study, we heard Third John tell Brother Winston that the pastor had paid Nadia Turner five thousand dollars to not have that baby, how else do you think she was able to go off to that big school? In Upper Room’s imaginings, the girl grew younger, the check larger, the pastor’s motives darker. He’d paid her to kill her child because he’d been afraid that the pregnancy would hurt his ministry or maybe he just didn’t want his kin mixing with Turner stock. Remember how crazy her mama was? Remember, as if any of us could ever forget.
Then the reporter came. A white boy fresh out of college, wearing melon-colored pants and a blond ponytail. We didn’t take him seriously at first, melon pants and all, until he told us that he’d heard that our pastor had paid off a pregnant girl, a minor too, and did we care to comment? He stood on our front steps in a wide stance, pen above his notepad, the way policemen always stand, a hand near their holster, as if to remind you they could take your life anytime they wanted. We told him we didn’t know nothing. He sighed, flipping that notepad shut.
“I figured wise women such as yourselves would want to know what your pastor’s been up to,” he said.
We wanted to chase him off those steps with a broom. Get! Get out our house! Who was he to poke around, turning up our rugs? Who was he to tell our stories? But he wrote it up anyway. One of the photographers had an aunty who went to Upper Room and was willing to talk. Some folks will say anything just to see their name in print. At that point, it didn’t much matter if his story was true. The earthquake came, the one we’d been expecting over the years. New members dried up. Old members stopped coming. Pastors around the city turned down invitations to visit and stopped inviting Pastor to their churches. Some days, Betty said, she sat in the pastor’s office with nothing to do, no schedule to fill, no appointments to make.
Years later, after Upper Room’s doors had finally shuttered, we paid Latrice Sheppard a visit. She invited us inside, offered us tea and cookies, but never an apology.
“I did what any mother would’ve done,” she said. “That girl should be thanking me. I gave her life.”
But none of us were sure what type of life Nadia Turner was living. We hadn’t seen her in years. Hattie said she’d settled down in one of those big East Coast cities like New York or Boston. She was a big lawyer now, living in a tall building with a doorman who tipped his cap to her when she came bustling in from out of the snow. Betty said she never settled down and she was still flitting around the world, from Paris to Rome to Cape Town, never resting anywhere. Flora said she heard about a woman on CNN who’d tried to kill herself in Millennium Park. She hadn’t caught the name but the photo looked just like the Turner girl, the same ambered skin and light eyes. Could that be her? Agnes said she didn’t know but she’d felt in her spirit that the girl would think about killing herself later in life, maybe even more than once, and each time, she would instead live. She got her mother in her, holding the knife, and her own spirit flinted over, and each time they struck, she would spark. Her whole life, a spark.
—
WE’VE SEEN HER one last time.
A year ago, maybe, on a Sunday morning that, like all Sunday mornings since Upper Room died, we have spent together. We’re too old to find a new church now, so each Sunday, we gather to read the Word and pray. No one leaves us prayer cards anymore, but we intercede anyway, imagining what the congregation might still need. If Tracy Robinson still has a taste for liquor, if Robert Turner has finished mourning his dead wife. We pray for Aubrey Evans and Luke Sheppard, who, in the dying days of Upper Room, we’d seen together in the lobby with their baby—together, but not quite so, the way you can fix a hole in a worn pair of pants but they never look new. On Sunday mornings, we pray for everyone who comes to mind and after, we sit on the balcony outside Flora’s room and eat lunch. But that Sunday, we’d glanced out and seen Robert Turner’s truck heading down the street. We were delighted to catch a glimpse of him but instead, we saw his daughter driving. She was older then, in her thirties maybe, but she looked the same, hair flowing down to her shoulders, sunglasses covering eyes that glittered in the sun. Her left hand hanging out the window held no ring but we imagined she had a man somewhere, a man she could get rid of when she had the mind to because she would never put herself in the position to be left. Why had she returned to town? Flora thought Robert might be sick again, but Hattie pointed out the flattened boxes filling the truck bed. Maybe she was helping her daddy move. Maybe she was bringing him home with her, wherever her home now was, and maybe that was why she’d seemed so peaceful, because this was the last time she’d ever step inside her dead mother’s house. Agnes swore she saw a pink Barbie bag on the passenger’s seat—a gift, perhaps, for Aubrey’s daughter. We imagined her walking up the steps with the present and kneeling in front of the girl, a girl who wouldn’t exist if her own child did.
Then she disappeared around the corner, and as quickly as we’d seen her, she was gone. We will never know why she returned, but we still think about her. We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She’s her mother’s age now. Double her age. Our age. You’re our mother. We’re climbing inside of you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Endless thanks to the following people, without whom this book would not be possible:
Julia Kardon, the agent of my dreams, who saves me daily with her guidance and wit. Thank you for always believing. There’s no one else I’d rather have in my corner. Everyone at Mary Evans Inc., especially Mary Gaule, whose feedback and support has meant so much to me. Sarah McGrath, whose incisive edits improved this book at each step, Danya Kukafka, for her invaluable help behind the scenes, and all the good folks at Riverhead, whose contagious enthusiasm has made the process of publishing my first book so much fun.
The faculty and staff at the Helen Zell Writers Program, particularly Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Nicholas Delbanco, and Sugi Ganeshananthan, who guided me in shaping a rough draft into a thesis into a book.