“She wants to get rid of it,” Luke said.
He looked defeated, brushing tears from the corner of his eye. She hadn’t seen him cry in years. Her boy, like all boys, had long outgrown her mothering. She’d watched Luke’s growth spurts, the stretch marks on his shoulders from summers of weight lifting, and the more mannish he became, the less he felt like her son. He was someone else now, a furtive and cagey person who disappeared behind closed doors and stopped talking on the phone when she entered the room. In elementary school, he’d wrestled with his friends on the living room rug, but in high school, she’d seen him shove a friend into a wall so hard, a picture fell off its hook. What bothered her most was the surprise on his face when she’d yelled at him to stop, as if roughness came so naturally, he was startled to find it a problem.
A daughter grows older and draws nearer to her mother, until she gradually overlaps her like a sewing pattern. But a son becomes some irreparably separate thing. So even though she hated to see her son cry, she was grateful for the chance to mother him again. She pulled him to her shoulder, stroking his hair.
“Shh now,” she said. “Mama’s taking care of it.”
At the bank, she withdrew six hundred dollars, and slid the cash in an envelope for Luke to give the girl. John hadn’t slept that night, tossing in bed, then pacing across the bedroom floor.
“We shouldn’t have done this,” he said. “My spirit-man is grieved.”
But Latrice refused to feel guilty about it. They hadn’t forced the girl to do anything she didn’t already want to do. A girl who didn’t want a baby would find a way to not have one. The good thing to do—the Christian thing—would be to make it a little easier on her. Now the girl could go off to college and leave their lives. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but thank God it wasn’t the disaster it could have been.
Still, John felt grieved, and when Robert Turner had arrived at church on Sunday, his wrecked truck already felt like a sign, the beginning of a long judgment. So John had gone to Robert’s house and offered the girl a pity job without even consulting Latrice first. Now the girl would be all under her this summer, only because John wanted to atone for undeserved grief.
“I don’t owe her a thing,” she said. “I’m all paid up.”
FOUR
At Elise Turner’s funeral, the whole church arrived early, spilling out of the pews.
We have known hard deaths before. Sammy Watkins, who’d been stabbed outside a bar, his body crumpled and wedged between two trash cans. Moses Brewer, who’d been found in Buddy Todd Park, bludgeoned to death. Kayla Dean, a fourteen-year-old shot by Mexican Bloods because she’d been wearing her boyfriend’s bright blue jacket. For a week, her high school had erupted in brawls between blacks and Mexicans until police arrived in riot gear and sheriff’s helicopters circled overhead. All the while, Upper Room remained a source of calm, Pastor Sheppard urging sense in a situation that made none. To be killed over a jacket. A child, waiting for fish tacos outside Alberto’s, who’d borrowed a jacket because she was cold, because her mother had fussed at her for coming home without one and tempting sickness. At Kayla Dean’s funeral, Upper Room had encircled the wailing mother and held her up, soundlessly, because hard deaths resist words. A soft death can be swallowed with Called home to be with the Lord or We’ll see her again in glory, but hard deaths get caught in the teeth like gristle.
We have known hard deaths, but the difference was that Elise Turner had chosen one. Not a handful of pills to stretch sleep, not a running motor in a closed garage, but a pistol to the head. How could she choose to destroy herself so violently? We’d all squeezed into pews, not knowing what to expect. What would the pastor say? Not the usual funeral scriptures, those would not do. We wouldn’t see her again in glory because what glory awaited a woman who’d sent a bullet into her own head? She had not been called home to be with the Lord—she had simply chosen to leave. Imagine, having the gall to choose when so many had that choice taken away from them. How dare she opt for a hard death when the rest of us were trying to manage the hard lives we’d been given?
We have never understood it, although maybe we should. We are, after all, the last ones to have seen Elise Turner alive. The morning she killed herself, we’d gone to Upper Room early to get started on our praying. At first, when we’d peeked through the sanctuary doors, we only saw a person wrapped in a down coat, slumped forward in front of the altar in what looked like prayer or sleep. A bum, probably. We stumbled across them sometimes in the mornings, sleeping across the pews.
“All right now,” Betty said, “you got to go. We won’t tell nobody we seen you but you got to go on now.”
No response. Probably a drunk bum. Lord, now those we couldn’t deal with. Passed out drunk after mistaking the offering basket for a toilet, leaving broken beer bottles around for the babies to cut their feet.
“Okay,” Hattie said, “now why don’t you hop on up? We don’t wanna have to call the police.”
We edged closer, noticing, for the first time, past the fur collar, long, dark hair swept up away from a slender yellow neck. A neck that looked too clean for a bum’s, too delicate for a man’s. Agnes touched the strange woman’s back.
“Elise! What you doin’ in here?”
“I . . . I came in here last night and . . .” Elise looked dazed as Flora helped pull her to her feet.
“Girl, it’s morning already,” Agnes said. “You better get on home to your child.”
“My child?”
“Yes, honey. What you doin’ sleepin’ in here all night?”
“Robert probably worried sick,” Hattie said. “Get on home, then. Go on.”
At the time, we’d laughed as we watched Elise head through the morning fog to her car. Oh, wait till we told the ladies at bingo about this. Elise Turner, asleep in the church like an ordinary bum. They would have a field day with that one. She had always seemed a little strange to us anyway—dreamy, like her mind was a balloon on a long string and she forgot to reel it in sometimes.
For years, we’ve fixated on that final conversation. Elise had hesitated before going out to her car, a pause that varies in length throughout our memories; Betty says it was a long moment, Flora, a brief hitch. Should we have known Elise would drive off and shoot herself? Was there any way of knowing? No, nobody could’ve predicted it, not if Robert hadn’t even known. Elise Turner was beautiful. She had a child and a husband with a good government job. She had gone from cleaning white folks’ toilets to styling hair at the salon on base. A pretty black woman living as fine as any white woman. What did she have to complain about?
—
THAT SUMMER, Nadia Turner haunted us.
She looked so much like her mother that folks around Upper Room started to feel like they’d seen Elise again. As if her restless spirit—and no one doubted it was restless—was roaming the place where it had last been seen. The girl, who haunted the church halls with her beauty and her sullenness, barely noticed the stares, until one evening, when Second John offered her a ride home from work in the church van. He pulled onto the street, and for a second, their eyes met in the rearview mirror.
“You look so much like your mama,” he said. “Gives me chills to look at you.”
He glanced away, bashful almost, like he’d said the wrong thing. At dinner that night, she mentioned his comment to her father and he glanced up, as if he’d needed to remind himself of what her face looked like.