“I don’t know,” Aubrey said. “Nadia never talks about it.”
She couldn’t exactly ask Nadia herself, although she thought about it often when they were together. Did Nadia know why her mother had killed herself? Was it even better to know?
“I see you two out there eating lunch all the time.” Mrs. Sheppard smiled, brushing sugar dust from her fingers onto a napkin. “I didn’t know you got on like that.”
“She’s nice.” Aubrey paused, taking a sip. “She’s . . . I don’t know. Funny. She makes me laugh. And she doesn’t let people run over her. She’s not afraid of anything.”
“I just wouldn’t get too attached if I was you,” Mrs. Sheppard said.
Aubrey frowned. “Why?”
“Now, don’t look at me like that. You know she’s runnin’ off to school in the fall. Making new friends in the dorms. Folks change, that’s all. I just don’t want you to get hurt, honey.”
Mrs. Sheppard passed her the plate of shortbread cookies and Aubrey silently took one. The first time she’d visited Nadia’s house, she’d spotted on her bookshelf a clay Noah’s Ark statue small enough to fit in her palm. A white-haired Noah stood on the deck, tiny giraffe and chimp and elephant heads poking out the portholes. She’d reached for it but Nadia had grabbed her hand.
“Don’t,” she’d said. “My mom gave me that.”
Aubrey had drawn her hand back, embarrassed for violating a rule she hadn’t known existed. But she saw then that Nadia didn’t speak about her mother because she wanted to preserve her, keep her for herself. Aubrey didn’t speak about her mother because she wanted to forget that she’d ever had one. And it was easier to forget when she was with Nadia.
She didn’t want to think about Nadia leaving for college. She felt at home in Nadia’s motherless world. Later that evening, she drove her friend home. They went out in the backyard and rocked in Mr. Turner’s hammock until the sky faded into black. Nadia stretched a long leg over the side and pushed her bare toes against the grass, careful not to upset their delicate balance.
FIVE
We were girls once. As hard as that is to believe.
Oh, you can’t see it now—our bodies have stretched and sagged, faces and necks drooping. That’s what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it’s from and where it’ll return. But we were girls once, which is to say, we have all loved an ain’t-shit man. No Christian way of putting it. There are two types of men in the world: men who are and men who ain’t about shit. As girls, we’ve lived all over. Sharecropping in the cotton fields of Louisiana until the humid air sucked our shirts to our backs. Shivering in freezing kitchens while packing lunches for daddies heading to Ford plants. Shuffling slowly over icy Harlem sidewalks, stuffing ripped fabric in coat-pocket holes. Then we’d grown up and met men who wanted to bring us to California. Military men, stationed out at Camp Pendleton, who promised us marriage and babies and all that sunshine. But before we woke to pink clouds drifting over the coastline, before we found Upper Room and each other, before we were wives and mothers, we were girls and we loved ain’t-shit men.
You used to be able to spot an ain’t-shit man a lot easier. At pool halls and juke joints, speakeasies and rent parties and sometimes in church, snoring in the back pew. The type of man our brothers warned us about because he was going nowhere and he would treat us bad on the way to that nowhere. But nowadays? Most of these young men seem ain’t-shit to us. Swaggering around downtown, drunk and swearing, fighting outside nightclubs, smoking reefer in their mamas’ basements. When we were girls, a man who wanted to court us sipped coffee in the living room with our parents first. Nowadays, a young man fools around with any girl who’s willing and if she gets in trouble—well, you just ask Luke Sheppard what these young men do next.
A girl nowadays has to get nice and close to tell if her man ain’t shit and by then, it might be too late. We were girls once. It’s exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way. No shame in loving an ain’t-shit man, long as you get it out your system good and early. A tragic woman hooks into an ain’t-shit man, or worse, lets him hook into her. He will drag her until he tires. He will climb atop her shoulders and her body will sag from the weight of loving him.
Yes, those are the ones we worry about.
—
SINCE HE’D SEEN NADIA TURNER LAST, Luke had broken seven plates, two bowls, and six glasses. “A personal record,” his boss Charlie had announced during the morning’s staff meeting. “No, scratch that—a company best. Give it up for Sheppard, folks. Making history one fuckup at a time.” Luke never dropped dishes. He’d spent years grabbing footballs out of the air, snagging them out of the reach of defenders, cupping his hands underneath them before they hit the grass. In fact, he was heralded throughout Fat Charlie’s Seafood Shack for his miraculous catches; the highlight reel, if one existed, would have consisted entirely of Luke Sheppard: Luke grabbing sippy cups before they teetered to the floor, Luke palming bowls tipped by wayward elbows, Luke righting trays sliding off their stands as customers applauded and coworkers clapped him on the back. But since Cody Richardson’s party, there’d been no heroics, no last-minute saves, no godlike displays of reflex and awareness. The commentators on SportsCenter, if SportsCenter covered workplace athleticism, would’ve hung their heads and said, “Too bad, that Sheppard kid sure had shown a lot of promise.” Now glasses slipped right through his hand or slid off his tray, and Luke, who worshipped the save, the graceful leap into the end zone, found himself instead kneeling on the sticky floor, watery Sprite soaking his pant leg.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Charlie said, hovering over him.
“I know, I know.”
“You trying to break every dish I own?”
“I said I’m sorry. What you want me to do? I’m cleanin’ it.”
“I want you to learn how to hold a cup. A monkey can hold a cup, Sheppard. A fucking chimp.”
Luke pushed past Charlie on his way to the trash can and that slight shoulder tap—the inch of space he’d forced Charlie to yield—felt like that moment after the doctor injected pain medicine into his leg. A pinch, and then relief.
Focus, that’s what Luke needed to do. Concentrate on one thing at a time. The smooth motion of his arm when he reached for the cup, the way the glass felt against his palm as he tightened his grip. And he did focus, from time to time. He survived a shift without dropping anything. Then Nadia returned to him, a sharp, sudden pain like hunger. Kissing her in the beach shower, his hands, still gritty with sand, on her stomach, his lips passed against the back of her suntanned neck. Later kneeling at the edge of his bed, hooking his fingers under the sides of her bikini bottom, her skin smoldering under his hands. She smelled like the ocean. She felt like the ocean when he was inside of her, rocking and rocking and calm. When it was over, he’d kissed the side of her face, the soft skin near her ears, the light baby hair turned curly from their sweat. His mouth had never touched anything that delicate.
He spent his dinner break smoking in the alley behind Fat Charlie’s with CJ. They used to play high school football together. CJ, a burly Samoan with long, curly hair, had been a decent nose tackle and earned a few letters from Division III schools, nothing like the recruitment packets and personal visits Luke had received. Still, they’d both ended up here, in an alley that smelled like wet garbage and sea air and cat piss. Luke leaned against the wall, passing the joint.
“You good, uso?” CJ said. “You got a weird look on your face.”
“Just some shit with this girl,” Luke said.
“Who? Shorty with the books?”
Luke hesitated, then needing to tell someone, said, “She told me she was pregnant.”