WHEN IT WAS OVER, Luke never came for her.
An hour after she’d called him, she was the only girl still waiting in the recovery room, curled in an overstuffed pink recliner, clutching a heat pad against her cramping stomach. For an hour, she’d stared into the dimness of the room, unable to make out the faces of the others but imagining they looked as blank as hers. Maybe the girl in the yellow dress had cried into the arms of her recliner. Or maybe the redhead had just continued her crossword puzzle. Maybe she’d been through this before or she already had children and couldn’t take another. Was it easier if you already had a child, like politely declining seconds because you were already full?
Now the others were gone and she had pulled out her phone to call Luke a third time when the dreadlocked nurse dragged over a metal chair. She was carrying a paper plate of crackers and an apple juice box.
“Cramps’ll be bad for a while,” she said. “Just put some heat on ’em, they’ll go away. You got a heat pad at home?”
“No.”
“Just heat you up a towel. Works just as fine.”
Nadia had hoped she might get a different nurse. She’d watched the others swish through the room to dote on their girls, offering smiles, squeezing hands. But the dreadlocked nurse just shook the plate at her.
“I’m not hungry,” Nadia said.
“You need to eat. Can’t let you go until you do.”
Nadia sighed, taking a cracker. Where was Luke? She was tired of this nurse, with her wrinkled skin and steady eyes. She wanted to be in her own bed, wrapped in her comforter, her head on Luke’s chest. He would make her soup and play movies on his laptop until she fell asleep. He would kiss her and tell her that she had been brave. The nurse uncrossed, then recrossed her legs.
“Heard from your friend yet?” she asked.
“Not yet, but he’s coming,” Nadia said.
“You got someone else to call?”
“I don’t need someone else, he’s coming.”
“He’s not coming, baby,” the nurse said. “Do you have someone else to call?”
Nadia glanced up, startled by the nurse’s confidence that Luke would not show, but even more jolted by her use of the word baby. A cotton-soft baby that seemed to surprise the nurse herself, like it had tripped off her tongue. Just like how after the surgery, in her delirium, Nadia had looked into the nurse’s blurred face and said “Mommy?” with such sweetness, the nurse had almost answered yes.
TWO
If Nadia Turner had asked, we would’ve warned her to stay away from him.
You know what they say about pastors’ kids. In Sunday School, they’re running around the sanctuary, hollering, smearing crayons on the pews; in middle school, a pastor’s son chases girls, flipping up their dresses, while his sister smears on bright lipstick that makes her look like a harlot; by high school, the son is smoking reefer in the church parking lot and the daughter is being felt up in a bathroom stall by the deacon’s son, who is quietly unrolling the panty hose her mother insisted she wear because ladies don’t show their bare legs in church.
Luke Sheppard, bold and brash with wispy curls, football-built shoulders, and that squinty-eyed smile. Oh, any of us could’ve told her to stay away from him. She wouldn’t have listened, of course. What did the church mothers know anyway? Not how Luke held her hand while they slept or played with her hair when they cuddled or how after she’d told him about the pregnancy test, he cradled her bare feet in his lap. A man who laced his fingers through yours all night and held your feet when you were sad had to love you, at least a little bit. Besides, what did a bunch of old ladies know?
We would’ve told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.
—
TEN YEARS BEFORE Nadia Turner’s appointment, we’d already made our first visit to the abortion clinic downtown. Oh, not the way you’re thinking. By the time that clinic was built, we would’ve laughed like Sarah at the thought of having babies, unwanted or otherwise. Besides, we were already mothers then, some by heart and some by womb. We rocked grandbabies left in our care and taught the neighborhood kids piano and baked pies for the sick and shut-in. We all mothered somebody, and more than that, we all mothered Upper Room Chapel, so when the church started a protest out front, we joined too. Not like Upper Room was the type of church to fuss at every little thing it didn’t like. Shake fists at rated-R movies or buy armloads of rap CDs just to crush them or write letters to Sacramento to ensure the state’s list of banned books stayed long and current. In fact, the church had only protested once before, back in the seventies, when Oceanside’s first strip club was built. A strip club, minutes from the beach where children swam and played. What next, a brothel on the pier? Why not turn the harbor into a red-light district? Well, the Hanky Panky opened and even though it was a blight to the community, everyone agreed that the new abortion clinic was much worse. A sign of the times, really. An abortion clinic going up downtown just as easy as a donut shop.
So the morning of the protest, the congregation gathered in front of the unbuilt clinic. Second John, who had driven the carless in the church van, and Sister Willis, who had instructed her Sunday School students to help color in the protest signs, and even Magdalena Price, who could hardly be bothered to do anything around Upper Room that required her to step out from behind her piano bench, had come down to the protest to, as she put it, see what all the fuss was about. All of us had circled around the pastor and the first lady and their son—a boy then, kicking dirt clods onto the sidewalk—while the pastor prayed for the souls of innocents.
Our protest only lasted three days. (Not because of our wavering convictions but because of the militants who joined us, the type of crazed white people who would end up on the news someday for bombing clinics or stabbing doctors. The last place any of us wanted to be was near the scene when one went off the deep end.) All three days, Robert Turner drove downtown at six a.m. to deliver a new batch of picket signs from the church. He and his wife were not the protesting type, he told the pastor, but he’d figured that transporting the signs was the least he could do, truck and all.