FIRST JOHN TOLD LUKE about the pie. A slice of lemon meringue, shared between his wife and another man at a diner on the pier. The men were moving folding chairs into the meeting room before men’s Bible study when the head usher broached the topic, a little bashfully, his eyes scraping the floor. First John’s wife had been at lunch with one of her girlfriends earlier that week and she’d happened to see Aubrey sharing lunch with a man. A congregation member, she’d thought at first, but she’d never seen him around church before. The man had seemed hungry. His eyes never left Aubrey’s face.
“I don’t mean to stir up no mess,” First John said, “but I’d want to know if it was my wife.”
The pie had angered Luke the most. A lunch may have just been a meal, but splitting dessert was intimate. His wife and this strange man dipping forks into the soft cream, her fork, then his, then hers again, falling into an easy rhythm. This man must have watched her lift the fork to her mouth, his hungry eyes following as it disappeared between her lips. Maybe later, in a dark corner of the parking structure, he’d sucked the meringue off her tongue.
“How was your date?” he said, when he returned home.
Aubrey was sitting on the couch, folding laundry. She wore a brown shirt, a baggy gray cardigan that hung open to her waist, the type of drab outfit that made Luke feel, in that moment, that both of them were older than they had any right to be.
“It wasn’t a date,” she said.
“Then what was it?”
“Lunch.”
“How come you didn’t tell me about it, then?”
“I don’t have to tell you about every lunch I go to.”
“If you’re out with some strange nigga, then yes, you fucking do!”
He never yelled at her. He snapped sometimes but he always felt horrible after, because she flinched when he raised his voice, which made him feel as guilty as if he’d actually hit her. He would never hit her but he felt that she believed it was always possible, so he’d forced himself to monitor his anger around her—to quiet his voice, to control his body, to never punch a wall or throw a glass, like he’d so badly wanted to. He never wanted her to feel scared of him, the way she felt around most men. But not this man she’d gone to lunch with. If Luke were married to another woman, he might have believed that lunch was just lunch. But he knew Aubrey. She didn’t have male friends she went out with alone. If she’d gone to meet up with this man, lunch had to mean more.
She stared at him evenly. “I never ask where you go,” she said. “I never ask when you’re sneaking off to see Nadia.”
He swallowed. “That’s different,” he said.
“Why? Because you love her?” She laughed a little, shaking her head. “I’m not stupid. I’m not in law school but I’m not stupid.”
“Please,” he said.
“Stop. You don’t have to lie to me anymore. You’ve always loved her—”
“Please.”
“She’s the one you want.”
“Please,” he said.
Her calmness scared him. He would understand if she had screamed and yelled or cried and cursed. He expected her to, but she was eerily calm and that was how he knew she would leave him. Maybe not right away but someday, he would return home and find her shelf cleared in the bathroom, her half of the closet empty. He’d be lonelier than he had been at the rehab center before she’d brought him a donut wrapped carefully in crinkly paper, a small gift he hadn’t imagined himself capable of receiving. He stood in the doorway while she folded his sweaters across her chest, her arms holding his arms and crossing them into her heart.
THIRTEEN
I just don’t know that girl’s problem,” Betty said.
We all peeked out the blinds, watching Nadia Turner pull out of the church parking lot. For weeks, she’d been silent and rude; she hardly spoke when she pulled up to our houses, answering in one word when we tried to be friendly. With that type of company, we would’ve been better off hiring a taxi. When she picked us up from church, she always paced outside of her truck, like she was late or something. Where she got to go? Who she got waiting for her but her daddy, and not like he was going anywhere.
“Maybe she worried about her friend,” Flora said.
“What she got to worry about? They married. Married folk got problems.”
“Y’all heard Aubrey moved out?”
“Oh, who hadn’t done that once or twice?” Agnes said.
“Y’all know how many times I packed me a suitcase and left Ernest?” Betty said. “Went running to my mama’s house and after a few days, I was right back. That ain’t nothin’. That’s what married folk do.”
“I heard that Sheppard boy got a wandering eye.”
“He a man, ain’t he?” Hattie said. “What these girls expect?”
Agnes said, “See, that’s the problem with colored girls these days. They too hard. Soft things can take a beating. But you push somethin’ hard a little bit and it shatters. You gotta be a soft thing in love. Hard love don’t last.”
“I still don’t see what none of this got to do with Nadia Turner.” Betty shook her head, staring back out the window. “Don’t say hello to nobody, don’t speak. And why she always walking back and forth like that? Like she got so many other places to be?”
What we didn’t understand then was that when Nadia dropped us off at Upper Room, she paced in front of her daddy’s truck so she could watch cars pass on the road. Sometimes she sat on the steps in front of the church for an hour or two, hoping that she might see a green Jeep pull into the parking lot. She never did. No one had seen Aubrey Evans for weeks.
—
FOR MONTHS, Nadia replayed in her mind the day her lies had collapsed into one another. A normal day, a day so unremarkable that she wouldn’t appreciate, until weeks later, those early nondescript hours when her life had been intact. Those hours had passed quickly and then it was evening and she was stepping out of the shower, towel-drying her hair, when she saw a light flash outside the house. She’d gone to the door and when she’d switched on the porch light and stood on her tiptoes to look out the peephole, she’d found Aubrey sitting on the porch.
“Why’re you sitting out here in the dark?” she’d asked, stepping outside. “Why didn’t you ring the doorbell?”
She hadn’t been puzzled by Aubrey’s unexpected visit—they were long past the point of calling before they stopped by—but she hadn’t understood why Aubrey was sitting unannounced in front of her house. What if Nadia hadn’t noticed her headlights from the shower window? Was she just going to sit there forever without letting Nadia know she’d come by? Aubrey hadn’t turned around, and for weeks, when Nadia thought about her, she remembered staring at her back, the delicate curve of her neck. Maybe, if Aubrey had never turned around, they would’ve remained suspended in that moment forever, between knowing and not knowing, that final strained pull of a friendship fraying at the seams.
“How?” Aubrey said.
She knew the what. She could guess the why. But the how of it all had been what eluded her. The how of any betrayal was the hardest part to justify, how the lies could be assembled and stacked and maintained until the truth was completely hidden behind them. Nadia had frozen, her mind numb and slow, like she was trying to form words in a different language. Then Aubrey had pushed herself up from the steps and started down the driveway, Nadia stumbling after her.
“Aubrey,” she said. “I’m so fucking sorry—”
“Funny how sorry you both are now.”
“I swear to God, I was sorry as soon as it happened—”
“Well, that’s nice of you.”
“Please. Please. Just talk to me.”
She had banged on Aubrey’s car door, tugging at the handle. She would wake the neighbors soon, her father peeking out the window and wondering why she was crying and pleading, why she’d hung on to the door even after Aubrey had started her engine.