The Mothers

by Brit Bennett

All good secrets have a taste before you tell them,

Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her chemistry teacher to her friends and back home to her parents. Then one day, her mother’s hand was gone and she’d fallen, clattering to the floor.

In all that living, we have known men.

she could see the top of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, two white domes that kids on the school bus used to call “the boobs” when they drove past on field trips.

Would she have to speak at the service? What did anyone expect her to say? That one day, she’d had a mother, and the next, she didn’t?

Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip. —

Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.

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.

because hard deaths resist words.

Maybe she’d never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn’t know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?

Was that all it took, kneeling at the altar and asking for help? Or did you have to invite everyone in on your private sorrow to be saved?

she just nodded and pretended to understand, the way she would pretend all her life when friends complained about their mothers. Rolling her eyes along with them while they ranted about mothers who disapproved of their jobs or their boyfriends, always sympathizing, always smiling, even though she hated them for complaining.

But we were girls once, which is to say, we have all loved an ain’t-shit man.

before we found Upper Room and each other, before we were wives and mothers, we were girls and we loved ain’t-shit men.

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.

She was drifting between two lives, and as excited as she felt, she wasn’t quite ready to lose the life she’d found

Aubrey just squeezed her hand because she too understood loss, how it drove you to imagine every possible scenario that might have prevented it.

Where her life ended, her mother’s life began.

In a way, subtle racism was worse because it made you feel crazy. You were always left wondering, was that actually racist? Had you just imagined it?

This would be her life, accomplishing the things her mother had never done.

Poorness never left you, she told him. It was a hunger that embedded itself into your bones. It starved you, even when you were full.

Luke hadn’t felt the healing power of God. He’d felt nothing, and maybe, that was the same thing.

Out in the world, he felt time racing past him and he could never catch up.

Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body.

In hot months, wanting always reaches its peak.

After a secret’s been told, everyone becomes a prophet.

She didn’t want to walk if her mother couldn’t be there to watch her.

her mind, she only saw pictures they would never take,

The pier was nothing but a long piece of wood that kept crumbling until it was rebuilt, and years later, she wondered if that was the point, if sometimes the glory was in rebuilding the broken thing, not the result but the process of trying.

weddings between people who had no business even thinking about marrying, who couldn’t bring themselves to share a sandwich, let alone a life.

Who wanted to be that type of wife? Afraid to leave her married home, like if she left her life for a few days, it might not remain once she returned.

Maybe it was easier to exit while she was still young and capable than wait for her own eventual decline.

She never wanted him to think she’d halted her life for him. Other fathers might have felt touched, but hers would only feel ashamed. She had inherited this from him, an inability to ask for help, as if needing something was an inconvenience.

She wanted to take him back to the hospital but he refused.

magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn’t want was a haunting.

In the beginning, there was the word, and the word brought about the end.

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.

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.