The Mothers by Brit Bennett

overlooking the beach. Her mother could barely understand the songs herself but she had heard on
Oprah
that it was good to expose a baby’s brain to different languages. That, she would later say, was how Nadia got to be so smart. How she’d read her first book before kindergarten, stumping the other parents so much that one mother had brought in her own book to test her, convinced she had just memorized the story. But Nadia’s mother remembered the Mexican women circling around her, cocooning her in Spanish, her brain sopping up words until it hung heavy and full.
    Her own patchy Spanish only took her so far. Her husband had been deployed to the Persian Gulf, and even though she had lived in Oceanside for a year, she had not made a true friend. So in her loneliness, she’d sought out a church home. She hadn’t been sure where to begin looking. Besides the Catholic churches, dutifully named after saints, most of the San Diego churches bore nautical names like Coastline Baptist or Seacoast Community Church. With names like that, she imagined congregations filing into pews wearing swim trunks, a minister who climbed the altar with a surfboard under his arm. She tried Calvary Chapel and Emmanuel Faith, but neither feltright. Emmanuel Faith had a woman pastor who had gone to Harvard, which she’d mentioned three times in the sermon. At Calvary Chapel, a woman behind her had gotten filled with the spirit and started flailing, nearly knocking everyone in the head. For years, she bounced from church to church, each one too small or too big, too modern or too traditional. Then one afternoon, she was emptying a room’s trash can when a bulletin from Upper Room Chapel fluttered onto her foot.
    â€œIt was my Goldilocks church,” she used to tell Nadia. “I knew it as soon as I walked in. Everything about it, just right.”
    On Sunday mornings, Upper Room Chapel crowded and bustled, men in suits pulling each other into rough hugs, ladies planting cheek kisses before scribbling brunch dates on scrap paper sticking out of Bibles, toddlers skirting around flowerpots in makeshift games of tag, and the Mothers, strutting past in colorful hats crowned with feathered plumes. Her first time in Upper Room, Nadia had watched from behind her mother’s knee, mystified, as their feathers bobbed up and down past her. White gloves were pulled up to their elbows, their tambourines jingled as they walked, and she’d wondered if jingling came with age, if one day, when she was wrinkled and gray, her own steps would make music. Her mother had laughed at the question.
    â€œOh, your body’ll make some sounds all right,” she’d said, wrapping her hand around Nadia’s.
    That first Sunday, her father had not been with them. Her mother had apologized for his absence to the pastor after service when she shook his hand in the receiving line.
    â€œMy husband, he just got back from overseas,” she’d said. “And he’s not much the churchly type.”
    Nadia’s father had arrived home a week ago. She was four thenand she barely remembered him, although she was old enough to understand that was a shameful thing to admit. In the months counting down to his return, her mother had gathered Nadia into her lap and pulled out a photo album, flipping slowly past pictures of her father holding her as a baby. In one, she was curled up like a kitten against his chest and her father, young and strapping in dress blues, smiled into the camera. He had a mole by his nose and short dark hair that looked plushy, like the bristles on her mother’s makeup brush. She studied his face, searching for features that were also hers. People had always said she looked exactly like her mother.
    She had been wary around him at first, shy even. He’d knelt to hug her outside of the terminal and she had drawn back, startled by this man in camouflage hefting a giant duffel bag, his face darkened by