Free The Mothers by Brit Bennett

don’t like the look of a lot of folks,” he said.
    â€œAnd am I wrong?”
    â€œIt isn’t a reason to fire someone.”
    Behind his desk, John sipped his coffee and Latrice sighed, pouring herself another cup. Out the window, she could see the fog rolling into the church parking lot. Enough to make her about sick of it. She was from Macon, Georgia. She knew rain and she knew humidity, but she hated this strange in-between, especially since springtime in Georgia was when azaleas and peach blossoms and magnolias bloomed and the weather was perfect for barbecues and porch-sitting and driving with the windows down. But here, she could barely see out to the road. It was enough to make her more frustrated than she already was.
    â€œHoney, we all like Brother Turner,” she said, “but I don’t need some fast-tailed, know-nothing girl following me around all summer!”
    â€œLatrice, the Word says that the good shepherd leaves the ninety-nine—”
    â€œOh, I know what the Word says. Don’t you preach at me like I’m some little woman in your congregation.”
    John slipped his glasses off his face, the way he always did when he wanted to make a point. Maybe some things were easier for him to say once she was blurred, out of focus.
    â€œWe owe her,” he said.
    She scoffed, turning in front of the window. She refused to be indebted to anyone, let alone a girl she’d done nothing but help. She had been the only one quick enough to act. That morning, her son had sat slumped over the kitchen table, his head in his hands, while her husband paced across the kitchen floor. Both her son’s stillness and her husband’s constant movement irritated her. She had barely woken up, hadn’t even taken the rollers out of her hair. A pregnant girl before she drank her morning coffee.
    â€œYou couldn’t have found you a girl who didn’t go to Upper Room?” she’d finally asked.
    â€œMama—”
    â€œDon’t Mama me. You know it’s yours? Who knows how many of these boys she been with?”
    â€œIt’s mine,” he said. “I know it.”
    â€œA high school girl,” she said. “Is she even eighteen?”
    â€œAlmost,” he said softly.
    â€œAfter everything we taught you,” John said, “after we raised you up in the Word, after we told you about living in sin, you go out and do something as dumb as this?”
    She had witnessed this scene dozens of times before, her husband yelling at Luke. For joyriding with his friends, theater-hopping, sneaking beer onto the beach in old Coke bottles, smoking reefer in Buddy Todd Park, goading Marines into fights. He wasn’t a bad kid but he was reckless. Black boys couldn’t afford to be reckless, she had tried to tell him. Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead. How many times had she told Luke to be careful? But he’d messed around with a girl who was not even legal yet—what would Robert think? He would be angry, ofcourse, but how angry? Angry enough to haul Luke to the police station?
    â€œShe wants to get rid of it,” Luke said.
    He looked defeated, brushing tears from the corner of his eye. She hadn’t seen him cry in years. Her boy, like all boys, had long outgrown her mothering. She’d watched Luke’s growth spurts, the stretch marks on his shoulders from summers of weight lifting, and the more mannish he became, the less he felt like her son. He was someone else now, a furtive and cagey person who disappeared behind closed doors and stopped talking on the phone when she entered the room. In elementary school, he’d wrestled with his friends on the living room rug, but in high school, she’d seen him shove a friend into a wall so hard, a picture fell off its hook. What bothered her most was the surprise on his face when she’d yelled at him to stop, as if roughness came