Free The Mothers by Brit Bennett Page B

slumped forward in front of the altar in what looked like prayer or sleep. A bum, probably. We stumbled across them sometimes in the mornings, sleeping across the pews.
    â€œAll right now,” Betty said, “you got to go. We won’t tell nobody we seen you but you got to go on now.”
    No response. Probably a drunk bum. Lord, now those we couldn’t deal with. Passed out drunk after mistaking the offering basket for a toilet, leaving broken beer bottles around for the babies to cut their feet.
    â€œOkay,” Hattie said, “now why don’t you hop on up? We don’t wanna have to call the police.”
    We edged closer, noticing, for the first time, past the fur collar, long, dark hair swept up away from a slender yellow neck. A neck that looked too clean for a bum’s, too delicate for a man’s. Agnes touched the strange woman’s back.
    â€œElise! What you doin’ in here?”
    â€œI . . . I came in here last night and . . .” Elise looked dazed as Flora helped pull her to her feet.
    â€œGirl, it’s morning already,” Agnes said. “You better get on home to your child.”
    â€œMy child?”
    â€œYes, honey. What you doin’ sleepin’ in here all night?”
    â€œRobert probably worried sick,” Hattie said. “Get on home, then. Go on.”
    At the time, we’d laughed as we watched Elise head through the morning fog to her car. Oh, wait till we told the ladies at bingo about this. Elise Turner, asleep in the church like an ordinary bum. They would have a field day with that one. She had always seemed a little strange to us anyway—dreamy, like her mind was a balloon on a long string and she forgot to reel it in sometimes.
    For years, we’ve fixated on that final conversation. Elise had hesitated before going out to her car, a pause that varies in length throughout our memories; Betty says it was a long moment, Flora, a brief hitch. Should we have known Elise would drive off and shoot herself? Was there any way of knowing? No, nobody could’ve predicted it, not if Robert hadn’t even known. Elise Turner was beautiful. She had a child and a husband with a good government job. She had gone from cleaning white folks’ toilets to styling hair at the salon on base.A pretty black woman living as fine as any white woman. What did she have to complain about?
    â€”
    T HAT SUMMER , Nadia Turner haunted us.
    She looked so much like her mother that folks around Upper Room started to feel like they’d seen Elise again. As if her restless spirit—and no one doubted it was restless—was roaming the place where it had last been seen. The girl, who haunted the church halls with her beauty and her sullenness, barely noticed the stares, until one evening, when Second John offered her a ride home from work in the church van. He pulled onto the street, and for a second, their eyes met in the rearview mirror.
    â€œYou look so much like your mama,” he said. “Gives me chills to look at you.”
    He glanced away, bashful almost, like he’d said the wrong thing. At dinner that night, she mentioned his comment to her father and he glanced up, as if he’d needed to remind himself of what her face looked like.
    â€œYou do,” he finally said, cutting his meat, his jaw set the way it always did whenever she tried to bring up her mother. Maybe that was why he always ran off to Upper Room, why he couldn’t stand to be around her. Maybe he hated looking at her because she only reminded him of all that he’d lost.
    The night before her mother died, Nadia had caught her staring out the kitchen window, arms deep in soap suds, so gone in her own mind that she hadn’t noticed the sink almost overflowing. She’d laughed a little when Nadia shut off the water.
    â€œLook at me,” she’d said. “Off daydreaming again.”
    What had she been thinking about in that