As she waits for him in the lobby after the procedure, her stomach cramps painfully and the clinic’s only black nurse urges her to eat, but Nadia resists the woman’s help. The next day, he presents with an envelope stuffed with $600 and promises to pick her up when the procedure is over at the abortion clinic-a clinic that their church, Upper Room, has picketed in the past.ĭespite his promise, Luke doesn’t pick Nadia up after the abortion. She tells him that she wants an abortion, and he promises to get her the money. When she tells Luke, he’s terrified but quick to listen to what she wants to do.

“She wanted Luke to be her outside hurt,” Bennett writes. When Nadia’s father is gone for the weekend, she sneaks Luke into her childhood bedroom and has sex for the first time, embracing the pain because it matches how she feels on the inside. Before long, they start hooking up, though they keep their relationship secret because Nadia isn’t eighteen yet and Luke’s parents are well-respected church officials. From this point on, Nadia makes a habit of seeing Luke at the restaurant, and the two grow closer. One day, she visits Fat Charlie’s seafood restaurant, where Luke-several years her senior-takes her order and flirts with her. Shortly after earning a sports scholarship to San Diego State, he injured his leg so badly that he still walks with a limp.ĭistraught and unmonitored by her grief-stricken father, Robert Turner, Nadia skips class and wanders through San Diego, even going to a strip club to drink booze, despite being underage. The winter after Nadia’s mother shoots herself in the head in a parked car, Nadia meets Luke, the pastor’s son and a hometown football hero. Alternating between this group’s voice and an omniscient third-person narrator, Bennett introduces readers to Nadia, a seventeen-year-old black girl living in San Diego in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide. “We didn’t believe when we first heard because you know how church folk can gossip,” begins the Greek chorus of elderly women known as the Mothers, who belong to Nadia Turner’s church, Upper Room.

The mothers brit