The Mothers

Bennett establishes the novel’s narrative framework by opening with the first-person plural voice of the Mothers of Upper Room Chapel. This collective “we” functions as a Greek chorus, a recurring motif that shapes the reader’s experience of the story. Rather than introducing Nadia Turner’s private crisis through her own consciousness, the narrative presents it as pre-digested community lore, “an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season” (2). This strategy collapses the distance between private suffering and public judgment, framing the central events not as they happen, but as they are remembered and retold. The metaphor comparing the secret to unripe fruit suggests that there is more to the story than the Mothers initially understand—that in passing the story around “before its season,” they fail to appreciate its full significance. The work of the novel, then, is in allowing this unripe secret to ripen. The Mothers are not passive observers; their voice is omniscient, retrospective, and steeped in a sometimes-unearned moral authority. By situating the story within this communal consciousness, Bennett dismantles the idea of a purely individual narrative. The characters are figures in a larger, ongoing community saga, their choices subject to gossip, interpretation, and moral accounting. This structure introduces the theme of social surveillance and the nature of community memory, suggesting that no secret can truly be kept.

The opening chapters introduce the theme of Motherhood as Both Aspiration and Burden. The absence of Nadia’s mother, Elise, who recently died by suicide, has left Nadia emotionally adrift. This absence becomes the context for Nadia’s own looming motherhood, which she perceives as a threat to her future. When Nadia becomes pregnant at 17, she believes she has fallen into the same trap her mother fell into: “Of all people, she should have known better. She was her mother’s mistake” (12). She believes that her mother’s unhappiness and eventual suicide stemmed from the burden of early motherhood. Nadia’s decision to terminate the pregnancy is thus a rejection of a maternal role that, in her experience, is linked to suffering. 

This choice contrasts with the judgment of the community. The Mothers, acting as a Greek chorus, enact a communal form of mothering that stands in for individual care, offering a mixture of empathy and judgment. Individual mothers within the narrative embody different facets of this multifaceted collective motherhood. Latrice Sheppard’s version of motherhood is concerned entirely with the maintenance of social standing; her decision to secretly fund the termination of pregnancy is not an act of empathy for Nadia but a calculated move to protect her son and her family’s reputation. In this way, she represents one facet of the Mothers’ understanding of motherhood—the enforcement of social norms—while failing to uphold the compassionate care that forms an equally important part of this ideal.

The characters’ unspoken emotional pain is externalized through the recurring motif of physical wounds and scars, suggesting that interior trauma manifests on the body’s surface. Luke Sheppard’s permanent limp from a football injury, for example, is what first attracts Nadia. In the wake of her mother’s death, Nadia is “drawn to anyone who wore their pain outwardly, the way she couldn’t” (8). Unable to articulate her grief, she seeks its reflection in Luke’s visible brokenness and wants the physical pain of sex to act as an “outside hurt” (10) that might validate her interior agony. The emotional pain of Nadia’s termination of pregnancy finds expression in the physical pain of intense cramps that she hides from her father, an early example of The Corrosive Power of Secrets. Knowing that she can’t depend on him to react supportively, she keeps the termination of pregnancy a secret, and this unspoken pain manifests in self-destructive behavior, as she immediately asks to borrow her father’s truck, drives under the influence of alcohol, and crashes into a tree. The damage to the truck—itself a symbol of communal responsibility, as her father uses it to deliver aid to those in need—represents the breakdown of community in the face of secrecy. This focus on the body’s suffering serves as a metaphor for the psychological damage the characters carry. It suggests that emotional wounds have a physical consequences, leaving scars that alter how one moves through the world.

The novel’s setting in Oceanside, California, a coastal community dominated by the Camp Pendleton Marine Base, represents both the allure of escape and its impossibility. As the narrator states, “She couldn’t ride west. West was the ocean” (4), a geographical and psychological limit to her world. It is also a site of imagined grief, as when Nadia envisions a baby left on the beach being reclaimed by the water. Together, the truck and the ocean create a symbolic geography of Nadia’s struggle. As she envisions her future at the University of Michigan, she imagines escaping to the North American interior, to a landscape from which she can move in any direction.

These initial chapters establish the corrosive power of secrets as the novel’s primary engine, illustrating how a single concealed act poisons relationships and alters character trajectories. The secret of the pregnancy and its termination are active, shaping forces. They reveal the limits of Luke’s “littlebit love” (22), as his cruel dismissal of Nadia—“I got you the money. What else do you want from me?” (32)—shows that he is not ready to face the consequences of his actions, consequences he can escape much more easily than Nadia can. The web of deceit expands as Latrice Sheppard secretly provides the money for the termination of pregnancy and as Nadia lies to her father about the crash, which in turn places her directly under the watchful eye of Latrice Sheppard, the one woman who knows a piece of her truth. Secrets possess their own momentum, isolating individuals and creating new, more complicated deceptions.