The Mothers

Luke Sheppard functions as the novel’s deuteragonist, a round and dynamic character whose life is defined by a series of personal and moral failures. His identity is inextricably linked to his past as a promising football star whose career was ended by a catastrophic leg injury. This event marks him physically and emotionally; his permanent limp is a constant, visible symbol of his broken dreams and arrested development. The injury relegates him to a life he never envisioned, working a menial job at Fat Charlie’s Seafood Shack and haunted by what might have been. This sense of loss and unrealized potential makes him emotionally passive and prone to avoiding conflict. When Nadia becomes pregnant, his initial reaction is fear and helplessness. His decision to abandon her at the clinic is a pivotal failure, born from an inability to confront the emotional weight of the situation. His action is a profound betrayal that fuels his guilt for years to come.

Luke’s primary motivation is a search for redemption and a stable, meaningful life that seems just beyond his grasp. His relationship with Aubrey represents an attempt to achieve this. Aubrey, with her quiet faith and gentle nature, offers him a path toward goodness and a conventional family life that he craves. She is the antithesis of his reckless past and his complicated history with Nadia. However, this new life is built on the same foundation of secrets that defines his past. His inability to be honest with Aubrey about the depth of his history with Nadia, particularly his lingering feelings for her and his guilt at the termination of pregnancy, ensures that this relationship is also fraught with unspoken truths. He tells Nadia he “didn’t want to kill our baby” (107), revealing a profound regret that he never shares with his wife, demonstrating his continued tendency to hide his most complicated emotions.

Throughout the novel, Luke grapples with his own weakness and inability to forgive himself. He seeks external validation, first through the camaraderie of the Cobras, a semiprofessional football team of other men nursing past failures, and later through counseling with a men’s support group. His work for the church’s sick and shut-in ministry is another form of penance, an effort to become a “good man” rather than the “big man” he once hoped to be. His journey is circular; he repeatedly finds himself caught between his past with Nadia and his present with Aubrey, unable to fully commit to either or reconcile the damage he has caused. He evolves from a promising but careless youth into a man burdened by his choices, perpetually seeking a sense of peace that his own actions keep just out of reach.

As a foil to Nadia, Aubrey Evans is a round, dynamic character whose life is governed by a deep-seated yearning for the safety and stability she was denied in childhood. Her traumatic past, which includes her mother’s series of unstable relationships and sexual abuse by one of her mother’s boyfriends, informs her every action. This history fuels her intense desire to build a perfect, loving family of her own, making the theme of Motherhood as Both Aspiration and Burden central to her arc. For Aubrey, motherhood is not a burden but the ultimate aspiration, a way to heal her own wounds by creating the nurturing environment she never had. She finds a surrogate family at Upper Room Chapel, where she is embraced by the community and finds a maternal figure in the formidable Latrice Sheppard.

Aubrey’s piety and religious devotion are a direct response to her trauma; she wears her purity ring not just as a symbol of chastity but as a reminder “that I can be clean” (137), symbolizing the shame she has internalized as a result of her childhood sexual assault. Her faith provides a framework for order and goodness in a world that has been chaotic and dangerous. Like those of the other central characters, her life is also built on secrets. She conceals the full extent of her past abuse, which creates a quiet fragility that others, like Mrs. Sheppard, often mistake for simple innocence. Her friendship with Nadia is founded on this unspoken kinship of loss and concealed pain. She sees in Nadia a reflection of her own motherlessness and is drawn to her strength and confidence, qualities she feels she lacks. The bond between them is genuine, yet it is ultimately fractured by the revelation of the long-held secret connecting Nadia and Luke, forcing Aubrey to confront the fact that the stable life she has built is founded on a devastating lie.

Though often perceived as delicate and naive, Aubrey possesses a quiet but formidable resilience. Her decision to leave her mother and move in with her sister is a profound act of self-preservation. While she often defers to others, she is not merely a passive victim of circumstance. Her journey is one of learning to reconcile her idealized vision of love and family with the messy, painful realities of adult relationships. The discovery of Luke and Nadia’s past forces her to shed her illusions and assert her own needs. Her path toward motherhood is fraught with its own pain, but in choosing to have her child, she reclaims her own narrative, moving beyond the shadow of other people’s secrets to build a future, however imperfect, on her own terms.

The Mothers, presented as the collective narrative voice “we,” function as a Greek chorus for the community of Upper Room Chapel. They are a round, static character, representing the intertwined forces of communal memory, judgment, love, and tradition. As observers and gossips, they are the primary vessel through which Bennett explores the theme of The Corrosive Power of Secrets is explored. Their speculation about Nadia’s pregnancy, Robert’s grief, and Luke’s failings demonstrates how private acts become public knowledge within a close-knit community, shaping reputations and influencing events. Their narrative intrusions provide context and foreshadowing, and their collective wisdom, born from having “lived all over” (87) and “known men” (22), offers a poignant commentary on the younger characters’ struggles.

Despite their often-judgmental tone, the Mothers are not simply malicious. They embody a communal form of mothering, offering prayers, food, and care to those in need, even as they dissect their lives. Their role is paradoxical; they are keepers of faith who pray for the souls of the congregation, yet they also perpetuate the rumors that cause so much pain. They see themselves as the bedrock of Upper Room, the guardians of its history and moral standards. Their physical presence in the church is constant, a symbol of the inescapable nature of community and the past. Through their collective voice, the novel suggests that individual lives are inextricably woven into the larger fabric of their community, for better and for worse.

Latrice Sheppard, Luke’s mother and the pastor’s wife, serves as a primary antagonist. She is a controlling figure whose actions are pivotal to the novel’s central conflict. Motivated by a fierce desire to protect her son and her family’s reputation, she engineers the secret payment for Nadia’s termination of pregnancy. This act, which she later defends by stating, “I did what any mother would’ve done” (273), is a moment of hypocrisy that establishes the tension between the church’s stated values and the personal motivations of its leaders. She views Nadia with disdain, seeing her as a threat to her son’s future, and her “help” is a means of control, designed to erase a problem rather than to offer genuine support. Her heterochromatic eyes, one brown and one blue, are described as “ghost eyes” (79), and her grandfather used to say that with these eyes, she could “see heaven and earth at the same time” (79), symbolizing her fluency in both religious doctrine and earthly political and social matters. She uses her perceptiveness to manipulate situations to her advantage. She is a static character, remaining steadfast in her convictions and unwilling to acknowledge the harm her actions have caused.

Nadia’s father, Robert Turner, is a minor but significant character whose development reflects the novel’s focus on grief and reconciliation. After his wife’s death by suicide, he is defined by silent sorrow, channeling his pain into relentless service for the church community. His truck, constantly used for church errands, becomes a symbol of his attempt to find purpose and avoid confronting his own grief and his fractured relationship with his daughter. He and Nadia inhabit the same house but are emotionally distant, both trapped by what they cannot say about their shared loss. His journey is one of slow healing, spurred by his near-fatal accident. This crisis forces both him and Nadia to care for one another, breaking down the walls of silence between them and allowing for a fragile, unspoken forgiveness to emerge.