by Lee Martin
“Time’s up, Ronnie. I’m telling you the same thing those papers are telling you. You walked out. You made a fool of me, and I’m not going to let that happen anymore.”
“I want to see the kids.”
“Ronnie, you know it’s still school time.”
“I want to see Gracie and Junior.”
“Junior’s asleep.”
Gracie poked her head around Della’s leg. Gracie with her chubby cheeks and her big gray eyes and her blond hair pinned up on her head with a pink clip in the shape of a star.
“Daddy, the goats been eating too much.”
The girls kept them in a pen out behind the trailer. These cold days, the goats huddled up in the low-roofed shed inside the pen.
“That right, sweetheart?” Ronnie reached down and cupped his hand at the back of her head. “Maybe they’re just hungry in this cold weather.”
It was a gesture Della had seen him make so many times over the years she wouldn’t even know how to count them. That hand cradling a head, holding it up when the kids were just babies, petting them when they got older the way he was now with Gracie. His hands were beautiful, but she’d never told him that because it wasn’t the sort of thing a man like Ronnie would want to hear. It was true, though. His hands were long and narrow with thin fingers, and when he spread them like he had now, palming Gracie’s head, the tendons stood up on the back of his hand, and there was something strong and delicate all at the same time about the way he touched his children. When Della looked at his hand, it was hard for her to believe that she was looking at the hand that had touched Brandi Tate in all sorts of ways she didn’t want to imagine.
Gracie grabbed onto his other hand with both of her little ones. “Come inside, Daddy. Come on. I’m getting cold.”
So Della let Gracie pull him into the trailer, and she shut the door.
It felt strange to have him there after so much time. Strange and familiar all at once. The sound of his footsteps—a whisking shuffle she’d know even if a million years went by before she heard it again. “That boy never picks up his feet,” her mama told her shortly after they were married. “Not even at the church during the wedding march. Did you notice that? He was dragging his feet like he was on his way to get hung. Oh, Lord, I hope this hasn’t been a mistake.”
“You getting on okay?” He looked around the trailer, and she knew he was taking note of the pile of laundry on the couch in the living room, waiting to be folded, and the scatter of crayons and coloring books on the breakfast table, and the mess of CDs Angel and Hannah had left by the boom box on the kitchen counter. Maybe he was looking for something that would make him come back. Maybe all she had to do was admit she needed his help. “Della, you got more than your hands full.”
“We’re doing just fine,” she said.
He looked down the hallway. The double-wide had three bedrooms. She and Junior and Gracie slept in one of them. Angel and Hannah in another. The last one was for the twins. A bath and a half. Fifteen hundred square feet. A double-wide Fleetwood trailer with underpinning set on a piece of ground Della’s parents owned along the blacktop. It’d been her home for fourteen years, and even if it was a little worse for wear these days, it was still hers.
“See you got a fire going.” Ronnie nodded toward the Franklin stove in the corner of the living room where Della had just put on a new split of wood. “Guess you need it in this weather.”
“The furnace has been acting up. Daddy thought he had it fixed, but it keeps cutting out. Sometimes I don’t even notice it until I wake up in the middle of the night, froze to death.”
“The blower?”
Della shrugged her shoulders. “Something about the pilot light, I think.”
“Want me to see what I can do with it?”
“Daddy’s coming over today to take another look. If he can’t fix it, I expect we’ll all go over to their house to sleep tonight.”
That was enough—that mention of Wayne Best possibly appearing at any moment—to put Ronnie into action. He went down the hallway, and Della followed him, Gracie skipping along between them.
Junior was asleep in his crib. “I don’t want you waking him,” Della said in a whisper. “He’s got the croup and I just now got him to sleep.”
“Does he need a doctor?”
“If he does, I’ll see to it.”
“He sounds like one of the goats,” Gracie said, whispering in imitation of Della. “I heard him last night.”
Ronnie was whispering, too. “I didn’t mean to suggest you couldn’t take care of him, Della.”
“It’s all right. I’m just tired. Haven’t been sleeping much.” She put her hand on Gracie’s back. “Why don’t you go out and color Daddy a picture?”
“I’ll draw you something nice, Daddy.”
“All right, baby. You do that.”
Alone, Della and Ronnie watched Junior sleeping the way they’d stood together at cribs over the years looking down on their children.
“Guess it’s my fault you haven’t had your sleep,” he said.
“Guess it is,” she told him. “You and seven kids.”
She watched him looking down on Junior whose jaw was slack, a little bubble of spit at his lips. The room smelled of the Vicks Vapo-Rub she’d used on his chest, and it was, at least to her way of thinking, a good smell. A scent she always associated with her own mother and how she’d cared for Della when she was a little girl. That heady smell of camphor and eucalyptus that said Mom was there and she knew exactly what to do.
“I hate this, Della. I really do. I hate the way it’s turned out. All this burden on you and now these divorce papers. It’s got me shook. I can tell you that.”
Junior squirmed a little in his sleep, his arm flying over across his chest, and Della held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t wake.
She and Ronnie were talking in such small voices now they had to stand close to each other to hear.
“You want to do something about it? You want to come home and give up this nonsense with Brandi Tate?”
For a long time, he didn’t say a word. Then she heard a little choke of breath, and his shaky voice said, “I can’t do that.”
It came to her, then, something she should have known. “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”
He wouldn’t admit it. He couldn’t face her and own up to it, but she felt sure she’d hit on the truth. She knew it in the way he looked at Junior, the way he reached into the crib and dabbed the little spit bubble with his finger. She could tell it from the way he wouldn’t look at her, the way he got all shy, the way he said, “Della, I—” and then couldn’t go on. She knew he wasn’t completely done with babies.
“You better get a lawyer,” she told him, and he said, “All right, then, if you’re saying it’s over, then by God let it be over. I can make it so you’ll wish you never started this.”
“I didn’t start it. So don’t you come in here threatening me.”
“Oh, I’m not threatening. It’s long past that now.”
“What in the world does that mean?”
“You’ll find out, Della. You can count on that.”
9
The Firebird’s tires squealed and laid black marks on the pavement when Ronnie left Della’s.
“He sure took out of there a-hellin’,” Shooter said to Captain. They were outside rounding up one of Della’s goats. The pen she had behind the trailer had a wood fence, and there was always a plank or two busted out and those goats would get free and wander across the road and Shooter would have to get them back in the pen. He’d take over a hammer and some nails and patch things up enough to hold them until the next time he’d find a goat or two in his garden, chomping up anything they could get to. It didn’t set right with him. None of it. Ever since Ronnie had left Della for Brandi Tate, the place had gone to hell.
Shooter had tried his best to do right by Della, helping her out with this and that when she needed it, trying to be someone that she and her k
ids could count on, but as the weeks went on it began to wear on him and he started to see Della as someone who was incompetent. She was a problem he couldn’t solve, and Lord knew he had enough worries of his own as Captain got older and more headstrong.
The Firebird shot up the blacktop, tires squealing and smoking, and Captain and Shooter listened to Ronnie let that engine out for a good long ways.
“Sugar tits,” Captain said.
“Don’t talk like that, Wesley.” Shooter hated to see that hangdog look on Captain’s face, that look that said he knew he’d done wrong, but he just couldn’t help himself. “Come on, Captain,” Shooter said. He only called him Wesley when he wanted to be stern. “Let’s get after that goat.”
Missy met Ronnie’s Firebird on the blacktop outside Goldengate. She was waiting behind the school bus that’d just put out its stop sign when Ronnie went roaring past, no regard for that bus at all.
On the bus, Angel saw the Firebird shoot by and she said to Hannah, who was sitting beside her, “There goes Dad.”
Hannah came up on her knees and squirmed around in her seat to look on down the blacktop. Her braid swung out and hit Angel in the face.
Some of the other kids on the bus had seen the Firebird, too. Angel grabbed Hannah by the arm and pulled her down.
“He’s been to see Mom,” Hannah said. “Do you think—”
“No, I don’t think,” Angel said. “Not with him driving like that.”
“Hey, Angel,” a boy called from the back of the bus. It was Tommy Stout, a boy Angel secretly liked. “There goes your dad,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t mean, but it called attention to what Angel had spent months trying to forget. Her dad had walked out and was living with someone else. “Looks like he’s in a hurry,” Tommy said, and Angel closed her eyes.
Missy used her cell phone to call Pat on his job site. “It’s a wonder no one got killed,” she told him. “I’m sitting here right behind the bus, and I’m shaking. I’m watching one of the Thacker girls cross the road, and I’m thinking about what might have happened. That Ronnie Black is out of control.”
Pat was a quiet man, and, when he spoke, he said his words slowly, as if he’d given them a good deal of thought and wanted to make sure he got them right. “He was just out here looking for work.” Pat’s construction company was building a house near Goldengate. “He said Della had papers served on him, and that girl he’s living with—that Brandi Tate?—well, she’s got a baby coming. He seemed pretty shook up.”
“Don’t make excuses for him. He’s only getting what he’s had coming.”
“I was just giving you the facts.” Pat’s voice shrank and got that little bit of hurt in it that always startled Missy whenever she heard it. “I didn’t mean to stand up for him.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to jump on you. I’m just so mad at Ronnie for doing Della the way he is.”
On up the road, Della threw on an old John Deere jacket that Ronnie left when he moved out, the first thing she grabbed from the coat pegs by the front door, not even noticing what it was until she was out in the cold. The buses would be coming soon—first Angel and Hannah’s, and then Sarah and the twins’—and she wanted to be there waiting for them, the way she managed to be every day no matter that she felt like her life had blown to pieces. She wanted her girls to know that nothing was going to change. They were going to get along as a family for a good long time.
Shooter had a rope around the neck of the billy goat, Methuselah, who was always butting his way through the rotten fence. Captain was walking alongside. When he saw Della, he gave her a big wave. His face lit up, the way it always did whenever he saw her. He swept the shaggy blond bangs away from his eyes.
“Della, we got your goat,” he said, and even though she was embarrassed about the stray goat, she felt a warm glow inside because to Captain it meant nothing that this was the umpteenth time that he and his father had to round up one of her goats. It was something he was glad to do, and he didn’t have it in him to pass judgment on her or anyone else for that matter. She was the same Della to him that she’d always been and this business with Ronnie—even though she knew Captain missed having him around—didn’t matter at all.
Shooter, though, was a different story. She knew that Shooter thought she should keep a better grip on things. “Damn it, Della,” he said to her once. “You’ve got to get things under control.”
She’d done her best to keep those goats inside their pen, but Methuselah was always breaking through the boards.
“Well, Della, looks like I’ve caught another one,” Shooter said, and though he said it with a smile, she knew that deep down he was tired of chasing goats. “I’ll put him back in the pen and see what I can do to patch it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and he gave a little wave of his hand as if to say he didn’t want to hear her apology.
At least he didn’t say anything about the way Ronnie had driven out of there like a crazy man. At least Shooter left that alone.
“You’re going have to come up with a better arrangement for your animals,” he said. “Come spring, I’m not going to have them eating up my garden. I mean it, Della. You’re going to have to find some way of making sure they stay where they’re supposed to be.” Then, as he led Methuselah around back of the trailer, he said something she wasn’t sure he meant for her to hear, but maybe he did. Maybe this was his way of saying he was tired of the whole damn deal. “Some people,” he said. “Captain, best thing would be to put a match to that fence and start over.”
Something about the way Shooter said some people struck Della wrong, and though she was generally a good-natured person, she snapped. She knew it was the bad feeling inside her after her run-in with Ronnie that made her so angry with Shooter. In fact, she was more embarrassed than anything, ashamed to be the woman who caused so much trouble. She followed Shooter and Captain behind the trailer.
“You don’t have to do anything to that fence,” she said. “In fact, you don’t need to do anything for me ever again.”
Shooter turned to look at her, and the wind bit at his face. The sharp tone of her voice caught him by surprise and made him get his back up even more.
“Damn it, Della. I’m trying to do the best I can for you, and you talk to me that way?”
“I know what you told Missy.” She took a step toward him. “I know you wish I wasn’t your neighbor.”
For a few moments, he didn’t know what she was talking about. What had he said to Missy? Then it came to him. Just a wisecrack. That was all. Just something he said and didn’t think for a minute that it’d ever get back to Della, and even if it did, wouldn’t she know he’d only been joking? You know, I’d like those people a lot better if they lived somewhere else. That’s what he’d said to Missy one day when he’d rounded up those stray goats and patched that fence again.
“Hell, Della. That was just a joke. I didn’t mean any harm.”
“You know what they say,” she told him. “In every ounce of jest there’s a pound of truth. If I’m so much trouble to you, just leave me alone.”
She whipped around and stomped off toward the road.
“That woman needs to learn to be more grateful,” Shooter finally said to Captain. “Come on. Let’s patch that fence while we’ve still got good light.”
10
It was a little after ten thirty that night when Brandi heard the firehouse siren. The television news had gone off, and she’d come to bed. She was sitting up with the lamp on, reading a book called Getting Ready for Baby. She had a whole stack of books like that on her night table: The Calm Baby Cookbook, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Pregnancy Without Pounds.
“Fire,” she said, not looking up from her book, and Ronnie, who was on his side, the blankets pulled over his shoulder, didn’t say a word.
He’d gone out for a drive earlier—no, he didn’t want company, he’d told her—and he’d come back, got into the shower, and then slipped into
bed. It wasn’t uncommon for him to go driving when he got antsy—just getting the kinks out, he always said—and Brandi didn’t make a fuss about it. She knew it wasn’t easy for him, all this mess with Della, particularly now that she’d filed for divorce. But Brandi, with no family nearby, had long ago grown tired of being alone. She’d come to count on Ronnie.
Just that morning, she’d run out of gas when she was so close to work that her boss, Mr. Samms, was able to push her Mustang into the parking lot at the Wabash Savings and Loan. She’d called the house, and Ronnie had gotten out of bed and carried five gallons to Phillipsport and poured it into her tank. If he wanted to get out for a bit in the evening and be alone with his thoughts, as he had tonight, who was she to say anything about it?
She was wearing a low-cut black chemise that came down over her hips and a pair of black bikini panties. A little pooch had already come to her stomach. It wouldn’t be long, she’d told Ronnie, before she wouldn’t be able to wear anything sexy to bed, or at least not that he’d want to see her in, so he’d better get an eyeful while he still could. She’d brushed out her hair, and it fell in waves over her bare shoulders, the tips snaking across the tops of her breasts.
For just an instant, she looked over the tops of the round rimless glasses she wore for reading. She looked toward the window and then quickly went back to her book.
Ronnie knew everyone thought he’d left Della because he was chasing tail and it ended up being his own that got caught in the door, but that wasn’t true. More than anything, he’d ended up with Brandi because she’d given him what he needed most: a peace in the heart he’d been hard-pressed to find on his own. She just had this calm way about her. She never got flustered, never flew off into a panic, never felt sorry for herself. He convinced himself that life with her was going to be easy. He believed it right up to the point when he drove out the blacktop with that five-gallon can of gas. Now he heard the firehouse siren and a chill went through him. He’d come back from the trailer, and Brandi had asked him where he’d gone.
