Late One Night

by Lee Martin

  “Why in the world wouldn’t you know?” she said now to Hannah. “Didn’t he say where he was going?”

  “Haven’t seen him,” Hannah mumbled. She was concentrating hard on removing the Adam’s apple with the tweezers. “Don’t know where he is.”

  The tweezers touched the side of the throat as she was lifting out the Adam’s apple, and the buzzer went off and the red bulb of the patient’s nose lit up.

  “You lose your turn.” Sarah clapped her hands together. Her bangs needed cutting. She kept brushing them out of her eyes. “Doesn’t she, Brandi? Doesn’t she lose her turn?”

  “Where’s your hair barrettes?” Brandi asked her.

  Sarah chewed on her bottom lip and twisted up her mouth as she thought. “I don’t know,” she finally said.

  Brandi put her hands on her hips and gave Sarah a disapproving look. “Did you lose them again? Oh, Sarah.”

  Secretly, Brandi was pleased. This silly, forgetful girl needed her to keep track of her hair barrettes, to comb the tangles from her hair, to cut her bangs, to remind her to brush her teeth before she went to bed. And there was Emma who liked it when Brandi read stories to her. And dear, dependable Hannah, who had woven her that friendship bracelet. It was Hannah who’d made room in her heart for Brandi first, and then the other girls had followed suit. All but Angel. She was the stubborn one, but Brandi was determined to win her over.

  Last night, after the ugly scene with Ronnie, Brandi had a talk with Angel, just the two of them, in the privacy of Brandi and Ronnie’s bedroom. Brandi sat on the bed with Angel, and she put her arm around her. Angel let her hold her like that, rocking her a little, stroking her hair.

  “Your daddy loves you, and I love you,” she said. “We’re just waiting for you to love us back.”

  Angel said, “You’re not my mother,” and Brandi admitted that she wasn’t. “No, I’m not, and I know this is all complicated for you. You’re at that age when you’re trying to figure out things about love, and I know your daddy and I haven’t made that any easier for you, but trust me, Angel, I love you like you were my own. In truth, you are my own now. You and all your sisters. We don’t have any choice.” Angel levered herself away from Brandi’s embrace. She got up and walked across the room to the door. Before she opened it, she turned back and said, “Maybe we do. At least I do. Maybe you don’t know everything.” Brandi asked her what that was supposed to mean, but Angel wouldn’t answer. She just opened the door and left the room.

  Brandi had spent a good part of her day mulling that over and had eventually dismissed it as Angel’s way of saying how hurt she was, how much she was suffering, how confused she was. A girl who’d lost her mother and not willing just yet to let the world be kind to her. Brandi could forgive her that and try to be patient and persistent with her love.

  “Where’s Angel and Emma?” she asked Hannah.

  Hannah was in her gawky stage now, all skinny arms and spindly legs, but Brandi could see she’d grow into a beautiful woman. That lustrous skin, those blue eyes.

  “Angel’s in our room,” Hannah said, “and Emma’s in her closet talking to Emily.”

  Poor Emma. She was having such a hard time being a twin on her own.

  “Well, at least someone knows something around here.” Brandi gave the girls a smile to let them know she wasn’t angry with them. “Did your father pick you and Emma up at school?” she asked Sarah.

  Sarah glanced at Hannah, and Brandi took note of how Hannah’s eyes opened wide, as if someone were trying to pull something from her and she wasn’t willing to let it go.

  “We came home from school,” Sarah finally said.

  “Sarah,” said Brandi. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “They walked home from school.” Hannah spoke up for her. “They were here when I got home.”

  “And your father nowhere to be seen and no way for me to call him.” He refused to carry a cell phone. Hadn’t had one all his life and didn’t see any reason to start now, even though Brandi tried to convince him he might wish he’d changed his tune someday. “Maybe Angel knows something,” she said, and went down the hallway.

  Angel was lying on her bed listening to a new iPod. Her old one, of course, was gone in the fire. She’d begged her father for a new one, but he’d said no.

  “Where’d you get that?” Brandi asked her.

  Angel took her earbuds out and propped herself up on her elbows. “I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you think.”

  “I didn’t say you stole it. I asked you where you got it.”

  Angel rubbed her thumb over the smooth face of the iPod. “It was a present.”

  “From a boy?” Brandi was aware of her voice rising in alarm, but she couldn’t help herself. She knew what a boy would be after with an expensive gift like that, and it wouldn’t be just friendship. “Was it that Tommy Stout?”

  “No, not from a boy.” Angel made fun of Brandi’s anxiety, making her voice squeak with mock fear. “I’m not looking for a boyfriend.” Her voice went flat and she gave Brandi a long stare. “I’m not on the prowl like you.”

  “That’s enough, Angel. You don’t know a thing about what brought your dad and me together.”

  Sure she’d locked eyes with him at Fat Daddy’s one night back in the summer, had told him he looked good in those new jeans. Had said, “Della better keep an eye on you.” She slow danced with him when the jukebox played Rascal Flatts’ “Bless the Broken Road,” and she sang all low and sexy in his ear, “Every long-lost dream led me to where you are.” When the song was done, she said goodnight.

  Then she just waited. It wasn’t long before she’d hear a car coming slow down Locust, and when she’d look out her front window she’d see Ronnie in his Firebird, taking his time as he made the turn onto Jones Street. She came to know the sound of that Firebird. Five nights running, Ronnie came by. On the sixth night, she was waiting on her porch, and when she saw him coming, she went out to the curb and flagged him down. She leaned in through his open window. “Might as well come in,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

  Angel didn’t know how it could happen. You could be out there looking and not even know it until all of a sudden you were in the scene from your life that you’d been heading toward all along. Then, like that, it all made sense—every damned move you’d ever made, right or wrong. You were where you were supposed to be. Didn’t make any difference that Ronnie was married. Didn’t matter a snap that he had all those kids.

  “I know one thing,” Angel said. “You hurt my mom. You and my dad. Maybe you’ve got a way of not thinking about that, but I don’t. I think about it every single day.”

  Brandi did too. She couldn’t get it out of her head, the fact that she and Ronnie had ended up together and now Della was dead. At her darkest times, Brandi thought about how part of that was her fault. If she hadn’t come up to Ronnie that night at Fat Daddy’s. If she hadn’t gone out to that Firebird that night at her house and told Ronnie to come in. If, if, if. A world of ifs, forever and ever. For that reason alone, Brandi was determined to love Angel and her sisters and to give them a good home. To make that one good thing she could do.

  “That iPod.” Brandi wouldn’t admit to Angel how much what she’d said had shaken her. She made her voice go hard. “Who gave it to you?”

  “Missy,” Angel said. “She’s taking us to 4-H tonight.”

  “Does your dad know about this?”

  “Maybe you should ask him,” Angel said. Then she stuffed the buds back into her ears, and gave Brandi the sweetest smile.

  Soon it was evening, the dark coming on early. Out in the country, off a gravel road that snaked back a mile to the west of where the trailer had been, the pole light came on in Lois and Wayne’s barnyard.

  They’d been resting, dozing in their reclining chairs, waking from time to time to watch out the picture window as the squirrels and jays and quail came to feed on shelled corn tossed around the blue spruce. They’d kept the lights off,
and now it was dark in the room and they talked back and forth in that quiet, just the two of them out there in the country.

  “Have things stopped spinning for you?” Lois wanted to know, and Wayne told her he thought he felt some better and maybe could eat a little supper.

  She made some grilled cheese sandwiches with sliced tomato, the way he liked them, and opened a can of tomato soup she’d brought home from the store. He said he could come in to the table to eat, but she told him there was no need. She’d set up TV trays, and they could eat in their chairs, maybe even put on the television. Not the news—they’d had enough of that—but maybe that Wheel of Fortune television show they liked to watch. They’d sit there and eat their supper and try to guess the puzzles on Wheel, and little by little—though they didn’t say this—they’d try to get back to some normal way of living.

  “It’s a good thing we didn’t try to take on the girls,” Wayne said when Lois brought him his supper. “The way I am, and you having to take care of me, I don’t know how we’d manage.”

  Lois turned on the TV and found the channel for Wheel. She and Wayne sat there, eating, watching the pretty woman turn over the letters of the puzzles, but they didn’t try to guess like they usually did.

  “It couldn’t be true about Ronnie, could it?” Lois finally said. “He wouldn’t have done anything like that, would he?”

  “Turn it up.” Wayne pointed to the TV. “I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

  _________

  Missy had been thinking about Angel all day and how maybe she shouldn’t have given her that iPod—even Pat said it was bad business—but she’d wanted to do something nice for her, something to let her know she didn’t hold any bad feelings over the way Angel had treated her after the funeral when the girls had packed up and left with Ronnie and Angel hadn’t told her a word of goodbye, hadn’t even waved at her as Ronnie drove away.

  Out of all the girls, Angel was the one who most worried her. Angel, who seemed to have a turnip for a heart. Missy was determined to save her from her own anger, to keep reminding her that there were good people in the world who loved her.

  “So you’re going to give her an iPod?” Pat said to her that morning at breakfast. They were sitting at the table just after dawn when the light was watery and the radio was on. WPLP was giving the farm market reports from the Chicago Board of Trade before turning to the local news. “That’s how you’re going to teach her about goodness?”

  “It’s a start,” she said. “It’s just a way to love on her for a while. What’s wrong with that?”

  Pat didn’t answer at first, but she could tell he thought she was overstepping her bounds and heading down a dangerous path.

  “You control their money,” he finally said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  Why did he have to say a thing like that, a thing that caught her by surprise and made her look at herself the way he saw her: a woman desperate with need? She couldn’t deny it—didn’t want to deny it, really. She wanted instead for the two of them to acknowledge what was lacking between them so they could let it draw them closer. She wanted to say, Don’t you see how this is our chance?

  Then the local news came on the radio, and the first story was about the trailer fire and how the State Fire Marshal had confirmed its suspicious nature. The investigation, the radio announcer said, was ongoing.

  Missy recalled the day at the bank when Laverne had practically begged her to say that Ronnie couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the fire, and Missy had left enough space for that rumor to spread.

  Now she only looked at Pat and said, “Oh, my. My word. Isn’t that just the saddest thing? And after what Shooter told us about Ronnie.”

  Pat got up from the table and grabbed his coat and lunch box. He looked at Missy a good long while. “Do you think he really did it?”

  “God help him,” Missy said.

  Pat nodded and then headed out the door.

  She took her time washing the dishes, keeping an eye on the clock on the wall of the kitchen. The clock was round with a yellow sunflower painted on its center. Yellow numbers circled the sunflower just outside the reach of its petals. It would take thirty minutes to drive to the high school in Phillipsport, and Missy wanted to make sure that she got there in enough time to be waiting when the bus from Goldengate pulled to the curb.

  At the school, she stood by her van, watching. When she saw Angel get off the bus, she called to her.

  Angel stopped on the sidewalk, her backpack slung over her shoulder, while the students getting off the bus moved past her. They were laughing and shouting, their breath steaming in the cold air.

  Missy waved at Angel, and her heart lifted when Angel finally raised her arm and waved back. Then she came down the sidewalk to where Missy was standing.

  “I know you have to get to your first class,” Missy said, “but I wanted you to have this.”

  Missy gave her the iPod, and Angel looked at it and looked at it and looked at it. When she finally raised her head, her lip was trembling.

  “Thank you,” she said in a soft voice.

  “Your dad said you’d been wanting a new one.”

  Angel rolled her eyes. “He wouldn’t let me have one.”

  Missy could have told her not to hold her father to account. She could have told her about the three-hundred-dollar check she wrote him and how he promised to make sure all the girls got something from it. But what she said was, “Sometimes dads just don’t know, do they?”

  “That’s for sure,” Angel said, and Missy thought she saw the trace of a smile.

  “It’s 4-H meeting tonight,” Missy said. “You and your sisters want to go?”

  “We don’t have our goats anymore.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Missy put her arm around Angel’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “We’d all love to see you. What say I come by for you around 6:30?”

  Angel nodded. “Okay,” she said. Then the bell was ringing, and Missy told her to hurry so she wouldn’t get in trouble.

  By six o’clock that evening, Brandi had called everyone she could think of who might know where Ronnie was. He hadn’t been in the Real McCoy Café or Casey’s convenience store or the IGA. Shooter Rowe hadn’t seen him, nor had Pat Wade.

  “Tell Missy not to come and get the girls for 4-H,” she told Pat. They hadn’t had their supper, and Emma and Sarah were getting whiny. Emma was tugging at the leg of her slacks. Sarah was pressing the tweezers against the sides of the Operation game over and over so it made an annoying buzz. Angel and Hannah were back in their room.

  “The girls?” he said, in a way that made it clear Missy hadn’t said a word about it to him. “She’s already gone,” he said, and before Brandi could say anything else, he hung up.

  She happened to think then to call next door to Willie Wheeler’s.

  “I saw Ronnie around noon,” Willie said. “He was out to the curb talking to the sheriff. Then Ronnie got in his car, and Biggs, he followed up the street after him.”

  “Must have been something about the fire,” Brandi said.

  Some time passed before Willie said anything else, and when he did, Brandi wished she wasn’t hearing what she was.

  “Haven’t you heard?” Brandi couldn’t find her voice, afraid to ask what Willie was talking about. Finally, he went on. “It’s about the fire all right. Fire marshal says it was set. It’s all over the news.”

  The rumors about Ronnie that she’d so readily dismissed now took her by the throat. Arson, and now Ronnie was more in the middle of it than she’d ever dreamed.

  She got off the phone and marched down the hall to Angel’s room. She didn’t bother to knock. She just pushed open the door.

  Angel was standing behind Hannah, braiding her hair. “Is there anything to eat before we go?” Angel asked.

  “You’re not going with Missy,” Brandi said. “I need you to get supper for your sisters and then look after them.”

  Angel took her h
ands out of Hannah’s hair. “Why haven’t you made supper by now?”

  “I’m trying to find your daddy. Aren’t you even worried?”

  Angel just shrugged her shoulders.

  Hannah said, “What’s wrong? Is there something wrong?”

  “No, there’s nothing wrong. I just need to find him.” She started to go. Then she turned back and said, “You’re to stay here tonight. Do you understand me?”

  Hannah said that she did. Brandi thought she might have seen Angel nod her head, but she couldn’t be sure. She guessed that was the best she could do. Now she needed to find Ronnie.

  He was in a bar in Brick Chapel—the Kozy Kiln—and had been since three o’clock in the afternoon. He and Brandi had come there once in the summer before he left Della and they were looking for somewhere to be off by themselves. He drank a few beers while the daylight faded and the streetlights came on and the headlights of cars swept by the plate-glass window by the table where he sat.

  The last of the afternoon shoppers hurried past, women with scarves wrapped around their faces and snow boots on their feet. They held shopping bags in their arms as if they were toting babies. From time to time, one of the women laughed so loud that Ronnie could hear it, a streak of a woman’s bright voice that was his for just a moment and then was gone.

  The waitress came to see if he needed anything, said, “Darlin’, you’ve been in here a good while. Don’t you have somewhere to go?”

  She was a girl with yellow hair falling over her shoulders. A girl with slender arms and long fingers. A girl with papery skin beneath which Ronnie could see the faint blue trails of her veins. A girl who put him in mind of Della when he’d first fallen head over heels for her. Della the way she was before the kids and all those years, and now he was starting over again, this time with Brandi, and he knew he should be home with her and the girls, but he hadn’t been able to lift himself up and make the drive back to Goldengate.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” he said to the girl.

  Then he had to look away, had to turn his face to the window. The girl was too beautiful in the way that Della had been, and if he kept looking at her, he wouldn’t be able to think of anything more than the way he and Della had once promised themselves to each other and how he’d broken his end of that promise and now she was dead.