Late One Night

by Lee Martin

  “I hope things get better for you, darlin’,” the girl said, and then he heard the heels of her shoes clicking over the floor and falling away to nothing.

  He’d been to the garment factory to see about that job. The plant manager, a tall man with a big belly and a long, sad face, said, “Pardner, I had to get me someone in that warehouse.” He hooked his thumbs into his waistband, on either side of an ornate silver belt buckle that featured an eagle and the Alamo and the words TEXAS TOUGH.

  “My girl.” Ronnie started in with an explanation. “She didn’t come home. I didn’t know what to do.” He knew he was talking too fast. “Then today I started out, and, well, you probably know about the fire. My wife. Three of my kids. Well, mister, it’s just been an unusual time for me. Otherwise, I’d of been here when I was supposed to. The truth is, mister, I need this job.”

  “I know about your trouble.” The plant manager shook his head in sympathy. “Jesus, yes. But, Ronnie, I had trucks needed unloading, and I had to get another man in that warehouse.”

  Ronnie looked the man in the eye, gave him a chance to change his mind. They were in his crow’s nest office, high above the factory floor where row after row of women had their backs curved over sewing machines. Even through the window glass, Ronnie could hear the angry buzz of all those machines.

  “So that’s the way it is?” he finally said.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have a damned thing to offer you now.”

  Ronnie hadn’t gone home. He hadn’t wanted to face Brandi and tell her he’d lost out on that job, and he didn’t for the life of him know what he’d say to her about Biggs sticking his nose into things and where that might be heading. He’d driven around until he’d found the Kozy Kiln, and he thought he’d just hunker down there for a while. It wasn’t until it was too late that he realized he’d forgotten all about picking up Sarah and Emma from school, and the fact of his neglect sent him into such a funk that he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to face anyone ever again.

  The phone was ringing behind the bar. Ronnie saw the waitress pick it up, and as she talked—he couldn’t hear what she was saying—he noticed that she kept looking over to where he was sitting. She nodded her head. Soon she put the handset down on the bar and made her away across the room to his table.

  “Darlin’, are you Ronnie Black?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  She nodded over her shoulder to the phone lying on the bar. “You got people looking for you.”

  Missy pulled her van into Brandi’s driveway and tooted the horn. She waited a few seconds and then saw little Emma at the front window, peeking out between the drapes. Missy waved, which seemed to startle her, because in a flash Emma was gone. Missy honked the horn again, and after a while Angel came out the front door and down the steps. Missy reached over and opened the passenger door for her.

  “What’s keeping your sisters?” she said.

  “They’re not coming.” Angel got in and slammed the door. “Brandi’s out looking for Dad.”

  “Who’s looking after you all?”

  “Hannah’s in there with Sarah and Emma.”

  Missy looked out at the soft glow of light in the front room window. “So it’s just you and me for 4-H tonight?”

  Angel shook her head. “We’re not supposed to. Brandi doesn’t like it that you gave me that iPod.”

  “What did she say?

  “She wanted to know if Dad knew about it. Then later she said I wasn’t to go to 4-H.”

  Missy was disappointed, but more than that she was worried about the girls being alone. “Where’s your dad?”

  “No one knows. He didn’t come home.” Angel’s coat was unzipped and she flicked at the zipper tab with her finger. Finally, she stopped fidgeting, and for the first time since she’d gotten into the van she looked fully at Missy and she said in a soft voice, “I think I know why. He’s done something wrong.”

  Missy braced herself. Here it is, she thought. The hard thing. “Honey, you’re going to hear some things about your father. Some horrible things.”

  Angel didn’t hesitate. “I already know he was at the trailer that night.”

  Missy was doing her best not to poison Ronnie for Angel. “No one’s guilty until it’s proven,” she said.

  Angel was quiet for some time. She turned away from Missy and kept looking out the passenger-side window of the van. The heater fan blew out hot air. The digital clock pulsed to another minute.

  Then Angel said, “I can prove it. I know what happened. I found his knife in the snow behind the trailer.”

  “His knife?” Missy reached over and took Angel’s hand. “Honey, he could have dropped it there anytime.”

  Angel shook her head. “He was there that night. Mr. Rowe saw him.”

  “He told you that?” Missy’s mind was racing. If that knife was proof of what Shooter claimed, that he’d seen Ronnie come out from behind the trailer that night, what else might there be waiting to be proven? She squeezed Angel’s hand. “Honey, I’m right here. Don’t be afraid.”

  “But what if he tries to hurt me? What if he tries to hurt all of us?”

  Missy leaned over and gathered Angel up into her arms. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.” She rocked her back and forth. She said, “Shh, shh, honey. Nothing bad can happen. You’re with me now.”

  She took Angel into the house and made sure the girls were all right. Emma was trying to spread jelly on a piece of toast. Sarah was standing on her head, her feet up against the living room wall. Hannah was in her room doing homework.

  Missy called Laverne Ott, the assistant 4-H leader, and asked her to go ahead and start the meeting without her. She had something to attend to.

  The girls hadn’t eaten, so she found some ground beef in the fridge and a can of peas in the cupboard. She looked in the freezer and pulled out a bag of French fries.

  “Burgers and fries?” she asked, and that was enough to get Sarah to stop standing on her head and Emma to jump up and down and Hannah to come out of her room. “And peas,” Missy said.

  “No peas,” said Sarah. “Peas make me gag.”

  “If you want fries, you’ve got to eat your peas.” Missy tapped her finger on Sarah’s nose. “Just pretend they’re candy, and you’ll do fine.”

  After supper was done, and Missy was drying the last of the dishes, she heard the front door open, and there was Brandi. The girls were in their rooms doing their homework.

  Missy came right to the point. “Do you know what he’s done? Ronnie? How can you be with him?” She’d never said the word before, but she said it now. “A murderer. How can you think he’d be a good father to these girls?”

  “None of this is your business,” Brandi said.

  But Missy wouldn’t stop. She told Brandi about Shooter’s claim that Ronnie had started the fire. She said Angel had told her about finding his knife in the snow.

  Brandi couldn’t bear to hear it. She couldn’t stand to think that he was capable of what people were saying he’d done.

  “I don’t want to hear that.” Her voice was trembling. She saw Missy’s coat draped over the arm of the couch. She picked it up and threw it at her. “You’ve got it in for Ronnie and me. That’s plain. Get out of my house. I don’t want you here.”

  Missy was calm. She put her on coat and took the time to button it. At the front door, she turned back to Brandi. “I’m going to Sheriff Biggs with this,” she said. “You tell Ronnie he better get a lawyer.”

  When she left Brandi’s house, Missy drove to Lois and Wayne’s, and there in the dimly lit living room she told Lois that, as much as it broke her heart to say it, facts were pointing to the possibility that all the rumors were true: Ronnie had started that fire.

  “I don’t think the girls should be in that house with him,” she said. “Who knows what else he might do.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Lois. “My grandbabies. It’s just about all I can do to look after Wayne now.”

  Wa
yne was in bed, sick again with the spins, but he could hear Missy and Lois talking in the living room. He said, “I don’t want to lose them to foster care. Missy, come back here.”

  The bedroom was dark except for the dim glow of a nightlight plugged into the wall. Lois took Missy’s hand and led her to the side of the bed, where Wayne lay flat on his back, his eyes closed.

  Then he opened them to look at her. “Della always thought you’d done well for yourself. Truth is, she envied you more than a little, though I shouldn’t tell you that about her. I know she asked God to forgive her for that, and surely He did.” Wayne closed his eyes, and Missy imagined he was trying to make the room stop spinning. He didn’t open them again. He said, “I’m old, Missy. I’m old and sick. Too old to be raising up those girls, as much as I love them. Della al ways said you had the nicest home, and she always thought the world of Pat. She always said it was a shame you having no kids of your own, because she could see how much love you had in you. That’s why she wanted you and Pat to be godparents to her kids. I know she wouldn’t want her girls with Ronnie and Brandi. I think you know what I’m trying to say. I think Della would want it. That is, if you’re willing. I expect I speak for Lois, too.”

  “She told me to go on,” Missy said to Pat, when she was finally home and relating the story. “Lois. She told me we had their blessing.”

  All of this happened after Ronnie picked up the phone from the bar at the Kozy Kiln and was surprised to find Brandi on the other end of the line.

  “How’d you know I was here?” he asked her.

  “I remembered you and I were there once. I figured you might have gone to Brick Chapel to see about that job, and then I just started adding things up.”

  Her voice was tight and flat, not the baby-sweet-baby voice he was used to hearing from her.

  “That job’s gone,” he said. “You heard about the fire marshal’s report?”

  “I heard.” That same flat voice, like he was a stranger to her. “That was no call for you to forget about Emma and Sarah this afternoon. No excuse for you to be there in that bar, making me hunt you down.”

  He was ashamed of that fact. He’d been so caught up in his own misery and trouble he’d forgotten how to be a father.

  “Baby, I’m sorry.”

  A long silence stretched out between them, as if she were on the other side of the world instead of only thirty miles away.

  Then finally she said, “Ronnie, you better come home,” and it was clear to him from the way she said it that she wasn’t really sure she wanted him to.

  “I’ll be there,” he said. “I love you, Brandi.”

  He waited for her to say she loved him too, but there was no response, and finally he figured out that she’d already hung up the phone.

  21

  Before Brandi made that call, she talked to Angel. They sat together on the side of Brandi’s bed, and Angel wished more than anything that she could be with Missy. She kept her head bowed and listened to Brandi talk to her in low tones so Hannah and Sarah and Emma wouldn’t hear from the living room.

  “You know this is very serious.” Brandi hadn’t even taken off her coat, a black pea coat with a double row of big buttons. “Angel, do you hear me? Are you telling the truth about finding your father’s knife behind the trailer?”

  Angel kept thinking about that knife, his pocketknife, and she’d given him a chance to say it didn’t mean anything, and he wouldn’t say that, couldn’t say it, because the truth was he’d been behind their trailer the night it burned. Somehow he’d dropped that knife in the snow, and though he wasn’t willing to tell her what he’d been up to, he’d left enough room for her to believe that the rumors were true. He’d come to do her and her mother and her brother and her sisters harm.

  “I showed him the knife.” Angel looked up at Brandi and tried to keep her voice level. “He didn’t deny anything. He was there that night.”

  “That doesn’t mean he did anything.”

  “Then why was he there? Mr. Rowe saw him. He was there right before the trailer caught on fire.”

  Later, Brandi would wonder who she’d been trying to protect—the girls? Ronnie? Herself? She’d scold herself for not being more sympathetic. She’d try to think back to that moment when she understood what was about to happen, and she’d try to determine whether even the smallest part of her could imagine that Ronnie had started that fire. What she knew for sure, even as she spoke to Angel, was that this family that she and Ronnie were trying to keep together would never be the same. Maybe, she’d think, it had been her and the dream she’d always had of having a man to love her and a family to take care of that she’d been trying to save above anything or anyone else.

  “This will change us,” she said to Angel. “No matter what turns out to be the truth.”

  When Angel didn’t answer, when she just hung her head and kicked her heels against the bed frame, Brandi left her there. She walked out of the bedroom and went to the computer to look up the phone number of the bar in Brick Chapel, where she thought Ronnie might be. She’d driven around Goldengate and Phillipsport before it had hit her—Brick Chapel—and she’d hurried home to make this call, but Missy was there and she said she needed to tell her something.

  Now Brandi had no idea how long it would be before everything got sorted out, and she didn’t know what would happen to her and Ronnie and the girls because of it. She laid her hand on her stomach as she settled down into the chair at the library table, and for the first time she felt her baby kick. Once, twice. Enough to thrill her for just an instant. Her first thought was, I can’t wait to tell Ronnie. Then she remembered what else she would have to tell him, and the wave of sorrow that swept over her was greater than any she’d ever felt. Already, just because Angel had said what she had, he seemed different to her. Even though it might not be true—it couldn’t, could it?—just the thought and the fact that they’d have to talk about it was enough to make everything seem strange. Brandi knew that the story would continue to spread. People were already talking, and that notion would always be there even if it got proved a lie.

  And if it turned out to be true? She couldn’t bring herself to think about that. She found the number of the Kozy Kiln and she picked up the phone.

  Ronnie drove out of Brick Chapel, not knowing what was waiting for him at home. He was worried. He’d told Brandi he was sorry for not picking up Sarah and Emma from school, and she’d said that fumble had better be the least of his sins. He wondered what she knew.

  He picked up Route 50 to Goldengate, and though he’d had a few beers—how many exactly, he couldn’t have said—he pushed the Firebird up to seventy-five and hurried on through the dark.

  Soon he crossed the river, and there on the flat bottom land, the lights of Phillipsport twinkled in the distance ahead of him.

  Just outside the city limits, where the highway curved past the Wabash Sand and Gravel yard before straightening out for the last clear shot into town, he let his foot off the gas and brought the Firebird back to the speed limit. He eased into the curve, and when he came out of it and glanced up to his rearview mirror, he was surprised to see red lights flashing behind him. As much as he wanted to keep going—to be home with Brandi—he knew he had no choice but to pull off the road into the parking lot of WPLP to see why someone wanted to talk to him.

  It was Biggs. He got out of his sheriff’s car and made his way to the Firebird. Ronnie didn’t give him the chance to get in the first word.

  “Was I speeding?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Why’d you stop me, then?”

  “Taillight’s out.” Biggs had his hands on the door frame, leaning in through the open window. “Where you been, Ronnie?”

  “Brick Chapel. Seeing after that job you cost me.”

  “Now how did I do that?”

  “All that nonsense this afternoon.”

  Biggs leaned in closer. “Get that taillight seen to,” he said, and Ronnie tol
d him he would.

  He pulled the Firebird back onto the highway and followed it, just under the speed limit, on into Phillipsport and then the eight miles to Goldengate where Brandi’s house was full of light. To Ronnie, at the end of this winter day when so much had gone wrong, it was tempting to believe that something festive was waiting for him inside those brightly lit rooms.

  The first thing he noticed when he came through the front door was that Brandi had on her coat, and that gave him a strange feeling. To see her standing there with her coat on as if any second she might walk out the door, which, stunned as he was, he didn’t bother to close. He’d taken the old storm door down a while back, meaning to replace it with a new one, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet, so there was nothing to block the cold air rushing into the house.

  “Brandi?” he said.

  She had her arms crossed, resting on her stomach. The girls were nowhere to be seen, and to Ronnie’s dismay there was no sign of them living in that house. No toys or dolls scattered on the floor as usual. None of their snow boots or gloves or coats tossed willy-nilly. Someone had picked up everything and put it away. The house was quiet. No television. No video games. No music. No squealing laughter. Just Ronnie and Brandi facing each other across the tidy living room. Just the two of them, the way it’d been before the fire.

  Then, with a suddenness that startled him, she said, “Did you burn up that trailer? Is that why you went out driving that night?”

  Ronnie felt all the air leave him. Here he was in that place he’d never wanted to be, that place where he had to start answering questions, and he knew it was because Angel had found his pocketknife and had apparently started to tell the story.

  “Oh,” he said. That was all. Like he’d been punched in the stomach and couldn’t get his breath. “Oh,” he said again. “I wish Angel hadn’t told you about that.”