by Lee Martin
“I guess Wayne and Lois made all the arrangements,” Ronnie said.
Dean was a short man who was all-over bald. He’d just finished arranging the casket spray of yellow lilies, white carnations, and red roses. He stepped back a moment and took in the casket and the standing floral sprays on their tripods and the baskets and vases sitting on the floor. The air was sweet with rose attar, the perfume of lilies, the spicy scent of snapdragons, and the aroma of gladioli.
“That’s right.” Dean took off his metal-rimmed glasses, and Ronnie noticed the creases the stems had pressed into skin above his ears. “And Missy Wade. She made sure the casket was taken care of.”
“Out of her pocket?”
“I really can’t say.”
Ronnie knew there was a fund at the First National to help with the girls. He’d read about it in the Weekly Press, but no one had said anything to him about it. No one had told him how to access the money because, so he assumed, no one thought he was capable of managing it. No one trusted him to make the right decisions. He’d lost three of his babies, and up to this point no one had given him a chance to do anything a father would have done.
“One casket,” he said to Dean.
Dean put his glasses back on. “No need for others,” he said in his gentle funeral director’s voice. He patted Ronnie on the shoulder as he turned to give him a moment alone at the casket. “You take your time.”
Ronnie stood there trying to recall what it was like when Della meant the world to him. He couldn’t say that he’d stopped loving her, only that he’d reached a point where it was easier to be away from her than it was to be with her, disappointing her too much of the time. Then there’d been Brandi, and one thing had led to another until he was in too deep and there was no getting back to the man he’d been and the life he’d had. A life that was achingly real to him now and yet beyond his reach.
He recalled the smallest things. The way he taught Emily to swallow air and make herself burp; the months when Gracie had an imaginary dog she called Pitty-Pat Popsicle Pooch; the way they’d all sing “Walking on Sunshine”—even Della—and Junior would bob his head and pound his sippy cup on his highchair tray like a drummer caught in the rapture.
Just things like that. Just the stuff of being a family.
Finally, he slipped out through a rear door that opened onto the alley. It was dark, and snow had started to fall. A few feet up the alley two men leaned against the wall of the school, one of them smoking a cigarette, the cherry bright when he puffed. Ronnie noted something familiar in the set of his narrow shoulders and the way he stood with his chin thrust out in front of him. He knew it was Milt Timlin, the fire chief from Goldengate.
“Something odd about that fire,” Milt said. “I was out there all night and most of the next morning. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but something doesn’t set right with me.”
And the other one said, “It went up in a hurry. I can tell you that. Missy said, ‘Della’s trailer’s on fire,’ and by the time I got there—”
Ronnie knew then that the other man was Pat Wade.
“And Shooter Rowe was already there?”
“Him and his boy.”
“No one else?”
“Just them.”
For a while neither man said anything, and Ronnie could hear the sound of traffic on the street that ran along the school. He could hear car doors slamming shut and the hushed tones of people talking as they made their way inside.
Then Pat said, “You don’t think someone set it?”
“I guess the State Fire Marshal will determine that,” Milt said, “but I can tell you that blaze sure burned hot in a certain place.”
That’s when Ronnie coughed so the men would spy him there and stop their talking. “Pat, is that you?” he called down the alley.
“It’s me,” Pat said. “Sure is snowing, isn’t it?”
Ronnie took a few steps and then stopped when he realized the snow was coming up over his loafers and the cuffs of his dress pants.
“You think I set that fire?” he asked.
Milt said something to Pat in a low voice, and then Ronnie thought he heard Pat say his name.
Then Pat’s voice came louder. “Ah, Ronnie, we were just talking. We didn’t say anything like that. Why in the world would anyone think you’d—”
Ronnie stopped him before he could say more. “I used to think you were head and shoulders above the rest of us, Pat.” His voice was louder and it echoed down the alley in the snowy night. He said, “I really did. I used to think you were a good man.”
He turned to go back into the gymnasium. He could barely catch his breath. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to know he’d been at the trailer that night. That was his secret, and his alone, and would be as long as he could keep it.
At the end of the alley he turned back to Pat. “I won’t let you keep my girls.” He was shouting now, and he didn’t care who heard him. “You can count on that. Understand? You better tell Missy. You tell her exactly what I said.”
16
Since her last miscarriage back in September, Missy and Pat hadn’t talked much at all, just the words necessary between two people who shared a house. But one evening toward the end of October, he came home and she was gone. He waited and waited, and the more time he spent in the quiet house, the more he began to relax, relieved of the tension he usually felt from occupying the same space with someone to whom he couldn’t say the things that mattered most to him. He’d tried to talk to Missy about getting pregnant again, but she’d made it clear that she didn’t want to have that conversation. So they moved through their days, speaking of things like utility bills and the weather and, of course, Ronnie and the fact that he’d left Della, a story that Missy took a special interest in, all too glad to let the anger she felt over the circumstances of her own life find a target with Ronnie Black. She finally came home that night in October, and even now Pat could recall the sinking feeling inside him when she started to speak and he felt a part of their life together coming to an end.
“I’ve been driving,” she said. “Thinking. Just driving around.” Her voice was even and calm, no hint of exaggeration or dramatics, and he knew that what she was about to tell him would be something he’d never be able to change. “I’m done,” she said. “That was the last time.”
“Missy?”
“I’m done with babies,” she said, and that was that.
Until the fire. “We could make a good home for the girls,” she said to Pat as they were trying to fall asleep after the visitation. “Couldn’t we? Oh, I’m sure we could, but whenever I think about it I get scared to death. Me? A mother? Maybe I’m being silly thinking about having the girls for good.”
“Custody?” Pat said. “Is that what’s on your mind?”
“I don’t know. Pat, do you think—”
Her voice trailed off, and he put his arm around her in the dark. “You’d be a fine mother,” he said, not having the heart to tell her that Ronnie had said he’d fight for his girls.
Pat woke the next morning and found himself alone in bed, the sunlight on his face. He smelled bacon frying in the kitchen. He’d had a miserable sleep, disturbed as he was by what Ronnie had said to him in the alley. One thought kept coming back: Why did Ronnie, eavesdropping from the alley, ask him if he thought he had something to do with that trailer going up? Why would a man ask that—jump to that conclusion—if he didn’t have something to hide?
Missy had the girls up and helping her get breakfast on the table. They were still in their pajamas and nightshirts. They padded around the kitchen in their socks, barely making a sound. Pat stood in the doorway, watching them as they moved about the kitchen on this, the morning of the funeral. He listened to the whisk of their feet over the tile floor, watched as they turned their willowy bodies to keep from bumping one another as they moved about the kitchen. Angel used a fork to spear bacon strips from the frying pan. She dipped her wrist to shake the greas
e off the bacon and then lay each strip down on a plate covered with a paper towel. When the plate was full, she raised it high, arching her arm to avoid Hannah who was at the toaster, plucking out slices of bread with two fingers. Sarah poured juice into glasses, and when she carried them two by two to the table, she held them with care, taking tiny steps around Emma, who was dipping in and out between the chairs, arranging silverware just so beside each plate.
Missy was at the stove cooking eggs, and when she turned and saw Pat in the doorway, she smiled. “Well, girls, look who’s finally here,” she said in a teasing voice. “Mr. Sleepy Head.”
He stepped into the kitchen, and Emma, who’d finished with the silverware, wandered over and leaned into him, laying her head against his leg. He let his hand trail through her hair, smoothing out the sleep tangles with his fingers.
“You were snoring,” she said. “You were snoring like a big old bear.”
“That’s what I am,” Pat said. “A big old sleepy bear. And you know what they say about sleepy bears, don’t you?”
“No, what?”
“Don’t wake them up.”
He tickled her ribs until she laughed, and he thought, yet again—how many times over the past few days had he thought it?—that given the chance, he’d make a good father. He’d know how to protect his children.
They sat around the breakfast table, and they all joined hands and closed their eyes while Pat prayed that God would watch over them and keep them safe.
After breakfast, when Pat and Missy were in their bedroom dressing for the funeral, she came to him and helped him with his necktie. She made sure the knot was neat, and then she let her hand lay flat against his chest and she said, “You’re so good with them.”
“He’s going to take them,” Pat said in a whisper.
Through the closed bedroom door, he could hear the muffled voices of the girls who were dressed and waiting. Just the faintest sound of their voices and their footsteps as if they were already ghosts that had come to visit but only for a while.
“He’s their father,” she said in a tight voice.
“For better or worse.”
Missy had a hard look in her eyes now. Just like that she was the bitter woman and he was the wary man they’d both been since the miscarriage in October.
“That’s just like you,” she said. “You’ve never had enough fight. Never.”
“But what can we do?”
She didn’t answer. She turned and marched out of the bedroom, leaving him stunned by how quickly she could change into that woman. All he could do was say what he’d just told her. The fact was Ronnie was those girls’ father, and he had his rights to them. Not a thing anyone could do about that. Not a single thing.
“Nothing,” Pat whispered. “Nothing at all.”
And there wasn’t. He knew it all through the funeral service as he and Missy sat next to each other, holding hands. They sat in the second row of mourners. The first row was reserved for the girls and for Wayne and Lois.
Across the center aisle in the front row sat Ronnie with Brandi beside him. He wore a dark gray suit, obviously new. The collar of his white shirt was too loose around his slender neck. He wasn’t a man accustomed to wearing a suit and a necktie, but he didn’t fidget or squirm. He sat still with his chin lifted and his narrow shoulders pushed back, and he stared straight ahead, knowing, Pat was sure, that so many eyes in the school gymnasium were on him and Brandi. She had on a black dress that under any other circumstances would have been considered modest, but because she was that woman, more than one person was quick to call the uneven cut of the hem too showy and the scoop neckline too revealing.
Pat understood that Wayne and Lois and the girls would always be set apart in Goldengate. What remained to be seen was how the story of Ronnie and Brandi would finally settle against this other story of four girls trying to make their way through the rest of their lives, of Ronnie and the girls trying to remember what it was to be a family because that was what Pat was certain would happen now. Ronnie would get his girls, and Pat and Missy would once again be alone in their house. It shamed Pat that he couldn’t separate that sadness from the grief he felt over the deaths, but there it was, all mixed in together, and it stayed with him through the service and on to the Bethlehem Church Cemetery where the gravediggers had heated the frozen ground before they dug, and into the church itself where Laverne Ott and the others had carried a dinner into the basement to feed the family. Before they ate, the pastor, Harold Quick, who owned the Real McCoy Café in Goldengate, asked a blessing on everyone gathered there, and he asked God to hold Ronnie and his daughters in His loving hands, now and forever. Amen.
Missy felt herself go hard inside where she knew her Christian heart should be soft and forgiving. She just couldn’t manage it, not after she’d spent the last days caring for those girls—cooking for them, helping pick out shirts and pants and dresses from the donated clothing, helping little Emma with her bath, combing tangles from her hair, tucking her and Sarah in at night and kissing them on their foreheads. Even Hannah and Angel—even tough, brittle Angel—allowed the same, lifted their heads a bit from their pillows to meet her lips and then sank back and closed their eyes and went to sleep.
Pat had been right. Ronnie would have those girls and there’d be nothing she could do about it. She could only say yes, which she did when Ronnie came to her as the dinner was winding down and the church basement was empty except for the family and those closest to them.
“I’d like to come by and get the girls’ things,” Ronnie said. “You’ve been a help, Missy, but it’s time my daughters were with me.”
Over Ronnie’s shoulder, she saw Wayne and Lois giving each of the girls a hug. Wayne had on his coat, and so did Lois.
“What about Wayne and Lois?” Missy nodded her head in their direction, and Ronnie turned his head to look at them. “Have you worked it out with then?”
“They can’t keep me from my girls.” Ronnie turned back to Missy. “There’s no call for anyone to keep me from them.” He let that sink in. “So I’ll be by for their things. All right?”
And Missy said the only thing she could. She said, “All right, let’s put together some clothes for them.” She’d pick and choose from the donations that were there at the church. “They’ve got things at our house, too. If you give me a couple of hours, I’ll get it all ready.”
But there was one problem: Angel didn’t want to go. “I won’t,” she said in the van on the drive from the church to Pat and Missy’s. She sat in the backseat, directly behind Missy. Hannah and Sarah were back there, too. Emma was on Hannah’s lap. “He can’t make me,” Angel said. “I’m going to stay with you.”
Angel’s desire to stay took Missy by the heart and wouldn’t let her go. She looked out over the fields, covered now with snow, and the rest of winter stretched ahead of her with its short light, the dark falling early, and the long, long nights. She wanted nothing more than the chatter of those girls to fill her house, but she knew it was out of her hands. She’d done what she could, and now it was her duty to let them go, no matter how much she disapproved of Ronnie.
“He’s your father,” she said.
It seemed like a long time before Angel spoke again. “Guess you don’t want us,” she said, and Missy tried hard to keep from saying what she really wished she could say: that she wanted Angel and her sisters more than anything. She wouldn’t say it because she was trying her best to do the proper thing, to give in to law and nature. Ronnie was their father. He may have walked away from his family, but it was his place now to raise these girls. If that’s what he wanted, there was nothing anyone could do to stop him. “I thought you loved us,” Angel said.
“I do. More than you’ll ever know.”
“Then let me stay.”
“Oh, sweetie. I can’t.”
So Missy packed up a box for each of the girls: shampoos and soaps and toothbrushes and toothpastes; deodorants and perfumes and toys and
CDs; pencils and pens and notebooks and paste and crayons; pajamas and underwear and hair scrunchies and house shoes. It amazed her how much they’d claimed from the donations in so few days. She packed everything up, her steps leaden, her arms weary, her hands seeming to belong to someone else.
Much later, when the girls were gone, and she was washing the dishes from her and Pat’s supper, she tried to convince herself that it had been simple: she packed up the boxes, and Ronnie came, and the girls told her goodbye. She knew she was lying to herself. Watching them go had been the hardest thing she’d had to do, harder in some ways than the miscarriages, hard to watch the faces of those girls at the windows of Ronnie’s Firebird, waving goodbye, goodbye, all except Angel, who slumped in the front seat, staring straight ahead.
Missy was playing all of that again in her head when she heard the knock at the front door and Pat’s low voice talking to whoever it was who had come to see them.
She dried her hands on the dishtowel and went into the living room to see who it was.
Shooter Rowe and Pat stood just inside the front door. Shooter had a fierce look on his face as if he’d thought hard about something and had just then come to a decision.
“Missy,” he said when he saw her, “I hate to bother you, but there’s something I got to tell you about Ronnie Black.”
17
Missy barely slept that night, turning over and over in her head what Shooter had come to say and what Pat had finally told her. Milt Timlin thought there was something fishy about the way Della’s trailer had burned.
That wasn’t any surprise to him, Shooter said, not given what he’d seen the night of the fire.
“I saw Ronnie’s Firebird pulled off to the side of the blacktop a little ways up the road, pointed toward town.”
“You mean he was there?” Missy said.
Shooter nodded. “I saw him come from behind the trailer. He was toting something. I can’t say what it was, but he put it in that Firebird, and then he started up the blacktop, not fast like he usually does, but real slow like he didn’t want anyone to take note of him.”