Late One Night

by Lee Martin

  Ronnie heard what wasn’t being said: that she didn’t trust him to do right with that money, and for an instant he was tempted to tear that check up and throw the pieces into her face. But when would he ever have his hands on three hundred dollars again? It was true that he could put it to good use for groceries and the like.

  He opened the door wider. “You want to come in?”

  Missy shook her head. “I’ve done what I came for.”

  “All right then.” He folded that check up in his hand. “Angel’s been crying for a new iPod, but I won’t throw this away on that. It’s hard enough to keep them all fed and in decent clothes. I’d say thank you, but something tells me it’s not thanks you want. I figure you aim to hold me accountable until the day I die.”

  Then he stepped back into the house and closed the door.

  _________

  At first, he was unaware of the talk swirling around the county—the talk of him being at the trailer the night it burned. He thought that was his secret. Even Brandi was in the dark, and, as for the girls, they were busy being kids, busy trying to get on with their lives.

  Then Brandi came home from work one evening and told them she’d been hearing gossip.

  “About me?” he asked. “About the fire?”

  Brandi studied him awhile. “Then you’ve heard it too,” she finally said. “It’s just talk. That’s what it is. Just crazy talk from stupid people.”

  “Still, I don’t want the girls to hear it.”

  “We can only hope.”

  One day at school—this was at the end of January—Tommy Stout, who’d been on Lucy Tutor’s bus the afternoon of the fire when Ronnie went tearing by in his Firebird, said to Angel in the hallway at lunchtime, “Jeez, did your dad try to kill you all?”

  At first, Angel couldn’t decide whether she’d heard him right. There was all the noise of the crowded hallway—lockers slamming, people talking, someone shouting, “Oh, baby!”—and she thought she must have misheard. Then it slowly came to her that Tommy had said exactly what she’d first thought, and she said to him, “Where’d you hear that?”

  “My dad. He was talking about it at supper last night. It’s all over the county. Folks say your dad was out behind your trailer right before it caught on fire. Shooter Rowe saw him.”

  She’d never cared for Mr. Rowe. He was too grumpy, and he’d taken her to task more than once on account of those goats, but he’d been there the night of the fire. He’d been there when they’d needed him.

  “If my dad was out there, how come I didn’t see him?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want you to see him. Maybe that’s why.”

  “That’s just stupid, Tommy.” Angel swatted him on the arm with a notebook. “That’s almost as stupid as you.”

  She thought about it all afternoon, the chance that her dad might have been so mad at her mom that he’d gone off the deep end and lit the trailer on fire. He had a temper. No doubt about that. Look what he’d done to her mom’s hair. How could Angel ever forgive him for that? And there were times, even though they were few, when one of them misbehaved and he lost his temper. Angel tried to forget those times when he let his anger get the best of him. In those days leading up to him finally walking out, he’d filled the trailer with his loud voice and his sharp words, but when Angel thought of him now and the way he was back through the years, she preferred to remember him as gentle and kind, which he was sometimes. He had a game he played with her before she got too old for it. Each evening, before her mother tucked her into bed, her father held his closed hands in front of him and told her to tap one. To her surprise, each time she did, he opened that hand and there on his palm was something just for her: an Indian bead fossil found in the gravel, a bird’s feather, a locust’s shell. Always something from an animal or a plant, something that had once been alive. She saved everything in a Buster Brown shoebox. Her treasures. Each time she tapped her father’s hand and he opened it to reveal what he’d been hiding, he opened his eyes wide in surprise and he said in a hushed voice, “You’ve done it again, Miss Angel of my heart. Amazing. You’ve won the prize.”

  It took her a while to figure out that he had something in both hands. It didn’t matter which one she tapped. She’d always be the winner. When she knew that, she felt a little squiggle inside, and she knew that squiggle was love. Her father loved her enough to make sure she was never disappointed.

  All through her afternoon classes, she thought about how close they’d once been. As she got older, he took her with him when he went into the woods each spring to look for morel mushrooms or in the summer to pick wild blackberries. He taught her how to swim in the pond at Grandpa Wayne’s. He gave her piggyback rides, taught her the names of the shapes the stars made in the night sky, pointed out the calls that bobwhites made and whippoorwills and mourning doves. In the winter, he pulled her on her sled and helped her make snowmen. Together, they’d lie on their backs in the snow and move their arms and legs to make angels. “There you are,” he’d say, pointing at the shape she’d left in the snow. “My angel.”

  She wanted all of that back, but she didn’t know how to say as much. She’d lost it, the closeness they’d once shared, when something went wrong between him and her mother, and suddenly nothing was right in their family. Angel couldn’t say what had gone wrong. She only knew that her father, who had always been so tender with her, suddenly had no patience. He snapped at Emma and Emily for being chatterboxes, told Sarah to shut up when she whined that all her friends had this and that and she didn’t, yelled at Gracie to pick up the toys she often left wherever they fell. He even had a sharp word for Hannah from time to time—kind, good Hannah, who did nothing to deserve his anger. The brunt of his disapproval, though, fell upon Angel, who didn’t make Hannah’s good grades in school, and dressed, he told her once, in jeans that were too tight and tops that were too revealing. “I know what’s on boys’ minds,” he said. “Especially if you go around looking like that.”

  It embarrassed her and made her mad to hear her father talk to her like that, her father who’d always spoken to her as if she hung the moon, as if she could never do anything to disappoint him. One night, when she came back from a football game, he said her skirt was too short, that she looked like a whore, and that hurt her more than anything, to hear him say that, as if she weren’t his daughter at all but just some girl he’d seen on the street. She didn’t know if she’d ever be able to forgive him for that, and when he finally walked out, she thought, good riddance.

  _________

  The bus went from the high school in Phillipsport to Goldengate, where they let the students off at the junior high. Then the country kids got on other buses to take them home. Hannah and Angel had been those kids just a few weeks back, but now Hannah waited in front of the junior high for Angel to get off the bus, and then they walked to Brandi’s house, where they were trying to be a family. In the old days, the days Hannah had come to think of as “Before the Fire,” she’d waited for the high school bus from Phillipsport, and then they’d climbed onto Lucy Tutor’s bus and made their way out the blacktop.

  On this particular day, though, the high school bus came and let everyone off, and Hannah saw Angel walking toward the bus parked near the front of the line, the bus she and Angel used to ride. Lucy Tutor opened the pneumatic doors, and they hissed and squealed.

  By this time, nearly four o’clock, the moon was already rising—Hannah could see it low in the sky just above the treetops along Locust Street—and the temperature was dropping. She could feel the cold’s bite on her face and through the fingers of her woolen gloves. She stamped her feet, and her toes tingled inside her boots.

  She called Angel’s name, and Angel stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned back to see who had called out and why. Two boys wearing Phillipsport letterman jackets split apart to move past her. Hannah knew the boys were football players. She could see the gold helmets they’d won for good plays pinned to the red wool of the
jackets. Beefy, bareheaded boys laughing about something before they got onto the bus.

  “Go home,” Angel told Hannah.

  “Where are you going?” Hannah ran down the sidewalk to where she was standing. “We’re supposed to go right home. You know Dad wants us to watch Sarah and Emma.” He’d said as much that morning. He’d pick up Sarah and Emma at their school and drop them off at Brandi’s for Hannah and Angel to take care of until Brandi got home from work. He had to drive over the river to Brick Chapel to see a man about a job. “We have to go,” Hannah said, and she took Angel by the sleeve of her coat. “We have to go right now.”

  “You can babysit.” Angel jerked her arm free from Hannah’s grasp. “You’re the one Dad really trusts anyway. Not me.”

  In the days since the fire, Hannah had delighted in the fact that she and Angel were growing closer. They’d put away their argument about who’d been supposed to feed the goats the night the trailer burned and who’d neglected that chore and who’d failed to carry out the ashes from the Franklin stove. That had just been sniping between two sisters who didn’t know what else to do in the aftershock of their disaster. It didn’t take long for them to find comfort in each other’s company. Nights, Angel often whispered to Hannah, who was in the bed across from her in the room they shared, and said, “You okay?” Sometimes Hannah nodded her head and said, yes, she was, and sometimes she said she didn’t think she’d be able to go to sleep because every time she closed her eyes, she saw the flames and smoke of that night. Angel got into bed with her then. She crawled in under the covers, and she let Hannah lie close to her and they held hands and finally drifted off to sleep.

  Now Angel was turning her away.

  “I’ll go with you,” Hannah said even though she knew she had to go to Brandi’s. “Are you going to Missy’s?”

  “I’m just going,” Angel said. “Never you mind where.”

  The sidewalk was almost empty now. Some of the buses had already pulled out. The last of the stragglers were getting onto Lucy Tutor’s bus.

  And with that, Angel was gone. Hannah took a few steps after her, but she knew it was all for show. She knew she’d go to Brandi’s like she was supposed to and she’d take care of Sarah and Emma. The only thing she didn’t know was what she’d tell her dad when he’d ask her, as she knew he would, Where is she? Where’s your sister?

  The only seat left on the bus was the one behind Lucy Tutor—the loser seat, the one for dweebs and ’tards. Angel didn’t care. She let her book bag slide off her shoulder as she dropped down onto the seat.

  “That you, Angel?” Lucy wore a pair of glasses she kept on a chain around her neck. She lifted the glasses to her face. She tipped back her head and crinkled up her nose. “Honey, you know you don’t ride this bus anymore.”

  “Are you saying I can’t?”

  “You live in town now.”

  “I know where I live.” Angel let her voice get all sweetie-sweet. She leaned forward and whispered to Lucy, “I’ve been invited.”

  “Invited,” said Lucy. “Invited to what?”

  “It’s very important that I be there.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it is.” Lucy let the glasses drop onto her chest. “Is it Missy Wade? Is that who you’re going to see?”

  Angel smiled, and there was something in that smile that was enough for Lucy. She said, “Missy sure does love on you girls.”

  Then she put the bus into gear and slowly pulled away from the curb.

  What was left of the trailer after the fire was still there. The furnace and the hot water heater rose up from the ruin. Angel turned her head as the bus went by. She saw the head of a wire coat hanger poking up along the trailer’s underskirting, a litter of baking pans rusting in the weather, scraps of this and that turned black with char. She remembered in flashes of light and sound the bits and pieces of that night once she understood that the trailer was on fire. Her mother shook her awake. She could smell smoke, could hear the crackle of flames. Her mother said that word, Fire. She told her to help get the others out. She was coughing, and she made sure Hannah was awake. Then she turned and went on down the hall. Something exploded, and Angel heard a whoosh of fire the way she did each time the furnace kicked on. That’s when she got more scared than she’d ever been in her life. She grabbed Hannah’s hand. “C’mon,” she said. “Run!”

  That was the moment that Angel thought about some nights now as she lay in bed with Hannah. Angel wanted to tell her what her mother had told her to do—save the others—but Angel couldn’t bear the thought of confessing that. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she’d been too scared to try to save the others. She couldn’t say that. Hannah, she was sure, would have been braver.

  Just maybe, Angel wished it true—what Tommy claimed Shooter Rowe said. If her father had something to do with the fire, she’d have reason enough to put aside how much she hated herself for running out of the trailer that night and leaving her sisters and brother and mother behind, how much she regretted not taking the ash box to the compost as she was told to do. If her father was guilty, then how could she be too?

  She realized how quiet the bus had become. The kids who’d been chattering had fallen silent. They were all looking back at the trailer’s heap of ruin. Angel thought of all the people who’d given her hugs once she returned to school after the funeral. Kids and teachers crying with her, telling her to know that they were there to help her through, encouraging her to be strong. They’d given her cards—some of them were about their prayers being with her; others featured doves, roses, oceans, sunsets. Someone stretched a banner above the stairwell leading to the second-floor classrooms: We ♥ You, Angel! Every time she went up the stairs, she saw it. For a while, people left things at her locker—teddy bears, flowers, and, of course, angel figurines—but after a while that stopped, and she was secretly glad because deep down she didn’t believe she deserved any of this kindness.

  She was embarrassed that the burnt debris was still there for all the kids on the bus to look at. It was a sign of everything that had gone wrong for her family.

  The bus was slowing in front of Missy’s house, and for a few seconds Angel didn’t understand that Lucy was stopping on account of her.

  “Here you are, honey,” Lucy said. The doors of the bus opened with a hiss. “You have a good visit.”

  Tommy’s voice rang out from the back of the bus. “Why we stopping here, Lucy? Missy doesn’t have any kids.”

  Angel gathered up her book bag and hurried down the steps of the bus before Tommy could spot her. She stood off the side of the blacktop and watched the bus go on. She stood there until she could no longer see it. Then she turned back to the south, back toward where she and her sisters and brother and mother and father had once had a home.

  Captain was at the mailbox in front of his house when the bus went by. He didn’t ride that same bus home from school. He got out of school a little earlier in the afternoon and rode a different bus—the short bus, all the kids called it—the one meant for people like him.

  Angel called out to him. “Captain.” She waved her arm back and forth over her head. “Captain, wait.”

  He saw her, then. Angel. She was back. Angel, so blond and so fair. Angel, who’d always been good to him. Angel with the silky hair. If he got close enough, he could smell her shampoo and it smelled nice the way Christmas trees smelled nice. Angel, the girl he dreamed about sometimes. Just last night, in a dream, she took his hand and they walked together down a grassy lane into the shade of a deep woods. It was summer, but the trees blotted out the sun. Overhead, squirrels chattered and leaped from limb to limb. Ahead, a red-winged blackbird took flight. He saw it all in his dream, and when it was done and he was awake, he thought for a moment that it was true. It was summer and Angel still lived across the road, and they walked down that lane into the woods. Then little by little he realized that it was winter—he could hear the wind outside, could feel the chill of the house—and the trailer across the
road had burned, and Angel lived in town now with Ronnie, and the dream he’d just had was nothing he could hold onto.

  “I’m here.” He waved his own arm above his head and answered Angel. “I’m right here.”

  Then he ran down the blacktop toward her, and he couldn’t help himself. He threw his arms around her, knocking her book bag off her shoulder and into the snow.

  Over the past few weeks, Angel had gotten used to people hugging her. It seemed like wherever she went—to church, 4-H, school, Read’s IGA—there was always someone who wanted to wrap her up in their arms and rock her from side to side. Honey, oh honey. So when Captain pressed her to him, she didn’t find it odd at all, nor unwelcome. He lifted her from the ground, and she clung to him, this tall, strong boy who had yet to realize how easily he could hurt someone. She knew his gentle spirit wouldn’t allow it, not even a thought of lashing out at someone like Tommy Stout, who sometimes teased him. Not really in a mean way. All in good fun, Tommy and the others like him would insist. Little jokes about the Captain. Snapping off salutes in front of him. Calling out, aye, aye. And maybe there was nothing wrong with that—after all, Captain enjoyed playing the role, saluting in response. She used to wonder whether, deep down, Captain knew it was all a joke at his expense and a way of pointing out that he was different from the “normal” boys.

  Angel pressed her face into Captain’s chest. She breathed in the smells from his wool coat—wood smoke and dried weeds, gasoline and hot cooking grease, snow and gravel—and to her it was the smell of home.

  “You’re back,” he said.

  Then before she could ask where his father was, Captain set her on the ground, grabbed her hand, and started running back up the blacktop. “C’mon, c’mon,” he said, and she had no choice but to go with him.

  He ran across the road, and finally they were turning up the short lane to the trailer’s ruins.

  She saw a purple knit glove on the ground, one with a silver star on its back. That glove had belonged to Gracie. Just a little glove for her little hand. It was enough to sting Angel’s eyes. Gracie, who’d always been crazy about stars. And Emily, who for months when she was four insisted that she was a fairy princess. And Junior, who’d been Angel’s to hold so many times when her mother was cooking or washing or cleaning. Junior with his silly grin and his bobbing head that made him look a little drunk. Angel could still remember the weight of him in her arms.