Late One Night

by Lee Martin

  As Missy loaded her groceries into the back of the van and made ready to drive to the grade school, she thought back to the day that ended up being the last one of Della’s life. She’d been making plans too, not knowing she was about to run out of time.

  At the high school in Phillipsport, Angel slouched at her desk behind Tommy Stout’s in algebra class and kept kicking her foot against his chair back. The teacher, Mrs. Ferenbacher, was writing equations on the board. She was about a million years old, and she kept a handkerchief balled up in her left hand, and sometimes she had a coughing spell and she spit phlegm into her hanky. When Tommy turned in his seat, Angel rolled her eyes, letting him know how bored she was, and he laughed a little, but not enough for Mrs. F. to hear. The chalk kept on squeaking, and Mrs. F. coughed a little, and Angel stuck her finger in her mouth like she was gagging, and that sent Tommy into a laughing fit he couldn’t control. Mrs. F. turned on her heel and surveyed the class. “Tommy Stout,” she said. “Would you mind telling us what’s tickled your funny bone?”

  In Goldengate, Hannah was dressing for P.E. class. They were square dancing with the boys today, so all she had to do was put on gym shoes and then hope that she didn’t get stuck with someone like Kyle Dehner, who always put his hand too low on his partner’s back, sneaking a feel of a hip. He’d been kept back twice and was almost old enough to drive a car. His brown hair hung over his eyes in bangs, and his breath smelled like bread and sour milk. All things considered, Hannah should have thought him disgusting but she couldn’t quite manage it. He was her secret crush, though she couldn’t figure out why she felt the way she did. She was afraid to dance with him. She didn’t want to say something stupid. She didn’t want him to feel her hip and find her too skinny for his taste. She didn’t want to think of him making fun of her later with his friends.

  At the grade school, Sarah was passing notes back and forth with Amy Cessna, whose desk was across the aisle from hers. Amy had played one of the Billy Goats Gruff in the class play, and she and Sarah were reviewing the highlights of the performance and giggling behind their hands when their teacher, Mrs. Stout, leaned over to search through a drawer in her desk. “Where is my stapler?” she asked. “Has anyone seen my stapler?” For some reason, Sarah and Amy thought this was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, and they covered their mouths and snorted.

  Down the hall, in the first-grade classroom, Emma was doing a reading lesson on the computer. She was learning the sound a short “a” made by reading a story about Zac the Rat. Zac is a rat. Zac sat on a can. The ants ran to the jam. The cartoon that went with the story was funny. She had on a purple sweater with fuzzy sleeves, and she liked the way the sweater felt when she folded her arms on the desk and put her chin on one of those sleeves. The fuzz tickled. It made her l-a-u-g-h.

  Sarah and Emma weren’t thinking much at all about what it meant that they’d had to pack their things and go back to Missy’s. They understood that it had something to do with the fire and with their daddy, but they didn’t know what that something was. Since the fire they’d gotten used to going where people told them to go. So they went to Missy’s and they understood that for the time being they didn’t live with their daddy and Brandi. They lived with Missy and Pat, who were kind to them, and the girls imagined, with the trusting natures that disaster had forced onto them, that everything would eventually work out. They knew it was their job to keep their attention on what they were responsible for: a class play, a friend named Amy, fuzzy sweater sleeves, Zac the Rat.

  Hannah, though, was old enough to worry, and worry she did. She missed Brandi. She knew that her father might be in trouble. She wanted things to quiet down. She wanted all the talk to stop. The talk about her father and what he’d maybe done. She wanted to sit somewhere by herself for a very long time and not have to give any thought to what was happening and what might happen and what it all meant for her and her family. But the square dancing music was starting, and boys were choosing partners, and here came Kyle Dehner.

  Angel thought she was right where she wanted to be: back with Missy, who bought her nice things and cooked her favorite foods and loved on her with hugs and kisses. She’d let Missy be her mother. She wouldn’t argue with that at all. Given the choice between Brandi and Missy, she’d choose Missy anytime, which she had, and now everything was working out the way she’d always dreamed. Mrs. F. was waiting for an answer from Tommy Stout. Exactly what had tickled his funny bone? “You’re in trouble now, buddy,” Angel whispered to Tommy. “You should’ve kept your mouth shut.”

  The girls were quiet after school as Missy drove to Phillipsport, even Sarah and Emma who were usually such chatterboxes. Now, away from school, they somehow understood—though Missy had certainly never said as much to them—that they might not see their father for quite some time.

  Finally, Hannah said to Sarah, “Where’s your hair scrunchie? Did you lose it?”

  Missy glanced up at the rearview mirror and saw Sarah pat her head and run her fingers through her hair. She finally shrugged her shoulders. “Yeppers,” she said.

  At the high school, Missy parked along the street right behind the bus that was waiting for the final bell and the students who would tromp up its steps and flop down onto its seats. What a lucky stroke, she thought, to find this place from which she could watch for Angel and honk the horn at her before she could get onto the bus. Missy took it as a sign that everything was going to work out just fine.

  “We picking up Angel?” Emma asked, and Missy couldn’t resist the lighthearted feeling that had suddenly filled her.

  “Yeppers,” she said, and Emma and Sarah began to giggle.

  “She said, ‘Yeppers,’” Emma said. “Didn’t she?”

  “Yeppers,” said Sarah, and that started them giggling again.

  Then Angel was coming down the school steps, her book bag slung over her shoulder, the wind blowing her hair across her face.

  Missy honked the horn, and Angel saw her. The other girls were in the second row of seats, so the front was empty. Missy leaned over and opened the door, and Angel started to get in.

  Then someone called her name. Missy turned around to look for who it was, and that’s when she saw Brandi coming up the sidewalk.

  “Angel,” Brandi called. “Angel, wait.”

  Missy didn’t know why Brandi had come or what it might mean, but she saw how worn down she was. How washed out her face looked with only the slightest tint of pale pink lipstick to adorn it, how burdened and overwhelmed she was, how unlike the sassy woman who had stolen Ronnie from Della. She hadn’t taken time to fix her hair—it had tangles in it—and she was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt, an old quilted coat thrown on. It was her voice that caught Missy by surprise. So tender it was, so sad.

  “Angel,” Brandi said again, taking her by the arm, and though part of Missy resented the intimate tone—one earned from the days Brandi had tried to do the right thing by the girls after the fire—she also felt herself drawn to it, wishing that could be the way she’d speak to Angel all the rest of her days. “Sugar,” Brandi said. “Oh, sugar,” she said again. “There’s something you need to know.”

  So there were stories. After weeks of speculation and gossip, people who claimed they knew things—the real, true things—were starting to talk.

  Shooter Rowe came into the sheriff’s office and told the deputy at the desk that he had something to say, and he was sure Sheriff Biggs would be very interested to hear it.

  Captain was in shop class at the high school. He was staining a gun cabinet he’d built, but his mind was somewhere else. With each stroke of his brush he whispered the chain of words that had become a chant inside his head: gas can, pocket, match.

  Brandi was still talking to Angel by Missy’s van at the high school, talking in a whisper. “Sugar, you know the sheriff’s got your daddy.”

  “Is he going to go to prison?” Angel’s own voice was calm.

  “Oh, sugar, he might.”

/>   Missy couldn’t stop herself. “Maybe that’s just where he needs to be,” she said, and she could barely stand the look that Angel gave her, a hard, hurt look, as if suddenly she’d realized how serious everything was and how awful it was for Missy to have said what she did.

  Biggs had questions for Ronnie.

  “Ask ’em,” Ronnie said. He’d waived his right to have an attorney present. He folded his hands on top of the table. Biggs sat across from him, and the questions began.

  Why had he bought all that gas at Casey’s? Brandi’s boss, Mr. Samms, had verified that Ronnie brought five gallons to put in Brandi’s car the morning of the fire, but what about the five gallons more that he bought that night? Why did the T-shirt he was wearing then now smell like gasoline? Why had a strip of that shirt been cut away? Why were there footprints behind that trailer that matched the size and tread of his boots?

  All Ronnie said was, “Everyone in town’s been talking about me. What I might have done. Guess there’s no reason for me to say anything. Folks have already made up their minds.”

  The door opened, and a deputy, his bushy brows arched with urgency, stuck his head inside. “You need to come out here,” he said to Biggs.

  “It better be important,” Biggs said.

  “Shooter Rowe’s wanting to talk to you. Says he knows exactly what happened the night of the fire.”

  Biggs nodded his head toward Ronnie. “See what you can get out of him.”

  The deputy stepped into the room. Biggs went down the hall to see what Shooter Rowe had to say.

  Brandi rubbed her thumb over the back of Angel’s hand, making that one gentle motion to let her know that things could turn out just fine. “I know you’ve gone through a lot,” Brandi said. “More than any girl your age ought to have put upon her, but there are people who love you, Angel. I love you, and your sisters love you, and so does your father.”

  Angel wouldn’t look at Brandi. “But he left us. You took him away, and look what happened.”

  Brandi didn’t know what to say to that. It was a fact she couldn’t deny. “Sometimes people are lonely,” she finally said. “So lonely they’ll do practically anything to feel happy again. Does that make it right? No, I suppose it doesn’t. I’m just telling you the way it was. I was lonely, and your father was lonely, and there we were.”

  “Why was he lonely? He had us, my mother and all us kids. Why weren’t we enough? We all loved him.”

  “Sugar, that’s something you’re going to have to ask him.” Brandi made herself count to ten. She took a deep breath and let it out. “But you should know what he told me before the sheriff came.”

  At that moment, Brandi felt a sharp, stabbing pain in her abdomen. She held onto Angel and waited for the pain to pass. The sun had come out and the light splintering off the snow-covered ground was too much for her. She felt sick to her stomach. Everything started to spin. Then she could feel the light dimming. She was slipping away. It was like a curtain was being drawn slowly over her eyes, and she felt like she was ducking under a thick pile of quilts.

  Angel, she tried to say. Listen, sugar. But she wasn’t sure any words were coming out of her mouth.

  Then she heard Angel say, “Missy, help. What are we going to do?”

  “It was like this,” Shooter said. “Ronnie Black ran out from behind the trailer that night. He was a man in a hurry, and it’s no wonder, seeing what he’d just done.”

  Biggs had taken Shooter into his office. They were standing just inside the door behind the frosted glass with the word SHERIFF stenciled across it. Two men. One, Biggs, barrel-chested and broad-shouldered; the other, worn down by too much, his back starting to hump with the strain of it all.

  “What exactly did he do?” Biggs asked.

  Shooter couldn’t get the words out of his mouth fast enough. He’d kept them there so long. He’d thought of this moment over and over the past few weeks, and now it was here.

  “He burned down that trailer is what he did.” Shooter realized his voice was too loud. He feared he was coming across like a lunatic. He tried to get himself calmed down, and then he tried to say it all again, this time in as steady a voice as he could manage. “He slopped gasoline all over it. He struck a match and lit it up. Then he ran.”

  Biggs studied Shooter for a while. “Anyone else see him? Anyone who can corroborate your story?”

  Shooter cleared his throat. He swallowed hard. Then he nodded. “My son,” he finally said. “He saw it too.”

  Biggs didn’t waste any time. He told Shooter to wait in his office, and then he went back to the room where the deputy had been interrogating Ronnie.

  “Well?” Biggs asked.

  The deputy shook his head. “Nothing we don’t already know.”

  “I’ll tell you who is talking.” Biggs pulled up a chair next to Ronnie. He leaned in close, but Ronnie didn’t try to move away. He met Biggs’s stare. “Shooter Rowe, that’s who. He just told me a very interesting story. Claims he and his boy saw you sloshing gasoline on that trailer and then lighting it up. Looks to me like if you didn’t do that, you might want to take this chance to say so.”

  A space heater was running in the corner of the room, and for a while the only noise was the hum of its fan, that and the deputy tapping a pencil against the edge of the table.

  Finally Ronnie shifted his weight in his chair, and the deputy put the pencil down. Ronnie cleared his throat.

  “Go ahead, Biggs. You chase that story around and see where it takes you.”

  Missy called 911 and soon the ambulance arrived, and the EMTs took Brandi away on a gurney. Angel’s fingers were trembling, and she tucked her hands up into her armpits to hide them.

  She wanted to ride in the ambulance with Brandi, but Missy said, “You wouldn’t want to be in the way of the EMTs, would you?”

  “But who’ll be there for her?” Angel said. “She shouldn’t have to be alone.”

  “Honey,” said Missy. “I’m sure she’ll be all right.”

  Missy tried to pet Angel’s hair, but Angel pulled away from her.

  “You said my dad should be in prison.”

  “I shouldn’t have said that. It was wrong of me. I just get mad sometimes.”

  Angel could understand that. It was how she’d felt for a good while on both sides of the night of the fire. Before and after. Just mad, mad, mad. Hearing Missy admit that she sometimes felt the same caused something to let go inside her; that anger came unknotted. She let her hands drop to her sides, and she felt a great calm pass through her, the first time she could remember not being on edge, as if strands of barbed wire were tangled up inside her since the night of the fire. Ever since her father had walked out and taken up with Brandi she’d been mad. Just mad at everyone, even herself. Mad at her mother sometimes for not being able to keep her father there. Mad at him for leaving. Mad at Brandi for taking him away. Mad at herself for not being a better person the night of the fire.

  Now Brandi was in trouble—and what about her baby?—and Angel was tired of being mad, tired of people’s messed-up lives.

  “I want to go to the hospital,” she said. “I want to be there for Brandi. She’s been trying her best with me.”

  It was then that Missy realized she was holding Brandi’s purse. It had slipped from her arm when she’d fainted, and somewhere in the bustle of the EMTs, Missy had seen it on the ground and picked it up so it wouldn’t be in the way. She’d been clutching it to her chest.

  “Get in the van,” Missy said, and in an instant, though she didn’t yet know this would be true, she got a picture of Pat and her going on into old age alone. As much as that thought saddened her, she felt a light and airy space somewhere deep inside. Something was opening in her heart—some little part of her she’d kept locked ever since her missed chances to have a child of her own. Angel and her sisters—they’d be all their children now. Brandi’s and Laverne Ott’s and Lois and Wayne’s, and every person in Goldengate and on out the blacktop
who loved them and wanted them to have a good and happy life. Missy knew that was what she wanted most of all. “Come on,” she said to Angel. “We’ll go to the hospital.”

  Biggs told Shooter to go home. “I’ll come by this evening,” he said. “I’ll have a talk with your boy.”

  “He’ll tell you,” Shooter said. “Count on it. He’ll tell you exactly what I did.”

  Then he left the courthouse and drove straight home. Captain was in the barn with the goats.

  “Come on,” Shooter said to him. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  “What for?”

  “No reason. Let’s just go.”

  In the emergency room, Missy went to the front desk to ask about Brandi.

  “Are you family?” the woman at the desk asked.

  Missy put her hands on Angel’s shoulders and nudged her forward a bit. “This is her daughter,” she said.

  Angel reached up and laid her right hand on top of Missy’s left, and then Missy let her go. Angel followed the woman to a set of double doors, and as the doors opened Missy got a glimpse of nurses bustling past in scrubs. She saw an empty gurney against the wall, a row of cubicles with curtains drawn closed. For a moment Angel hesitated, looking back at Missy, who smiled at her and motioned with her hand for her to go on. Angel mouthed the words Thank you, and then she was gone.

  Shooter just drove. He had Captain in the truck, and he didn’t know where he was going. He only knew that for the time he didn’t want to be at home, didn’t want to think about that evening when Biggs, if he were true to his word, would come to talk to Captain.

  For now, Shooter only knew he wanted to keep moving. He didn’t want to sit still and have time to think. So he drove into Phillipsport and then out of it, letting State Street become Route 50. Soon he was driving past Wabash Sand and Gravel and WPLP, and then he was crossing the river, driving over the bridge that would take him into Indiana.