Late One Night

6

In his heart Ronnie often felt all scraped out and empty over the way his life with Della was — too much want, too much lack, too much desire running up against the no-way-in-hell of it all. The truth was he’d loved Della once and loved her hard and still could from time to time when there came a snatch of breath in the suffocation of trying to provide for her and all those kids. Sure, she’d told everyone that it was him who’d wanted to keep trying until they had a boy, but Ronnie would tell them, if they’d ever listen, that it was Della who kept wanting to get pregnant. “I just love ’em to death,” she kept saying. “Ronnie, I love having a baby in the house.”

“We can’t go on like this,” he told her in the summer when he was having trouble finding construction work — the work was there, but he’d proven himself too unreliable in the past for contractors to take a chance on him — and it was getting harder and harder to feed everyone. “We just can’t, Della. We’ve got to stop. You’ve got to get back on the pill. We just can’t be having any more babies. Do you understand?”

She nodded her head, but he made her say it.

“Do you, Della?”

“You’re right,” she said. “We need to do better looking after the ones we’ve got.”

So Ronnie thought they had an understanding. Each morning he got up and went looking for work. The air was cool and there was dew on the grass and the birds were singing, and the day seemed full of promise. He’d find work, he told himself. Today would be the day. He’d find steady work, and he’d be a man who could make a good life for his family. He’d be the man he’d meant to be all along.

He knew what the neighbors surely thought of him each time Della locked him out of the trailer and they heard him banging on the door, heard him cussing on the step, heard him getting all teary-eyed and saying, “Aw, now come on, baby. Don’t be like this.”

Pat and Missy and Shooter and Captain knew too much about him, but not even they knew what happened before Della walked into that Kiwanis Club pancake supper. They didn’t know that earlier that day, while she was in town cleaning houses, Ronnie hauled an old chair out the back door, setting it up against the trailer in the tall grass that he never quite got around to weed-eating. The chair’s upholstery, a corduroy brown, had split open in a number of places and the foam stuffing stuck through. One of the legs had come off and disappeared. Just an old chair gone to ruin and no good to anyone. He thought maybe he’d carry it back to the burn barrel and light it up, but while hunting for a fresh box of Diamond matches inside the trailer, he found Della’s birth control pill case in a drawer of the bathroom vanity.

Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have thought a thing about that white case, but in light of the conversation he’d had with her he considered opening it just to make sure that she’d been keeping good to her word. But, no, that wouldn’t be right. That wouldn’t be trusting her. He closed the drawer and went on about his business, forgetting about that old chair and his plan to burn it.

He was alone in the trailer. The kids were with Della’s folks while she worked in other people’s houses.

His own house put him to shame — the tables heaped high with toys and clothes, the counters littered with unwashed plates and saucers, the sink full of pots and pans, and there on the sill of the window above that sink, a bud vase with a single silk rose in it, a hurtful reminder of a more orderly life.

As a boy he’d lived in enough foster homes that were cluttered and dirty and now he couldn’t stand the reminder. He forgot about that old chair and instead started to clean. He did the dishes. He wiped down the counters. He picked up toys and carted them into the kids’ rooms and put them where they were supposed to be. He vacuumed. He dusted. He folded laundry and put it away. All the while he was working, he remembered how nice Della had made the place in the beginning before there were all the kids. He remembered how they’d started out, full of hope, drunk on love. Recalling all that made him feel a misery born from the fact that so much had changed.

He went into the bathroom to clean there and he opened that vanity drawer again and took out the case that held Della’s birth control pills. He stared at it a long time before he worked up the nerve to open it.

“My, oh my, oh my,” Della said when she came home and saw how Ronnie had cleaned. “Mercy, what a surprise.”

He was sitting on the kitchen counter, twirling a matchstick between his fingers. He’d finally found a box in the pocket of a flannel shirt hanging in his closet. He was swinging his legs and drumming the heels of his boots against the cabinet.

“Don’t do that,” Della said. “You’ll leave scuff marks.” He kept swinging his legs. He wouldn’t look at her. “Ronnie, I said don’t.”

She walked over to him and pressed her hands down on his knees to make him stop.

That’s when he grabbed her hair, wound the long blond hair up in his fist and jerked her head over close to his face. She smelled like bleach and furniture polish. She grimaced and he watched the lines fan out from the corners of her eyes.

“You think I’m a fool,” he said.

“That hurts, Ronnie.” She tried to tug away from him, but he held fast. “I mean it.”

He let go of her hair and shoved her away. “We had a deal, Della.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Those pills.”

She looked away from him. She bit her lower lip.

He said, “Jesus, you haven’t been taking a one.”

She put her hands on her hips. She stomped her foot on the floor so hard he felt a little vibration come up through the cabinet and into the backs of his thighs.

“You think you can just snoop into my things any time you want?” she said. “Some things are private.”

He stopped swinging his legs. “We had a deal,” he said again, his tone even and measured. “Leastwise, that’s what I thought we had. Looks like you were just playing me.” He took a matchstick and pressed the head into the strike strip along the side of the box. He held it there with the tip of his forefinger on his left hand. He curled the forefinger of his right hand back against his thumb and held it up to the middle of the matchstick as if he were going to flick it away from him. It was a little trick he knew, one he used to pass the time on occasion, just flicking that match out so it was lit when it took to the air.

“How many kids do you want?” he asked.

“Don’t you do it, Ronnie.” She lifted her arm and pointed her finger at him. “I mean it. Don’t you light that match.”

When it finally happened — when that lit match twirled out into the air and landed on the floor at Della’s feet — he couldn’t say for sure that he’d done it on purpose or whether the finger on his right hand had uncoiled with no thought on his part. He only knew that once it was done he felt he had to do it again to keep himself from doing something worse. He was certain that Della had purposely lied about taking her pills because she wanted to have so many babies he’d never be able to leave her, wanted to fence him in so he’d never get out.

The thought of her deceit enraged him. Sure, he knew he’d been the one to deceive her first, but when she’d agreed to start taking her pills again, he’d told himself he’d stay. He’d forget this business with Brandi, and he’d stay and be a father to his children and a husband to Della. They’d start fresh.

That was out the window now. “How many do you want?” he said, and now he was vaguely aware, as she was, that he was talking about something other than babies. He flicked another lit match at her, and another, and then another. She put her hands up around her face because the matches were coming dangerously close to her now. He flicked another, and it hit her hand and she gave a yelp and jumped to the side. “How many, Della?”

The last match went tumbling over her head.

“That’s enough, Ronnie.” She was crying now. “No more.”

The misery in her voice caught him by the throat and squeezed. He jumped down from the counter and went to her. He put his arms around her shoulders, raised one hand to pet her hair.

That’s when he felt the heat. The last match had lodged in Della’s hair and started to burn. The stink was all around them now.

“Oh, good Lord,” she said, swatting at her head. “Look what you’ve done.”

He got the fire out by beating at it with his hand. He felt the burn on his fingers.

She jumped back, holding her hands to her head. “Don’t touch me. Not now. Not after what you just did.”

“What I just did?” He balled his hands up into fists. “Damn it, Della, you made a promise to me.”

“Promises, promises,” she said. “I’ve seen the way you look at that Brandi Tate.” For a good while he didn’t speak, and that was enough to tell Della that she’d struck a nerve, that what she’d never thought was possible now just might be, that there was something going on between Ronnie and Brandi. “Oh, no,” she said. “No.”

He took her by the shoulders and gave her a shake. “Can’t you see I’m trying?” he said.

“You’re not trying enough. That’s plain.”

“Neither are you,” he said.

“I’ll never forgive you for that, Ronnie. Never. Do you understand?”

“Understand?” He gave her a little smirk and then a cut of his eyes that sent a chill through her. “Oh, I think I understand everything just fine,” he said, and then he walked out.

“He looked like he could have killed me,” Della said to Missy when she told the story of the matches. “Honestly. Like I wasn’t nothing to him at all.”

She had to take the scissors to her hair, to cut out that little burned patch. If she did it just right, she thought, she wouldn’t have to cut much at all. But looking at herself in the mirror and thinking about how worn down she looked — nothing like Brandi Tate at all — she grabbed a large bunch of hair and sawed away at it until it was cut. She kept going, her hands trembling. Cutting and cutting. Sometimes so close that she nicked her white scalp. She left some of the hair long. She made herself as ugly as she could, as ugly as Ronnie must have thought she was. Good thing the kids were with her folks so she could have time alone to do this thing.

And once it was done, she got into her old gray Ford, the one with the passenger door caved in and the tailpipe hanging loose, and she drove into Goldengate. She walked into that pancake supper. She said as big as she could, “How you like my new hairdo?” And she let all those people think what they were going to think, the same thing that Laverne swore was true — Ronnie had done her wrong, had treated her no better than he would an old mangy dog, and then set her out to find her way.

At the time all this was happening, Ronnie was driving out to the river, to an old fishing camp, and with him was Brandi Tate. She was listening to his story.

“The woman’s crazy,” he told her. The next day, he’d start to hear the talk around town about what he was supposed to have done to Della’s hair, and he’d know he’d made the right decision to stay at Brandi’s that night and not go home, not to go back to Della who was telling such a lie on him, not to go back to a woman who would hack at her hair that way and then let people believe he’d been the one to do it.

“Sugar,” Brandi said, “you’ve got to get out of that mess.”

And Ronnie stayed with her, stayed as autumn stretched on to the first frost, and then the killing frost, and then the dark, damp days of November.