Late One Night

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 grease 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.”