Late One Night

7

By Thanksgiving, Della’s hair was growing back. Even though she’d gone to the Looking Glass Salon to have it shaped up, there was still a bald spot on the side of her head that was hard to cover. Her mother caught sight of it when Della brought the kids over for dinner.

“Mercy,” she said. “I don’t know how you can stand to show your face around town, what with Ronnie shacked up with that girl.”

Della gave a little wave of her hand. She was trying to be tough-minded about it all. “Oh, these are modern times,” she told her mother. “People don’t think a thing about something like this.”

But she heard the talk, felt the eyes on her as November turned into December and she went about her business cleaning houses for those who hired her. She took the kids to the Bethlehem Christian Church for Sunday School and to 4-H meetings at the fairgrounds. She kept her gaze steady, met everyone with a smile, looked them in the eye and said it was good to see them and that she hoped they’d have a Merry Christmas.

Then one morning Missy and Laverne Ott stopped by the trailer with a Christmas box from the church: a twenty-pound turkey, a ten-pound bag of potatoes, a head of cabbage, cans of Ocean Spray jellied cranberry sauce, Green Giant sweet peas, Bush’s baked beans, a tray of dinner rolls, a box of Carnation powdered milk, frozen pie crusts and pumpkin filling, tangerines, ribbon candy, chocolate bars, peanuts in the shell.

Della looked through the box while Laverne and Missy went back to Missy’s van to tote in gifts for all the kids: new winter coats, boots, mittens, and wrapped packages, one for each, seven in all.

“We could have stopped at five and had a basketball team,” Della used to tell folks, “but we decided to keep rolling the dice and hit that lucky number seven.”

She was thirty years old, and she’d been pregnant most of her life since she gave herself up to Ronnie at sixteen. She had six girls. Angel, Hannah, Sarah, the twins Emily and Emma, and then Gracie. In order, from age fourteen to three. All of them were fair-skinned like their mother, small-boned and blue-eyed, with fine hair the color of straw. Her girls. She’d taught them to love Jesus and to know what it was to work. They were good girls — even Angel, who had streaks of Ronnie’s spit and vinegar. Della tried to be patient with her. Angel was fourteen, Della reminded herself, remembering that when she was that age Ronnie had started taking note of her. Fourteen and beginning to feel the charms she held for boys. Fourteen and sure of too many things. Whatever mistakes she’d made with Ronnie along the way, at least she had these beautiful children now, her treasures. Ronnie could run off to Brandi Tate and Della couldn’t stop him, but her babies were hers, the joy of her life, and no one could take them from her.

She’d wished and wished for a boy, and finally just before last Christmas, he came along, Ronnie Jr. Ronnie was in heaven. He loved on that baby boy more than he’d ever loved on anyone in his life. You’d thought, folks said later, it would’ve been enough to keep him from Brandi Tate.

“You’ve got a brood,” Laverne said as she brought the last of the Christmas gifts into the trailer. “I swear, Della. You really do.”

Her glasses were steamed up from coming in out of the cold, and when she took them off, there was a hard set to her face. She’d never married, and now on the other side of sixty, she found herself alone. A broad-shouldered woman with big hands, the fingernails clipped straight across. She wore no makeup, nothing to give her thin lips any color or shape, nothing to enhance her pale gray eyes. Her only indulgence was her hair, which Della knew she darkened with Clairol Nice ’N Easy — Light Caramel Brown — Della had seen the empty box in Laverne’s trash when she cleaned her house. Laverne kept her hair long and wore it in a braid that came down to the middle of her back. She took a handkerchief from her coat pocket and wiped her glasses. She put them back on and studied Della, who knew that she was well-acquainted with situations like hers — a woman left with all these kids — and even worse.

Della would think later that Laverne hadn’t meant for what she said about her brood to sound like a judgment, but at the time Della heard it that way, just a smidge of resentment from having to be out in such vicious cold, toting boxes to a woman whose husband had left her to care for all those kids.

Missy patted Della on the arm. “We just want to make sure you and the kids have something for Christmas,” she said. She knew that Ronnie had tried to bring presents, but Della turned them away because the money that bought them came from Brandi Tate. “You know I love them all to pieces,” Missy said. “I always have.”

Della tried her best not to be envious of Missy, but, gracious, just look at that new house Pat had built for her — a two-story house with dormer windows and gingerbread trim and fretwork on the wraparound porch. Della cleaned that house each week, and though she tried to stay a Christian woman, she couldn’t quite press down the bad feeling that rose in her when she saw the already tidy house with hardly a speck of dirt that needed cleaning — nothing really that required Della’s attention, but she dusted the furniture that already gleamed, wiped down the bathrooms where silk flowers in dainty vases sat on the counters and the towels were folded neatly over the rods, ran the vacuum over carpets that looked like no one had walked on them.

Della did all that because Missy paid her for her services, and she tried not to resent too much the fact that Missy could afford that charity. Della tried not to get all out of shape because the girls loved Missy so much. She always made such a fuss over them, bringing them little doodads, having them up to the house to roast marshmallows or color Easter eggs or trim the Christmas tree. It was enough to make Della think sometimes that the girls would be better off with someone like Missy for a mama, someone who could give them every little thing that they wanted and keep them loved and happy and safe. “You wouldn’t want the mess of them for always,” Della told her once, and Missy said, “Oh, Della, I’d give the world for just one baby to brighten my days.”

“Well, it’s just too much,” Della said now, looking at the kitchen counters piled up with the groceries and the packages. “I don’t know what to say.”

Laverne had a jingle bell brooch pinned to the lapel of her coat, and it made a merry noise every time she moved. “Della, this is from the church. It’s from the heart, honey. It’s nothing more than what we want you to have.”

“We know it’s not been easy,” said Missy. She had such black hair — such shiny, thick black hair falling over her collar — and Della had always envied it. How pretty Missy was with her red lipstick and her eyes so bright, her liner and shadow applied just so, her lashes stiff with mascara. The suede glove she was wearing was so soft on Della’s arm. “We have to look out for one another. I know you’d do the same for me, if you could.”

That was enough to set Della’s teeth on edge. She turned away from Missy for a moment, fussing with some of the grocery sacks on the counter until she could compose her face.

“I take care of my kids,” she finally said. She turned back to Missy and Laverne. She hoped her smile didn’t show the strain she felt — how badly she wanted to tell both of them to take back everything they’d brought, but she couldn’t. “There’s not a thing in the world I wouldn’t do for them.”

“Della,” Laverne said. “We know that’s the Lord’s truth, but there’s no shame in accepting a little help now and then, especially the way that Ronnie’s up and done. Everyone says it’s a pity. We all feel sorry for you, honey.”

That was enough to make up Della’s mind. The way that Laverne and Missy made it plain that she was now gossip, someone people talked about, maybe felt badly for, maybe sat in judgment of, all because she was letting this mess with Ronnie and Brandi string along, all on the chance that one day he might come home. She’d forgive him everything. Forgive him for that episode with the matches, forgive him for falling for Brandi, and she’d ask him to forgive her for not taking her birth control pills and for the way she let the lie spread that he’d chopped off her hair.

They’d been kids together, Della and Ronnie. They’d been friends before they loved each other, and even now she felt a little crinkle in her heart, a heave and a flutter because she’d known him first and best. All of her adult life, she’d known him. Nothing would ever change that.

“Don’t you remember who I am?” she asked him the night he came for his things.

He couldn’t look at her. He stood at the trailer door, the last of his clothes on hangers hugged to his chest, and he bit his lip.

It was like she went rushing back through the years, trying to gather everything in: the way he sang in a low murmur beside her in church and she felt the vibration of his voice and she thought no matter what troubles they had there they were, together and safe; the lopsided birthday cake he baked for her one year; the way he said, “Della, oh Della” whenever he felt overwhelmed with whatever it was that kept them together so long; even all the times he’d done something stupid, like he was still sixteen, and then he’d come to her looking all hangdog, and she’d forgive him. She would have even forgiven him that night when he was about to leave if he’d only said he was sorry. She would have put her arms around him. She would have told him to stay. But when she asked him if he knew her and he finally looked at her with a stare that was flat and empty, like he wasn’t looking at anyone who mattered to him, she knew that they were in more trouble than she’d first thought. “I have to go,” he said, and then he did.

On Christmas Day, she asked her daddy for the loan of enough money to hire a lawyer. She asked him when the girls were out feeding the goats and her mama was napping in the reclining chair.

“I wouldn’t ask if I had some other way,” she said. “Daddy, I know this isn’t how we’d want it.”

It was all she could do to face him on account of she knew how badly she’d disappointed him when she was sixteen and pregnant. He’d stood by her, though. When everyone else was telling her to give the baby up for adoption and forget about Ronnie Black, her daddy said, “You do what you feel in your heart. Whatever that is, I’ll be there to help you when I can.”

“I can’t hardly stand the way Ronnie’s done you,” he said.

“You coming down with a cold, Daddy?”

He cleared the hoarseness from his throat. “Come see your mama tomorrow. She can drive you in to the bank.”

_________

It was just after New Year’s when she finally filed for divorce. She left the attorney’s office in Phillipsport, intending to drive to her mama’s to pick up Gracie and Ronnie Jr. — Angel and Hannah and Sarah and the twins were in school — but at the last minute she decided to drive to Goldengate. Her nerve surprised her, but she wanted to look Ronnie in the eye and tell him what she’d done.

She found Brandi’s house on Locust Street, a one-story frame house with white clapboards and a porch, wide red ribbon wrapped around the posts, Christmas lights still hanging from the eaves. A house not much better than the trailer Ronnie had left out in the country. But it was quiet there, he’d told her back in October when he moved out, and maybe that’s what he needed, he said, a little quiet.

He came to the door when Della knocked, and for a moment she almost lost her voice. Then she told him what she’d come to say.

“I’m looking you right in the eye, and I’m telling you, Ronnie. I’m not going to let this go on.”

She told him she’d thought and thought on the matter, and if he was going to keep on with Brandi, then she didn’t have much choice. She had to do what was right for her and the kids.

“You understand, don’t you? I can’t let you keep making a fool of me. I’m going to have to cut you loose and put an end to the two of us. I’ve been to see a lawyer.”

The wind was blowing hard and there was Ronnie in jeans, but with no shirt and barefoot. He was standing in the doorway to Brandi’s house, his bare chest white and hairless, goose pimples dotting his arms.

“Della? What about the kids? Those are our kids.”

“Come back.” She leaned in and whispered it. She was surprised at how little it took to make her want him. She could tell the lawyer she’d changed her mind. Her forehead rested just an instant on Ronnie’s bare chest. She could feel how cold his skin was. “I mean it, Ronnie. Come back, and we’ll be a family.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe that could be true. Maybe you mean it this time about not having any more babies, and maybe you’re sorry that you lied about me cutting your hair.”

“I was just mad,” she said.

He looked at her for a long while. “I need some time to think about it. You’d give me that if I asked you, wouldn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t give you forever.”

He reached out and took her hand, held it just a little while the way he had when they first started out one night at a football game at the high school. “I’m not a good enough man for you.”

Somewhere in the house, Brandi was calling for him. Della hadn’t known she was there.

“Ronnie? Baby? You still out there talking?”

Already he was easing the door closed. “I’m letting the cold in,” he said. “I’m sorry, Della.”

Something about hearing Brandi call him baby and then seeing how he wanted to get back inside and pick up whatever the two of them had been doing made Della’s mind up for good. “You’re right.” She’d let the divorce papers do what they were meant to do. Let Ronnie have what he wanted. Let him have Brandi Tate. “You’re no kind of man,” Della told him, an ache in her throat as she fought against the tears that were threatening to come. “No kind of man at all.”

“Della,” he said.

He reached out for her, but it was too late. She’d already turned to go, and she didn’t look back. Not once. She’d said what she’d come to say and now it was done.