Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

I stepped down off the stool and pulled on my clothes—the jeans that still fit if I pushed the waistband down beneath my stomach, the radio station T-shirt that had once been relegated to the sleep-shirt drawer before its roominess gave it a new appeal. At least I had Leela now—not my own mother, no, but a woman who had raised sons as well as a daughter, who knew the pain I would be facing and might hold my hand through it. I had only a few months to build a relationship with her before the baby arrived, and since she was a farm woman I had a guess at how best to do that: to share her work. That would mean something to her.

I tied back my hair and tramped upstairs to Leela’s attic craft room. The large folding table was strewn with items Dodge had sold on eBay—oddly sized, often fragile knickknacks he’d collected from clean-outs of storage units the family owned. Once a year they seized the contents of any unit that was far enough behind on its rent and sold off the items one by one. In a larger community they would have held an auction for the entire lot, but here Dodge believed it more lucrative to sell things off one at a time. This year they had declared two of the twelve units abandoned, and so the craft room was cluttered with Hummel figurines, ceramic eagles, shot glasses and gaudy lamps. I’d offered to pack it all up for shipping, and I definitely had my work cut out for me.

But I didn’t mind. The craft room was a tall, vaulted space, with a ceiling fan to stir the air and open windows that looked out on the front and side yards; it felt like a refuge, and all the more so when I considered the smoky air and dark rooms downstairs. The walls were painted sky-blue, and all around the room, at the height I could reach on tiptoe, hung metal barn stars painted like American flags. These stars—large, sturdy and full of dimension—Leela painted, packaged and sent along with Dodge as he made his trips to the post office, mailing them off to customers around the country who bought them online. Most bore mottoes painted on strips of wood suspended between the stars’ two lowest rays—Glory Glory Hallelujah, or God Bless America, or Sweet Land of Liberty. If the customer requested, she attached a wired yellow ribbon, looped into a bow, no extra charge.

In the beginning Leela had seemed shy of me, giving me a wide berth and speaking to me only about what was necessary, but gradually she seemed to be warming to my company. After each morning of packing up eBay items, I began helping her with the craft orders by painting the mottoes across the stars she had otherwise completed. Candy sometimes doesn’t get them quite right , she told me in a conspiratorial tone, and I had to suppress a giggle; it was no big secret that her daughter wasn’t much of a speller. I was glad to have an easy way to make myself useful.

One warm afternoon I carried my box of stars downstairs and settled into the chair beside Elias, who didn’t acknowledge me. He was watching his usual fodder: a game show made up of contestants trying to cross a water-based obstacle course using small foam rafts, lengths of PVC pipe and giant rubber balls, narrated in crude double entendre. I had never once seen him crack a smile at it.

“You and Cade need to have a guy’s night out one day soon,” I said. “I think you both could use it.”

Elias gestured toward my chair as if it were a throne. “He could always come over here and watch Wipeout with me. Not like I’m a tough person to pin down.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing. You could both stand a little change of scenery now and then. And hey, you could do worse than to go someplace with Cade. Dodge is always saying he wants to get you to come out to the woods with them one day. Said he’d like to see you shoot.”

He chuckled. “Homeboy does not want to put a gun in my hand.”

“You load one every night.”

“That’s for security. If Dodge handed me one, I might take it as an open invitation.”

“No, you wouldn’t, Eli.”

He cut a glance in my direction, his eyes conveying a shadow of a challenge. Smoke drifted around his face like an apparition. “Try me. You know what I did over there?”

Over there was his term for Afghanistan. He referred to it often enough, but had never said much about the specifics of his role. “You were infantry, right? You went out on patrol and stuff like that?”

“Yeah, trying to keep the roads secure. Doesn’t matter whether you’re at the checkpoint or on the road—where we were, there’s IEDs all over the place. You might drive over ’em, or else a car comes up to the checkpoint with a suicide bomber in it, either way you’re fucked. You wouldn’t believe how many of us end up in little bits the size of jelly beans blown all over Afghanistan. And people like Dodge and Scooter want me to come back from that and go out and shoot beer cans while they grill burgers. If that isn’t the stupidest shit on the planet, I don’t know what is.”

“Then you and Cade should go out somewhere. Maybe over to the quarry, right? Hang out there. Isn’t that what you always used to do?”

He cast a rueful gaze on the TV and dragged on his cigarette. “Ahh, the quarry. Good times were had by all.”

“They’re doing another clean-out tomorrow. I’m sure they’d be glad to take you along. I think it’s the last one for a while.”

He sipped from a can of beer, then shook his head slowly. Round one had begun, with an overweight young man in a life vest jogging in place and shaking his arms, getting ready to tackle a pendulum swinging high above the water.

“It’d be something to do. Break the monotony.”

“Spending time with Dodge isn’t breaking the monotony.”

“Oh, c’mon. They found some interesting stuff yesterday. It’s like a treasure hunt.”

At that, he snorted. I looked at him with surprise, and he said, “Grave robbing is more like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Profiting off others’ misfortune is dirty business. Somebody saved that stuff for a reason.” I opened my mouth to speak, and he held up his hand. “I know, I know, they’re in arrears, they ought to pay their bills. But when you go and sell somebody’s grandma’s antiques because they lost their job and put priority on feeding their kids, I think that’s dirty. Life’s hard.”

“Your family wouldn’t have been able to feed their kids if people didn’t pay their rent.”

“Sure. Some people deserve to have their shit sold off. Some people don’t care. I’m telling you what I think, is all. Just because it’s fair doesn’t mean it’s right. There’s such a thing in this world as mercy.”

Dodge thumped into the room, and Elias drained his beer. Once Dodge had left, he glanced at me and said, “You know he kicked out the renters, right?”

“The ones with the broken dishwasher?”

“Yep. Gave them forty-eight hours to pack their shit and leave, and now they’re gone. Completely illegal. All because he thinks Randy warned them that he likes ’em young. The truth hits you at the core.”

My paintbrush was sinking into the jar of blue, untouched. “You said you didn’t believe Randy said anything.”

Elias waved a dismissive hand. “Dodge’s looking for an excuse for a confrontation. He isn’t going to get it, not from Randy. What those renters ought to do is sue his ass, but they never would. People from Randy’s church aren’t too big on getting the government involved. Don’t think Dodge doesn’t know that.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Yes and no. They want to live that life, then this is a part of it. Maybe they’ll turn the other cheek. Maybe they’ll stick up for themselves, and we’ll get a knock on the door one day. It’s their call.”