Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

Meanwhile Darius stood several paces away, half in the light, half in the shadow, looking to Michael Boni as if he were measuring the distance between himself and the door.

It was ten-thirty in the morning, and Violet was wearing only one shoe as she burst out of the apartment to all the usual pandemonium — shouting and banging and the motherfucker directly below whose God-given right it was to blast his bass so he could feel it in the shower. But right now she couldn’t care less about adding to the racket, slamming the door behind her, glad at last to have a solid object between herself and her mother.

Solid ish . Cheap, hollow wood. And her mother’s voice still carried through. Raised you … Never forget . The missing words easy enough to fill in. She’d heard them a thousand times in the last two days alone. That’s how long it had been since her mother had gone fishing for something in her purse and found ten bucks missing. Two days for ten bucks! Not that Violet wouldn’t have been pissed. Ten bucks was two hours work, after taxes and all that. But was it worth two days of crazy?

Violet had never pretended she was an angel. There was the time she was nine, the bracelet with the turquoise stars from the display stand at the drugstore. But to steal from her own mother? It was just easier to yell at Violet than to accept the obvious, that the ten bucks had disappeared the same way everything else disappeared from the apartment — crumpled bills and pocket change and anything still in a box that could be returned; and the old broken watch and the hideous old necklace that had belonged to Violet’s grandmother, neither of which was worth the effort of pawning, except to somebody already beyond help, like Victor.

Everyone in the building knew about Victor. But still they had to play this game. When her mother shouted, for all the neighbors to hear through the cardboard walls, what an ungrateful thief of a daughter she had, the only thing for Violet to do was to pop in her earbuds and wait it out. But sometimes she couldn’t help wondering what exactly her mother gained from this drama, why she thought it was better for the neighbors to believe she had two fuck-ups for children, rather than just one.

With the door closed behind her, Violet could choose to imagine the crazy voice inside the apartment belonged to someone else, someone with a good reason for this despair, someone, ideally, she wasn’t related to, didn’t even know.

But now she was about to be late. Hopping on one foot, she reached down to pull on her other shoe. That was the moment she realized she’d grabbed the wrong one. A black clog and a white sneaker. Not even close.

She was so exhausted, her first thought was Fuck it. Go back to sleep. Rest her head right here on the mangy carpet, stare at the bug-bottomed globe of the ceiling fixture, pretend her mother was screaming a lullaby.

It had been only six hours since Violet had finished the closing shift, her third that week. Five hours since she’d gotten into bed. But Sheree was sick, and someone needed to fill in for lunch, and an hour spent at work, no matter how dead on her feet, was an hour Violet didn’t have to spend here. And when she got in, she could stick her mouth under the Mountain Dew dispenser until everything on her twitched.

On the other side of the door, the shouting had faded. Ear to the keyhole, Violet calculated how quickly, how quietly, she could duck in, get the other shoe. It didn’t matter which one.

“What is it this time?”

She nearly jumped at the sound of the voice, spinning around to find Darius sitting on the top step at the end of the hall. He was still dressed in his work clothes.

“What’d he take?” Darius was all scrunched up, hunched over, as if he’d been huddled there for hours.

“What are you doing here?”

“I got in late,” he said. “Everyone’s gone. Sylvia, the kids.”

Violet pulled on the black clog. “I’m going to be late.”

“Nothing worse than an empty apartment.”

“Want to trade?”

“I haven’t seen you in a long time.” Darius’s eyes were red, his shirt half untucked.

If she didn’t know him better, she might have thought he was drunk. “That’s what happens,” she said, “when you tell a person you don’t want to see them anymore.”

She hobbled forward, her feet at different heights. Just as she reached the banister, she heard something new coming from behind the apartment door. Something almost too soft to catch over the rest of the noise vibrating up from the lower floors.

“She’s crying,” Violet said. And crying, unlike everything else her mother did, in a way not intended to be overheard.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m late.”

Darius stretched his legs out across the top stair, and Violet stepped over them.

“Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?” he said.

She reached the landing. “Not really.”

“I’m in trouble,” Darius said.

From down here, he looked even more pitiful. She could no longer hear her mother crying. “Why don’t you tell Sylvia about it?”

Darius rose on unsteady legs. “I made a mistake.”

Maybe so, but Violet had done exactly what he’d told her to. For almost two months now she’d stayed away.

“I’ve got to go.”

But now he was coming toward her down the stairs, and then she felt his heaviness on her, and then she was holding him. He was nearly limp, all arms and dead weight.

“Something bad’s going to happen,” he said. “Something—”

“It’s going to be fine,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

At his door she felt in his pocket for his keys.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said. “I didn’t realize—”

“Go to bed,” she said. “Get some sleep.”

His arm was still around her shoulders. “Don’t leave.”

“We agreed,” Violet said. “You were right.”

He took her hand. “Please.”

From his bed, a half hour later, Violet texted Sheree: :-(sick 2 .

April didn’t know if the cancellation had anything to do with the weather. It was just as possible the bus had broken down somewhere. The other, more irritated passengers speculated more wildly; they suspected a cover-up. Why was no one from the station volunteering information? At this hour, most of the employees had gone home. The public address system simply informed the irritable occupants of the waiting room that their bus wouldn’t be coming. The hurried, monotone voice offered no explanation. It suggested they return in the morning, and then the station fell into silence.

The people around her took out cell phones. April could hear them making their apologies for calling so late, asking for a ride home, a place to spend the night. A line formed at the pay phone. There was a bustling trade in bills for coins.

April took out her cell, looked at the time, then let the screen go dark again.

Inez had dropped her off an hour before. She’d been so upset, she wouldn’t return April’s kiss. Didn’t even take the car out of gear.

“Don’t do this,” she’d said.

“I have to,” April had told her.

The car was Inez’s first, a subcompact that stalled whenever she slowed.

“One thing,” Inez had said, one hand on the stick, the other on the wheel. “Just name one thing you’ve done for her you didn’t come to regret.”

“It’s complicated,” April had said. Everything with McGee was always complicated.

There was nothing comforting about the nearly empty station. But April found she appreciated the ambiance of the place, its high ceilings and buttresses and columns hiding doors that never seemed to open. She guessed the station hadn’t always been a station. It had been constructed at another time, for another purpose, with a clientele in mind that would appreciate such excesses. Half an hour before, the room’s deep acoustics had echoed and preserved every one of the other passengers’ curses — toward the bus company, toward its employees, toward the rainy late-August night. There was something about the station’s impractical dimensions and ostentatious design that made the place seem almost holy. In their simplicity and arrangement, the rows of oak benches looked like pews. Replace the ticket counter with an altar, and April could have imagined herself sitting in a church. She hadn’t been in a real one since she was a child. She’d forgotten how intimidating they could be.