Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

She’d never felt so helpless. As she had so many times before, she tried to meet his gaze, searching for some sort of reassurance. She’d failed so often to see anything there that she was unprepared for what now appeared. In those bright overhead lights, she could see pink in the whites of his eyes.

“What are you looking at!” Charles shouted, and then he was pulled into the hall and back to his cell, and Constance waited for someone to take her away, too.

“He sounds like an asshole,” Dobbs said.

Constance frowned. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“But tell me about these lights,” Dobbs said. A bouquet of loose wires bloomed out of his fist. “How badly do you really need them?”

§

She’d found the scraggly white birch in the back room, growing up through a crack in the slab. That was how she knew this was the perfect location. It helped, too, that the building was only a block from her house and had been abandoned so long, no one would notice or care if she made it her own. The tree was just the right touch, a bit of garden brought indoors.

Constance and Michael Boni were in the kitchen now, the birch hanging overhead. Michael Boni was on his back, his flashlight strobing the stove’s undercarriage. His toolbox was stuffed with screwdrivers and wrenches whose battered edges inspired confidence.

“What seems to be the problem?” she said.

“The problem,” he said, “is I’m a carpenter. I don’t know shit about appliances.”

She poured him a cup of coffee and led him out to the dining room. He stood in the doorway, shaking his head. She’d needed help with the booths, the heavy stuff. But she’d done the rest herself — the paintings, the plants, the knickknacks. It was his first time inside, his first sight of the tables and chairs and decorations. “Where’d you find all this stuff?”

“Oh, here and there.”

He walked into the center of the room, turning around and around. “When I was a kid, it was a dairy.” He pointed to the far wall. “That’s where they had the ice cream.”

It wasn’t a bad idea.

He came over and joined her at the knotty pine booth, blowing steam from his cup. “You never finished your story.”

“My story?” Constance tried to remember where she’d left off. “Charles,” she began, “he did eight years …”

But from Michael Boni’s expression, Constance could tell she’d lost track of things, that she’d told the piece about prison to Dobbs instead.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “The day he got out, I took the day off to go to Jackson to pick him up. I got there just in time to see him get in a car with a woman slathered in eye shadow. I never saw him again.”

Michael Boni had turned back to peer at the vanished ice cream cases. “Sounds like you were better off without him.”

Constance spooned sugar into her cup. “I’m going to tell you a different story,” she said.

After Clifford was born but before Charles was arrested, Constance said, she and her husband almost never went out together. Charles was working only part time then, filling orders at a warehouse. The war was over, and so was the boom. Charles always said they couldn’t afford dinner or dancing, though that didn’t stop him from disappearing almost every night with James and Bobby.

In retrospect, she would’ve liked to think at least a part of her knew they were up to no good. But in truth she was still a child then. A mother, but still a child.

One night a couple of months before he was arrested, Charles came home and announced they had plans for Saturday night. He’d already bought her a new dress, and he gave her money to get her hair and nails done. She didn’t know what the occasion was, what they were celebrating. She was afraid if she asked too many questions, he might change his mind.

The dress he’d bought was blue, a size too big, but Constance pinned it in as best she could. And when Saturday night came, she was so excited, she didn’t even care that James and Bobby showed up at the house with unfamiliar women on their arms. It was a triple date, and James and Bobby wore new suits. Constance had never seen them in anything but jeans. The girls looked young enough still to be in high school, swaying their narrow hips through the doorway.

James and Bobby and their dates took one car, a borrowed Buick. Constance and Charles were alone in theirs. It was their first car, a salt-corroded ’47 Dodge prone to vapor lock. Charles had bought it just two weeks earlier, another display of wealth she’d chosen not to question. As they drove south on Woodward, Charles balanced his hand on Constance’s knee. His fingers were dry, but she didn’t mind. Just to be with him, to be the center of his attention, made her willing to forgive anything.

The Sparrow Room was packed, nothing but elbows all the way from the door to the dance floor, but somehow there was a table waiting just for them. And the drinks that night came in endless rounds, Charles simply wagging a finger whenever they needed more. James and Bobby, across the table in their pin-stripe suits, were as calm as bankers. They’d turned their chairs to watch the band, a jazz quintet. She’d never heard Charles or James or Bobby listen to jazz, but that didn’t matter. Everyone was someone else that night. Charles held her hand, and she could see sparkles of candlelight in his eyes. They were rich and beautiful, every single person in the club. That night was a fairy tale, and Constance was the servant girl transformed into a princess, discovering the world where she’d always belonged.

* * *

“But that was a different time,” Constance said now to Michael Boni, sitting opposite her in the knotty pine booth. “I was a different person.” Someone capable, she thought, of mistaking a blue dress for love.

Michael Boni nodded distractedly, as if he weren’t even listening.

“Let me show you,” she said.

She reached into the pocket of her cardigan, taking out a newspaper clipping. Slowly, careful not to rip it, she unfolded the paper, smoothing it out on the table, directly in front of Michael Boni. There were two pictures side by side on the page, both of them black and white. Michael Boni saw them, but he didn’t yet understand.

The first shot was from more than half a century ago, a picture of a downtown building at night, glossy cars parked on the street out front, long swooping Cadillacs and Lincolns and Packards. There was a crowd on the sidewalk, the men all wearing suits and hats. The building’s marquee was aglow, spelling out THE SPARROW ROOM in bright white bulbs.

This was the “before” picture. The “after” was only a day old, a smudgy shot of crumbled walls, a weedy lot circled with police tape. Nothing recognizable, and yet the place felt just as she remembered it.

Pointing at the rubble, Constance said, “This was the corner where the bandstand was. Over there, the bar.”

And here, she said to herself, was the table where she and Charles had held hands, where James and Bobby had given themselves to the music, where Constance had lost the last piece of her innocence.

Now the place was gone. The night before, someone had come along and blown it to pieces, leaving little more than a crater.

“I know about the others, too,” Constance said, staring into Michael Boni’s eyes. “The grocery store, the shoe place. They’re not just buildings, you know. They’re memories. They have meaning.”

“What makes you think I know anything about it?”

“You men,” she said, “you think you’re so mysterious.”

“Think of the gardens,” Michael Boni said. “Think of the possibilities.”

She jabbed at the clipping with her finger. “This isn’t what I want.”