Lee Martin - Late One Night

The garage sat at the end of the short lane that ran alongside the trailer. Since Ronnie had left her back in the fall, she’d never had a thought of putting her car in the garage, which had always been for the Firebird he’d restored. It was easier now for her to leave her Ford in the lane.

“I will, Daddy,” she said. “Be careful on those steps. They’re icy.”

The wind was up now, out of the north, sweeping across the flat land. Lois and Wayne leaned into that wind. Wayne opened the passenger-side door and helped Lois up. He tucked the hem of her long coat into the truck and then closed the door. He turned back to the trailer and gave Della a wave. She waved back. Then she stood there in the cold as Wayne got behind the wheel, backed out onto the blacktop, and set out for home.

After they were gone, Della asked Angel to carry the box of hot ashes out to the compost pile when she went to feed the goats the girls kept for their 4-H project. Five Nubian goats — two nannies with long floppy ears, two kids stubbing around on their short legs, and the billy with his horns curved back over his head.

“It’s Hannah’s turn to feed,” Angel said. She was fourteen and strongheaded, a girl with light blue eyes that went icy when she cut them at someone who’d rubbed her the wrong way. Her blond hair fell across her forehead, and she swept it back with a jerk of her arm.

“I just went out for more wood,” said Hannah. How rare it was for her to put up a fuss. She was twelve, the dependable one, the obedient one — a Sunday’s child, bonnie and blithe and good and gay. Her hair was in a neatly wrapped braid.

“Mom?” said Angel. Della just stared at her until finally Angel said, “Whatever.”

But then American Idol came on TV, and the girls settled in. Even Della watched. She liked the reality shows like Idol and Dancing with the Stars . Everyone always looked so glamorous, and for at least a while, she could ignore the mess of her own life.

The twins, Emma and Emily, were six, just old enough to be excited when their older sisters were. Sarah, the forgetful one, was nine, and Gracie, a pistol and a scold, was three. Junior was just barely a year. Della’s family. Hunkered down in their trailer on a cold winter night.

After the show was over, the phone rang, and it was Lois calling to see whether Della had put her car in the garage. “Your daddy wants to know.”

“Tell him I’ve taken care of it,” Della said, and then, after she was off the phone, she put on a coat and went out to make good on her word.

What little was left of the evening whirled by in a tangle of voices, the music of her children rising and then gradually falling as they got ready for bed, slipped between the covers, and drifted off to sleep.

Della was so tired. She was flat worn out. So tired that when she took one last trip through the living room, switching off lights, and saw the cardboard box of ashes still by the Franklin stove, she couldn’t bring herself to wake up Angel and tell her to finish her chore. Nor did Della feel like getting her coat back on to haul the ashes out to the compost. She opened up the back door and set the box outside on the wooden stoop. The wind was still up, and she shivered as she closed the door.

Just then, the phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID, so she let it ring and ring. She was too worn out to talk to someone anyway. What a day it had been — all the houses she’d cleaned, and a run-in with Ronnie to boot.

She put another log in the Franklin stove.

“Who was on the phone?” Angel called to her as she passed by in the hallway.

“Wrong number.”

She went into her bedroom, where she checked on the baby and then lay down and quickly fell asleep, not giving that call a second thought.

In town, Ronnie hung up the payphone at the Casey’s convenience store and got in his Firebird. He had a five-gallon can of gasoline on the seat beside him, and he knew the way out the blacktop, knew it by heart.

Della, nor anyone else for that matter, had any way of knowing that a few weeks before the fire, Shooter had forced himself to go through more of his wife’s things, a task he’d been doing a little at a time since she died back in the spring. All that was left were a few boxes still in her closet, just a few cardboard boxes that held who knew what and then it’d all be over, nothing more to do but take care of Captain. And that was turning into a full-time job and then some.

Shooter sat on the floor outside the closet and opened the first of the three boxes that he’d eyed throughout the summer and autumn and into December, putting off the moment when he’d open them, trying to make his chore last as long as he could, dreading the time when it’d be done and the ache of Merlene’s absence would settle around him with a completeness he feared would bring him to his knees.

The box was full of photographs, some of them as old as Merlene’s girlhood. Little girl with her hair in braids and a calico cat squirming in her arms. Teenage girl in her high school graduation gown, a pair of white pumps on her feet. Pictures of her and Shooter when they were young and just starting out. Merlene was such a tiny thing next to his bulk.

In one picture, she stood in their kitchen archway, turned sideways so the swell of her stomach showed. She was pregnant with Captain, and looking at that picture Shooter felt his throat close, overcome as he was with what it’d felt like to be that young couple expecting their first baby, thrilled and in love. Then he’d come, Wesley, and Shooter hadn’t known what to do with him, had been afraid to hold him, had little by little slipped away from him and Merlene, and now here he was, the one left to do right by their son.

The second box had mementos in it: Captain’s storybooks from when he was a kid, drawings he’d done, cards he’d made for Merlene on Mother’s Day. Some of Merlene’s favorite books were there, too, like The Diary of Anne Frank . Shooter leafed through its pages, and to his surprise a snapshot fell out. A shot of Ronnie sitting inside Shooter’s house, sitting backwards astraddle a ladder back chair, his hands folded on the top slat, his chin resting on top of them, his eyes closed.

At ease.

The words popped into Shooter’s head. It was plain that Ronnie was content to be where he was. At peace. It came to Shooter, then, that Merlene had taken that picture — he couldn’t remember ever having seen it — and had kept it back so she could look at it any time she chose.

“He’s trouble,” she said about Ronnie once. Shooter had never forgotten it. “But he’s got a sweetness about him. Sweet like a little boy.”

Shooter scoffed at that. Ronnie was just mean and tricky enough to do some damage if the punching and gouging got going. He had a tattoo on the back of his neck, BAD MOON. Shooter knew enough of his history — orphaned young and farmed out to one foster home after another — to make him believe it was true; he’d been born under a bad moon on the rise.

Now, looking at that picture, Shooter wondered for a moment whether Merlene had been more smitten with Ronnie than Shooter had ever known. Something about that photo nestled there with all those family pictures — when in the world would Merlene have taken it, sometime when she and Ronnie were alone in the house? — pricked at Shooter and led him to imagine things he’d be ashamed to admit.

Just his mind running away with him, he thought. Just nonsense. Nothing more than that. Merlene had thought the world of him. She’d never have done anything to be ashamed of, and particularly not with the likes of Ronnie.

Then Shooter opened a blue stationery box. He remembered buying it for Merlene one year for Christmas. Oh, how she loved that stationery, each sheet embossed with her monogram. “Now, that’s fancy,” she said when she opened it, and she held up a single sheet and traced her finger over the M, and the R, and the E. Merlene Elizabeth Rowe. “My, my, my,” she said. “It’s fit for a queen.”