Lee Martin - Late One Night

Ronnie stopped him before he could say more. “I used to think you were head and shoulders above the rest of us, Pat.” His voice was louder and it echoed down the alley in the snowy night. He said, “I really did. I used to think you were a good man.”

He turned to go back into the gymnasium. He could barely catch his breath. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to know he’d been at the trailer that night. That was his secret, and his alone, and would be as long as he could keep it.

At the end of the alley he turned back to Pat. “I won’t let you keep my girls.” He was shouting now, and he didn’t care who heard him. “You can count on that. Understand? You better tell Missy. You tell her exactly what I said.”

Since her last miscarriage back in September, Missy and Pat hadn’t talked much at all, just the words necessary between two people who shared a house. But one evening toward the end of October, he came home and she was gone. He waited and waited, and the more time he spent in the quiet house, the more he began to relax, relieved of the tension he usually felt from occupying the same space with someone to whom he couldn’t say the things that mattered most to him. He’d tried to talk to Missy about getting pregnant again, but she’d made it clear that she didn’t want to have that conversation. So they moved through their days, speaking of things like utility bills and the weather and, of course, Ronnie and the fact that he’d left Della, a story that Missy took a special interest in, all too glad to let the anger she felt over the circumstances of her own life find a target with Ronnie Black. She finally came home that night in October, and even now Pat could recall the sinking feeling inside him when she started to speak and he felt a part of their life together coming to an end.

“I’ve been driving,” she said. “Thinking. Just driving around.” Her voice was even and calm, no hint of exaggeration or dramatics, and he knew that what she was about to tell him would be something he’d never be able to change. “I’m done,” she said. “That was the last time.”

“Missy?”

“I’m done with babies,” she said, and that was that.

Until the fire. “We could make a good home for the girls,” she said to Pat as they were trying to fall asleep after the visitation. “Couldn’t we? Oh, I’m sure we could, but whenever I think about it I get scared to death. Me? A mother? Maybe I’m being silly thinking about having the girls for good.”

“Custody?” Pat said. “Is that what’s on your mind?”

“I don’t know. Pat, do you think—”

Her voice trailed off, and he put his arm around her in the dark. “You’d be a fine mother,” he said, not having the heart to tell her that Ronnie had said he’d fight for his girls.

Pat woke the next morning and found himself alone in bed, the sunlight on his face. He smelled bacon frying in the kitchen. He’d had a miserable sleep, disturbed as he was by what Ronnie had said to him in the alley. One thought kept coming back: Why did Ronnie, eavesdropping from the alley, ask him if he thought he had something to do with that trailer going up? Why would a man ask that — jump to that conclusion — if he didn’t have something to hide?

Missy had the girls up and helping her get breakfast on the table. They were still in their pajamas and nightshirts. They padded around the kitchen in their socks, barely making a sound. Pat stood in the doorway, watching them as they moved about the kitchen on this, the morning of the funeral. He listened to the whisk of their feet over the tile floor, watched as they turned their willowy bodies to keep from bumping one another as they moved about the kitchen. Angel used a fork to spear bacon strips from the frying pan. She dipped her wrist to shake the grease off the bacon and then lay each strip down on a plate covered with a paper towel. When the plate was full, she raised it high, arching her arm to avoid Hannah who was at the toaster, plucking out slices of bread with two fingers. Sarah poured juice into glasses, and when she carried them two by two to the table, she held them with care, taking tiny steps around Emma, who was dipping in and out between the chairs, arranging silverware just so beside each plate.

Missy was at the stove cooking eggs, and when she turned and saw Pat in the doorway, she smiled. “Well, girls, look who’s finally here,” she said in a teasing voice. “Mr. Sleepy Head.”

He stepped into the kitchen, and Emma, who’d finished with the silverware, wandered over and leaned into him, laying her head against his leg. He let his hand trail through her hair, smoothing out the sleep tangles with his fingers.

“You were snoring,” she said. “You were snoring like a big old bear.”

“That’s what I am,” Pat said. “A big old sleepy bear. And you know what they say about sleepy bears, don’t you?”

“No, what?”

“Don’t wake them up.”

He tickled her ribs until she laughed, and he thought, yet again — how many times over the past few days had he thought it? — that given the chance, he’d make a good father. He’d know how to protect his children.

They sat around the breakfast table, and they all joined hands and closed their eyes while Pat prayed that God would watch over them and keep them safe.

After breakfast, when Pat and Missy were in their bedroom dressing for the funeral, she came to him and helped him with his necktie. She made sure the knot was neat, and then she let her hand lay flat against his chest and she said, “You’re so good with them.”

“He’s going to take them,” Pat said in a whisper.

Through the closed bedroom door, he could hear the muffled voices of the girls who were dressed and waiting. Just the faintest sound of their voices and their footsteps as if they were already ghosts that had come to visit but only for a while.

“He’s their father,” she said in a tight voice.

“For better or worse.”

Missy had a hard look in her eyes now. Just like that she was the bitter woman and he was the wary man they’d both been since the miscarriage in October.

“That’s just like you,” she said. “You’ve never had enough fight. Never.”

“But what can we do?”

She didn’t answer. She turned and marched out of the bedroom, leaving him stunned by how quickly she could change into that woman. All he could do was say what he’d just told her. The fact was Ronnie was those girls’ father, and he had his rights to them. Not a thing anyone could do about that. Not a single thing.

“Nothing,” Pat whispered. “Nothing at all.”

And there wasn’t. He knew it all through the funeral service as he and Missy sat next to each other, holding hands. They sat in the second row of mourners. The first row was reserved for the girls and for Wayne and Lois.

Across the center aisle in the front row sat Ronnie with Brandi beside him. He wore a dark gray suit, obviously new. The collar of his white shirt was too loose around his slender neck. He wasn’t a man accustomed to wearing a suit and a necktie, but he didn’t fidget or squirm. He sat still with his chin lifted and his narrow shoulders pushed back, and he stared straight ahead, knowing, Pat was sure, that so many eyes in the school gymnasium were on him and Brandi. She had on a black dress that under any other circumstances would have been considered modest, but because she was that woman, more than one person was quick to call the uneven cut of the hem too showy and the scoop neckline too revealing.

Pat understood that Wayne and Lois and the girls would always be set apart in Goldengate. What remained to be seen was how the story of Ronnie and Brandi would finally settle against this other story of four girls trying to make their way through the rest of their lives, of Ronnie and the girls trying to remember what it was to be a family because that was what Pat was certain would happen now. Ronnie would get his girls, and Pat and Missy would once again be alone in their house. It shamed Pat that he couldn’t separate that sadness from the grief he felt over the deaths, but there it was, all mixed in together, and it stayed with him through the service and on to the Bethlehem Church Cemetery where the gravediggers had heated the frozen ground before they dug, and into the church itself where Laverne Ott and the others had carried a dinner into the basement to feed the family. Before they ate, the pastor, Harold Quick, who owned the Real McCoy Café in Goldengate, asked a blessing on everyone gathered there, and he asked God to hold Ronnie and his daughters in His loving hands, now and forever. Amen.