Lee Martin - Late One Night

Missy felt herself go hard inside where she knew her Christian heart should be soft and forgiving. She just couldn’t manage it, not after she’d spent the last days caring for those girls — cooking for them, helping pick out shirts and pants and dresses from the donated clothing, helping little Emma with her bath, combing tangles from her hair, tucking her and Sarah in at night and kissing them on their foreheads. Even Hannah and Angel — even tough, brittle Angel — allowed the same, lifted their heads a bit from their pillows to meet her lips and then sank back and closed their eyes and went to sleep.

Pat had been right. Ronnie would have those girls and there’d be nothing she could do about it. She could only say yes, which she did when Ronnie came to her as the dinner was winding down and the church basement was empty except for the family and those closest to them.

“I’d like to come by and get the girls’ things,” Ronnie said. “You’ve been a help, Missy, but it’s time my daughters were with me.”

Over Ronnie’s shoulder, she saw Wayne and Lois giving each of the girls a hug. Wayne had on his coat, and so did Lois.

“What about Wayne and Lois?” Missy nodded her head in their direction, and Ronnie turned his head to look at them. “Have you worked it out with then?”

“They can’t keep me from my girls.” Ronnie turned back to Missy. “There’s no call for anyone to keep me from them.” He let that sink in. “So I’ll be by for their things. All right?”

And Missy said the only thing she could. She said, “All right, let’s put together some clothes for them.” She’d pick and choose from the donations that were there at the church. “They’ve got things at our house, too. If you give me a couple of hours, I’ll get it all ready.”

But there was one problem: Angel didn’t want to go. “I won’t,” she said in the van on the drive from the church to Pat and Missy’s. She sat in the backseat, directly behind Missy. Hannah and Sarah were back there, too. Emma was on Hannah’s lap. “He can’t make me,” Angel said. “I’m going to stay with you.”

Angel’s desire to stay took Missy by the heart and wouldn’t let her go. She looked out over the fields, covered now with snow, and the rest of winter stretched ahead of her with its short light, the dark falling early, and the long, long nights. She wanted nothing more than the chatter of those girls to fill her house, but she knew it was out of her hands. She’d done what she could, and now it was her duty to let them go, no matter how much she disapproved of Ronnie.

“He’s your father,” she said.

It seemed like a long time before Angel spoke again. “Guess you don’t want us,” she said, and Missy tried hard to keep from saying what she really wished she could say: that she wanted Angel and her sisters more than anything. She wouldn’t say it because she was trying her best to do the proper thing, to give in to law and nature. Ronnie was their father. He may have walked away from his family, but it was his place now to raise these girls. If that’s what he wanted, there was nothing anyone could do to stop him. “I thought you loved us,” Angel said.

“I do. More than you’ll ever know.”

“Then let me stay.”

“Oh, sweetie. I can’t.”

So Missy packed up a box for each of the girls: shampoos and soaps and toothbrushes and toothpastes; deodorants and perfumes and toys and CDs; pencils and pens and notebooks and paste and crayons; pajamas and underwear and hair scrunchies and house shoes. It amazed her how much they’d claimed from the donations in so few days. She packed everything up, her steps leaden, her arms weary, her hands seeming to belong to someone else.

Much later, when the girls were gone, and she was washing the dishes from her and Pat’s supper, she tried to convince herself that it had been simple: she packed up the boxes, and Ronnie came, and the girls told her goodbye. She knew she was lying to herself. Watching them go had been the hardest thing she’d had to do, harder in some ways than the miscarriages, hard to watch the faces of those girls at the windows of Ronnie’s Firebird, waving goodbye, goodbye, all except Angel, who slumped in the front seat, staring straight ahead.

Missy was playing all of that again in her head when she heard the knock at the front door and Pat’s low voice talking to whoever it was who had come to see them.

She dried her hands on the dishtowel and went into the living room to see who it was.

Shooter Rowe and Pat stood just inside the front door. Shooter had a fierce look on his face as if he’d thought hard about something and had just then come to a decision.

“Missy,” he said when he saw her, “I hate to bother you, but there’s something I got to tell you about Ronnie Black.”

Missy barely slept that night, turning over and over in her head what Shooter had come to say and what Pat had finally told her. Milt Timlin thought there was something fishy about the way Della’s trailer had burned.

That wasn’t any surprise to him, Shooter said, not given what he’d seen the night of the fire.

“I saw Ronnie’s Firebird pulled off to the side of the blacktop a little ways up the road, pointed toward town.”

“You mean he was there?” Missy said.

Shooter nodded. “I saw him come from behind the trailer. He was toting something. I can’t say what it was, but he put it in that Firebird, and then he started up the blacktop, not fast like he usually does, but real slow like he didn’t want anyone to take note of him.”

“Like he had something to hide,” Missy said.

She was still thinking on it the next morning when she set out for town. She meant to go to the bank to speak with the president, Faye Griggs, about the fund she’d set up for the girls. Missy wanted to make sure that Ronnie wouldn’t be able to withdraw that money. She was the account holder, and she didn’t intend to step aside. This seemed important to her, especially in light of Shooter’s story. If the authorities came for Ronnie, would he try to get what was in that account and then run?

“Good folks gave that money,” she said. “Faye, it’d just kill me if it went for something other than what it’s meant for. Can we make it so I can divvy it out as I see fit to help with the girls’ care?”

They were sitting in Faye’s office, Faye behind her desk and Missy in a chair in front of it. Faye leaned forward to close the space between them, and she spoke in a low, confidential voice. “You know, the world is full of folks who mean well. All sorts of people trying to do the right thing. What is it they say about the road to Hell? Paved with good intentions?”

Faye had worked at the bank as long as Missy could remember. Her hair had gone gray in all the time she’d worked there, and the skin had gone loose under her chin. She’d been at the bank so long she knew about everything there was to know about the business of the folks who lived in and around Goldengate. She’d notarized their wills, handled their quit claim deeds on land sales, set up annuities for their retirements, sold them certificates of deposit, taken note of the balances in their savings accounts. She was known from time to time to let something slip about how well-off someone was or what had caused someone to have to make a significant withdrawal. She knew about sons and daughters who needed bail money. She knew who had disinherited whom. She knew about people with accounts they were keeping secret from a husband or a wife. She was sometimes — to put it plainly — a gossip. Over the years, she’d come to believe — at least Missy imagined this was true — that since she was the guardian of so many people’s business, she had a right to say whatever she wanted. “Sometimes it’s hard, isn’t it?” she said now to Missy. “I mean, it’s tough knowing the right thing to do.”