Lee Martin - Late One Night

“Someone set it?” Ronnie said. “Someone put that trailer to burn with my kids inside?”

“With your kids and your wife.”

“Who’d do that?” Ronnie jumped up from his chair. “Find out who it was and I’ll kill the bastard.”

“No one’s going to be doing any killing,” Biggs said. “Not if I can help it.” He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “Ronnie,” he said, “where were you the night of the fire?”

“I was home,” Ronnie said. “At Brandi’s. I was with Brandi.” He pointed his finger at Biggs. “Surely you don’t think I’d do something like that. Try to kill my whole family?”

Biggs got up and walked around the desk. He stood with his face just inches from Ronnie’s own. “I truly hope that’s not the case, but someone set that fire, and now it’s my job to find out who. I’m going to have to start talking to folks.”

“You do that,” Ronnie said. “You talk to everyone you can find who can tell you something.”

“I may be back to talk to you.”

“What can I tell you that I haven’t already?” Ronnie shrugged his shoulders. “Like I said, I was with Brandi.”

“I just want you to know that I’m going to be pushing this hard,” Biggs said. “I’ve got a family of my own, and what someone did to yours makes my blood boil. It’s the saddest damn thing that’s ever happened around here. You get me?”

“You think it doesn’t do the same thing to me?” Ronnie’s voice shook and tears came to his eyes. “I may have left Della, but I had fourteen years with her, and we had all those kids. And now three of them are dead. I was their father. You remember that.”

Outside the courthouse, a cold wind had come up out of the north and the temperature had dropped. By the time Ronnie got to his Firebird he was wishing for his gloves. He fumbled with his keys and they dropped to the street. He stooped to pick them up. Finally, he got the car unlocked and he slid in behind the wheel.

Anyone driving by just then would have seen a man pounding his fist on the dashboard, and if they didn’t know he was Ronnie Black — and if they didn’t know about what had happened at that trailer — they might have thought him a crazy man. Still others, just moments later, might have seen the Firebird backing out of its parking place and not thought anything about Ronnie and what he might be up to until they got home that evening and read about the fire marshal’s report in the Phillipsport Messenger . Then they might recall seeing the Firebird on the courthouse square, and they might think about how slowly he drove, taking a left onto Fifteenth to the stoplight at State. Maybe they sat behind him there in their own cars. Maybe they saw him start to turn left when the light went to green — left to Goldengate — and then change his mind and turn right instead with a squeal of tires and a roar of engine like he didn’t care who might be in his way.

_________

Brandi came home from work and found the girls alone. “Where’s your dad?” she asked Hannah.

“Don’t know,” Hannah said.

She was playing a game of Operation with Sarah. The two of them were on their knees on the living room rug, the large oval braided rug Brandi bought last fall to celebrate Ronnie’s moving in. “This has just been a house,” she told him. “Now it’s going to be a home.” When she found out she was pregnant, she counted back and thought that night must have been the night they made the baby. First part of October, the nights starting to cool and soon the leaves would turn and there’d be the lovely part of autumn that she’d always treasured. The leaves, and pumpkins on people’s porches, and scarecrows on straw bales in front yards, and corn shocks woven around the gaslights. Indian summer days — a last time of warm sun and golden light before the turn toward winter.

“Don’t know?” Brandi tossed her car keys onto the marble top of the old washstand that she kept just inside the front door. The house was full of things she’d inherited from her grandmother — a pie safe with punched tin panels, a Hoosier cabinet, a library table, a Morris chair, an apothecary dresser, a sleigh bed, a cedar chest. “I like old things,” she’d told Ronnie. “They’ve got character.” And he said, “Must be why you like me.”

“Why in the world wouldn’t you know?” she said now to Hannah. “Didn’t he say where he was going?”

“Haven’t seen him,” Hannah mumbled. She was concentrating hard on removing the Adam’s apple with the tweezers. “Don’t know where he is.”

The tweezers touched the side of the throat as she was lifting out the Adam’s apple, and the buzzer went off and the red bulb of the patient’s nose lit up.

“You lose your turn.” Sarah clapped her hands together. Her bangs needed cutting. She kept brushing them out of her eyes. “Doesn’t she, Brandi? Doesn’t she lose her turn?”

“Where’s your hair barrettes?” Brandi asked her.

Sarah chewed on her bottom lip and twisted up her mouth as she thought. “I don’t know,” she finally said.

Brandi put her hands on her hips and gave Sarah a disapproving look. “Did you lose them again? Oh, Sarah.”

Secretly, Brandi was pleased. This silly, forgetful girl needed her to keep track of her hair barrettes, to comb the tangles from her hair, to cut her bangs, to remind her to brush her teeth before she went to bed. And there was Emma who liked it when Brandi read stories to her. And dear, dependable Hannah, who had woven her that friendship bracelet. It was Hannah who’d made room in her heart for Brandi first, and then the other girls had followed suit. All but Angel. She was the stubborn one, but Brandi was determined to win her over.

Last night, after the ugly scene with Ronnie, Brandi had a talk with Angel, just the two of them, in the privacy of Brandi and Ronnie’s bedroom. Brandi sat on the bed with Angel, and she put her arm around her. Angel let her hold her like that, rocking her a little, stroking her hair.

“Your daddy loves you, and I love you,” she said. “We’re just waiting for you to love us back.”

Angel said, “You’re not my mother,” and Brandi admitted that she wasn’t. “No, I’m not, and I know this is all complicated for you. You’re at that age when you’re trying to figure out things about love, and I know your daddy and I haven’t made that any easier for you, but trust me, Angel, I love you like you were my own. In truth, you are my own now. You and all your sisters. We don’t have any choice.” Angel levered herself away from Brandi’s embrace. She got up and walked across the room to the door. Before she opened it, she turned back and said, “Maybe we do. At least I do. Maybe you don’t know everything.” Brandi asked her what that was supposed to mean, but Angel wouldn’t answer. She just opened the door and left the room.

Brandi had spent a good part of her day mulling that over and had eventually dismissed it as Angel’s way of saying how hurt she was, how much she was suffering, how confused she was. A girl who’d lost her mother and not willing just yet to let the world be kind to her. Brandi could forgive her that and try to be patient and persistent with her love.

“Where’s Angel and Emma?” she asked Hannah.

Hannah was in her gawky stage now, all skinny arms and spindly legs, but Brandi could see she’d grow into a beautiful woman. That lustrous skin, those blue eyes.

“Angel’s in our room,” Hannah said, “and Emma’s in her closet talking to Emily.”

Poor Emma. She was having such a hard time being a twin on her own.

“Well, at least someone knows something around here.” Brandi gave the girls a smile to let them know she wasn’t angry with them. “Did your father pick you and Emma up at school?” she asked Sarah.