Lee Martin - Late One Night

“Promises, promises,” she said. “I’ve seen the way you look at that Brandi Tate.” For a good while he didn’t speak, and that was enough to tell Della that she’d struck a nerve, that what she’d never thought was possible now just might be, that there was something going on between Ronnie and Brandi. “Oh, no,” she said. “No.”

He took her by the shoulders and gave her a shake. “Can’t you see I’m trying?” he said.

“You’re not trying enough. That’s plain.”

“Neither are you,” he said.

“I’ll never forgive you for that, Ronnie. Never. Do you understand?”

“Understand?” He gave her a little smirk and then a cut of his eyes that sent a chill through her. “Oh, I think I understand everything just fine,” he said, and then he walked out.

“He looked like he could have killed me,” Della said to Missy when she told the story of the matches. “Honestly. Like I wasn’t nothing to him at all.”

She had to take the scissors to her hair, to cut out that little burned patch. If she did it just right, she thought, she wouldn’t have to cut much at all. But looking at herself in the mirror and thinking about how worn down she looked — nothing like Brandi Tate at all — she grabbed a large bunch of hair and sawed away at it until it was cut. She kept going, her hands trembling. Cutting and cutting. Sometimes so close that she nicked her white scalp. She left some of the hair long. She made herself as ugly as she could, as ugly as Ronnie must have thought she was. Good thing the kids were with her folks so she could have time alone to do this thing.

And once it was done, she got into her old gray Ford, the one with the passenger door caved in and the tailpipe hanging loose, and she drove into Goldengate. She walked into that pancake supper. She said as big as she could, “How you like my new hairdo?” And she let all those people think what they were going to think, the same thing that Laverne swore was true — Ronnie had done her wrong, had treated her no better than he would an old mangy dog, and then set her out to find her way.

At the time all this was happening, Ronnie was driving out to the river, to an old fishing camp, and with him was Brandi Tate. She was listening to his story.

“The woman’s crazy,” he told her. The next day, he’d start to hear the talk around town about what he was supposed to have done to Della’s hair, and he’d know he’d made the right decision to stay at Brandi’s that night and not go home, not to go back to Della who was telling such a lie on him, not to go back to a woman who would hack at her hair that way and then let people believe he’d been the one to do it.

“Sugar,” Brandi said, “you’ve got to get out of that mess.”

And Ronnie stayed with her, stayed as autumn stretched on to the first frost, and then the killing frost, and then the dark, damp days of November.

By Thanksgiving, Della’s hair was growing back. Even though she’d gone to the Looking Glass Salon to have it shaped up, there was still a bald spot on the side of her head that was hard to cover. Her mother caught sight of it when Della brought the kids over for dinner.

“Mercy,” she said. “I don’t know how you can stand to show your face around town, what with Ronnie shacked up with that girl.”

Della gave a little wave of her hand. She was trying to be tough-minded about it all. “Oh, these are modern times,” she told her mother. “People don’t think a thing about something like this.”

But she heard the talk, felt the eyes on her as November turned into December and she went about her business cleaning houses for those who hired her. She took the kids to the Bethlehem Christian Church for Sunday School and to 4-H meetings at the fairgrounds. She kept her gaze steady, met everyone with a smile, looked them in the eye and said it was good to see them and that she hoped they’d have a Merry Christmas.

Then one morning Missy and Laverne Ott stopped by the trailer with a Christmas box from the church: a twenty-pound turkey, a ten-pound bag of potatoes, a head of cabbage, cans of Ocean Spray jellied cranberry sauce, Green Giant sweet peas, Bush’s baked beans, a tray of dinner rolls, a box of Carnation powdered milk, frozen pie crusts and pumpkin filling, tangerines, ribbon candy, chocolate bars, peanuts in the shell.

Della looked through the box while Laverne and Missy went back to Missy’s van to tote in gifts for all the kids: new winter coats, boots, mittens, and wrapped packages, one for each, seven in all.

“We could have stopped at five and had a basketball team,” Della used to tell folks, “but we decided to keep rolling the dice and hit that lucky number seven.”

She was thirty years old, and she’d been pregnant most of her life since she gave herself up to Ronnie at sixteen. She had six girls. Angel, Hannah, Sarah, the twins Emily and Emma, and then Gracie. In order, from age fourteen to three. All of them were fair-skinned like their mother, small-boned and blue-eyed, with fine hair the color of straw. Her girls. She’d taught them to love Jesus and to know what it was to work. They were good girls — even Angel, who had streaks of Ronnie’s spit and vinegar. Della tried to be patient with her. Angel was fourteen, Della reminded herself, remembering that when she was that age Ronnie had started taking note of her. Fourteen and beginning to feel the charms she held for boys. Fourteen and sure of too many things. Whatever mistakes she’d made with Ronnie along the way, at least she had these beautiful children now, her treasures. Ronnie could run off to Brandi Tate and Della couldn’t stop him, but her babies were hers, the joy of her life, and no one could take them from her.

She’d wished and wished for a boy, and finally just before last Christmas, he came along, Ronnie Jr. Ronnie was in heaven. He loved on that baby boy more than he’d ever loved on anyone in his life. You’d thought, folks said later, it would’ve been enough to keep him from Brandi Tate.

“You’ve got a brood,” Laverne said as she brought the last of the Christmas gifts into the trailer. “I swear, Della. You really do.”

Her glasses were steamed up from coming in out of the cold, and when she took them off, there was a hard set to her face. She’d never married, and now on the other side of sixty, she found herself alone. A broad-shouldered woman with big hands, the fingernails clipped straight across. She wore no makeup, nothing to give her thin lips any color or shape, nothing to enhance her pale gray eyes. Her only indulgence was her hair, which Della knew she darkened with Clairol Nice ’N Easy — Light Caramel Brown — Della had seen the empty box in Laverne’s trash when she cleaned her house. Laverne kept her hair long and wore it in a braid that came down to the middle of her back. She took a handkerchief from her coat pocket and wiped her glasses. She put them back on and studied Della, who knew that she was well-acquainted with situations like hers — a woman left with all these kids — and even worse.

Della would think later that Laverne hadn’t meant for what she said about her brood to sound like a judgment, but at the time Della heard it that way, just a smidge of resentment from having to be out in such vicious cold, toting boxes to a woman whose husband had left her to care for all those kids.

Missy patted Della on the arm. “We just want to make sure you and the kids have something for Christmas,” she said. She knew that Ronnie had tried to bring presents, but Della turned them away because the money that bought them came from Brandi Tate. “You know I love them all to pieces,” Missy said. “I always have.”

Della tried her best not to be envious of Missy, but, gracious, just look at that new house Pat had built for her — a two-story house with dormer windows and gingerbread trim and fretwork on the wraparound porch. Della cleaned that house each week, and though she tried to stay a Christian woman, she couldn’t quite press down the bad feeling that rose in her when she saw the already tidy house with hardly a speck of dirt that needed cleaning — nothing really that required Della’s attention, but she dusted the furniture that already gleamed, wiped down the bathrooms where silk flowers in dainty vases sat on the counters and the towels were folded neatly over the rods, ran the vacuum over carpets that looked like no one had walked on them.