Lee Martin - Late One Night

In the moonlight slanting through the window and falling across their faces, they began to talk.

Brandi said, “I bet you’re sorry you ever ended up with me.”

No, Ronnie told her. He wasn’t sorry. “We’re going to have a baby,” he said.

“Sometimes I still have trouble with what you did.” She reached over and took his hand. “I won’t lie about that.”

They lay together awhile, not speaking. Then Ronnie said, “It could have been true. All of it. I was that close to setting that trailer to burn.”

“What I’ve decided is maybe we’re all that close to doing things we’d regret. The right chain of circumstances, and there we are.”

“I know, but still.”

“We both have to let it go. Your girls need us. This baby needs us. Day by day, we’ll go on.”

Ronnie knew in his heart that Captain hadn’t meant for that match to catch the gas on fire. At night, he and Brandi talked it over.

Sure, maybe Captain didn’t have any business taking it upon himself to even think about burning down the goat pen and shed — and on a windy night like that, no less — but Ronnie knew, from all the time he’d spent with Captain while he worked on the Firebird, the boy was always eager to please. Ronnie knew how close he felt to Della, especially after his mother died.

“He didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” Ronnie said to Brandi. “Shooter should have been better with him, but who am I to say that? I guess I’m not exactly the Father of the Year.”

“I imagine it’s been hard for him to raise a boy like Captain by himself,” Brandi said.

Ronnie agreed. “I’m sorry now to see the way some folks are treating them. So much of that is my fault.”

That’s when Brandi had the idea of taking out ads in the Gold-engate and Phillipsport newspapers.

“Why would anyone listen to me?” Ronnie asked. “They’re ready to run me out of town.”

“You’ll see,” said Brandi, and then she told him how she thought it might work.

When the ad came out in the papers, it was the talk of Phillipsport and Goldengate. Mr. Samms and DeMova Dugger at the Wabash Savings and Loan saw it when Mr. Samms stepped out of the office that afternoon to appraise a property and came back with the Messenger .

“Good for him,” Mr. Samms said after he’d showed the ad to DeMova. “He said it just right, and I hope people listen. And he had the courage to put his name to it.”

“It was a horrible accident,” DeMova said. “That’s what it was. That poor boy didn’t mean to burn that trailer.”

In Goldengate, the ad came out that same day in the Weekly Press . Anna Spillman sat at the counter at the Real McCoy and leafed through a copy on her afternoon break. When she saw the ad, she recalled how Ronnie spent that night with her when Brandi put him out. He was lost that night, all scraped out. “What am I going to do?” he asked her. “Other folks know trouble,” she told him. “You just keep remembering you’re not alone.”

When she saw the words he’d put in the paper, she felt her breath catch. “Oh, my,” she said, and Herbert Quick came around the counter to see what she was reading.

“That’s the truth.” He tapped his finger on the ad. “You have to admire a man for saying the truth, no matter what you might happen to think of him.”

Not everyone agreed. Taylor Jack read the ad and thought to himself, Who in the hell does he think he is, saying something like that?

“And in the newspaper, no less,” said Roe Carl the next day at the IGA. “Leave it alone, if you ask me.”

Missy read the paper before bed, and the ad nearly took her breath away. When she got down on her knees to pray that night, she asked God to forgive her for whatever mistakes she’d made all because she’d been so eager to have children of her own.

Shooter Rowe saw the ad when he sat down with the paper after supper. “Come in here,” he said to Captain, who was finishing drying the dishes. “Come look what Ronnie’s done.”

Captain looked over his father’s shoulder as he read the ad aloud.

“In spite of everything.” Shooter’s voice was strong and clear in the quiet house. “I still believe that people are really good at heart.” That part of the ad was in quotation marks, and Shooter knew it came from the diary Anne Frank kept while in hiding from the Nazis. He knew this because the book of that diary had been one of Merlene’s favorites. She’d written out that quote in her beautiful handwriting and kept it in her Bible. In the ad, Ronnie’s words came after the quotation, and Shooter read them aloud, too. “I can’t change what’s done. Neither can you. We all have lives to live. We need to help one another. We need to forgive. That’s what I aim to do. In my heart of hearts, I hope you’ll do the same.”

For a good while, neither of them spoke. Then Captain said, “He’s talking about me.”

Shooter let the paper settle down onto his lap. “He’s talking about all of us, Wesley. He’s saying we ought to know we’re all doing the best we can.”

Brandi had read The Diary of Anne Frank while she’d been on bed rest, and the part about believing that people were good stuck with her. After she’d written that down for the ad, she told Ronnie to just speak from his heart.

“What do you want to say to folks?” she asked.

He thought for a minute. “I want to tell them we all mess up and do things wrong. Things happen and we can’t go back and change them. All we can do is try to be better. Something like that.”

“Keep talking,” Brandi said. “We’ve got all night. I’ll help you say it just the way you want.”

At that moment, when she lifted the pen from the paper, the frayed friendship bracelet that Hannah had woven for her fell from her wrist.

“Looks like I get my wish,” she said.

“What did you wish for?”

“This. All of this right now. You and me and the girls.”

They were alive to him now more so than they’d ever been. Everyone who mattered to him was more alive — the girls and Brandi and Pat and Missy Wade and Shooter and Captain, and, yes, Wayne and Lois, even the woman Della had been in his last days with her, the woman who loved having a baby in the house. They were more alive to him because of the part of the story he swore he’d never tell, the part that left him knowing in a way he never had how scared they all were, how broken.

He hadn’t told Ray Biggs and his deputy everything about the night the trailer burned. He hadn’t told it all to Brandi. He wished he could. He especially wished he could say it to Captain, the one who most needed to hear it.

Ronnie wanted to tell him that when he first pulled away from the trailer that night, he glanced up to his rearview mirror, and he saw Captain standing at the edge of the trailer looking after him as if he expected him to change his mind and come back.

Just a shadowy figure out there in the cold, but it was enough to remind Ronnie of how he’d felt all the times he’d been the new boy at a foster home, how all of the other foster kids knew one another, and he was too shy to try to be their friend. How he waited for them to come to him, to treat him with kindness, but that rarely happened. More often than not, they thought him standoffish and weird, and they left him to the misery he nursed in his heart.

“If you’d just smile more,” a helpful boy said to him once, “maybe people would like you.”

He’d been that boy, the one who wouldn’t smile.

When Ronnie saw Captain standing there in the moonlight, he almost stopped the Firebird, almost threw it in reverse and went back to the trailer, but he couldn’t imagine what he’d say to explain why he’d returned. He had no words for what he wanted, no words at all. He only knew that deep down he wanted to stand there again with Captain, who refused to judge him, who knew from experience that people were mostly just who they were and all you could do was try to love them for that. But as much as Ronnie wanted to give himself over to Captain’s goodness, he was too ashamed to admit that he needed it. He was too ashamed to admit that he’d needed it all along, that Captain, a boy he’d only thought he was humoring with his attention, had mattered to him much more than he’d known, had been the one who could have saved him.