Lee Martin - Late One Night

So he kept his foot on the gas pedal. He put his eyes on the dark road stretching out ahead of him.

He glanced back only once, and, when he did, Captain was gone.

Ronnie went a good ways up the blacktop before he turned on his headlights, and when he did, a quick picture came into his head and he wondered whether just before he’d looked away from Captain in his rearview mirror, he’d seen a spark of light flash behind the trailer. He slowed down. He almost turned around. Then he told himself, no, he was only imagining things. He was only afraid of what he’d almost done. He was afraid of himself.

That’s when he punched the Firebird, worked it through its gears, gave it full throttle, in a hurry now to make his way back to town.

That was the moment that would haunt him forever, the moment in which he almost knew there was danger, when he almost went back. The fire wouldn’t have been raging just yet. He could have done something to stop it, and even if he hadn’t been able to do that, he would have been there when it became clear that his family was inside, and he would have gotten them out.

He wanted to tell Captain that there was that moment when he convinced himself nothing was wrong, that moment when, eager to escape his own shame, he drove up the blacktop, choosing to be ignorant. Captain wasn’t the stupid one. He was.

Remember that , he wished he could say to Captain. Your father was right. He was right all along. I was the stupid one. I was selfish and stupid, and now here I am, too much of a coward to tell you any of this .

Brandi tapped her pen on the paper, and Ronnie remembered he was supposed to be telling her what he wanted to say in the newspaper.

“Keep talking,” she told him.

His voice was soft, but in their rooms, Angel and Hannah and Sarah and Emma almost came up from sleep. He never spoke loudly enough to completely rouse them, but the murmur of his voice was something they felt just at the edge of waking. In that twilight, they listened long enough to know they were hearing their father, a fact that brought them comfort as they sank back into sleep on this cold winter night. They were all there in the house. They were warm beneath their covers. They had tomorrow waiting on them and the day after that. A baby was coming, and they were all doing what they could to help Brandi make her way to July.

“Do you want me to write it like this?” she asked Ronnie.

She wrote another line and then let him read it.

“Yes,” he said.

People were asleep in Goldengate and Phillipsport, and out the blacktop into the country. Snow was falling — a steady snow that would cover the fields, settle over the roofs of the houses where Wayne and Lois Best slept, where Shooter and Captain slept, where Missy and Pat Wade slept. A snow that would blanket the graves behind the Bethlehem Church. An all-night snow coming down on what was left of the trailer after the fire. Coming down to cover, at least for a while, the charred scraps of furniture and bedding and dishes and toys and clothing and photographs and everything that had once made the trailer a home. The last big snow of winter, but Ronnie and Brandi took no notice.

“Go on,” she told him, and he did.

This book wouldn’t exist without the faith and effort of my agent, Allison Cohen. I’m forever grateful for her encouragement, support, and her sharp editorial eye. Guy Intoci made this book better, and I’m indebted to him and everyone at Dzanc Books for welcoming me into the fold. There were people who knew things that I didn’t, and they generously shared their expertise with me. Thank you, Philip Grandinetti, Dale Perdue, and Ruth Ann Zwilling. Thanks, too, to the Ohio State University for their continued support. Above all, thank you to Cathy Hensley for the love she gives me every step along the journey’s way.