Lee Martin - Late One Night

“We’re doing just fine,” she said.

He looked down the hallway. The double-wide had three bedrooms. She and Junior and Gracie slept in one of them. Angel and Hannah in another. The last one was for the twins. A bath and a half. Fifteen hundred square feet. A double-wide Fleetwood trailer with underpinning set on a piece of ground Della’s parents owned along the blacktop. It’d been her home for fourteen years, and even if it was a little worse for wear these days, it was still hers.

“See you got a fire going.” Ronnie nodded toward the Franklin stove in the corner of the living room where Della had just put on a new split of wood. “Guess you need it in this weather.”

“The furnace has been acting up. Daddy thought he had it fixed, but it keeps cutting out. Sometimes I don’t even notice it until I wake up in the middle of the night, froze to death.”

“The blower?”

Della shrugged her shoulders. “Something about the pilot light, I think.”

“Want me to see what I can do with it?”

“Daddy’s coming over today to take another look. If he can’t fix it, I expect we’ll all go over to their house to sleep tonight.”

That was enough — that mention of Wayne Best possibly appearing at any moment — to put Ronnie into action. He went down the hallway, and Della followed him, Gracie skipping along between them.

Junior was asleep in his crib. “I don’t want you waking him,” Della said in a whisper. “He’s got the croup and I just now got him to sleep.”

“Does he need a doctor?”

“If he does, I’ll see to it.”

“He sounds like one of the goats,” Gracie said, whispering in imitation of Della. “I heard him last night.”

Ronnie was whispering, too. “I didn’t mean to suggest you couldn’t take care of him, Della.”

“It’s all right. I’m just tired. Haven’t been sleeping much.” She put her hand on Gracie’s back. “Why don’t you go out and color Daddy a picture?”

“I’ll draw you something nice, Daddy.”

“All right, baby. You do that.”

Alone, Della and Ronnie watched Junior sleeping the way they’d stood together at cribs over the years looking down on their children.

“Guess it’s my fault you haven’t had your sleep,” he said.

“Guess it is,” she told him. “You and seven kids.”

She watched him looking down on Junior whose jaw was slack, a little bubble of spit at his lips. The room smelled of the Vicks Vapo-Rub she’d used on his chest, and it was, at least to her way of thinking, a good smell. A scent she always associated with her own mother and how she’d cared for Della when she was a little girl. That heady smell of camphor and eucalyptus that said Mom was there and she knew exactly what to do.

“I hate this, Della. I really do. I hate the way it’s turned out. All this burden on you and now these divorce papers. It’s got me shook. I can tell you that.”

Junior squirmed a little in his sleep, his arm flying over across his chest, and Della held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t wake.

She and Ronnie were talking in such small voices now they had to stand close to each other to hear.

“You want to do something about it? You want to come home and give up this nonsense with Brandi Tate?”

For a long time, he didn’t say a word. Then she heard a little choke of breath, and his shaky voice said, “I can’t do that.”

It came to her, then, something she should have known. “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

He wouldn’t admit it. He couldn’t face her and own up to it, but she felt sure she’d hit on the truth. She knew it in the way he looked at Junior, the way he reached into the crib and dabbed the little spit bubble with his finger. She could tell it from the way he wouldn’t look at her, the way he got all shy, the way he said, “Della, I—” and then couldn’t go on. She knew he wasn’t completely done with babies.

“You better get a lawyer,” she told him, and he said, “All right, then, if you’re saying it’s over, then by God let it be over. I can make it so you’ll wish you never started this.”

“I didn’t start it. So don’t you come in here threatening me.”

“Oh, I’m not threatening. It’s long past that now.”

“What in the world does that mean?”

“You’ll find out, Della. You can count on that.”

The Firebird’s tires squealed and laid black marks on the pavement when Ronnie left Della’s.

“He sure took out of there a-hellin’,” Shooter said to Captain. They were outside rounding up one of Della’s goats. The pen she had behind the trailer had a wood fence, and there was always a plank or two busted out and those goats would get free and wander across the road and Shooter would have to get them back in the pen. He’d take over a hammer and some nails and patch things up enough to hold them until the next time he’d find a goat or two in his garden, chomping up anything they could get to. It didn’t set right with him. None of it. Ever since Ronnie had left Della for Brandi Tate, the place had gone to hell.

Shooter had tried his best to do right by Della, helping her out with this and that when she needed it, trying to be someone that she and her kids could count on, but as the weeks went on it began to wear on him and he started to see Della as someone who was incompetent. She was a problem he couldn’t solve, and Lord knew he had enough worries of his own as Captain got older and more headstrong.

The Firebird shot up the blacktop, tires squealing and smoking, and Captain and Shooter listened to Ronnie let that engine out for a good long ways.

“Sugar tits,” Captain said.

“Don’t talk like that, Wesley.” Shooter hated to see that hangdog look on Captain’s face, that look that said he knew he’d done wrong, but he just couldn’t help himself. “Come on, Captain,” Shooter said. He only called him Wesley when he wanted to be stern. “Let’s get after that goat.”

Missy met Ronnie’s Firebird on the blacktop outside Goldengate. She was waiting behind the school bus that’d just put out its stop sign when Ronnie went roaring past, no regard for that bus at all.

On the bus, Angel saw the Firebird shoot by and she said to Hannah, who was sitting beside her, “There goes Dad.”

Hannah came up on her knees and squirmed around in her seat to look on down the blacktop. Her braid swung out and hit Angel in the face.

Some of the other kids on the bus had seen the Firebird, too. Angel grabbed Hannah by the arm and pulled her down.

“He’s been to see Mom,” Hannah said. “Do you think—”

“No, I don’t think,” Angel said. “Not with him driving like that.”

“Hey, Angel,” a boy called from the back of the bus. It was Tommy Stout, a boy Angel secretly liked. “There goes your dad,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t mean, but it called attention to what Angel had spent months trying to forget. Her dad had walked out and was living with someone else. “Looks like he’s in a hurry,” Tommy said, and Angel closed her eyes.

Missy used her cell phone to call Pat on his job site. “It’s a wonder no one got killed,” she told him. “I’m sitting here right behind the bus, and I’m shaking. I’m watching one of the Thacker girls cross the road, and I’m thinking about what might have happened. That Ronnie Black is out of control.”

Pat was a quiet man, and, when he spoke, he said his words slowly, as if he’d given them a good deal of thought and wanted to make sure he got them right. “He was just out here looking for work.” Pat’s construction company was building a house near Goldengate. “He said Della had papers served on him, and that girl he’s living with — that Brandi Tate? — well, she’s got a baby coming. He seemed pretty shook up.”