“Try not to worry too much about Shooter. He’s mostly full of bluff.”
“Still,” she said, “just to be on the safe side.”
“All right, Missy. You know best. Call if you need me.”
_________
Missy moved through her day trying to convince herself that nothing was unusual. It was the first day of what was going to be her life for a good while to come, the life of a mother. She stopped at Read’s IGA and ticked off the items on her list: breakfast cereal, orange juice, bread, milk, apples, bananas, canned soups, lunch meat, ham salad, ground beef, frozen pizzas, pasta, and tomato sauce. It was so cold outside the perishables would be fine in the very back of the van. It wouldn’t take her long to gather up Hannah and Sarah and Emma and then drive over to Phillipsport for Angel. They’d all ride home together, a family, and she’d ask the girls to help her put the groceries away.
By the time she got to the checkout line, Missy’s cart was heaped full.
“Got a load there,” Roe Carl said.
“Cooking for five now,” Missy said.
“I heard you got Ronnie Black’s girls.”
Missy nodded. “The sheltered care hearing was this morning.”
“Good luck to you.”
“Thank you,” said Missy, feeling her breath catch.
She knew Roe didn’t mean to give her any alarm, but something about that wish for good luck made Missy afraid of everything she’d soon know about the night of the fire. Here she was dreaming about the future, all the good parts of it, not stopping to think what it would do to the girls if they found out that indeed Ronnie had set fire to the trailer.
As Missy loaded her groceries into the back of the van and made ready to drive to the grade school, she thought back to the day that ended up being the last one of Della’s life. She’d been making plans too, not knowing she was about to run out of time.
At the high school in Phillipsport, Angel slouched at her desk behind Tommy Stout’s in algebra class and kept kicking her foot against his chair back. The teacher, Mrs. Ferenbacher, was writing equations on the board. She was about a million years old, and she kept a handkerchief balled up in her left hand, and sometimes she had a coughing spell and she spit phlegm into her hanky. When Tommy turned in his seat, Angel rolled her eyes, letting him know how bored she was, and he laughed a little, but not enough for Mrs. F. to hear. The chalk kept on squeaking, and Mrs. F. coughed a little, and Angel stuck her finger in her mouth like she was gagging, and that sent Tommy into a laughing fit he couldn’t control. Mrs. F. turned on her heel and surveyed the class. “Tommy Stout,” she said. “Would you mind telling us what’s tickled your funny bone?”
In Goldengate, Hannah was dressing for P.E. class. They were square dancing with the boys today, so all she had to do was put on gym shoes and then hope that she didn’t get stuck with someone like Kyle Dehner, who always put his hand too low on his partner’s back, sneaking a feel of a hip. He’d been kept back twice and was almost old enough to drive a car. His brown hair hung over his eyes in bangs, and his breath smelled like bread and sour milk. All things considered, Hannah should have thought him disgusting but she couldn’t quite manage it. He was her secret crush, though she couldn’t figure out why she felt the way she did. She was afraid to dance with him. She didn’t want to say something stupid. She didn’t want him to feel her hip and find her too skinny for his taste. She didn’t want to think of him making fun of her later with his friends.
At the grade school, Sarah was passing notes back and forth with Amy Cessna, whose desk was across the aisle from hers. Amy had played one of the Billy Goats Gruff in the class play, and she and Sarah were reviewing the highlights of the performance and giggling behind their hands when their teacher, Mrs. Stout, leaned over to search through a drawer in her desk. “Where is my stapler?” she asked. “Has anyone seen my stapler?” For some reason, Sarah and Amy thought this was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, and they covered their mouths and snorted.
Down the hall, in the first-grade classroom, Emma was doing a reading lesson on the computer. She was learning the sound a short “a” made by reading a story about Zac the Rat. Zac is a rat. Zac sat on a can. The ants ran to the jam. The cartoon that went with the story was funny. She had on a purple sweater with fuzzy sleeves, and she liked the way the sweater felt when she folded her arms on the desk and put her chin on one of those sleeves. The fuzz tickled. It made her l-a-u-g-h.
Sarah and Emma weren’t thinking much at all about what it meant that they’d had to pack their things and go back to Missy’s. They understood that it had something to do with the fire and with their daddy, but they didn’t know what that something was. Since the fire they’d gotten used to going where people told them to go. So they went to Missy’s and they understood that for the time being they didn’t live with their daddy and Brandi. They lived with Missy and Pat, who were kind to them, and the girls imagined, with the trusting natures that disaster had forced onto them, that everything would eventually work out. They knew it was their job to keep their attention on what they were responsible for: a class play, a friend named Amy, fuzzy sweater sleeves, Zac the Rat.
Hannah, though, was old enough to worry, and worry she did. She missed Brandi. She knew that her father might be in trouble. She wanted things to quiet down. She wanted all the talk to stop. The talk about her father and what he’d maybe done. She wanted to sit somewhere by herself for a very long time and not have to give any thought to what was happening and what might happen and what it all meant for her and her family. But the square dancing music was starting, and boys were choosing partners, and here came Kyle Dehner.
Angel thought she was right where she wanted to be: back with Missy, who bought her nice things and cooked her favorite foods and loved on her with hugs and kisses. She’d let Missy be her mother. She wouldn’t argue with that at all. Given the choice between Brandi and Missy, she’d choose Missy anytime, which she had, and now everything was working out the way she’d always dreamed. Mrs. F. was waiting for an answer from Tommy Stout. Exactly what had tickled his funny bone? “You’re in trouble now, buddy,” Angel whispered to Tommy. “You should’ve kept your mouth shut.”
The girls were quiet after school as Missy drove to Phillipsport, even Sarah and Emma who were usually such chatterboxes. Now, away from school, they somehow understood — though Missy had certainly never said as much to them — that they might not see their father for quite some time.
Finally, Hannah said to Sarah, “Where’s your hair scrunchie? Did you lose it?”
Missy glanced up at the rearview mirror and saw Sarah pat her head and run her fingers through her hair. She finally shrugged her shoulders. “Yeppers,” she said.
At the high school, Missy parked along the street right behind the bus that was waiting for the final bell and the students who would tromp up its steps and flop down onto its seats. What a lucky stroke, she thought, to find this place from which she could watch for Angel and honk the horn at her before she could get onto the bus. Missy took it as a sign that everything was going to work out just fine.
“We picking up Angel?” Emma asked, and Missy couldn’t resist the lighthearted feeling that had suddenly filled her.
“Yeppers,” she said, and Emma and Sarah began to giggle.
“She said, ‘Yeppers,’” Emma said. “Didn’t she?”
“Yeppers,” said Sarah, and that started them giggling again.
Then Angel was coming down the school steps, her book bag slung over her shoulder, the wind blowing her hair across her face.
Missy honked the horn, and Angel saw her. The other girls were in the second row of seats, so the front was empty. Missy leaned over and opened the door, and Angel started to get in.