Laverne Ott said the options were few. Lois and Wayne were in poor health, and if Missy and Pat, the godparents, were saying they trusted Ronnie, and if the court wanted to avoid a foster home situation, as Laverne believed they did as long as a biological parent was capable and willing, then the proper thing to do would be to entrust the girls’ care to Ronnie.
Finally, the judge asked Laverne to bring each of the girls individually to his chambers.
He asked them, one by one, where they wanted to live.
Angel was direct. “Brandi needs us. We want to be a family.”
Hannah was earnest. “I love my father.”
Sarah had a puzzled look on her face. “Aren’t kids supposed to live with their parents?”
Emma simply said, “Daddy and Brandi.”
“You want to live with your daddy?” the judge asked.
“Yeppers,” Emma said.
Then the judge asked to speak to Ronnie and Laverne.
“Mr. Black, I can’t say I’m pleased with you.”
“No, sir,” Ronnie said.
“You can see why this is a difficult decision.”
“Yes, sir, I can. I’ve not always been an upright man, but this has changed me. I’ve owned up to everything. I’m just hoping for a chance to keep my girls.”
The judge tapped the end of a pencil on his desk and studied Ronnie a good long while.
“Children’s Protective Services will have a sharp eye on you. Isn’t that right, Miss Ott?”
“You can count on it,” Laverne said.
“And this court will be watching you. Mr. Black, I feel you’ve lost enough. Make sure you make good on this second chance.”
Brandi and Ronnie gave the story of Captain a good deal of thought on those evenings when Ronnie sat with her while she was lying in bed as her doctor had commanded. Brandi had already thought hard about what she knew about Ronnie. He’d gone out to the trailer that night meaning to burn it. He spread that gasoline. Then he saw a hole in the siding and got his senses back. He tried to do a good thing. He patched that hole and then he came back to town and got into bed beside her. He was still there. After everything they’d gone through, he was still there. The baby was coming, and she wasn’t alone. She told Ronnie to forgive himself for what he almost did that night. She told him to believe in love.
Her due date at the first of July seemed far in the distance, but neither she nor Ronnie complained. Time seemed to slow down for them, and that’s exactly what they needed. Too much had been happening too quickly. Now they had the drowsy evenings of winter. They had time to talk.
They played board games with the girls. Then once Ronnie had them off to bed, he and Brandi lay close together, and he rubbed his hand gently over her stomach and felt the baby kick, and the joy of those moments was so pure and good there was no need for either of them to say a word.
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.”